Traditional Table Tuesday: Lacto-fermentation and my new favorite condiment

I'd like to introduce you all to my new favorite condiment... drumroll, please... Ginger Carrots, a.k.a. Pickled Ginger Carrots or Lacto-fermented Ginger Carrots. As strange as they sound, they are amazing, and really easy to make. You must try these!


I was inspired to make these carrots by reading Nourishing Traditions' explanation of the benefits of lacto-fermented vegetables, long a staple in many societies because the lactobacilli produced in this method of fermentation serve not only to preserve veggies, but also makes them more beneficial to the health of those who consume them. The lacto-fermented vegetable most people are familiar with is sauerkraut, although much of what we find canned or jarred nowadays lacks the beneficial lactobacilli that homemade sauerkraut contains because industrial processes kill it off. Lactobacilli and the lactic acid they produce help to promote healthy intestinal flora, much like the good bacteria we are familiar with in yogurt.

I thought I'd try these carrots after I wasn't much a fan of the sauerkraut I made. (The family loved the kraut, though I did not. Gabriel will enthusiastically eat a PBJ sandwich and sauerkraut--on the side, not on the sandwich--for lunch! Peter likes my lacto-fermented beets better than the sauerkraut, due to texture issues. Guess he's not the only baby like this!)

Here's the recipe, with some of my own notes added, based on that from Nourishing Traditions. These are a delicious accompaniment to so many things, including, but not limited to: Black Beans and Rice, Thai Coconut Fish Soup, Hummus and Avocado Sandwiches, the above-pictured "Garden Pitas" (layered with hummus, carrots, beets, and feta), Red Lentil soups and dals, Spinach & Cranberry salad, and other rich or spicy foods.

Ginger Carrots

4 cups grated carrots, very tightly packed
1 T. freshly grated ginger (use less if you're not sure you're a big ginger fan--it's strong)
1 T. sea salt
4 T. whey (if not available, use an additional 1 T. salt, although know it might be a bit salty for your taste--you can get whey by draining yogurt or buttermilk through cheesecloth, or, join a milk co-op like me and order a quart of it. Hey, if anyone is really excited about making this, I'll order you some whey myself!)

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl or pot. Pound with a wooden pounder or meat hammer until the carrots release their juices, maybe about 10 minutes. Place in a quart-sized, wide-mouth mason jar and press down firmly so that the juices cover the carrots. The top of the carrots should be at least 1 inch below the top of the jar (they expand!). Cover tightly and leave at room temperature about 3 days before transferring to cold storage (the top shelf of your fridge).

Traditional Table Tuesday ( a day late): Our Daily Bread

As I mentioned in my first post on our journey to becoming more “traditional” eaters, we would like most, if not all, of the foods that we purchase to be foods that mankind has been eating for thousands of years. This means eliminating from our cabinets packaged foods such as cereals, crackers, boxed cookies, frozen premade dinners, and highly processed breads.

Now, I grant that there are some delicious breads out there, from good bakeries, made with only fresh, traditional ingredients. I don’t even allow myself to browse at the Whole Foods Bakery, primarily because at $5-$8 a loaf, their breads just aren’t in our normal-everyday budget range, but also because I would probably drool on the cases and I know Peter and Gabriel would be begging to have some bread since they love the stuff!

At home, I can make my own bread with all organic ingredients and eat it fresh out of the oven for about $0.89, if I make my standby Whole Wheat Sourdough. My sourdough starter has been disappointing me lately, so at Michael’s request, I tweaked a 100% Whole Wheat bread recipe with conventional yeast, soaking the grains overnight to reduce their phytate content (what in the world is this, you ask? Read here or here to find out) and also to make mouth-wateringly fluffy bread and rolls.

The new conventional yeast recipe I’ve recently discovered, based pretty closely on a recipe from an awesome used-bookstore treasure, Cooking with Whole Grains by Ellen and Vrest Orton, costs me about $2.00. Again, I use all organic ingredients, but instead of water I use milk, butter, and honey, so that adds to the cost. However, a great frugal tip-- you can use milk that's past its prime for this loaf--yes, sour milk-- and honestly I think it tastes even better!

I have to tip my hat to my mother who facilitated my discovery of this great cookbook which has tons of old-fashioned, all 100% whole grain recipes! She passed along this fascinating article called The Mystery of the Mill, which is the introduction to the cookbook I referred to above. Anyone interested in the history of food and the industrial food system will be interested in reading this history of how white flour, although less nutritious, became the predominant flour of our American food system. (It’s all about the money, folks. Are we surprised?)


