Specialty Breads- Whole Wheat Pocket Bread (Pitas)

In the last few years these nifty little breads have become a staple item, and they are available nearly everywhere. A balloon of crisp-soft bread, they are good for filling with anything to make a sandwich, whether it is in the traditional falafel and sliced cucumbers, or more mundane things like soyspread and sprouts. Pita is tasty and doesn't get soggy, and futhermore, as our favorite grand-daughter points out--"Grandma it didn't fall apart"

Almost any plain bread dough can be used to make these, but I will attach our favorite whole wheat pita bread recipe at the bottom, which has been very reliable for us. With the Bosch Universal Plus doing the kneading it usually is done in less than 45 min. If making it by hand you can add twice the years and warmer water and have them on the table in about 2 1/2 hours. (Still faster than making regular bread)

Shaping : Once the dough has been kneaded the rolling, shaping and resting are easy. I like to roll them into about a 5" circle on a floured counter. Do not use oil when rolling pitas as they don't like to be stretched. You then pick them up and turn them over and set them on a dry tea towel. Once I have done a few I cover them with another dry towel. The turn over is important as well. In fact one of our customers remarked that she watched them making pitas in an outdoor oven in Turkey and they did the same thing; rolled them, flipped them on the the resting surface and then when placing on the baking surface we flip them again.

The trick for making good pitas is in getting the baking just right. The breads actually cook inside from the steam they generate as they puff in the oven, so they don't brown much on the top. Depending on your oven, it may take a little experimentation to adjust the heat and paraphernalia to make sure that the pockets get enough bottom heat that they puff, but not so much that they burn.

Baking: If you have a gas stove, you can bake pita on the floor of the oven or on a heavy cookie sheet (not non-stick) on the oven floor. Preheat the cookie sheet along with the oven. Electric stoves are trickier. It's best to heat the oven from the bottom only (don't turn on the broiler). If both elements come on when heating up, try shielding the baking pocket breads from top heat by putting another cookie sheet on the very top rack under the top element. A well-heated oven stone (pizza stone) or tiles can give the immediate bottom heat that is the secret of puffy pockets.

Pita breads like a very hot oven. I usually turn it up to 450°F. If you have a Convection oven use the Convection Bake Cycle. I have found that pita's also like lots of hot air. You can bake them on a stone as mentioned, a cookie sheet but my real preference is a wire cooling rack that has a close grid so the edges don't fall over. These let lots of air through and give the required bottom heat to get a good puff to the pitas. Again when we pick them off the resting towel, flip them over again onto the baking rack or stone, or cookie sheet. They bake in about 3 to 4 min. so don't turn your back. In fact I use to tell the cooking class customers that it was the most exciting thing to do in our city, to come in and watch the pitas rise and bake. They will actually blow up into little cushions right before your eyes.

The baked pitas should be slightly browned on the top. You can open one up and check to see if the insides are done. They will be moist, but shouldn't look shiny-wet. If you think they need a little more time, you can bake them a bit more on the top rack while the next batch bake on the bottom of the oven. Don't let them get crisp, though, or brown, because they will break when you fill them. The steam inside them bakes them extremely fast, and they will stay soft and flexible when cool.

These are very fast and fairly easy and are definitely worth trying for the great result and taste they have.

WHOLE WHEAT PITA BREAD RECIPE

How to Make Your Own Bagels

Each kind of specialty bread is special in it's own way and quite different from all the other; what they have in common is that they are all good eating,

Bagels should be found in the dictionary under fun, but according to Webster (who probably liked his with a shmear) a bagel is "a hard bread roll made of yeast dough twisted into a small doughnutlike shape, cooked in simmering water, then baked." The bagel is the only bread product that is boiled before it is baked. That's what gives the bagel its unique texture and the crust its characteristic shine.

Legend has it that in 1683 in Vienna, Austria, a local Jewish baker wanted to thank the king of Poland for protecting his countrymen from Turkish invaders. He made a special hard roll in the shape of a riding stirrup-Bugel in German - commemorating the king's favorite pastime and giving the bagel its distinct shape.

Over the many years the bagel was perfected in the bakeries of the Eastern European countries and brought to North Amercia with the immigrants in the early 1900's. In modern times, prepackaged bagels first became available in grocery stores in the 1950's. With the introduction of frozen bagels in the 1960's, consumers had access to bagels even if they didn't live near a bagel bakery.

