all my gods are mountain gods

all my gods are mountain gods
resting gently on pinkstained aeries
watching snow leopard cub chase eagle shadow
standing guard over solitary sleepers
and outside my dharma cave
in silence of snow newfallen
ancestors weave whispers into safetydreams
     where child hides from demonmother
and soulsong swells with ancient dreams
     of future tales
     of past lives yet unlived
and eagle shadow dances
and brooksong sings of leopard cub dreams
and granite spires bathe in the birthdeath pink
     of sun’s daily tribute to mountain gods
and all my gods are mountain gods

For example, last Saturday I baked 213 traditional French baguettes, more than 100 ciabatta, plus ten or so other breads in quantities up to two dozen. That after making two kinds of muffins and a batch of scones, plus baking seven different pastries and 17 dozen cookies of various sorts. The kitchen temperature approached the mid-80′s, but when I’m doing the bread bake, I’m standing in front of a triple deck oven at 450° into which I regularly inject steam. So it gets hot and humid no matter what time of year. Oh, and I start my shift between 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning.

It’s just really difficult to consider doing the sort of cooking required for blogging after a day like that. I want to do that sort of cooking, because I really enjoy doing the blog and interacting with everyone who comments, but I’m sixty years old and as much as I want to do it, I just can’t. At least not yet.

So what I’m going to do, for now at least, is just try to write a bit about my life, and food-related things, and sustainable life. Meanwhile, please ask questions about food, whether the recipes on this blog or just food questions in general. I’ll try to find the energy to write a bit more, and we’ll see where we end up.

Cheers!

Sow True Seed, based in Asheville, NC, is one place you can get real seeds so you can grow great food. Watch the video below to learn more about them, then visit their website to get a catalog.

Posana Café

Posana Café proudly identifies itself as North Carolina’s first Certified Green Restaurant. They’ve gone through the steps necessary for 3 Star certification by the Green Restaurant Association, which is a pretty big deal. Gotta give them 2 big thumbs-up for that.

Two thumbs up for the casual seating options (sofas and nice padded chairs with small coffee/end tables) and the drop-in-and-lounge-awhile attitude. One thumb up for the wine list. Two thumbs way up for the Chinese Herbal Tonics!

Only ate here one time, for lunch. Had a brisket sandwich. Meh. The lentil soup was pretty good, although the only part of the bacon I could taste was the smoke. But the so-called bread they served for the sandwich was a disgrace to the word bread. Soft. No flavor. Fell apart when I picked up the sandwich. And the brisket, while nice and tender, should have been, well, seasoned. You know, that white stuff? Salt? Try it, folks, it can make things taste better.

I’ll try again. The soup was good enough to give them another try or two, and they have a reasonable wine list. And those Chinese Herbal Tonics will bring me back.

Bouchon

The name is a cliché, but it’s a bistro, so I really can’t complain that Bouchon has a boringly-common bistro name. The owner seems to be French, or at least has an accent. So I gave it a try.

Three thumbs up for the bread. Oh, wait, I can’t rate the bread, I baked it that morning. It had better be good.

The paté maison was pretty good, and was served with crisp cornichons and bright, real, Dijon mustard. Nice. I’ll give it two thumbs up.

Ordered the steak frites. It’s a bistro, it better ace the steak frites, don’t you think? I do, anyway. And I’ll give the frites two thumbs up. Would have given it three if they’d used truffle salt instead of Herbes de Provence, but the chef nailed it nonetheless. Hot, golden, crispy outside, fluffy soft inside, and served in a paper cone with the correct sauce (not ketchup, but mayonnaise based and I can’t for the life of me remember what it’s called). Delightful.

The steak not so much. I asked for “a pointe” but got “bleu,” and it was shoulder, not flank, and it was sliced, but the maitre d’hotel butter was nice. The vegetables rather sucked, but one doesn’t much care for veggies on a steak frites, so who cares?

The service was perhaps sub-par. No, let me be more honest. The service was piss-poor. First of all, don’t open your door, tell me that the menu in the window is the winter menu, then hand me another one that has higher prices on it but the same food and expect me to like it. Secondly, now that you’ve opened the freaking door, invite me in, don’t make me stand at the host/ess stand like an ass. Third, don’t then walk up to me like I’m an ass for standing where you left me and ask what I want, I want a freaking table you moron. And finally, when I’ve looked over your overpriced but mostly French wine list and ask for a glass of Burgundy, don’t point to the freaking Bordeaux listing and ask if that’s what I mean. If I’d wanted a Bordeaux I wouldn’t have asked for a freaking Burgundy you dolt.

