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| From Weekend cooking |
What did we do on our rainy Saturday? We cooked. But we cooked with a twist.
The first thing we made was sourdough bread. I am particularly pleased with this sourdough because the yeast and lactobacilli I used to raise the dough were captured in my kitchen. I didn't use commercial yeast, I didn't get a starter from someone else. I just left flour mixed with water out on my counter top for a few days and waited for the yeast and lactobacilli in the air, and on the flour, to begin to ferment. Because I used local microbes, this bread is truly a taste of our home, of San Francisco, of fall. If I have a chance I want to isolate the rRNA from the bread to see if I can identify the populations of yeast of lactobacilli in the bread. But I doubt I'll have the time. However, I can go to the literature (I have) to see what others have found. A few (somewhat) interesting papers from a group at the University of Ghent interested in bacterial populations in bread ecosystems showed that while the populations of lactobacilli varied from bakery to bakery, they did not change significantly over time, suggesting the ecosystems in their bread systems were fairly stable. However, one thing they didn't test was how the sourdoughs change with season when starting from scratch, as I did a few weeks ago and propose doing again this winter or spring. That's something I think would be interesting. How does the taste of our bread change with the change in season? That is, how does the change in microbial life in the air of my kitchen affect the taste of my sourdough?
Anyway, enough of that, here is the bread:
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| From Weekend cooking |
And here is one of the sandwiches we made using mozzarella we made from citric acid, whole milk, microbial rennet and heat:
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| From Weekend cooking |
In addition to making sourdough and cheese, I've been making beer and have cabbage from our CSA fermenting downstairs. In a few weeks I hope to have enough food for a nearly-all fermented barbecue, with beer, sourdough bread and sauerkraut.
3 comments:
That sandwich looks good enough to eat. You're a regular locavore.
hey-
our wine is bubbling away....it went from a strange yellowish color to pink....I wonder if that is the tannins or the shadow of vinegar to come! anyway, it, too has been a fun experiment.
Right on with the bread!
Can't wait to taste some :)
love, mom
Well, dwstaple, just so you know, we did import our milk from China. There's something about melamine that adds to the flavor of the cheese. And our rennet is vegetarian, so its made from a GMO microbe, possibly by a certain, local, well-known biotech company, but probably not. So thanks for the props on locovorism, but with parents like library goddess, who make wine from grapes growing in their front yard, well, we have a long way to go to really, truly, by locavores.
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