The goldenrod is nicely in flower here in Massachusetts. I highly recommend you get yourself some bunches for drying.
It's a joyful wildflower that brings calm and happiness! If you're further north, you may still find some in protected places where the colder nights haven't nipped it. If you're south of here, keep your eye out! (The grapes are from vines gone wild in my neighbor's yard, spotted at the end of my walk. Usually the birds get them long before I even see them!)
When it is dry, you can store the leaves and flower heads in a jar. Make a tea when anyone needs an immune-system boost, has the warnings of a UTI, seems a bit down, or needs a warm cloth for a wound — soak the cloth in the tea and apply.
Just opening the jar and smelling the goldenrod gives you a boost!
If you're feeling overwhelmed by cherry tomatoes, I find that cutting them in half and drying them for storage is a good way to deal with the surplus.
Little by little, you can fill a few jars — later in winter you will be so happy to be able to toss some in a salad instead of dried cranberries (no added sugar, either), or into sauce or soup for a tomato boost.
If you don't have a dehydrator (mine is from a yard sale, got it for $5), set your oven on its “proofing” setting or however low it will go and dry them that way. When you are drying, you have to stir them around, removing the truly dry ones and letting the others continue. It's not a binary thing like baking.
Sourdough Corner
I hope your starter has… started!
I am an intuitive bread baker.
I could come on here and tell you not to worry about following recipes (especially when you ask me for my recipes, which are… non-existent) but it would be brutally unfair to you — and to me!
Because the truth is that I followed recipes for about 10 years — about 45 years ago. I made loaf after loaf over and over again until the recipes became part of my muscle memory.
I know how to bake bread without a recipe because I spent years in training with recipes tested by people whose job it was to test them.
I paid close attention to each recipe until I realized that flour, water, and salt would produce a rustic, chewy loaf, and the addition of milk especially, but also butter (or oil), sugar (or other sweetener), and even egg would result in a soft, tender loaf.
I pored over charts explaining the function of each ingredient. I learned what the proportion of “extra” ingredients such as cooked cereals (like cornmeal, oats, and coarser wheat grinds) could be added before the gluten of the base flour was compromised.
On many an occasion, I forgot to add the salt and figured out what the salt does. (Don't leave out the salt! In fact, add a bit more than the recipe calls for.)
{My pizza is always ready… when the sun has gone down. Sorry for the bad lighting! This is the best pizza I have ever made, made it last night: sourdough crust, chopped tomatoes from the garden, mozzarella, ricotta, parmesan, sweet yellow peppers and fresh purple basil also from the garden. Cracked the code on my new gas range and got the tenderest, crispiest crust. Trust me, I will work on providing you with the method!}
I made thousands of dinner rolls and countless pizzas. It all got critiqued by my little munchkins and then I strove to match their visions of even softer rolls and even crispier pizza crusts.
So when you got into this sourdough thing with me, you maybe didn't quite realize that I would make you do something like that as well. I went through it, and emerged a good baker, but the intuition means I'm not good at offering recipes!
I can tell you, though, that if, now that you have your starter, you follow some good recipes and try to learn from. your mistakes as I did, I will show you two things:
- To maintain your starter without discarding!
- To make big batches of bread/rolls/pizza or anything else!
So this week, in the project of making you an intuitive baker as well, and assuming you have a nice strong starter, may I suggest that you practice by making this King Arthur recipe for two loaves of sourdough sandwich bread.
I encourage you to make sandwich bread to start with because the extra ingredients — milk, butter, and sugar — mean you don't have to do stretch-and-folds or otherwise baby your dough. Just keep it warm.
TIPS:
- See the tips below regarding the starter/levain.
- You can use milk in place of the water if you don't have milk powder. You can use oil in place of the butter and honey in place of the sugar.
- After you mix the ingredients together, let the dough rest for 1/2 an hour before proceeding with the rest of the recipe.
- Go by the rising, not by the timing. LOOK at the dough, not the clock. It should look a bit puffy and not dead-like.