Other than that, the service was just fine. And I’ll probably go back when I’m absolutely desperate for a reasonable facsimile of French cooking and am too lazy to do it myself.

Bistro 1896

Half price wine on Tuesdays. I’ll be back, Bistro 1896. Friendly service, good if unexceptional food, and good locally-brewed beers. Not afraid to serve a burger cooked medium rare. I can live with the odd choices for soup of the day, just pour another half-price glass of wine and I’ll be fine.

Bonus Round

I said three, didn’t I? Well, if you’re looking for a good, inexpensive breakfast in downtown Asheville, The Mediterranean Restaurant is the best choice. It seems to be the only place open weekdays (and Saturday) at 6 am (no other place opens until 8 I think, no coffee shops are open yet at 7). The owner, who still cooks breakfast 6 days a week, is Greek. The breakfast is hearty and inexpensive ($8.95 for steak and eggs with real potatoes and toast or biscuits, grits optional). Haven’t been there for lunch so can’t say whether it’s up to the breakfast standard. They will accept credit cards for orders over $5, but prefer cash. You can find me there on Monday mornings.

I would like to have remained in Tennessee, and worked the small plot of land I was on into a mature forest garden. But there is no living food culture (deep-fried is not a culture) in Northeast Tennessee–at least none that I could find–so here I am in Asheville, North Carolina. An hour’s drive south-south-east and I’ve arrived in a location that believes in the importance of local and has a city government willing to devote resources to sustainability.

Exhibit one: the picture above. Does your city have edible parks? Asheville has twelve. Twelve parks built using principles of permaculture that are maintained by the city and its citizens. One of the parks supports 10 CSA shares. The other parks are free picking. Literally.For more information, click the picture to the right or visit the Bountiful Cities Project website.

Exhibit two: the first weekend in April saw the 7th Annual Asheville Bread Festival. The Asheville area supports more artisan breadmakers than many states. I’m now baking at one of them, City Bakery Café. Funny, really, considering my last post and the whining about getting tired of making bread, when all I was doing was making one or two loaves at a time instead of baking off assorted pastries, 6-9 dozen bagels, and as much as 500 pounds of bread five days a week. On the bright side, I really enjoy baking.

Exhibit three: beer. Lots of good beer is being brewed here, some of it at city center right between the police station and the City Building. It makes sense that there would be microbrewing to rival the artisan bread making when you know that beer is liquid bread.

Asheville is willing, and always has been so far as I can tell, to let people express themselves. So there’s a building by the architectural icon I.M. Pei across the street from buildings exhibiting earlier styles of architecture, including the neo-Gothic Jackson Building (1924). Reflected above, it’s the tall slender building with fully functional gargoyles in the photo below, flanked by even earlier architectural gems.

No description of Asheville could ever be complete without a mention of her most famous son, Thomas Wolfe. Born in Asheville, Wolfe lived here at “Old Kentucky Home” until he went to college in 1916. He is reputed to be one of the most important writers in modern American literature. I wouldn’t know, never having read any of his novels. But for those who have, Asheville has preserved “Old Kentucky Home” on its original site, and highlights important features of the neighborhood found in Wolfe’s novels.

Old Kentucky Home

Did I mention there are seventeen (17!) farmers markets in Asheville? One of them, WNC Farmers Market, is open seven days a week, year round. Take that Portland!

What will all this mean for Stumptown Savoury? For now, I won’t be writing nearly as much as I was, and it may be a few months before I manage to start posting recipes again, unless I happen to get inspired. I will, however, keep posting about sustainability, books I’m reading, or whatever else I wish to share.

See you soon!

Speaking of bread, has anyone started a sourdough mother? If there are any questions about that or anything else on my site, please ask.

If you aren’t sure what a Baker’s Percentage is, read my previous post. Here’s the basic dough recipe I worked from.

Lean Bread Dough

flour 100%
water 60%
salt 3%
yeast 2%

Naturally, I didn’t just use that dough. No, I want wild yeast in my bread, and since it’s a Provençal-style bread, I need olive oil. First thing I need to know is how much flour and water are in the mother starter. You’ll have to take my word for it, but if you made the mother the way I did and posted, it’s 100% flour, 75% water, and 33.3% seed culture. To make life easy, I decided to calculate as though the water and flour were equal. One of the tricks of baking is to hold back some liquid until you see how the dough or batter turns out. If it’s too dry, add more liquid, but never start out using all the liquid because if it happens to be too wet, you can’t add more flour without messing up the proportions of every other ingredient.

