She’s feathering in and looking like . . . a chicken.
The Real Injera
Homegrown Revolution was delighted to receive a comment from “Watch Woman“, who is from Ethiopia, reacting to the injera recipe we posted earlier,
From my experience of baking injera, the baking soda/powder, self-rising flour or commercial yeast alters the real taste & texture of teff injera. I say, the restaurants here in the US have the look alike of the injera, but far from the real taste & texture of injera. Sorry but the truth. Just by using one of your starters you can bake good decent injera. No need to add the baking powder/soda.Trust me. See, the reason injera is always sour dough back home is, that it will take some of the bite out of that spicy rather hot stew (doro-wote- spicy, hot chicken & hard boiled egg stew ).
I remember, once I invited a friend of mine (American of course) for lunch. Served this real doro-wote hot, I mean this was the real deal, real hot. Only I forgot to warn him. I remember his face turned pink & his eyes red, bulged out. O my God, what was I thinking? Well my first culture shock. That was some 27 years ago. Now I do not make doro wote that hot myself. I guess —when you live in Rome, —as the Romans,
Best of all, if you go to Watch Woman’s blog she has posted her own recipe for injera and we can’t wait to try it!
Whole Wheat Sourdough Starter Recipe
UPDATE : we have a whole (so to speak) new take on making a starter. See our sourdough starter video for a better way to do this.
Back in March we showed how to make a sourdough starter with white flour. This month we converted a white starter over to whole wheat and have baked many successful loaves of bread with it. The reason that we have to do this conversion rather than starting out with whole wheat flour is that whole wheat tends to get moldy before the beneficial cultures have a chance to take over.
You can use our “Not Very Whole Wheat Loaf” recipe to bake loaves with a whole wheat starter by simply substituting it for the white flour starter. You’ll end up with a loaf that’s about half white, half whole wheat.
To convert a starter from white flour to whole wheat flour do the following:
1. Begin with your white flour starter. Our recipe for creating a white flour starter is in a previous post.
2. Instead of feeding your white flour starter with the usual routine of a half cup of white flour and a half cup of water each day switch to feeding it a half cup of whole wheat flour and a half cup of water.
3. After about a week you will have “converted” your white starter to a wheat starter–hallelujah!
As we emphasized with our recipe for white starter, you must feed the starter every single day or it will begin to rot. This is particularly important with whole wheat flour which will go bad much more quickly. If you can’t keep up with the feeding you can temporarily store the starter in the refrigerator, but for no more than two weeks with whole wheat starter. White starter will last in the fridge for longer.
If this turns your crank, you can sit around your compound watching your sourdough starter bubble while geeking out on Cornell Professor Steven Laurence Kaplan’s book Good Bread is Back, which details the revival of sourdough bread making in France in the early 1990s. Kaplan notes that sourdough,
“rises less than a dough made with baker’s yeast and also more slowly. Its crust is thicker. It keeps significantly longer. It has greater nutritional value, partly because it is richer in certain vitamins and enzymes that are by-products of lactic fermentation, and it contains less phytic acid, which blocks mineral absorption.”
So get that starter going and forget about that crap bread at the supermarket!
Nuts!
As of fall 2007 truly raw almonds will no longer be available in the US or Canada, because the USDA, FDA, and the California Almond Board has released a marketing order that all almonds be pasteurized. This is due to two recent salmonella outbreaks, the cause of which, in Homegrown Revolution‘s opinion, is the usual poor factory farming practices. But it gets worse, according to the folks at the Weston A. Price foundation,
There is an even bigger issue. The FDA has decided not to tell the consumer the truth about this processing step. The almonds you will buy in Wholefoods this fall may still say “raw almonds but they will have been subjected to high heat and a five log kill step…that they are calling Pasteurization”. This lie is being permitted by the marketing order!!
But there’s even more bad news since pasteurization, according to the Almond Board of California, involves a choice of steam, high heat or, we kid you not, highly toxic and carcinogenic propylene oxide once used as a racing fuel, an insecticidal fumigant and an ingredient in thermobaric weapons. Thank you Almond Board and FDA!
But it turns out we all may have been buying pasteurized and bad tasting almonds all along without knowing it. Hidden in this little reported story is the dirty secret of how Trader Joe’s is able to offer cheap nuts. According to D & S Ranches, which runs a group of orchards in California’s San Joaquin Valley,
The Almonds that you see in retail stores, particularly the big chains, and membership stores, are usually very inferior for a number of reasons.
First, they are almost never a single variety, but rather a “mix” of many different Almonds. They are rarely sized for uniformity or inspected for quality and they contain a large portion of broken and scratched nuts and are mostly smaller nuts. This reduces the wholesale costs on the nuts and increases the profit for the store..
But the biggest problem is the transportation and storage. They are usually not stored properly and are exposed to odors around them in warehouses that contain everything from cases of motor oil to TV sets. They have endured truck rides around the country, in and out of long storage periods in hot warehouses or “distribution centers”. Proper industry standard cold storage is critical to maintain nut quality, and large chain stores do not have the facilities, the expertise, and frankly don’t care very much about, proper storage.
Recently large chains like Trader Joes and Costco have begun obtaining “pasteurized” Almonds This is a disaster. It effectively destroys all the delicate Almond Flavor, but it has one big benefit. It allows enormous profit for the store. This is because, “just any old nuts” including ones that are years old, imported from unknown sources and perhaps not USDA inspected, of questionable quality, to be “thrown into the pasteurizer machine” and the resulting nuts can be made safe for human consumption! They are tasteless and terrible, but you can safely eat them, and you will be happy to know that you are helping the share holders of that big corporate chain, because they bought the nuts for a fraction of what quality fresh nuts would cost.
The other moral here is to incorporate nut trees into your landscaping. Why plant a useless ficus tree when you can plant something that will provide food? And come harvest time you wont need to mix in any racing fuel.
Selling the Revolution
“Revolutionary urbanists will not limit their concern to the circulation of things and of human beings trapped in a world of things. They will try to break these topological chains, paving the way with their experiments for a human journey through authentic life.”
-Guy Debord “Situationsit Thesis on Traffic”
So it’s got singing hippies and it’s basically an ad, but we just can’t help but love this mini-doc about the creators of our fun and useful Xtracycle: