As a family, we (mostly) follow a traditional foods diet.  Living in Montana, we are somewhat meat-heavy in our diet (no apologies—we are far healthier than ever before).  We are busy, and being a bread baker I often look to the quick sandwich to feed my family while on the go. 

I am going to smash the excuse that real food costs more, or that you do not have any choices.  I have already done the hard work (out of necessity for my family’s health) of pricing out each option ounce-for-ounce and I am going to pass along my “aha moment” to you.

The Local Deli Counter

I asked the lady if I could see the ingredients list for the cold cuts on sale.  No verbal answer, but she stared at me with that look on her face that said, “It’s meat.  Meat.”   The manager understood my plight thankfully, and said, “If you cannot have dextrose or cornstarch, we might not have any deli meat for you.”  Label by label by label, we tediously discovered that ultimately, the delicatessen is off-limits.  We discovered that there is one “safe” and cornless deli meat, pastrami, which probably isn’t “safe” at all by other standards.  On that particular day, I was just trying to feed my kid on a busy trip into town so I bought it (crazy expensive too, I might add). 

I blame a lot of my “lack of real food choices” on the fact that I live in a small town, but I found that is not true.  On a recent trip to an extremely metropolitan East Coast city, I found the local deli still had only a single non-corn meat…pastrami.  They also had the incredulous look of “It’s meat, Lady” on their faces, and the “safe” choice still had an ingredients list at least 5 items long.

 The Solution

Finding pre-sliced lunch meat without all of the corn syrup, msg, food coloring, preservatives, and other unnamed gunk…it can be done but not easily or cheaply.  We have yet to discuss what the animal was fed, it’s living conditions, the use of antibiotics, or genetic modification!  Lest you feel like giving up before you start, there is a solution that only takes minutes of your day—less if you plan ahead. 

My solution was the food slicer (currently $20 off in honor of this blog).  Originally purchased for making our 6-8 gallons of yearly sauerkraut, we find reasons to use it all of the time.  In fact, we find it really helps to make fermented foods like pickles, sauerkraut, and kimchi simpler and thereby, we have increased our intake of those naturally probiotic foods.  I probably use it every bit as often as a companion to my Excalibur dehydrator…zucchini chips, tomatoes, onions, carrots, potatoes…you get the idea.  But back to the meat of the matter.  

I have control over the meat we are eating.  We get our pork semi-locally (2 hours away, and in Montana that is “local”); they even deliver it twice a year.  Grass-fed, no hormones, humanely butchered, and unlike any other pork I have ever eaten in my life.  Try to find those options in your community. 

For comparison’s sake, I will be talking only of ham so that we have a baseline.

Option 1: The Local Producer

Very often, your local producer is using locally-grown feed.  You can usually go to the farm yourself to see the condition of the livestock.  You can ask questions, walk around, smell the roses (so to speak).  There are generally different package deals; if you have adequate freezer space you can even buy ½ an animal, or a whole animal.  Find someone else to split the meat with to get the best deal of all.  

If I buy just a ham a la carte, it will cost $7.49/ lb.   That’s 47¢ an ounce.  A bit too high, but if I buy in bulk, I can bring that cost all the way down to 19¢ an ounce!  As an aside, our local producer will sell sliced ham to you for $1.50 more per pound.  That food slicer is paying for itself.

Option 2:  The Wholesale Box Store

I recently talked to a friend who lives in the Washington DC area who said that the Costco/Sam’s Club style store is the “only way we can stay within a food budget around here”.  I know that this is a common way to shop, and so here was my price comparison.

 25¢/oz.  for this smoked ham, cured 4-6 months.  No information whatsoever was given about the farm, farming methods, antibiotics, feed, animal treatment, and so on.  The ingredients list was acceptable (salt, sugar, pepper, that type of thing).  

Option 3: The Local Health Food Grocery Store

Having recently emptied my bi-annual supply of pork, I purchased this one at a large, full-selection health food store.  I was pleased with the ingredients (the lack thereof), the flavor is delicious, and I know that this is a quick, safe meal for a family on-the-go.  I sliced the whole thing and put most of it into the freezer for another day. 

39¢ an ounce.  Your health food store might be cheaper—we live in a food-expensive area because everything must get trucked in over the mountains. 

Conclusion

Plan a family trip out to your local farm (use Farmmatch, Local Harvest, or Farmplate to find one).  Make a day of it, have an experience and reconnect with your food.   Then the next day, slice up your meat and put it all into your freezer for later convenience. 

Oh, and as an aside—here is the ingredients list for a Hillshire Farm product, very typical of everything out there.

Thick Sliced Virginia Brand Ham

Water Added, Caramel Colored ● Made in Kentucky

Ingredients:

CURED WITH WATER, SUGAR, DEXTROSE, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: SODIUM LACTATE, SALT, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, CLOVE, SODIUM DIACETATE, SODIUM ERYTHORBATE, SODIUM NITRITE, CARAMEL COLOR.

Don’t forget to make a panini for me,

Chaya 

 P.S.– The Nesco food slicer is $20 off right now!  No coupon needed; we just want to encourage you to produce, prepare, & preserve–your own lunch meat! 

Proviso:

Nothing in this blog constitutes medical advice.  You should consult your own physician before making any dietary changes.  Statements in this blog may or may not be congruent with current USDA or FDA guidance

Pre-ferments: How They Work

Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a yeast by any other name 

The eyes in swiss cheese and the pockets in French Bread are both caused by trapped gasses—however the first is caused by bacteria (Monera Kingdom) and the second is from yeast (Fungi Kingdom).  In bread, it is possible to leverage both through the use of pre-ferments. 

If you read our other blogs on pre-ferments you are likely sold on them and you are already on your way to making great bread.  I just wanted to fill you in on a bit of the “how it works” behind the scenes with the smallest parts of nature doing all the heavy lifting.  Enzymes do so much for us and eventually to us.  Need to make cheese?  Enzymes can help you do that.  After I am put in the ground one day to make compost, it will be enzymes doing the hard part of converting me to soil.  Hand-in-hand with enzymes, are bacteria recycling everything in nature.

Enzymes typically end in “-ase” and are named for the sugar that they consume which typically ends in “-ose.”  For example, amylase is the enzyme that converts the sugar in a bruised or freshly cut apple to the brown color we observe.  The amylase enzyme is acting on the amylose sugars in the apple, of which fructose is one kind of amylose.  “Enzymes are complex proteins that act as catalysts in almost every biochemical process that takes place in the body.  Their activity depends on the presence of adequate vitamins and minerals, particularly magnesium” (Fallon & Enig, p. 46).  Great, but what does that have to do with bread? 

An enzyme is what nature uses to break stuff down, whether they are working in your saliva or in huge vats in a Cargill plant in Blair, Nebraska turning long chain corn sugar into short chain high fructose corn syrup—enzymes reduce things.  Typically we would not want to leverage this if it were fruit salad, so we counteract enzymes with acids.  However, in creating a great pre-ferment we are cheering the enzyme process as it is the first step in releasing the grain’s full potential. 

Here is an experiment that you can try at home: take a pinch of flour and put it on your tongue—it likely does not taste palatable at all, why is that?  “Flour tastes like sawdust because its sugar components are too complex to differentiate on the tongue” (Reinhart, p. 59).  The tongue is not set up to taste let along fully appreciate the wheat berry or its flour in its raw state because the sugar chains are way too long.  This is why sprouted bread has markedly higher nutrition, because the enzymes have already done so much of the work to make the nutrients available.

So the bread baker will either use the natural enzymes present in the dough plus time or he/she may wish to add a small percentage (usually .5-1% by weight) of an enzyme such as malted barley to the dough.  The enzyme process will break down the wheat sugars, this much you know, but the follow on processes are what makes bread truly extraordinary.  According to Reinhart, amylase and distase break down the wheat sugars to impart three subsequent effects: color (called “carmelization” by bakers) for the crust and crumb, flavor (the whole reason we are doing this!) and food for the yeast.

There are enough enzymes naturally occurring in flour that it is not always necessary to add them in the form of malted barley, as long as you are able to stretch time long enough to allow them to do their job.  This is, in a nutshell, why pre-ferments create superior bread: they are a way to manipulate time, to stretch it, so that the wondrous chemical activity going on at the cellular level can fulfill its mission (Reinhart, p. 64). 

Hmmmmm, food for the yeast?  I thought that is why we added enrichments to the bread?  You certainly can do that, but in Europe luxuries such as sweeteners were not always available, so pre-ferments were leveraged to embody flavor and develop structure in the bread.  Yeast is a simple organism, a fungus, an eukaryotic microorganism to be exact, and it eats simple sugars like glucose. 

But not all yeast is the same, nor does it have the same efficacy.  Reinhart, who prefers instant yeast, gives the following equivalency chart for substituting yeast (p. 60):

100% fresh yeast = 40-50% active dry yeast = 33% instant yeast

Typically all yeast that we buy will be the commercial yeast known as Saccharomyces cerevisiae otherwise known as baker’s yeast or brewer’s yeast—it is the same thing.  Breaking the word down we get from Latin: Saccaro, meaning “sugar,” myces, meaning “fungus,” and cerevisiae, meaning “beer.”  We can otherwise say that as: “sweet fungus of beer” (Volk & Galbraith). This yeast is produced to be reliable and predictable for baking—two things that you definitely want.  Pre-ferments using this kind of yeast are easy to work with and have reproducible results. 

The other kind of yeast you really do not need to buy, because it is everywhere.  It is the white powdery residue on the wheat berry, a grape or even a plum—yes, we are talking about wild yeast or Saccharomyces exiguus.  This is typically used in sourdough breads, and the wild yeast works in conjunction with bacteria, notably our old friend Lactobacillus. 

The complex sour flavor is not created by the wild yeast [alone].  Other bacterial organisms, specifically lactobacillus [sic] and acetobacillus [sic], create lactic and acetic acids as they feed off the enzyme-released sugars in the dough, and these are responsible for the sour flavor (Reinhart, 65).

Remember that we are leveraging time in this process as well, so here is where the road splits off the direct doughs from the indirect doughs (using pre-ferments).  I have friends that are beer brewers and they say that everything has to be spotlessly clean because any bacteria will ruin a batch of beer.  “If bacterial activity creates too much acid, this type of yeast will die and make the bread taste funny, with an ammonia like aftertaste and a weakened gluten structure caused by the glutathione released by the yeast.  Most regular Saccharomyces cerevisiae leavened breads have a pH level of 5.0 to 5.5” (Reinhart, 66).

On the decidedly more acidic end of the pH scale is Saccharomyces exiguus which works best in a pH level of 3.5 to 4.0 “and therefore thrives when the bacteria does its work creating lactic and acetic acids.  Since it takes twice as long for the bacteria to create flavor as it takes for the yeast to leaven the dough, it requires a hearty strain of yeast to endure” (Reinhart, 65).  This chart should sum up everything we talked about so far:

If you have a recipe, tip or trick for using a pre-ferment—please leave a comment and share it with us.  Also, if you are a US resident, and you are over 18 and you have entered a valid e-mail address—I have a small prize for the first person who posts what a “barm” is in the comment section below (without doing an internet search, please). 

Wilson

Pro Deo et Patria

Works Cited:

Fallon, S., & Enig, M. (2005). Nourishing traditions. (Deluxe Edition ed., p. 4). Washington DC: NewTrends Publishing.

Reinhart, P. (2002). The bread baker’s apprentice, mastering the art of extraordinary bread. (p. 27). Ten Speed Pr.

Volk, T., & Galbraith, A. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/dec2002.html

Photo Credits:

Saccharomyces cerevisiae by photo credit: Rising Damp via photopin cc

Yeast and saccharomyces exiguus are taken from the Public Domain

All other photos and graphic by Pantry Paratus and may be used with permission with proper attribution–thanks.  

Proviso:

Nothing in this blog constitutes medical advice.  You should consult your own physician before making any dietary changes.  Statements in this blog may or may not be congruent with current USDA or FDA guidance.

www.Hypersmash.com

Pre-ferments, the key to unlocking really great bread 

Leveraging time, enzymes and yeast

“Fermentation is the key to world-class bread, assuming that the flour and other ingredients are good” (Reinhart, p. 11).

I used to not believe that quote above, but then again I used to think that flour only came in a paper bag.  Which now that I think about it, should have tipped me off because the bag always leaked and why would an agricultural society (& one that cares about “if seal is broken”) put up with that?  Sure, yeast will eat sugar.   I have tasted beer and watched bread rise to know that is true.  However, before I was married to a bread baker I was unaware that there is so much more than the mechanical pressure of carbon dioxide going on in the bread baking cycle.  The difference between bread by the academic definition and extraordinary bread is fermentation; and if you want to go up a notch from there—pre-ferments make the difference. 

We will metaphorically follow the bread baker’s axiom that the best loaves are made by building dough in stages . . .  Eighty percent of the quality of the finished bread will be determined during the primary fermentation stage (Stage Three) and the other twenty percent primarily will be determined during the baking, or oven stage (Stage Ten) (Reinhart, p. 48-49).

Reinhart goes on to identify twelve stages of baking bread, but that is for a different day.  If you recall from our blogpost on the Classifications of Bread, the use of a pre-ferment (or not) is what makes the dough a straight or direct dough as opposed to an indirect or sponge dough.  I still consider myself to be still catching on to this, but a real bread baker utilizes millennia of wisdom.  Dough that is mixed directly can still use yeast as the fermenting agent, but will not have the benefit of unlocking all the sugars of the grain which make the bread truly delicious.   That happens only with grain and yeast and time. 

What does “pre-fermentation” mean?

A fermentation process allows time to capitalize on the bacteria naturally present in a food item to digest the difficult enzymes that our bodies might not like (things like phytic acid), releases gases, and gives all of the flavors present an atmosphere to mingle, smooze, and make connections. If you make bread using yeast instead of sourdough, you are taking a shortcut (and you know it—but hey—I’m not judging) to the end result of bread without allowing a true fermentation to take place. 

A “pre-ferment” is when you do give the flour a fighting chance for flavor by the gift of time.  You are hydrating the flour ahead of time.  You can use any measure of the flour you will use in the end recipe and an equal part water, stir, and let it sit out at room temperature for a few hours or even overnight (we will get into the details of this in our next blog).  It is called a “pre-ferment” instead of “ferment”, because you are not fermenting the entirety of your bread, you are not utilizing a sourdough starter (with the proper strains of bacteria to raise the bread) and you did it ahead of time from the actual act of “making bread”.  In other words, you aren’t adding the rest of the ingredients yet, you aren’t getting flour in your hair, and you have not even invested enough time into this process to require a “bread baking music” selection.   You are not adding the ingredients yet.  Just flour, just water (and sometimes a smidgen of yeast).  This can still be yeast bread and not a sourdough with a sourdough bread starter, but you will mimic many of the flavors and increase the health benefits of a pre-digested wheat kernel through that gift of time. 

Is this just academic? When will I ever use this, anyway?

French or Italian breads can only be properly made with a pre-ferment because the ingredient list is so simple: Flour, Water, Yeast and Salt (in a 60-2-2 baking math formula).  The difference between bland and awesome is “the quality of the wheat, coupled with the baker’s ability to draw out flavor through fermentation and baking technique” (Reinhart, p. 31). Since the wheat berry is such a compact form of energy, it is best to coax the maximum value out of it slowly over time; which as a corollary has everything to do with the gluten content. 

Take this analogy of a gallon of gasoline.  If poured into a metal pan and ignited on fire, it will not do much work at all—rather it will likely put out a lot of black smoke and prompt your neighbors to call the fire department.  Take that same gallon of gasoline and meter it out slowly in a fuel efficient internal combustion engine and you can get twenty or thirty miles down the road on that same unit of energy.  Wheat works the same way, in that it responds better to slow release of flavor.

The use of pre-ferments is a simple and inexpensive way to improve bread quality.  Each preferment generates different aromas depending on its characteristics.  Aromas and final bread flavors are influenced by the pre-ferments’ liquid or stiff consistency, fermentation temperature, salt including or exclusion and the use of commercial yeast or wild yeast (Rossada).

So have I left you hanging?  In the next blog we pick this conversation right back up.  We will discuss the different types of pre-ferments and the considerations to make when choosing one.

Wilson

Pro Deo et Patria

Works Cited:

Reinhart, P. (2002). The bread baker’s apprentice, mastering the art of extraordinary bread. (p. 27). Ten Speed Pr.

Rossada, D. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.bakerconnection.com/artisanbaker/article_04.htm

Photos by Pantry Paratus.  Feel free to re-pin or share them, but maintain proper attribution and link.  Thank you.

 
 Proviso:

Nothing in this blog constitutes medical advice.  You should consult your own physician before making any dietary changes.  Statements in this blog may or may not be congruent with current USDA or FDA guidance.

www.Hypersmash.com

Classifications of Bread

A systematic approach to the staff of life

“Bread is basic.  Most likely it was the original baked good, for at heart bread is nothing more than flour and water” (Joachim & Schloss, p. 64).

People think in concepts that are reduced to words such as: tree, house or bread.  What is crystal clear in one person’s head may not be so to another person, so language was invented to trade these ideas in the form of words.  And when a particular kind of tree is under discussion, not just any old word will do and so descriptors were invented to classify things and identify their distinctions—bread is one such thing.  What comes to mind as “bread” in France is different than New Zealand, China or Argentina because everyone has their own favorite kind of bread depending on available ingredients and techniques.  So it is good that people (who like to name things) have thought of a way to have different classifications of bread. 

Bread is largely divided up by its contents with one exception being flat bread which is a label applied to the physical characteristic of the bread namely its height.  Peter Reinhart in his landmark book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, lists five different criteria in which bread is classified, namely:

  Hydration

  Richness

  Pre-fermentation

  Leavener

  Height (as in flat bread)

First up, classification by hydration: Bread’s basic ingredients are flour made from some kind of grain and water; from there you can do just about anything to vary the staff of life—everything from whole food to the now defunct Wonder Bread.  Delineating bread by water content is an example of a pretty straight forward application of Baking Math.  According to Reinhart, the types are stiff doughs, standard doughs and rustic doughs (Reinhart, p. 45).

Next is the Classification by Richness.  Flour and water are the basic ingredients for both paper mache and a genuine Valley Forge soldier’s firecake—neither of which tastes very good at all.  So over the past few millennia man has engineered bread to taste moister, absorb more gravy or just feel better to the mouth by enriching it with fats, milk and/or sugars (whenever available).  Reinhart identifies three kinds of these doughs: lean doughs, enriched doughs and rich doughs with a subcategory called laminate doughs (Reinhart, p. 45). 

Classification by (the use of) Pre-fermentation is also another category by itself.  This is the means to make bread extraordinary through the careful manipulation of time, enzymes and the raw fuel found in grains. 

As dough ferments, its yeast continues to produce carbon dioxide, which filters into the air pockets formed by kneading, causing them to inflate and raise the dough.  The gentle stretching continues to develop the gluten, so even barely kneaded dough will become stretchier and more cohesive during fermentation.  Yeasts reach their greatest activity at around 95˚F (35˚C), so at that temperature a dough will rise rapidly, but a fast-rising dough can also develop unpleasant yeasty aromas and an abundance of unwanted by-products of yeast metabolism, like alcohol.  Lowering the temperature, by letting the dough rise in a cool room or in the fridge, extends the rise, diminishes off flavors, and encourages more desirable flavors.  The longer a dough ferments the more time there is for yeasts and bacteria in the dough to generate flavor compounds.  This is most evident in whole wheat breads, in which a slow rising increase the nutty and honey-like flavors in the grain (Joachim & Schloss, p. 66).

The topic of pre-fermentation is a fascinating one, and we will have a whole blog dedicated to that next week.  For now, suffice to say that the two categories that Reinhart identifies regarding pre-fermentation are straight doughs and indirect or sponge doughs (Reinhart, p. 45). 

Then we have classification by leavener.  The type and use of (or lack thereof) regarding leavening agents is how this category is divided.   Breads here can be commercially yeasted, naturally leavened breads (wild yeast or sour dough), a hybrid of the above (also called “spiking the dough”) and unyeasted doughs that may or may not be chemically leavened (Reinhart, pp. 45-46). 

Lastly we have the classification by height.  Where all of the other categories up until now have been groupings of breads by ingredients, this last category is a bit of a catch-all.  Flat breads can be enriched or lean, yeasted or unyeasted and are all differentiated from other breads by their low height.  Both pizza and matzo crackers are included here in flat bread, while the former has yeast and is enriched the later does not have yeast and is lean.  (Reinhart, p. 45). 

With these classifications you can catalog any bread.  Take Chaya’s awesome bread recipe, it scores as follows: stiff, enriched, direct and commercially yeasted which helps explain it looks like a pirate boarding party with butter knives in hand when the bread comes out of the oven.  If you do not own Reinhart’s book, you can click on this link to see a view of pages 46-47 to look up a bread by name and see what its classification is.  Bread baking is a controlled chemistry experiment, and when you learn what the classifications of bread are you will better understand how to bake it or better yet, how to make substitutions when necessary (or trouble shoot when something goes wrong).   Bread, with thousands of recipes, there is likely a loaf of bread awaiting you at the end of the learning curve.  Are you are a bread baking pro?  Then try different ferment techniques to really give that flavor some kick!  Enriched or lean, good home baked bread is tough to beat, so leave a comment and tell us how yours comes out!

Wilson

Pro Deo et Patria

Photo Credits:

All photos by Pantry Paratus

Tables are adapted from Peter Reinhart’s book, cited above

Works cited:

Joachim, D., & Schloss, A. (2008). The science of good food. (p. 64). Toronto: Robert Rose.

Reinhart, P. (2001). The bread baker’s apprentice: mastering the art of extraordinary bread. (p. 45). Berkeley: 10 Speed Press.

Further Reading:

https://www.stellaculinary.com/scs20

Proviso:

Nothing in this blog constitutes medical advice.  You should consult your own physician before making any dietary changes.  Statements in this blog may or may not be congruent with current USDA or FDA guidance.

www.Hypersmash.com

Wilson’s Video Review: The Oiling of America

Discussing the Lipid hypothesis, fat and heart disease

“Lettuce is a modern luxury and in the past people only had lettuce during certain parts of the year.  And this leads to my own particular theory about the cause of heart disease—it is caused by lettuce” (Morell, 2008).  If you have never read anything from Sally Fallon Morell, then that last statement will likely not resonate with you.  However, I recently had the chance to meet her and I was pleased to see that I share the same sarcastic sense of humor with her.  Her high-water book, Nourishing Traditions is a straight talk book about everything that you wanted to know about food and nutrition but were afraid to ask.  Her challenge to the “diet dictocrats” starts on page 4 with a discussion on fats and how the right fat is in fact healthy for you.

I tend to read a lot more books than watch videos.  Although I found the movies Fresh and Food, Inc. fascinating and entertaining they are not well constructed arguments that you would expect to see in a book due to the nature of their brevity.  The average book that I read takes me 10-30 hours to read, where a movie is two hours or less of “engagement.”  If you do not have the ability to watch this presentation, you can download the slides here for free or buy the movie (I recommend that) here.  

“Americans have cholesterol that is too high.”  If that statement sounds like everything that you have ever heard or read on the latest publications in the supermarket checkout that pass for scientific journals, then you will really enjoy this video.  What is a healthy diet?  Well, that is exactly what Sally Fallon Morell specializes in not only by writing Nourishing Traditions, but also by presiding over the Weston A. Price Foundation as well as being a farmer herself. 

Saturated fat, the long time target of what Michael Pollan calls “lipophobia” has been all the rage; sadly, it never went out with the Carter Administration, which is the era from whence it came.  The story of how fat and heart disease became “the truth” is an interesting story that was rightfully scorned in the early part of last century when it was first espoused.  According to the DVD presentation by Sally Fallon Morell, the first myocardial infarction (heart attack) was not recorded in America until 1921; by 1930 it was 3,000 myocardial infarction deaths and by 1960 it was 500,000 deaths.  Today the number of deaths from heart attacks is 600,000 each year, and according to the CDC—that is one out of every four deaths. 

The numbers are treacherous, 600,000 deaths is a crushing amount.  However, where do they come from?  Lettuce?  Not directly, likely the silent killer for so many people eating a “western diet” is transfats, white sugar and white flour.  Saturated fats do so much for food.  Without saturated fats culinary arts would not have progressed nearly as far as they have over time because the “peasant foods” that make ethnic culinary cuisine so popular the world over would not have been invented. 

For example, what gives a croissant the flaky crust—fat, real fat.  You can substitute bread, gravy, sausage, salami, bacon, or cheese and get the same trajectory in culinary tradition—go with the fats.  The reason why saturated fat is so popular in history is because it keeps so long–it is stable.  Take lard for example, when properly rendered it will keep for a looooooong time.  The prized leaf fat from a pig’s back is found no where else in nature and is so valuable, that it is the only fat good enough for traditional Charcuterie methods for making salami.  Why do saturated fats last so long?  Because they do not oxidize very easily—that is to say that they do not go rancid like a polyunsaturated fat will at a much faster rate.  Fats or anything else that oxidize easily are generally known in the business as free radicals—bad news. 

Graph showing the “French Paradox:”   can originally be found here

Among epidemiologists and other people who study these trends, there exists something known as the “French Paradox.”  In case you are not conversant on food science studies and governments’ interest in them, the “French Paradox” is the trend that shows the populations of Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria as eating diets high in saturated fats but having lower than normal complications from heart disease.    This is bad news if you were say all geared up to push statins on the market . . .

The elephant in the room that Sally Fallon Morell really brings to the front of the viewer’s attention is if fat and heart disease is such a sure connection, then why is saturated fat (namely animal fats) the number one target?  If animal fats (the largest source of saturated fat) are the culprit, then why do vegetarians have similar autopsy results to omnivores?  “Autopsy studies show zero correlation between estimated animal fat intake, and degree of atherosclerosis of serum cholesterol level” (Morell, 2008).  Why Sally Fallon Morell does make a good case for the benefits of saturated fat and animal fats in particular, the culprit for heart disease has to be something else other than high cholesterol food—because not all fats and not all cholesterols are the same. 