For these two breads, I’m going to use 20 ounces of flour. So flour, 100%, equals 20 ounces.

Step one, make a starter. I used 2 ounces of mother, 3 ounces of water, and 5 ounces of flour. That set overnight at room temperature. Here’s where I am:

flour 30% (5 ounces plus 1 ounce in the mother )
water 20% (3 ounces plus 1 ounce in the mother)

If I’d been thinking ahead when I first made this bread, I would have added about ⅓ cup of Herbs de Provence to the starter so that the herbs would have plenty of time to hydrate. I didn’t do that, and also used ½ cup, both mistakes that you can now avoid.

Step two, make a dough. I need to get flour to 100% so need to add 14 ounces. Water (liquid) needs to be at 60%, so I chose to use 1 ounce of extra virgin olive oil (5%) and 7 ounces of water (35%). For the record, it’s best to use lukewarm water. Add it to the starter and mix to soften, then add the remaining dry ingredients. That’s what I did, and included 2 teaspoons of kosher salt. I also used ¼ teaspoon of active dry yeast to boost the rise in the bread.

Pain de Provence

sourdough mother 10%
unbleached flour 95%
water 50%
extra virgin olive oil 5%
kosher salt 3%
active dry yeast (optional)  0.5%
Herbs de Provence 3%

If you’re paying attention, you probably wonder how salt (2 teaspoons) and Herbs de Provence (⅓ cup) are both 3%. Because they weigh the same. At least they did for me. You might also question how I only have 95% flour and 50% water when I should have 100% flour and 60% water. Remember that half the mother is flour and half is water, more or less, and that I used some oil in place of some water. You might also wonder why the lean dough recipe has 2% yeast, but I only listed 0.5%, and that optional. The mother is taking care of most of the yeast, so I don’t need to add nearly as much commercial yeast to the dough.

Now, in a more convenient form, the “final” recipe for Pain de Provence.

Starter

2 oz sourdough mother
3 oz water
5 oz unbleached flour
⅓ cup Herbs de Provence

Dough

10 oz starter (all of it)
14 oz unbleached flour
7 oz water
1 oz extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons kosher salt
¼ teaspoon active dry or instant yeast

Mix the starter and let it set at room temperature overnight. The next day, add the rest of the ingredients, mix until a dough forms, adding more water or olive oil as necessary (I used the oil). Knead for several minutes until the dough passes the windowpane test (stretch a small window until you can see through it without breaking it). Let rise 2-4 hours, until doubled in size. Refrigerate overnight at this point if you wish. Gently degas the dough and form into a boule (or whatever shape you prefer). Place on a baking sheet and let rise, covered, 2-4 hours. Preheat your oven to its highest temperature with a sheet pan in the oven for water. When the oven is hot, carefully score the dough using a lame, serrated knife, or razor blade. Place the baking sheet in the oven, carefully add water to the steam pan, then close the oven and reduce the temperature to 450°F. Bake 12 minutes, then rotate the baking sheet and continue to bake until done, about 24 more minutes. The bread is done when it’s nicely browned and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. Turn off the oven and leave the door open for about 10 minutes, then remove the bread to a cooling rack for at least an hour before you slice it.

Now for some onion rolls. I started by having some caramelized onions on hand. Once again I used the lean dough Baker’s Percentage as the foundation, and I used the same starter as for Pain de Provence. This time, however, I not only wanted to add some olive oil for flavor and color (that’s the yellow tinge), I also wanted to use both unbleached and white whole wheat flours. Whenever you use whole wheat flours, you’ll probably want to add some oil. Whole wheat flour still has bran in it, and bran has sharp edges that will shred the gluten strands. Oil protects the gluten and reduces shredding.

Just as in the the previous recipe, I need to get flour to 100%. I find that if I have more than about 10-15% whole wheat flour the bread seems a bit dry and begins to get bitter unless I make an enriched bread. So I decided to hold it down to 10% so the sandwich rolls would have a bit more toothiness to them as well as a richer flavor to stand up to whatever I chose to put in my sandwich.

Additionally, I find that 60% liquid doesn’t produce a bread with quite enough heft to it. It’s excellent on its own, but as a sandwich bread, it’s a bit too weak. So I increased the liquid from 60% to 65%. Not a huge change, but it produced a denser bread.

Onion Rolls

Starter

2 oz sourdough mother (10%)
3 oz water (15%)
5 oz unbleached flour (25%)

Dough

12 oz unbleached flour (60%)
2 oz white whole wheat flour (10%)
8 oz water (40%)
1 oz extra virgin olive oil (5%)
2 teaspoons rosemary salt (3%)
¼ teaspoon active dry or instant yeast (0.5%) optional
½ cup chopped caramelized onions

The procedure for making this bread is exactly the same as for Pain de Provence, above, except that instead of forming a boule, you’ll cut the dough into squares or rectangles or whatever sandwich shape you want. Or form it into a boule, baton, or loaf if you want. It’s your bread.

If I were writing these recipes for commercial production, the starter and dough would each be seperate, and the percentages would be totalled. I would also weigh the onions in whatever units I’m using (ounces or grams) and express them as a percentage. I’ve written the separate parts of the recipe as though everything was in one process for clarity about how I arrived to the recipe. I didn’t weigh the onions because I suggest you use as much or little as you wish, or even leave them out altogether. The bread will be fine.

I hope this helps you understand the recipe creation process I use. Now I need to get back out to the garden while this false Spring is still going on because there’s a lot of work to be done.

If there is one arcane art in baking, it’s understanding and using the Baker’s Percentage. Once you’ve grasped the fundamentals, the whole world of baking seems simpler.

At its core, the Baker’s Percentage is the ratio of ingredients expressed in a relationship to flour. The first thing to remember is that flour is always 100%. Second, all ingredients are in weights. Third, all ingredients other than flour are expressed as a percentage of flour. Confused yet?

Let’s take a look at a simple lean bread dough, the one in Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking: flour, 20 ounces; water, 12 ounces; salt, 2 teaspoons; yeast, 1 teaspoon. Simple enough. Now the same dough recipe as a Baker’s Percentage.

Lean Bread Dough

flour 100%
water 60%
salt 3%
yeast 2%

For the sake of illustration, let’s assume you want to make a bit of bread but when you check you only have 100 grams of flour. If you’re looking at a recipe that calls for 20 ounces, good luck with the math. But if you know the Bakers’ Percentage, you’re ready to roll: flour, 100 grams; water, 60 grams; salt, 3 grams; yeast, 2 grams. Need about 10 pounds of bread? That’s a lot of bread, but start with 4 kilos of flour, or 4000 grams, and the rest is simple math: 60% of 4000 = 2400; 3% 0f 4000 = 120; 2% of 4000 = 80.

Why would you care? Because you can play around with your ingredients to make what you want. Say you want some nice extra virgin olive oil in that bread. Water is 60%, so if your liquid equals 60% the recipe will still work. if you use 55% water and 5% olive oil you’ll still have 60%, but the bread’s character and flavor will change quite a bit. Maybe you find that the lean dough is too dry for you. Okay, increase the water to 65% or even as much as 70%. You’ll have some other challenges at 70%; however, hydration at 65% won’t change any techniques, but will give better flavor in a cold fermentation (that’s when you let it rise in the refrigerator overnight).

Want to add some whole grains to your bread? You can substitute up to 20% of the flour with whole grains and still have enough gluten to make good bread. If you use more than one flour or flour substitute, the total of all the flours’ weights will be 100%. So if I used 16 ounces (80%) of unbleached flour, 2 ounces (10%) of white whole wheat flour, 1 ounce (5%) of oat flour, and 1 ounce (5%) of 10-grain cereal, the total would be 20 ounces, or 100%.

I’ll give a couple of simple recipes Friday to illustrate.

At its most fundamental level, bread is a magical mixture of flour, water, salt, and yeast. The one ingredient in that short list that causes fear is yeast.

There are four forms of yeast available to the average baker: fresh, instant, active dry, and wild. Fresh yeast is the most difficult to find unless you’re in a large city or have a dedicated artisanal bread maker working nearby. Instant and active dry yeast are very similar. Both are dried, granulated forms of yeast that are pretty much interchangeable. Instant yeast, sometimes called rapid rise yeast, was formulated for bread machines, but works outside the machine quite well. Active dry yeast is somewhat less active than instant yeast.

Wild yeast, or sourdough, is readily available to anyone willing to grow a culture. It just isn’t all that hard to do. You’ll need a nonreactive container with a lid (glass, stainless steel, food-grade plastic),  flour (all-purpose, rye, or whole wheat), unsweetened pineapple juice or water, and time. The water should be pure spring water or filtered water that is left to sit at room temperature for 24 hours before using.