Bagels can be made from just about any bread dough. For years we have shown how to make them from the same old bread dough (SOBD) that we make with our Bosch Universal Plus from the basic bread recipe. I have however, provided some recipes below for you to follow for making just bagels.

Whole Grain Bagel Recipe

While kneading the dough start a large pot of water to boil on the stove with 1/4 cup of brown sugar in it. The bagel dough needs to be kneaded as much as the regular bread dough (longer if using whole wheat) From the risen dough you can make three large balls that you can let rest for about 10 min. Take each ball and with oiled hands and counter cut into baseball size pieces and shape into a ball ( I get approx. 4 out of each ball so I cut the larger ball into quarters) I shape the balls by rolling under your cupped hand. Let the ball rest again briefly and then flatten each ball with your hands and poke your thumb through their middles, twirling each new bagel on your thumb to enlarge the hole until the hole is about 1 1/2" in diameter. If you don't make the whole big enough it will disappear when you go to boil the bagels. Preheat the oven to 425°F.

Let each bagel rest for about 5 to 10 min. to let them rise just a bit and then place them in the boiling water. Cook only 2 or 3 at a time. The bagels will sink, then rise in a few seconds--if they don't sink, they rested too long. No harm done, just turn over so that both sides get wet. After a minute in the water, remove them with a slotted spoon and place them an inch apart on a greased cookie sheet. Bake at once for about 35 minutes, turning the bagel over at the halfway point if they haven't browned evenly.

Fancy Bagels: You can add extras to the bagels once they are boiled and before they are baked. You can sprinkle them with sesame seeds, poppy seeds, sauteed minced onion, (with or without garlic), or caraway seeds. I like to brushed the boiled bagels on the top, with 1/2 beaten egg and 2 Tbsp. of water and then sprinkle the chosen garnish. You can also just dip the wet bagel fresh from the boiling water into the seeds to coat one side. The wash makes an ungarnished bagel shiny and pretty though so you can use that even on the ungarnished ones. You can also make different flavoured bread doughs into bagels, like rye, whole grain, herbed and cheese. Be imaginative!!

Whole Wheat Bagel Recipe

FRUITS, NUTS, AND SEEDS IN BREAD

No one needs to be told that raisins, and walnuts and caraway seeds have a special  place in the world of breads.  Every homeland and almost every holiday boasts some particularly wonderful fruited  or seeded or nutted bread all it's own, with the fragrance of tradition to enhance the enjoyment of every bite. 

Making breads that are laced with fruits is a sure way to win high marks with the eaters, but it can be tricky, and what promises laurels, if not glory, can betray you with a weighty, gooey, or holey loaf--not at all what you had in mind.  I hope that the tips in these next few posts will help you produce exactly the bread you DID have in mind, or at least one that pleases as much as it surprises you. 

In these days of soaring prices and shrinking hours, I would personally rather make sure the loaves that I am going to lavish my time and money on are going to be light as well as tasty, edible as well as incredible, free from holes and goo, and sliceable, even toastable and sandwichable---though none the less special for that when there are raisins and nuts on the scene.  I have made many raisin loaves over the years and have spotted some quirks as well as some of the special talents of natural fruits, nuts, and seeds.  I want to talk about how to use them to their best advantage, giving some recipes that work well with the Bosch Universal Plus machines, that will serve both as examples and springboards to your own creations.  I am talking about them in this months posts, altogether not because they have much in common but  because as ingredients they compliment each other so beautifully.  When one is included, adding another is simply the logical thing to do.

One Word About Cinnamon (Which is not a fruit, not a nut, not a seed) :  Though it is probably the favorite of all the sweet spices, cinnamon is after all made of ground-up tree bark, so DON'T add it to dough along with the flour, or it can tear up the gluten and reduce the bread's rise.  In addition, cinnamon reacts with yeast dough in a mysterious way, producing a metalic flavour that is extremely unpleasant to those who are sensitive to it.  As you'll see, I like to add cinnamon when the loaf is being shaped, either as a dusting on the crust, or rolled into the loaf in a delicate swirl. 

Fruits:  When we think of fruit in bread, raisins come instantly to mind, and in fact they are hard to beat.  Other very flavourful fruits shine too like dates, apricots, prunes and currants.  Fruits with subtler flavours like apple or pear can make a less showy but very good contribution when as juice or stew, they can provide the bread's liquid measure and it's sweetener naturally.  Any addition ofr fruit improves the keeping quality of the bread.

If you have experimented much baking with fruits you will have observed that sometimes they seem in interfere with the normal rise of the yeasted breads.  I don't know of any research that pinpoints the exact reasons, but it is not unlikely that fruits contain acids, active enzymes, and reducing sugars, any one of which could affect the quality of the dough.  It is hard to be general, but there are a few tricks that can help insure good results.

First Time Baking With Certain Fruits:  If you are baking with a new fruit whose effects on the dough you don't know, take a few precautions.  Later, when your are more familiar with it's ways you may decide that this fruit doesn't hurt the dough and so abandon these techniques and just throw it in. 

1.  The fruits should have about the same moisture content as the dough, or be just a little drier, to prevent its juice from being drawn into the dough. 

2.  For raisins and currants that are tender but not so soft they fall apart, steam or simmer for a few minutes, drain immediately, and let them cool before using.  (When you don't mind darkening the colour of the bread, use the broth as part of the liquid in the recipe.)  Cooking the fruit also deactivates stray enzymes in the fruit that coukd affect the dough.

3.  Currants need to be washed.  Prunes and dates need to be pitted.  (this is easy to forget)    There is more variation in the flavour of prunes than in most fruits and the good ones are better than you could think.  Pitted dates should be checked for inhabitants.

4  Unsulfured dried fruit is dark brown, tart, and often leathery:  it needs to be steamed briefly--but not too soft please.  For example soft apricots can disappear into the dough and make the bread unpleasantly tart.

5. If you buy fruit that is already quite soft, it is worth baking it a half an hour or more in the oven on low heat, so that it can develop the toughness required to stand up and be noticed when it is time to eat the bread.  Even if the exterior becomes somewhat crusty in the process of drying out in the oven, the flavour improves.

Gloom and Doom on the Dried Fruit Front:  It is no secret that the bright-coloured dried fruits get that way because some form of sulfur has been used to preserve them.  Many questions are being raised about the safety of this ancient technique, and more information seems to be coming every day.  Some people are allergic to sulfur, and they shouldn't have these fruits at all.  The rest of us might do well, especially if we eat a lot of fruit, to choose the less colourful, unsulfured kind or even dry our own fruits in a home dehydrator, until we know more about the long-term effects of the residues left by this kind of processing. 

My next post will deal with how and when you add the fruits to the bread.

MAKING BREADS WITH CEREAL OR CRACKED GRAINS

When it comes to adding cereal grains to breads, there are two schools of thought.  On one hand is the crowd who will add nearly anything--certainly any leftover cereal--to bread dough: the motive either can be earnest thriftiness or sometimes it's a kind of unabashed bravado.  These people are fond of their inevitably hearty loaves, and even when some of their friends don't share their enthusiasm, it turns out all right because a bread that has a lot of cooked grain in it will not stale quickly.

In the second school, rather more button-down, are those who admire the featherlight commercial "honey-wheatberry" bread and long for a recipe that will enable them to make such loaves in their OWN KITCHENS: they want to reproduce the pale, airy, sweet, tender loaves, luscious with soft nuggets of REAL WHEAT strewn throughout.  Alas, careful reading of the fine print on the wrapper reveals that the first (the most plentiful) ingredient is white flour--cunningly called "Wheat" flour but not "Whole Wheat."  Very few home bakers would be able to replicate that bread with whole wheat flour (although we come pretty close when using our Bosch machines).

Whatever school you favour, and even if you are not ready to join either, I hope the information in this post will get you interested in including whole and cracked grains, and grains other than wheat in your breads. 

Wheat:  Here, I am talking about wheat that isn't ground into flour--about whole berries or kernels that have been cracked, and about bulgar wheat, a special kind of cracked wheat that is particularly good for baking.

Cracked Wheat:  You can make nubbly, pretty bread with ordinary cracked wheat, very easily with the Bosch machine, however by hand it requires a little more work.  The main problem with cracked wheat that you purchase at the store is it is usually too finely ground.  When you buy it, or if you grind it yourself, try to get a crack that is nearly half of a wheat berry--very large.  Most of what I have seen on the shelves is more of a wheat meal, and when added to the bread it does nothing more than make it heavy and crumbly.  If you mill your own, it is worth sifting out the small particles.  You can crack your own in our hand operated Family Grain Mills or in the blender of the Bosch Universal Plus machines. (jogged a couple of times so as not to make meal)

Bulgar Wheat:  This is a sort of cracked wheat that I like best for adding to bread.  I suggest to use the coarsest size.  It keeps it's shape, and is different enough in colour to show up against wheat dough.  Natural food stores often sell bulgar wheat in bulk, or you may find it on the supermarket shelf.

You can soften grain for using in your dough in several ways.  Probably the easiest is to rinse a cup of grain and stir in a cup of boiling water, letting it stand, covered, until the water is absorbed.  If you use more water, as you would if cooking the wheat for normal eating, it will be too fluffy and tender to keep it's shape in the dough. 

Wheat Berries:  If you sprout wheat for two or three days, it will make a good show in a whole wheat loaf.  Knead them, about half a cupful per loaf, into any bouncy plain bread dough.  Slightly less wonderful but plenty good are unsprouted whole berries cooked chewy-tender, kneaded into the dough in the same proportion.  ( I cook it like rice with a ratio of 2 to 1, water to wheat, for about 1/2 hour or so) 

Oats:  Oats give whole wheat a subtle sweetness and a little extra chew.  The flavour of oats blends well with wheat, making it a taste richer.  You can use rolled oats uncooked in bread but it won't be any lighter for their presence.  On the other hand, if you use porridge made from rolled oats to replace most of the liquid in the bread dough, the results is an exceptionally light and chewy-tender loaf.

Oat groats or steel cut oats (oat groats cut up) must be cooked.  Bread using their porridge makes a slightly heavier, moister loaf, but one with outstanding eating quality that keeps very well. 

For a very pretty crust on the dark breads especially, or on any bread with oats inside, coat the loaf with rolled oats after shaping the dough.  Either spread the oats on a table and rol the loaf in them, or just sprinkle them in the greased pan before you put the bread into it;  for the top, brush with milk or water and dust with the oats just before putting the bread in the oven to bake.  Hearth loaves can be baked on a rolled-oat-strewn baking sheet, but strew with a light hand:  to thick a layer will keep the bread from cooking on the bottom.

Barley:  Ordinary barley has tough, sharp hulls that adhere to tightly that the grain must be milled many times (pearled) to get them off;  the germ and the useful bran layers are lost in the milling, needless to say, along with the indigestible hull.  I wouldn't recommend using pearl barley.  A naturally hulless barley that we get with our grain order is good for this use.  Just make some porridge from it and use it in the bread the same way as the cooked oatmeal.

Our next post will talk about adding different types of grains to bread such as corn, millet, buckwheat, rice, rye, triticale and quinoa.

Yeasted Sprouted Breads

YEASTED SPROUTED BREADS This type of bread is very distinctive with a lots of chew, lots of character, and lots of appeal.   I like to credit som of the goodness of this version to the efficiency of our Bosch meat grinder that I use to gring the sprouts.  Using the disc that comes with it (4.5) it does a great job of coarse grinding the wheat spouts that give the bread a coarser texture that is flecked with bran.  I like it that way, but if you want to grind the spouts finer, you can make an extremely fine-textured light bread. In making this type of bread, the trick is to sprout the grain just until the tiny sprout is barely beginning to show and the grain itself is tender--about 48 hours.  If the grain is not tender, your griinder will heat up, making the dough too hot.  But if the sprout develops long enough for the diatatic enzymes to get going, you will have a very gooey bread that will never bake through.  It is because the grain is not sprouted long enough to develop the enzymes and be sweetened by them that the recipe calls for a generous amount of honey.  Without it, the bread simply doesn't taste very good. This bread recipe is based on what I can make with our meat grinder attachment or food processor.  If you have equipment that can produce a really smooth grind with only tiny bran particles, the resulting dough will make lighter bread and so probably be more than enough for two loaves.  You can either make a few rolls or buns with the extra, or reduce the quantities to what you would use for two normal loaves.  2 pounds of wheat, 1/4 cup honey, 2 1/2 tsp. salt, and 2 tsp. of yeast. Sprout bread makes excellent use of the talents of the food processor on your Bosch machine.  The steel blade grinds the sprouts and  the dough hook in the bowl kneads the dough too--a big contribution with this bread, which is hard to knead by hand.  The result is a flaky-textured bread with incomparable flavour, easy as pie. Sprouted-Wheat Yeast Bread Recipe

USING A DEHYDRATOR TO MAKE SUGAR-FREE JAM

A few posts ago I wrote about making Sugar Free jams using sugar substitutes to sweeten it and Ultra Gel to thicken the jams to a spreading consistency.  I forgot to tell you about a little known method of producing jam without sugar or any other additiive.  If you own a dehydrator or home food dryer, you can use the fruit leather sheets (solid sheets that usually come with the dryers) to make a wonderful all-fruit spread that will keep in the fridge for up to a month or in the freezer for several months. 

This is a very simple process.  The first thing you do is prepare your fruit by cleaning and removing stems, pits etc.  Puree the fruit in a blender or food processor or mash it with a potato masher until you have a puree.  Spray your fruit leather sheets with a non-stick lecithin spray (we useVegelene) like Pam or lightly grease them with butter or margarine.  Pour the puree or mashed fruit on the fruit leather sheets and place in the dehydrator on high.  Put a timer on for 1 hour.  When the timer goes off, come back and using a table knife, stir the outsides to the middle and re-spread the fruit on the sheets.  Repeat for 4 hours, stirring it once an hour. 

After the 4 hours you should have a much thicker spread.  You can put the spread in a jar and freeze it, as is, or in the fridge for immediate use.  This has no sugar in it and it is not cooked so it's keeping properties are no where near as good as a regular freezer jam loaded with sugar and/or a cooked jam. 

Personally I like to add 1 Tbsp. of Xagave Natural Sweetener per cup of fruit puree.  This gives the jam spread a little more sweetness and makes it more jam-like in texture so it is easier to spread on the toast or bread.  My family loves these spreads so give them a try and let me know what you think!

The dehydrator can also be used to thicken an existing jam that you have made and that turned out to thin.  The dryer removes some of the moisture so your jam will become a more spreadable texture.

Dehydrating Food for Storage

We have dried our summer produce for over 30 years now.  It hasn't been always perfect but we have certainly been moving to perfection.  We started by just dehydrating apple slices in the summer's sun.  We have a little too much liquid sunshine around here so it wasn't very practical to put a cookie tray on the south side roof of the house with a net over it to keep out the bugs and birds.  We had to remember to take it in every night and we couldn't always count on the weather to be right for drying.

We have dried foods in an oven--mostly fruit leather which I will talk about later.   Oven drying can be tricky but if your oven will go low enough (150 F. degrees or less) you can do it there.  We would set the oven on the lowest temperature and leave the oven door open a crack.  We found that if you had a small fan on one side of the oven blowing over the food and out the other side that the time to dry the food decreased.  This of coarse, used a lot of energy and sometimes the results weren't worth the effort.  Convections ovens can be used nowadays, with better success.  You just have to keep the settings under 150 F. degrees.  The more air circulation the more effective the drying.  A close-grid cooking rack would be perfect to use to place the food on, as it would let the air flow under and above the food.

I had my husband build me a dehydrator out of wood about 30 years ago.  We followed instructions we had found in a book and it had all the bells and whistles for back then.  There were air holes at the bottom and top, 10 trays that slid in and out, made out of screening.  We even had a heating element, small fan and a thermostat at the bottom where it would suck in the air and heat it up and blow up through the food.  All these early attempts did produce dried foods, but not quickly.  Usually something like apple slices would take from 2 to 3 days or if we tried something hard like grapes, over 5 days.  Many times the food would go bad before it dried.  When we finally purchased a commercial dehydrator, we noticed the difference immediately.  It was like night and day!  We finally took all the trays out of the homemade one, turned it on its side and used it as a toybox.

The difference it makes to use a real dehydrator is due to the fact that commercially sold dehydrators have be technically developed and tested so that they work energy efficient and save time and money.  Now the foods would dry in 8 to 10 hours or for the harder items like grapes, 20 to 24 hours.  No more guess work nor food going bad!