- When you form your logs, gently pat or roll each piece of dough out to make a flattened, thick rectangle. Then roll it up and seal the seam. (Later in the week when you do it again, you can braid the loaves according to my tutorial.)
Here are more tips for reaching that first goal of not discarding any starter:
I'm going to assume you have about a cup of starter in your jar.
Where it says at the beginning of the recipe to make the levain (which is feeding your starter and getting the quantity needed for the loaves), use the amount of starter that will leave about 1/4 cup of starter in your jar.
In other words, take your measuring cup and put into it whatever amount results in you having a few tablespoons of starter left over.
It doesn't matter if it is or is not the 3 tablespoons called for in the recipe.
It can be a cup or 1/2 cup — if so, add the amount of flour and water necessary to bring it up to around 300 g total (the total given in the recipe when you add up the amounts). If you have a bit more than that, it's fine. If you have a lot more, measure out the amount they say and use the rest for pancakes for tomorrow as I laid out in last week's post.
The main, key learning here is to be left with about 1/4-1/3 cup of starter in your jar (about 100 ml).
The recipe will come out the same whether you have 275, 300, or 325 g of starter.
But you will have too much starter in your jar if you don't pay attention to how much you're leaving, because…
You need to feed the starter in your jar as you make your levain for the bread recipe.
So do that now.
Feed it about 1/3 cup flour (a mix with rye if you can) and 1/4 cup very warm water or whatever ends up being a similar volume of flour to what you have in there plus just enough water to make it into a stiff dough.
Then put the cover on, not tightly, and wash the outside of the jar with hot water (to clean it and warm it up — it's been in the fridge and the glass is cold).
Now leave both out — the levain for the recipe and the starter.
Proceed with the recipe (looking at my first set of tips again) and put the starter back in the fridge when it has doubled in volume but before it loses its nice dome.
By the way, this is my current situation due to all this starter talk:
We'll leave the second goal (making big batches) for when you've mastered your two sandwich loaves!
bits & pieces
- Rob Marco did a long interview with me, being published in three parts. Here is the first part — you can click along to see the second, and I think the third will be published next week. I talk mainly about feminism and its terrible cost to our well being.
Leila Miller was kind enough to say:
Leila Marie Lawler gave the interview that I've been waiting for all my life. If you are a woman, read this. If you have a daughter, read this. If you even know a woman, read this!!!!
(Then, find your courage, and share this! You never know whose life you will be changing, and that will affect generations.)
- I'm glad we're going into natural fermentation, because I really think our current bread situation is the contraception of bread — the fake pleasure of a thing without delivering the goods, without achieving its end, which in the case of bread is to nourish, to provide flourishing to the body and to point beyond itself to the Bread of Heaven.
I think I have told you about this Substack that sends you a passage from the Rule of St. Benedict every day, with light commentary. I was reading this entry about what the monks ought to eat.
The commentary on the amount of bread:
“A pound of bread” – this sees a very large amount to us today! But medieval bread was usually more rich in protein and nutrients than its modern equivalent and formed a large part of the diet of everyone, not just monks. Of course we don’t really know what a “pound” meant to St Benedict, as he didn’t leave us any detailed measures in his Rule. Dom Delatte, in his commentary on the Rule, tells us that the monks of Monte Cassino did preserve the measure and that it equates to 12 ounces. Be that as it may, I think most monks and nuns today would think eating that much bread per day was quite a lot.
You can see here what he means about “more rich”:
Have you ever tried a bread and water fast? It's really hard, if not impossible, on bread made with yeast. I've been thinking about how the bread of the past must have been different from ours. It's unthinkable to me that active people — men who worked as well as prayed in the monastery — could survive on one meal a day plus bread, if they meant by that what we have.
But naturally fermented bread, when made with whole meal, is incredibly sustaining. My journey into it has revealed to me the difference. A piece of bread that you get in France or Germany from a good bakery or something like what I can now make at home is just not the same as anything you can buy or make with yeast.