If the fat and heart disease link is so unassailable, should history not show the same trend when you control for certain factors?  Unfortunately not for these en vogue “diet dictocrats.”  One early opponent was a medical doctor by the name of Dr. Paul Dudley White, who was known as “the father of modern cardiology,” one of the founders of the American Heart Association and personal physician to President Eisenhower following Ike’s heart attack.  Dr. White had this to say on public television,

“Heart disease in the form of myocardial infarction was nonexistent in 1900 when egg consumption was three times what it was in 1956 and corn oil was unavailable. . . . See here, I began my practice as a cardiologist in 1921 and I never saw an MI patient until 1928.  Back in the MI free days of 1920 the fats were butter and lard.   And I think that we would all benefit from the kind of diet we had at that time when no one had heard the word ‘corn oil’” (Morell, 2008).

French Paradox comic strip is used with persmission from Lola Lollipop

There is way more content in the video than can be effectively summarized here in just one blog, and everyone has to weigh out the evidence for themselves between the accepted link of fat and heart disease.  However, given the historical cover-ups, the half-baked scientific methods used to show pre-approved results in the “studies”, and the force of law used to leverage the outcomes– the DVD is well worth an hour of your time to evaluate what Sally Fallon Morell presents on the detangled science of real food.  Lastly, it would be anticlimactic to not establish the link between lettuce and heart disease—transfats found in salad dressings and other food imitators.  Speaking as a former lipophobe, I can actually believe that it is not butter.  Butter, cream and eggs perform like nothing else—but they are costly and the real foods that they are used in will spoil much more quickly than other . . . shall we say, not real foods. 

Wilson

Pro Deo et Patria

Photo credits:

Oiling of America is from New Trends Publications

Saturated Fat by Pantry Paratus

Fat and Heart Disease is taken from Dr. Briffa’s blog of the UK, the original source can be found here

Fat Characteristics by Pantry Paratus

French Paradox comic strip is used with permission from Lola Lollipop

Works cited:

Morell, S. (Presenter) (2008). The oiling of America [DVD].

Fallon, S., & Enig, M. (2005). Nourishing traditions. (Deluxe Edition ed., p. 4). Washington DC: NewTrends Publishing.

Further reading:

http://www.drbriffa.com/2012/10/02/the-french-paradox-is-not-a-paradox/

Article on Dr. Paul Dudley White: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/clc.4960140716/abstract

Proviso:

Nothing in this blog constitutes medical advice.  You should consult your own physician before making any dietary changes.  Statements in this blog may or may not be congruent with current USDA or FDA guidance.

www.Hypersmash.com

“Only in America”

DC Radishes, a fresh start to spring

Article by Charles Fenyvesi reprinted with permission

Spring, the mythic season of renewal, began for me in late January, and it was ushered in by a stranger.

It was the kind of lovely, unseasonally balmy day the nation’s capital offers every winter, making daffodils and magnolias as well as people think that winter has been cancelled and spring is about to break out.  I was walking toward the poor end of M Street, downtown Washington’s power corridor.  Between 22^nd and 23^rd streets, in front of a dilapidated row house, I saw a pudgy little man digging up what is known as a treebox: a 2-foot wide, 10-foot-long strip of mean urban sod sandwiched between the concrete sidewalk and the asphalt street. 

A tree box in DC

He was in his middle 50’s and wore a rumpled, thick, brown wool suit that must have originally belonged to someone taller and heavier.  With sweat glistening on his face, he wrestled with a rusty old spade, stopping only to remove a clump of scraggly grass or a piece of broken brick.  He also ran into plenty of chewed-up concrete.  Patiently and neatly, he collected all of the debris in an aluminum trash can.

I wished him a good morning and asked him what he had in mind to plant.  “First radishes,” he said, stopping his work and pulling a 75-cent seed packet from his breast pocket.  “Then some more radishes.  And maybe later I will plant other vegetables I also like.  I am sorry but I don’t know their names in English.  Not yet.”

I found out that he had come from Iran a few months earlier, to join his brother who had a little restaurant in the row house facing the strip of land he was cultivating.  Both of them had been in the restaurant business before the Iranian revolution of 1979, but they did not want to live in the new Iran.  “Khomeini is no good,” he said.  “Khomeini wants to kill, kill, kill.”  He turned around faced east and shook both his fists in anger.  “In Iran I had a big garden,” he said.  “Many radishes.”

He took my arm and lead me around the corner to 23^rd street, where a much longer strip in front of another row house and an adjacent parking lot had been raked smooth and protected with a fence of sticks and strings, makeshift but attractive.  “Here I finish my work,” he said, beaming.  “Here will be more radishes.” 

I asked if he had added anything to improve the soil.

“Soil?” he asked.  “What is soil, please?”

I picked up a handful and asked if he thought it was good enough for growing radishes. 