There are several features to look for in a dehydrator:

• Make sure it has both a fan and a heating element so that the air is circulated.
• Do not buy a dehydrator made out of metal.
• A thermostate that checks the temperature constant\ly is necessary to keep the temperature even.
• Stacking models are much easier to clean as you won't have to crawl inside to clean like you would have to if you had a box shaped one.
• Stacking models can usually be increased and decreased in size depending on how much you need to dry at one time.
• Make certain it can be repaired, if worse comes to worse.  Many appliances cannot, but we can repair the models we have sold.

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Most foods will dehydrate overnight.  We use this phrase "overnight" to mean 6 to 10 hours.  (depends on how long you sleep)  We always dried our foods while the kids were asleep so the same amount of food would be in the dehydrator when it finished.  If we dried the food during the day we would notice that several pieces were missing when we went to take it out, as the children would sneak some for themselves. 

Dehydrating Fruits

• Most fruits you just cut up and put in on the mesh sheets in the dryer and take it out 8 hours later.  We try to keep the slices or wedges the same size so that it will dry at the same length of time.
• Fruits that oxidize in the air and turn brown, like apples, peaches, pears etc. you can dip the slices in a bowl of cold water with several Tbsp. of lemon juice, drain it, then place on the mesh sheets
• Use mesh sheets when you dry fruit so it will be easy to remove once it has dried
• You can tell fruit is dry by the feel.  It should be leathery or brittle depending on the fruit
• Waxy skinned fruit like grapes, blueberries, cherries and plums will require poking to let the air inside it and will take much longer to dry.  (up to 24 hours in a good dehydrator)
• When your remove the pit from the plum, but them in half and turn them inside out.
• Blueberries and grapes can be plunged into boiling water for 10 sec to 20 sec. depending on the size, and into cold water and drained,  to check the skins before putting on the trays.
• Soft or overripe fruit can be used to make fruit leather or fruit rollups (see picture below).  Puree the fruit in the blender and add 1 Tbsp. of honey for every cup of puree.  Make certain to spray fruit leather trays with non stick spray or grease lightly, so the fruit leather will come off easily.
• Dried fruits will keep 2 to 3 years in a container

Dehydrating Vegetables

• Vegetables you eat raw like onions, green pepper, tomatoes, cucumbers, you can slice and put on the trays to dry.
• Vegetables you eat cooked like peas, beans, corn, carrots, broccoli, you can steam blanch for 2 min. before putting in the dryer.  You will retain more flavour and colour if you do.
• You can powder vegetables like broccoli, or cauliflower and add to a thin to medium white sauce to make a cream soup fast and easy.
• Dried vegetables take overnight to dry and will keep 1 to 2 years in a container

How to Dehydrate Casseroles and Saucy Entrees

Yes we can dry several main course dishes such as Baked Bean, Spaghetti Sauce, Stew, Chili or Mac and Cheese, providing they have some kind of sauce.  This is great for people who camp, bike, hike or canoe as the food is already prepared and you just add water.  We use the fruit leather sheets to hold the food while drying and it usually only takes an overnight period to dry these items.  To use them we like to put it in a thermos or pot and add boiling water (just enough to cover the food) and put a lid on it for 10 min.  You will have your dinner already for you when you open the pot.

How to Dehydrate Cheese and Eggs

Yes we can dry these too!  Cheese can be grated onto a mesh sheet and place in the dryer with the tray under the cheese containing paper towel.  The cheese doesn't loose moisture it looses oil and it drips down to the tray under it so the paper towel can catch it.  The dried cheese also is done over night and can be stored up to 1 year.  We like to powder it in the blender and use it  to make cheese sauce, or sprinkle on a casserole. 

Eggs can be dried either whole, whites or yolks.  You will need to whip them up so they are thick enough to remain on the fruit leather sheets while drying.  Again they are done overnight and placed in the blender to powder and into a container to keep for 1 year.  We use them in camping for cake mixes, scrambled eggs, pancakes etc.  1 Tbsp. of egg powder and 3 Tbsp. of water equals one egg.

How to Dehydrate Meat and Fish

You can dry meat and fish either cooked or raw.  The meat or fish being called jerkies.  Basically you "Cook" the meat with with a marinade and the fish is "cooked" with a brine or cure.  Both are done overnight before placing in the dryer to dry in 6 to 8 hours.  Cooked meat and fish also can be cut into bite size pieces and dried overnight as well for use in stews, soups or casseroles.