I hope that encourages you to keep working at it!
- Next month will be held the conference on Blessed Karl of Austria in Washington, D.C. Phil will be speaking; I will be there! Our dear friend Paul Jernberg has written a Mass for the liturgy on Saturday. I hope you will be able to go!
Finally, some might be wondering why I call my new Substack The School for Housewives and not something like “for domesticity” or what have you, perhaps more appealing to those who are not married.
Partially my impulse is to startle. Who thinks of housewives today? Yet “housewife” is the exact counterpart of “husband” and the life of the married couple centers on their little domestic universe. There's a character in the book I'm currently re-reading (in its uncensored form, which I had not gotten to), In the First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who refuses to use “latinized” words but insists on only words with Russian roots. His obsession is to use language in the most realistic, elemental way possible as a sort of protest against the “foreign” Marxist tyranny that has actually imprisoned him.
I'm not that fanatical, but somehow “housewife” seems like a good bit of resistance to me.
Anyway, another reason is my delight in the School of Housewives in Iceland, which I learned about from watching this film: The School of Housewives: The Nordic school that creates the perfect housewife. I encourage you to watch it — watch it with your young people!
My thought with my Substack is to have a little something popping in your inbox every day that helps you love your little spot a bit more.
liturgical living
Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Next week the Ember Days are on Wednesday and Friday.
Here is my affiliate link to my Amazon page — the only affiliate thing that goes on here on LMLD, which is why the page loads quickly and you don’t have to keep closing pop-ups etc! Thank you for opening it and shopping if you are so minded — as some have asked me. If not, don’t worry one bit!
My book, The Summa Domestica: Order and Wonder in Family Life is available from Sophia Press! Also in paperback now! All the thoughts from this blog collected into three volumes, beautifully presented with illustrations from Deirdre, an index in each volume, and ribbons!
My “random thoughts no pictures” blog, Happy Despite Them has moved over to Substack! — receive it by email if you like, or bookmark, so you don’t miss a thing! The old one is still up if you want to look at the comments on past posts. It will take me a while to get things organized, but you'll be patient, I know!
There you will find the weekly podcast done by Phil and me, called On the Home Front. Do let us know what you think!
Visit me at The School for Housewives and recommend it to your young friends!
My podcast, The Home Truths Society, can be found on the Restoration of Christian Culture website (and you can find it where you listen to such things) — be sure to check out the other offerings there!
Stay abreast of the posts here at LMLD, when they happen:
Consider subscribing to this blog by email. We would love to pop into your inbox! The subscription box is on this page on the sidebar!
We share pretty pictures: Auntie Leila’s Instagram, Rosie’s Instagram, Deirdre’s Instagram. Bridget’s Instagram.
Auntie Leila’s Facebook (you can just follow)
The boards of the others: Rosie’s Pinterest. Sukie’s Pinterest. Deirdre’s Pinterest. Habou’s Pinterest
Liz says
I bake a lot and make most of our bread items, but I do use yeast because my husband doesn’t like sourdough. Do you have any tips to make it less “sour”? He doesn’t like the tanginess of the sourdough he’s had at bakeries.
Liz says
I just had the thought of searching through the comments on the last few posts and saw that you said that a stiffer starter makes the bread less sour. So I guess that is my answer! Maybe I’ll get to it once the weather cools down again here.
Leila says
Yes, we will talk about that. I think the two biggest factors are a warmer temperature throughout all the stages (starter rising, fermentation, rise, shaping) and a stiffer starter. You can get going on that!
But if you use yeast, you can get closer to the natural fermentation ideal by making your bread with a levain, instead of going straight from adding the yeast to mixing the dough.
So use just a little yeast (like 1/4 tsp), mix with 1/2 cup water 1/2 flour, leave it to rise, and then use it. You can use just a pinch of yeast and leave it out all night.