Step 1: Mix together 3½ tablespoons (1 oz) of flour and ¼ cup (2 oz) of pineapple juice or water. Cover loosely and let sit at room temperature for 48 hours. During the two days it sits, stir it with a wet whisk or spatula at every meal time to aerate the mixture. You probably won’t notice any change, except the odor changes a bit.

Step 2: Add 3½ tablespoons (1 oz) of flour and 2 tablespoons (1 oz) of pineapple juice or water and mix. Cover loosely and let sit at room temperature, stirring as before at meal times. Sometime in the next 48 hours it should begin to get bubbly. Don’t expect wild frothy bubbles unless you live in San Francisco. When it gets bubbly, move to the next step.

Step 3: Add 7 tablespoons (2 oz) of flour and 2 tablespoons (1 oz) of water (no more pineapple juice). The mixture will be a lot drier now, because the ratio of flour to water has changed from the original 1:2 to the opposite, 2:1. Do the cover and stir thing for the next 24-48 hours, during which you’re looking for more signs of life, including bubbles and expansion. When you see it has expanded, you have a good seed culture started. Go to the next step.

Step 4: Measure out ½ cup of the culture and add to it 10½ tablespoons (3 oz) of flour and 2 tablespoons (1 oz) of water. Mix thoroughly, cover and stir as before, and let sit 4-24 hours, until it doubles in size. The seed culture is finished. Now to make it into a mother starter, or chef.

Mix together 2¾ cup (12 oz) flour, 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (9 oz) water, and ¾ cup (4 oz) of the seed culture, which is about half of it. Save the remainder to make a second mother with a different flour, give it to someone, or compost it. Once the ingredients are mixed together, knead for about two minutes, then place in a lightly-oiled nonreactive container. Cover loosely and let sit at room temperature 4-8 hours, until it doubles in size. It might take a little longer than 8 hours, and if it more than doubles there’s no harm.

Turn it out onto a work surface and knead for a few seconds to degas the mother. Form it into a ball, return it to the container, cover tightly, and refrigerate. You now have sourdough mother.

If you start to run low, or just haven’t used the mother for a couple of weeks and it smells a bit alcoholic, you’ll need to refresh it. If you have 4 ounces, just use the above instructions. If you have less than 4 ounces, you’ll need to build up to that amount by using 3 parts flour to 1 part mother to 1.25 parts water. As long as you have an ounce of mother you’ll be just fine.

This stuff will last as long as you feed it. It’s alive, you know.

It took me awhile, but I finally managed to watch this documentary and I must say I really shouldn’t have waited. Peak oil is an important topic, particularly because we are nearing if not already beyond Hibbert’s Peak, the point at which oil production begins to decline because there just isn’t enough.

Why should that matter to those of us who care about food? Well, in the United States, the average calorie of food takes ten calories of hydrocarbon energy to produce and ship. Think about that for a moment. Agriculture worldwide is largely dependent on fertilizers that are made from oil. To put it in really simple terms, everything you eat that isn’t organically or naturally grown is oil. And if you didn’t grow it yourself it took oil to get from farm to table.

The era of cheap oil is over. Watch this movie if you haven’t already. You need to know.

American Terroir

Here is an enchanting read for those of us who like to know foods. Rowan Jacobsen describes a day’s basic foods from maple syrup and coffee at breakfast to chocolate for dessert and introduces the growers, foragers, harvesters, and artisans who get it to market. There are interesting characters to meet, delightful places to visit, and a few interesting recipes, but the stars of the book are the foods.

Did you know that it takes forty to one hundred gallons of maple sap to make one gallon of maple syrup? I didn’t. Nor could I even begin to imagine cutting twenty-eight cords of wood every year just to boil the sap. Yet there’s at least one man in Vermont who does it every year because he really enjoys making maple syrup.

Another thing I learned: “Shellfish farms can produce ten times as much protein per acre as cattle farms, with zero inputs of any kind. They are one of the greenest forms of food production on the planet.” Once again, I was ignorant. Now, however, I can freely indulge my love of shellfish with a clear conscience.

This is a celebration of what’s good rather then a condemnation of what’s bad about food in the Americas. And we can sure use some good news about food in this country, what with the idiots at the FDA poised to ban raw milk cheeses altogether while continuing to allow virtually unrestricted tobacco sales and the fools at the USDA deciding that it’s okay to allow unrestricted growing of GE Alfalfa because their masters at Monsanto say it’s okay.