“Soil,” he said triumphantly, delighted to add a new English word to his vocabulary.  He rubbed a little of it between his thumb and forefinger, and then smelled it.  “Good soil,” he said.  “Good America.  Good radishes.”

There is no room for Khomeini’s tyranny in this expatriate’s American garden.

I thought that the soil was typical heavy Washington clay mixed with a lot of urban rubble and much too compact for a root vegetable such as a radish.  But I did not want to say anything to discourage him. 

He explained that he was planting radishes so his brother could serve them fresh in the restaurant.  I must come and taste them fresh, he said, because that is the only way to eat radishes.  He assured me that I will love their flavor.  “Radishes are special,” he said.

He showed me the size of radishes he planned to harvest, and I thought that his expectations were high.  But I did not have the heart to tell him that in America, radishes do not grow as big as apples. 

Perhaps his radishes will.

This article entitled “Only in America,” originally appeared in the May 1988 issue of Organic Gardening magazine, in the section called, “Another Look.”  The article is written by Mr. Charles Fenyvesi and is reprinted here with permission.  

Please feel free to leave a comment for Charles to read!

Photo Credits:

Treebox: photo credit: drewsaunders via photopin cc

Radishes by TACLUDA can be found here: http://www.rgbstock.com/searchgallery/TACLUDA/radish

Soil: photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography via photopin cc

www.HyperSmash.com

How to Core and Dehydrate a Pineapple

Aloha from Montana

Pineapples were on sale, so I picked up two and they are both in the photo above . . . no, seriously.  The pineapple on the left is in its natural state the way the Dole shipped it and the pint widemouth jar on the right is also one whole pineapple that has been dehydrated. 

If you read up on the Sulfur, Part I and Part II blogs you saw where I compared the store bought dehydrated pineapple side by side with my own.  I wanted to show you the steps of how I got that final product using the right Kitchen Hardware and Everyday Tools.

First thing is first, you have to get the pineapple chilled.  Any way you choose to do it, I recommend cutting off the top and turning it upside down.  Montana in the winter, done! 

Let us say it is not winter, or you do not have snow—not to worry, you can always put it in the refrigerator.  For reasons that are not completely clear to me, the Hawaiians that I have talked to said that it is important to flip it upside down as it is normally stored right side up.  This is to let the juices redistribute back through the whole fruit.  Who am I to argue? 

After it has chilled for a few hours, you are ready to start cutting the pineapple.  I have illustrated with the Tattler widemouth canning ring about how much of the pineapple you get when it is cored for you in the store.  This is a substantial loss of the valuable fruit for a small cosmetic gain.  

As for me, I like to just start cutting the skin off the pineapple closer to the edge.  This will leave some “divets” in the fruit depending on how sharp your knife is, how ripe the fruit is and how much of an angle you are cutting. 

Contine all the way around until you have the pineapple totally skinned.  Next step will be to remove the “divets” the best that you can.  Since this is going into the dehydrator and not being served to the Queen of England, I am willing to live with a few blemishes. 

Since the Apple Corer that I will be using is not all that deep, I will cut the pineapple in half so that I can remove the core.  The fiberous center along with the pineapple top and skin are destined for the compost bin.

Next comes the show and tell for kitchen tool technology.  The apple corer on the left is one that we had in the drawer from years past that is more like something you would expect to use if you were on a work detail in a prison camp–it is not easy to use or pleasant to clean.  The Apple Corer on the right is one that we sell that works like a dream without all the suction and brute force banging on the countertop. 

Simply put it in the center, align it and push it through.  Voila! 

Next, eject the core into the compost bin.

Next, slice the pineapple (watch that thumb!) and then cut it into chunks.

Since the pineapple is already high in citric acid, you will not have to do anything to it before putting it on the dehydrator tray.  I typically like to run my dehydrator at lower heat for a longer time to make sure that I get it good and dry. 

Here is the pineapple after 24 hours:

Here is the pineapple after 48 hours:

Lastly, take them off the dehydrator tray with some tongs and place them in a jar.  If you dried them very thoroughly (~93% dehydration) you can hear bounce as you drop them on the counter.  These will keep for a long time, especially with an oxygen absorber. 

Leave a comment to let me know how you did.  Enjoy!

Wilson

Pro Deo et Patria

Photo Credits:

All photos by Pantry Paratus

Proviso:

Nothing in this blog constitutes medical advice.  You should consult your own physician before making any dietary changes.  Statements in this blog may or may not be congruent with current USDA or FDA guidance.

www.HyperSmash.com