Judith says
I can’t thank you enough for this tutorial!! After multiple tries over the past 5 years this is my first successful starter!! Thank you!! Question about feeding the starter once we make the King Arthur Bread recipe…if we are using the scale to measure, should the flour we add equal the weight of the starter we are adding to? And then the scant amount of warm water to get the stiff dough? So for instance, I have 117g of starter left…instead of using measuring 1/3c of BF could I use 117g BF? Thank you again!!!
Leila says
Yes, exactly.
Maria says
My husband and I speak Russian ‘at home’ (ie within our family and with the kids, only Russian) and insist on Russian being spoken with Russian words as well. Not as a rebellion, and a bit different as he’s choosing between derivatives and we’re dealing with two languages, vut anyway we do so just because there’s the Russian language and there’s the English, and sort of like Spanglish, if you’re not purposeful about it, you lose your linguistic purity (I mean a reasonable amount.. esp in this global world, it’s impossible to keep each totally pure). You’d be surprised how many Russian speakers, including those who came here at older ages and cannot speak English fluently even after many years here, have forgotten all manner of Russian nouns. This is all neither here nor there, ie I have no point I’m making, just thought of it and decided to share.
Leila says
Thanks for this!
Have you read the book I mentioned? It’s so interesting, because the same thing happens in English. We think it’s better to use a latinized word than an Anglo-Saxon one. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it’s not.
Anyway, that character is quite lovable.
Caitlin says
My husband speaks Russian with our children and I bet he’d like that book /character very much… it’s so funny because Russian doesn’t seem to have made use of many loanwords before about the eighteenth century (this is my unscholarly, totally not-researched and spontaneous claim!). You see them in words that have to do with science, biology, libraries or the gym, ha ha! But because of this a lot of Russian words are almost adorable in their straightforwardness… a pillow is an “under-ear” and such.
There is an illustrated children’s version of Beowulf where the author only used Anglo-Saxon-based words to give the narrative proper flavor. It’s so good!
https://www.amazon.com/Beowulf-James-Rumford/dp/061875637X/ref=sr_1_1
Joan says
So I watched the Nordic school of housewife’s. Any idea what that pastry was that they were making at the end? It was almost like a large prizzele cookie or maybe just a very thin crust to top a pie? Kudos to the talent of handling such a thin piece of dough!!
Joan
Donna L. says
Hello Auntie Leila and thank you SO MUCH for this instruction about being intuitive–with sourdough as well as other housewifely activities and duties! May I ask which cookbooks and people you read so that I might bolster my meager memory for such things, please? I must say that I was intrigued when you wrote: “because I spent years in training with recipes tested by people whose job it was to test them.” I would love to have that kind of training–and there is no time like the present!
May God richly bless you~
Leila says
Hi Donna 🙂
In this post I went over a few of the books that I used assiduously to learn to cook and bake: https://likemotherlikedaughter.org/2013/12/cookbooks-in-life-syllabus-library/
There was a bread baking book that I had back in the 80s that helped me figure out what ingredients do what in a batch of dough, but I long ago passed it on, figuring I didn’t look at it any more. It’s the one I got the olive oil raisin bread from, and after I wrote it down, I felt I could part with that book. Sorry about that — but there are others, I’m sure, and maybe the library would reveal some solid volumes on the subject.
In this post: https://likemotherlikedaughter.org/2009/02/spent-grain-bread/
I foolhardily tried to combine passing along some technique with a rather arcane bread recipe/method (spent grain bread — I would hazard to guess that 99.9% of my readers don’t know what spent grain is!), and there are a few books mentioned in it.
That said, the techniques are solid, and you can see the big covered enameled pan I find so useful when rising a big batch of dough.
Of course, that was all before the internet age! Can you imagine!!
Now I also go to the King Arthur site (and my daughters have the cookbook as well) and there are a few other accounts I follow for technique. I will try to remember to post about them as they turn up.
Marie says
I love your interview. We kept noticing how the news segments on the Butker speech all used Taylor Swift as a counterpoint. “Look! Clearly Butker is wrong! Here’s a lady who makes a ton of money!”