Here’s the recipe from Cooking With Wholegrains with my modifications:
Soaked Wholewheat Bread

12-24 hours before you wish to start rising the bread, put in a large bowl:
3 T. honey
3 T. butter

Pour over:
1 ½ cups warmed (but not boiled) milk
Stir until butter and honey are melted.
Add:
½ cup buttermilk or yogurt
5 ½ cups flour

Stir until well mixed. Let stand covered in a warm place until you are ready to start the rising process. I usually do this step ( the “soaking” step) the night before, and start my rising process in the morning.

Mix together and allow to proof:
2 1/4 tsp commercial yeast
1/4 cup warm water
1 tsp sugar or honey Mix this into your bread. (I used the bread hook on my Kitchen Aid with much success.)
Once it’s mostly incorporated, mix in:
2 tsp salt

Knead it for a bit, then set in a well-oiled, covered bowl to double in bulk. You’ll be allowing this doubling four times. Once it’s doubled–about an hour, but sometimes a bit more the first time–punch down the dough, and fold the dough from the sides to the center until it is about turned over, and let rise until doubled again. After the fourth time, turn the dough out onto a floured board and knead for a minute or so until it seems firm. Cut off about a third of it, leaving about 2 lbs. of dough for a loaf and about 14 oz. of dough for a couple dinner rolls. Alternately, you could make 2 loaves. After cutting the dough knead it a minute or so more, shape, and place in your bead pan. Let rise in the pan until about doubled–don’t let it over-rise, so keep a close eye on it, then place in a pre-heated oven at 425 for 15 minutes, then lower to 375 and bake for 20 minutes longer, maybe 45 minutes in all. You may need to "tent" the bread with some foil to keep the top from browning too much.

Traditional Table Tuesday: Why Food Matters

On holy milk

From virgin nurse the Boy God feeds;
This miracle all else exceeds.
The One to whom all owe their lives
On food from someone else survives.
O peerless wonder! See him thrive
On fleshly food who keeps alive

the flesh.

(From a poem featured in the Magnificat on January 1, celebrating Mary the Mother of God.)

Over the past months, and years, really, I have been trying to get to the root of why food is not incidental to those who live a life of faith. Food isn’t just a neutral factor in our lives, something just to be consumed without thought, a topic that hovers on the margins of the life of faith but never really enters in. Why? So many reasons come to mind. I’ll just get started with one. The One to whom all owe their lives/ On food from someone else survives. These simple lines reveal two simple truths:

1) Christ ate.
He who shares all in common with us (except for sin, of course) ate, and in so doing, he incorporated the act of eating into the eternal Trinity. Kind of blows you away, doesn’t? God not only made the world, but entered into it, and entered into it all the way, made it a part of himself in the most basic way possible.

2) Food comes from.
Even the completely self-sufficient farmer (and perhaps the self-sufficient farmer is more greatly aware of this) exists in a relationship of reception. For him, food comes from the earth, from his animals, from the good graces of a Creator who has set the world up to be responsive to his labor. For most of the rest of us non-farmer types, food “comes from” in an even more radical way. Food comes from the farmer, from the field laborer, from the trucker, from the butcher, from the supermarket shelf-stocker, and finally, from whomever it is who prepares it for us. What does all this mean? It means that food comes from someone. Thus, food establishes relationships. This basic fact is beautifully illustrated by the infant who must be fed; the entire survival of the infant is completely dependent upon being in relationship with someone who will feed, someone from whom food will come.

These days it is easy to forget that food comes from. We could potentially enter a supermarket, purchase some shrink-wrapped, pre-made frozen food, swipe through a self-checkout aisle, and breeze out of the store, without a word to another human being. No one to thank, no one to even acknowledge.

Looking at these two points together, we see that in eating, Christ entered into relationships. The first and most basic we see in the poem–nursing put him in relationship with his mother Mary (and through her, with all of created humanity). We can only guess at the web of relationships that the Holy Family entered into in order to obtain their food, but I would guess that they were probably not self-sufficient farmers if Joseph and Jesus worked as carpenters. They probably raised part of their own food and traded for part of it. In any case, I doubt that Christ or the Holy Family entered into exploitative relationships in order to obtain the food they ate. Granted, it was a very different time in history, but I am certain there were those who were exploited by the commercial system of the day. All this has convinced me that I need to think hard about the relationships that are established by the food that my family purchases. Am I doing my best to make sure that I am not exploiting others just to get a lot of something cheap, when I could pay more or go to some small amount of trouble to be more respectful of those who are bringing my food to me?