 Click here for more Dehydrating Tips and Recipes

FOOD PRESERVATION-  KEEPING WHAT YOUR GARDENS GROWS

I LOVE to garden!  In fact there is a sign in my garden that states that "Gardening is cheaper than Therapy"  I truly believe that!  I am in no way, an expert gardener but we do appreciate the bounty that our small garden  gives to us year round.  What I do know about though, is how to preserve that bounty every year.  Personally I prefer to dehydrate most of the fruits and vegetables we grow, however, I do use the freezer for some things and I do use the canning kettle for  others, but drying the food is the faster and easiest way to keep the freshness of the food and I find it is really easy to use in my cooking. 

HOW DOES DRYING FOOD WORK?  There are several reasons I prefer the food presserved by dehydrating.  Drying the foods, only removes the liquid or moisture from the food.  When the moisture is removed from food, the bacteria that is in all food, can not work, so it hibernates until moisture or water is added back to reconstitute it again.  That is why you can keep dried food very easily and for long periods without special equipment or containers.  In the canning process, the high heat and boilng waters kills all the bacteria so the food will keep, and in the freezing process the bacterial is frozen and with warmth cannot react either. 

NUTRITION--When you dry your food you retain a much larger percentage for the nutrition in the raw food, than you would if you canned it or froze it.  The USDA did a study a number of years ago comparing the 3 forms of food presservation and how much nutrition is left in the food.  They used 3 types of fruits and/or vegetables to do the study like peas, peaches, tomatoes.  They found that when the foods were dried with just the moisture removed, they still retained on the average 80% of the nutrients that were originally there in the raw food,  When frozen, the foods lost 50% of the nutrients and when canned with all the high heat that is involved, they lost 80% of the nutrition.  That is why the dried foods also have a better taste than the same foods, canned or frozen.

SAVING TIME--These days none of us can spare a lot of time to do some of the work our ancestors did when preserving their foods.  Canning and freezing requires much preparation time and effort, depending on what you are working with.  When we dry foods in a dehydrator we basically cut it up the same size and place it on the trays, go to bed, and when you get up in the morning, it is done.   We simply remove the food from the trays and put it in a plastic bag, on container with a lid or even the glass jars that we no longer use to can the foods, with a lid.

SAVING SPACE--Dried foods take up a lot less space than frozen or canned foods.  We did a comparison one year with 20 lbs. of tomatoes.  When we canned them we were able to get them into 10 quart sealers.  We took another 20 lbs of tomatoes and cut them into slices on a slicer, and placed them on the drying trays.  Next morning we were able to get the same 20 lbs. of dried tomatoes into 3 qt. sealers.  I like to make pizza sauce with my dried tomatoes so I decided to powder the tomatoes in our Bosch blender (about 5 min.) by putting the dried tomatoes in the blender and turning it on high.  We now got the 20 lbs. of powdered, dried tomatoes in 1 qt. sealer.  Every tablespoon of tomato powder is approximately 1 tomato.  To use it I just add warm water to a few Tbsp. of the tomato powder in my blender, let it sit a few minutes to reconstitute, and turn it on for a few seconds.

SAVING ENERGY--Dehydrating foods requires warm moving air to pass across the foods.  All the dehydrators we sell are really efficient in the way they work by re-circulating the warm air, so it costs pennies to run them.  (Approx. 5 cents @hr.).  Most foods are dried in 8 to 10 hours so you have used very little energy to presseve the food.  Since you require no special container to store the foods we can use recycle containers like ice cream buckets or plastic food containers or even just glass jars with lids.  You are not paying to run a freezer all the time, nor the cost of purchasing special jars nor the energy required to keep things boiling for long periods of time as you would for canning.

TASTES BETTER--Last but not least, when you go to use the foods in cooking or just eating it, as is, like in the case of dried fruits, it tastes a lot better than its canned or frozen counterpart.  When foods are dried the flavours and sugars are concentrated, thus giving peaches a more peachy taste and bananas a more banana taste.  Speaking of bananas, drying them is the only way to presserve the integrity of the fruit so it can be still eaten raw when dried. 