Haven’t they read a single fairytale? But I suppose they haven’t.
Leila says
Thank you! Yes! “Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”
sibyl says
Is there a way to watch the video with English subtitles? The link I clicked had the film in the original Icelandic, if that is what they are speaking!
Leila says
Yes, click on the thingy that looks like a quote bubble — it’s the fifth thingy from the right down at the bottom of your screen when you hover your cursor over and the progress bar comes up.
Jessica says
Do you (or perhaps one of your readers will?) have suggestions for substituting milk with a non-dairy option in sandwich bread? I am currently dairy-free (with the exception of butter, though that may have to change too) for the sake of the baby I am nursing who sadly cannot tolerate it. I miss baking with dairy SO much!! I’ve been sticking with a classic sourdough boule because I’m just not sure how to wade into the issue of dairy substitutes when it comes to making sandwich bread.
Leila says
Ugh, sorry about that. It’s a hard thing to give up!
Yes, instead of the milk, do this:
Substitute 1/4 c. of whole wheat flour for the bread flour (or AP) called for in the recipe. Boil 1/2 cup of the water called for and, in a bowl, pour it over the whole wheat flour, whisking as you go. After about 10 minutes, pour another 1/2 cup of the water called for in the recipe over that mixture (a slurry, also known as tangzhong — you can look it up).
Now that slurry should be lukewarm. You can now mix it in with the other ingredients.
Another method would be to take 1/4 c. of oats and pour boiling water over them and proceed the same way. Adding this to the existing recipe would not change it very much.
Instead of butter, you can use a mild oil like avocado or non-EVOO olive oil. This actually makes the bread more like challah and it will have a nice texture!
Jessica says
thank you so much!! This is so helpful!
Katie says
Great interview. I think that point you made about spirited women always having had careers is so important and so often missing from the conversation. One has only to look at the saints to see that some women are born to something a little more heroic in the philosophically “masculine” sense (St Joan of Arc, St Theresa d’Avila, St Lucy, etc). The point isn’t that everyone’s life looks the same, but that we are free to follow God on the path he’s set before us, and for most women that is the home and family life.
Recently, people keep asking me if I need an outlet for fulfillment since I’m always home, but I keep telling them that I get to read and become competent and creative and enjoy being with my darling husband and children. And then they start suggesting that I’m a freeloader! So you just can’t win!
Leila says
Haha oh my goodness. People are just so silly!
But when they are in a pinch, they call the mom who is home…
Kathkath says
Have you come across any information/suggestions for making gluten free sourdough?
We are a 100% gluten free home, but many years ago, before I had to go gluten free, I used to make all our own bread.
Leila says
I’m sorry, I am not up on this! But the King Arthur site seems to be very helpful with gluten-free baking!
Ellen says
During Covid the website Bakerita did a huge post on making gluten free sourdough. I didn’t try it, but her instructions are very thorough if you want to check it out.
Min says
Thank you for this post ! I embarked on my sourdough journey last week and so far the starter looks great! Making my first 2 loaves tomorrow. I just made the sourdough levain today and set aside to rise overnight. I also left my jar of starter out for several hours after feeding, but it didn’t rise. I was doing so well with the feeding/rising routine last week and wasn’t expecting it to not rise. I am worried about leaving it out overnight so I placed it back in the refrigerator. Should I leave it out of the refrigerator again tomorrow? Or just leave it there until I attempt to bake again?
Leila says
As I sad in the post, often there does seem to be a little plateau. Don’t worry. Set it out and see if it rises. Are you using the rubber band?
When it gets good and warm, if it doesn’t seem to rise, feed it again and if you have rye that would be great to use about half rye.
Depending on your amounts, this would be the one situation where I would discard (or chuck into your waffle batter; surely it’s just a matter of a small amount).
But don’t worry, it will bounce back. It may be that things are cooler than you realize — here in MA the nights have been downright cold!