I know there is so much suffering that is invisible to me, suffering that I take for granted on a daily basis, but the suffering of agricultural workers is something that will probably always be present to me. I was blessed by the opportunity to meet and work with a handful of the Mexican migrant workers who pick the apples for our Virginia applesauce and the grapes for our classy Virginia wines. I see their faces when I pay more for the organic produce I purchase, when I chose to get our summer produce from Amish family farms by joining a summer CSA. Most vividly, I see Lupita’s face–she was young, she was my best student, and she and her husband worked in a vineyard. They had constant rashes from the sprays that irritated their arms as they picked the grapes, and although they wished for children, were having a lot of trouble conceiving and wondered why. Although I will never know for sure, I often wondered if the level of chemicals Lupita was exposed to had something to do with their fertility issues.

Our “traditional table” has a lot more to it than just the conventional/organic issue, and certainly, there are nutritional and health benefits to organic foods as well, but honestly, for me, those have always been the icing on the cake, as it were. To me, it is more about the people, more about the social and commercial structures that I am supporting with my food dollar, although it’s nice to know that there’s less toxic chemicals building up in my family’s bodies as well.

New for 2010: Traditional Table Tuesday

Everyone who approaches eating with a high degree of intentionality seems to like to label themselves– perhaps because the way they eat is not just about scanning a finger down a menu and choosing one thing rather than another, but it can become a whole way of life. I’m thinking here of vegetarians, vegans, raw foodies, etc. Over the past five years that we’ve been married, my husband and I have been on a gradual path towards becoming quite intentional about what we eat, but we don’t fall into any of those categories. We’ve been drawn, for a variety of reasons, towards becoming “traditional” eaters.

Traditional eating, for our Catholic family, means that we try to:

• eat foods that have fed and nourished humanity for thousands of years.*
• purchase food that is local; grown in a sustainable and traditional manner
• prepare said food in a traditional way–maximizing not only its nutritive value but our understanding of meals as the gift and fruit of labor
• ponder in ever-greater depth what it means to eat if our God has become Incarnate; if he asks us to take and eat of His very self.
  

On Tuesdays I will chronicle our adventures in becoming traditional eaters. I'll try to add a suggested booklist and some recipes too, eventually.

*The fascinating findings of Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist who travelled all over the world and observed the eating habits of populations that had been isolated from industrial civilization are well-chronicled elsewhere. The short version is this: he observed diverse populations– from the Inuit in Alaska to isolated mountain-dwelling Swiss villagers to Afrikan tribes– and found that their health, not only dental but all-around, was excellent. He compared these isolated peoples to members of the same racial/cultural groups who had begun to eat the foods of industry– white flour, white sugar, white rice, concentrated fruit juices, among many things–and saw the industrial eaters suffering from a great many more health problems as well as physical and mental debilities. Although we have joined the Weston A. Price Foundation– a group that encourages traditional eating and publishes an interesting a quarterly journal on the subject– I must make a caveat here that I do not wholeheartedly endorse everything this group says and does, for reasons I am feeling out slowly and will discuss here as time goes on.

Holy Fermentation, Batman!

It's been a busy night in the kitchen. In the quart jars you'll see the night's big project: Cortido, a.k.a. Latin American Sauerkraut, ready for 3 days of lacto-fermentation on the countertop. Next to it is a bowl of black beans, soaking so they'll be ready to cook tomorrow night, and a bowl of oats, soaking in warm water and 2 tablespoons of cultured buttermilk and cinnamon so it will be ready for our muesli tomorrow morning. Finally there is a big, beautiful, and oh-so-delicious loaf of sourdough bread, a collaborative effort between Michael and me today.

The cortido is my first venture into lacto-fermentation. It's kind of like a leap of faith into the wilds of non-refridgeration, and it's honestly taken me a while to get here. After seeing the beautiful results of sourdough, with its non-refridgerated (at times) starter, I am willing to take the leap! Basically, lactic acid is a natural preservative that inhibits bacteria, and historically lacto-acid fermentation has been used by traditional socities to preserve vegetables for extended periods of time. In other words, leaving the cabbage mixture out on the counter for three days won't kill us, and the author of my cookbook assures me that if the batch goes bad, it will smell so awful there will be no mistaking it. We'll see! I'll let you know how it all turns out when we open the jars on Friday, to use as a condiment for our Black Bean Tostados.