No-knead bread from frozen sourdough starter

A while back a kind friend gave me some sourdough starter, along with two lots of instructions to make no-knead bread with it.  I love sourdough, plus it's good for me as it's low GI, so no-knead sourdough sounded like a winner!

Unfortunately, the instructions involved making bread frequently in order to keep the starter alive.  I don't eat much bread, so that wasn't going to work for me.  I was sure that the culture would survive freezing, but I couldn't find any information on how to go about freezing and reviving it.

After some experimentation, I seem to have come up with a method that works reliably:

• Freeze your sourdough starter in 1/4 cup lots (I put 4 or 5 'blobs' of it on a silicone tray in the freezer, spaced well apart as my starter is quite runny).  When they're frozen, store in a ziplock bag in the freezer.  I don't know how long they keep like this, but definitely at least 6 months.
• A few days before you want to bake your bread, take one portion of starter out of the freezer and put in a bowl.  Mix together 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup water and spread over the starter.  Put it in a warm place (I use the hot water cupboard when the weather's cold) and cover loosely with a cloth.  Don't cover it with a plate - the starter needs to 'breathe'.
• When the starter has thawed, stir it all together.  Check from time to time.  When it's risen and covered in bubbles (which will probably take 1-3 days) it's ready to either use or, if you need a large amount of starter, feed again.  Further feedings should be at approximately 12-24 hour intervals.*

NB If it separates into whitish sludge with yellow/green/brown/grey liquid on top don't worry - that's alcohol separating out.  Stir it back in and feed it/use it when that happens.  The only time to discard it is when you see hairy mold on top (in which case just remove those portions, don't throw the whole thing out) or when the liquid on top smells foul - not just of acid and alcohol (in which case throw it all out).

*  To feed, stir it (so you can see how much you have); add about twice this volume of flour and about this volume of water (i.e. equal parts by weight); stir to mix; then leave it.  It should produce enough gas to double in volume by its next feeding, so your container should be big enough to cope with this.
 
The bread recipe I use is as follows:

Ingredients:
6 cups flour (1:1 wholemeal:white is nice)
1 T salt
3 T sugar
1/2 - 3/4 cup sourdough starter (revived from 1/4 cup frozen)
3 cups water

Method:

1. (at noon) In a large bowl combine flour, salt and sugar. Add starter then water and stir until blended; dough will be very soft and sticky. Cover bowl with paper towels**.  Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature (e.g. in the hot water cupboard).
2. (9.15 am) Check the dough.  If it hasn't risen much (or at all) and is quite runny under a crust/skin, stir in extra flour till it's only sticky - this generally takes around 1 1/2 cups flour.
3.  Work the dough a little, folding it on itself till it doesn't get any smaller (should take less than a minute), then separate the dough into two balls. Generously coat a baking tray with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put each dough ball on the tray and dust the tops liberally with more flour, bran or cornmeal.  Cover loosely with paper towels** and let rise somewhere warm for at least 2 and preferably 5-6 hours.
4. (3 pm) At least 20 minutes before you bake the dough, heat oven to its hottest setting - around 250°C. Put two heavy oven-safe containers (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex, pottery or silicone; anywhere from 5-cup capacity up is fine) in oven as it heats, along with a shallow pan with a cup or so of water in it.
5. When dough is ready (3.30 pm), carefully remove pots from oven.  Drop the risen dough balls flour side down into the containers; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K.  Don't worry if they've barely risen at all - they should still rise during baking and be fine.  Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Bake uncovered 30 minutes.  Turn onto a rack and leave to cool.

This bread freezes beautifully, so I usually slice it when it's cool, freeze those slices on a tray then reassemble them into a loaf.  That way I can just take out a few slices from time to time as I need them :-)

With thanks to http://www.sourdoughhome.com for helping me to understand sourdough better so that I could develop a reliable method for making my bread :-)

** In general I'm not much of a fan of paper towels, preferring washable reusable cloths instead.  However, after gumming up our washing machine with the tiny scraps of dough that had accumulated from many months of washing teatowels used this way, I came to realise that using compostable paper towels is much more sustainable than wrecking our washing machine!

BU Kofi

Martin and I are excited about a new project that the Baptist Union of churches in New Zealand is involved in.  In partnership with the Baptist Union of Papua New Guinea, they are starting up a fair trade coffee growing and processing business.  It will be established in the Baiyer Valley in the Highlands region of PNG and be called 'BU Kofi'.

You can read more about the project here*, but the things that appealed to us are:

1. the project has been initiated by people from Papua New Guinea (rather than foreigners);
2. they see this project as being important in peace-building in an area that has seen a lot of conflict in recent times;
3. their process has been guided by a World Bank report into the coffee industry in PNG, so they won't be making the same mistakes as have been made by others in the past (although of course they can make new mistakes and they still see this as a high risk endeavour).

The Baptist Union of PNG is asking the Baptist Union of New Zealand to help them financially in this endeavour.  As I've spoken about earlier, I've been really challenged in recent years by the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10.  In it, Jesus seems to be saying that we have a responsibility to help our neighbour, and defines our neighbour simply as anyone who asks for our help.  In the light of that, Martin and I decided to make a small contribution to help out our neighbours in PNG.  If you would like to do the same, click on this link and select 'PNG coffee project' in the 'campaign' field.  They need to raise $100,000 over three years, in addition to funds already promised by NZAID and the PNG government.