Check out our tips for drying foods here

We will talk about how to dry the foods in our next post..

Hard Red Wheat Vs. Hard White Wheat

We get asked many times what is the difference between the two hard wheats that we sell in our store and bring in for our wholesale food and grain order each fall.  We hope this article will clarify everything.

Whole wheat berries: Choose from hard red or hard white wheat, both ideal for bread making. Breads made with hard red and hard white wheat will be very similar; the main difference is that red wheat produces a fuller, heartier flavour, and the bread will have a slightly darker colour. Many of our customers prefer the whole grain white wheat, and a good number prefer the red — it's a matter of taste. If you're just beginning with whole grain baking and don't know how to pick, we suggest starting with hard white wheat. Note: Don't confuse "whole grain white wheat" with store-bought "white flour"! White wheat is called "white" just because it's slightly lighter-coloured than "red" wheat; in fact, both are shades of reddish-brown. Store-bought white flour, on the other hand, is essentially nothing more than the endosperm (energy-producing carbohydrate) part of the kernel, with nearly everything nutritious removed in the interest of indefinite after-milling shelf life... which benefits huge commercial millers, at the expense of your health and the character of your food.

Hard Red Wheat:  This grain is planted in the spring and is not irrigated, thus yielding a hight protein and low moisture content.  This type of grain makes and excellent loaf of bread when used with any other types of lighter flours.  It can be mixed with grains like rye or Kamut to make a different flavour but the gluten content of the wheat will allow the bread to rise fairly high, even with the lower gluten grains like the rye included.  Red Wheat has dark brown colour and a branier flavour than the white white.  This grain is a great storage grain and will keep 30 years plus when stored in cool and dry conditions.  For long term storage, it is best to place it in rodent-proof containers and use dry ice on a paper to displace all the oxygen (lid on but not closed tight).  After 1/2 and hour the dry ice will disappear and you can close the lid tightly.  We have carried Hard Red Wheat for years and love its versatility and long-term storage qualities.

Hard White Wheat:  White Wheat has recently been developed (last 20 years) by essentially crossing Hard Red Wheat with Soft White wheat and getting characteristics of both of the parent grains.  The White wheat is lighter in colour and taste than the Red Wheat and makes wonderful high loaves of bread.  The white wheat has all the same nutritional content as the Hard Red wheat as well.  The Hard White Wheat is an alkaline based grain like barley and will not produce gas in the intestines.  If you have problems with gas or bloating after eating Hard Red wheat, try changing to the Hard White Wheat and those problems will be less or completely disappear. 

Beat Oxidation! In whole-grain foods, the plant's cellular walls protect nutrients from oxidation. The process of oxidation begins to occur as soon as grain is ground, exposing the cell's contents to oxygen in the air. Flour that is several days (or more) old, has been exposed to oxygen that inevitably diminishes its nutritional value. The way to get full nutrition from whole grain foods is to mill them when you need them, right in your kitchen. Modern high-speed grain mills make it fast and easy to enjoy the freshest, best tasting and most nutritious food imaginable!

Convenient & safe storage:  When you store grain at home, it needs to be protected in a couple of ways. First, it needs to be protected from a variety of little critters who'd like to get to it before you do. Weevils, for example. And isn't this interesting: Chances are you've never seen weevils in the white bread or crackers you bought from the store. That's because weevils put no stock in media campaigns from white-flour milling conglomerates; rather, they know what's good for them, and they'd come after your grain from miles around if you let them. And mice have good nutritional judgment, too. Not that there's ever been a mouse in your house, but if there was... you wouldn't want it having access to your grain. Secondly, grain needs to be kept dry. The grain we sell is all dried to a very low moisture level that's optimal for storage and baking and guarantees that you get the most grain for your money. You need to protect your grain from picking up excessive additional moisture, which can be drawn from the atmosphere. Never store grain directly on a cement flour, either in bags or buckets.  The grain will pull the moisture out of the flour and get moldy and not keep as long.  You can put pallets or 2'x4''s on the flour under the grain.  The buckets or metal garbage cans with a tight fitting lid offer protection against storage risks.  A Dessicant or an O2 absorber can be added to the buckets to eat the oxygen but the dry ice method mentioned above also works great.  Always keep grains in a cool and dry area of your home.