Updated 01/23/18 If you prefer your food bland, skip this blog post. Until now, when I made preserved lemons in the past, honestly, I struggled to use up an entire jar. Classically, you use preserved lemons in chicken tagine but we don’t eat much chicken. They go well with fish but we eat little fish. […]
Fermentation
Why and How to Make Sauerkraut and Krautchi
Click here to jump to the recipe Why ferment? People have fermented foods for thousands of years. At first, ferments must have happened by sheer accident—a handful of vegetables forgotten in salty water or a misplaced bowl of porridge, discovered days later and showing signs of life and gentle bubbling. When those first curious cooks tasted these supposed mistakes, they would […]
Raid Your Kitchen to Clean Your Bathroom
I recently gave a workshop at the Menlo Park library on fermentation. I love facilitating workshops. The audience is so enthusiastic to learn about zero-waste cooking, fermenting, sourdough baking, produce bag sewing and so on. I thought homemade cleaners might make another great workshop but quickly realized it would last only a few minutes. It would go […]
Garlic-Dill Pickles
For pickles, fermentation was the primary means of preservation until the 1940s, when direct acidification and pasteurization of cucumber pickles was introduced. — The Art of Fermentation Store bought pickles may taste good but to render them shelf-stable, food manufacturers pasteurize the cucumbers in vinegar. On the plus side, they last forever. On the down […]
Two New Webinars: Dill Pickles and Ginger Beer
Jump to the webinar info I moved this past weekend to a different unit in my intentional community and I have so much more light in my kitchen that I decided to schedule two more webinars. The lighting in my previous abode had made recording these problematic. This is much brighter!
Garlic-Dill Sauerkraut
I have converted several self-professed haters of sauerkraut with this garlic-dill blend. It tastes just like dill pickles. And almost everyone likes dill pickles, including kids. People who tell me they hate sauerkraut often also say they want to like it because of the many health benefits that lacto-fermented foods such as sauerkraut offer. Fermented sauerkraut: Is […]
Sourdough Starter Webinar
If you missed my sourdough webinar tonight streaming on YouTube, you can watch it below. I have to warn you that this no-budget video, unlike the information contained within, is not of the highest quality. Below the video, I’ve added my class notes if you were either in the class and want to refer to them […]
Sourdough Measurements by the Cup (or Why I Use a Kitchen Scale…)
Updated 08/05/20 WARNING: Use these measurements at your own risk! When I feed my sourdough starter or bake sourdough bread, I measure out the ingredients on my kitchen scale. I set my bowl or measuring cup on the scale, zero it out and then simply dump out the flour until I hit x grams. And […]
Sourdough Pancakes
Click here to jump to the recipe Go here for a vegan version Ever since Michael Pollan’s four-part series Cooked debuted on Netflix in February, my sourdough bread post gets more traffic than anything else on here, followed closely by this post on Eleanor, my sourdough starter. If you too have caught the sourdough bug, you […]