Recipe for the World’s Best Whole Wheat Pancake

...ea salt 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon baking powder The night before making these pancakes I take a tablespoon of mature starter and add it to 100 grams of freshly milled Sonora wheat flour and 110 grams of water. This mixture will be the 200 grams of starter you’ll use in the recipe. The next day mix all the ingredients together, fry them up in a pan and get ready to have your pancake paradigm shifted. New frontiers in baking Freshly milled...

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Eight Things to Consider When Saving Vegetable Seeds

The directions for seed saving in our last book, Making It, almost got cut. Perhaps we should have just changed those directions to “Why it’s OK to buy seeds.” The fact is that it’s not easy to save the seeds of many vegetables thanks to the hard work of our bee friends. That being said, Shannon Carmody of Seed Saver’s Exchange gave a lecture at this year’s Heirloom Exposition with some tips for ambitious gardeners who want to take up seed saving...

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Stern Sprouted Wheat Vegan Cookie or Health Bar Type Things

...akes a small batch, a good size for evaluation. Double it if you feel bold Pictures below! Ingredients: Sprouted Wheat Berries*: 225 g/2 cups (I’m sure this can be subbed for other sprouted grains, but I haven’t tried, and yes, I’ve put sprouting instructions at bottom of post) Raisins (or other dried fruit): 75 g/1 cup Whole raw almonds (or other nut): 75 g / 3/4 cup Salt: 1 g/generous pinch Tools: Some kind of device which can grind all this stu...

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2013 in Review Part I

...it should rain. It didn’t. The year was the driest on record: 3.6 inches, making it a desert not the Mediterranean climate it should be. It seems to be a dry winter again this year and I’m worried. March A texting music video producer totaled our car and thus began a six month experiment in living without a car in Los Angeles. That experiment ended in September when we bought a car. Living in LA without a car was easier than I thought it would be...

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Does Sourdough Offer Hope for the Gluten Intolerant?

...uickly. But even before Pasteur, bakers used the yeast remaining from beer making (also a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae) to make doughs rise. Sourdough cultures are not as powerful and predictable, so it’s understandable that commercial bakers would want a more dependable alternative. What is in a sourdough culture? There are many strains of yeast in sourdough cultures, but the main one is Candida milleri. Candida milleri is tolerant of highl...

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