* there's more information in the links in the orange 'recent articles' section at the right-hand side of the page.  We also have a pdf about the project that contains some information that doesn't seem to be on the website.  If you'd like me to email you a copy just put a request in the comments or email us here.

AppWriter Cloud

I've recently been really enjoying a tool Martin came back from Thailand with: AppWriter Cloud.  One of his fellow vendors at the conference there was touting it and was kind enough to give me a free login for it.  It's an add-on to the Chrome browser that reads web pages aloud - and it can read any web pages, including the pages within my Google Drive, meaning I can use it to read pdfs and other documents to me as well so long as I upload them there first.

It's a bit temperamental, and using it requires me to have a Windows virtual machine running as it doesn't work in Chromium, but I'm still delighted with it.  After years of failing to get Orca* to work for me, something that works most of the time is fantastic :-)  I find reading pretty hard work, even on a screen where I don't have to deal with holding the weight of a book, but this has suddenly made it a lot easier!  Yay!!

* the Linux version of JAWS - the text to speech programme blind people generally use

Give a man a fish...

I was intrigued and excited by the story in 'Act one' of this recent This American Life episode.  In it, Planet Money reporters looked into the work of GiveDirectly: a charity that, rather than giving poor people cows or seeds or other goods or training, simply gives them money.

The reporters went to a village in Kenya where the poorest residents had each received the equivalent of US$1000.  From what I could gather, they were people living in a cash economy and this money was roughly what they would normally earn in a year.  The reporters were keen to find out what that money had been spent on.

The villagers lived in thatch-roofed huts and the majority of them had used part of their money to replace the thatch with corrugated iron.  Iron is not only more water-tight and much less hassle to maintain than thatch, over its 10 year life-span it also works out considerably cheaper (you have to buy special grass for thatch).  With the remainder they did all kinds of things: mostly buying income-generating assets such as a cow or a motorbike, but not always.

The story that moved me the most was that of one man who spent the remaining money on a mattress.  Previously he'd been sleeping on the dirt floor (maybe on some kind of a mat - I can't remember for sure), now he sleeps on an actual mattress.  When he was asked why this was important to him, he said something like: "Before, I was just the image of a human, but now I am a human.".  I was stunned.

It got me thinking, too.  I've never heard of a charity that gives away mattresses.  Cows or grain mills, yes: but not mattresses.  Yet it was a mattress that this man wanted, and he wanted it because it gave him dignity.  And surely that's really important?

It also made me realise my own racism.  It keeps on popping up within me: racism.

When I heard about GiveDirectly, I was uncomfortable.  It didn't seem right to just give these people money.  I wasn't confident that they'd spend it well, whereas I was confident that a trustworthy aid agency would give them the right goods and training to really improve their lives.  "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day" and all that.

However, a while ago when I heard that the New Zealand government was proposing to limit what certain beneficiaries could spend their money on, I wasn't very happy about it.  Partly I was concerned on a practical level - how could WINZ know what was best for everyone in all their different circumstances? - and partly I was concerned that it would take dignity away from already vulnerable people.

Why had I thought it would be any different in Kenya?

In the This American Life story they also talked about how all the people in a nearby village had recived cattle from another charity.  In the GiveDirect village, some people had chosen to buy cattle, but others had bought all kinds of other things instead - including the man who had more-or-less bought himself dignity.  It seems that my concerns about the New Zealand welfare proposal may well have been valid, but I'm ashamed that I didn't apply the same respectful thinking to vulnerable people far off as I did to those in my own country...


NB If you don't want to listen to the whole This American Life story (it's 28 minutes long), you could listen to a 6 minute version on the Planet Money website or read an article about the investigation on the New York Times website.

Caring for onesself

In a recent issue of Meeting Place, (the magazine of ANZMES, the CFS support society for New Zealand) I was struck by three articles placed close together.

The first was by a Christian woman with whom I have corresponded over the years.  She made a complete recovery from CFS a few years back and was writing here about the therapy through which God healed her: Mickel Therapy.  It is a talking therapy and is based on three principles.  In my words, they are:

1. being honest/not being afraid of creating waves
2. looking after your body and your needs
3. not letting people abuse/manipulate you.

Although the therapy is secular, she was keen to emphasise how these were principles that she has since been seeing again and again as she reads the Bible.  The principles all seem to me to deal with different kinds of looking after yourself.
Soon after this article came two more.  One was from a woman who had recently been on a holiday on a cruise ship.  While she was on the cruise she found her health greatly improved.  She wondered if this might be because she wasn't pressuring herself to get things done, so when she returned to NZ she put in place some strategies to limit how hard she pushed herself day to day.  Since doing so, her health has been much better than it's been in years.  The other was from a man whose quality of life greatly improved once he learned to live within his limits and look after himself better.

It was both encouraging and scary to see what a difference learning to look after themselves had made in the lives of these three people.

It reminded me of something we'd been discussing in our Bible study group a few weeks earlier.  We're studying Paul's letter to the Colossian church and, on the week in question, were looking at Colossians 3:5-17.  In verses 12-15 Paul says:

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.

We talked about whether this meant that we should just let other people walk over us (something that I believe the church often encourages women, in particular, to do).  However, we concluded that it probably actually meant an active and strong kind of love for other people: the kind of thing you can only do if you are deeply established in Christ (something that Paul was talking about in the previous chapter).


How sad (and scary!) to think that the church, by taking passages like this in isolation and using them to encourage people to let others treat them badly, may actually be encouraging people to do something that could leave them significantly ill for years on end!

Spring!

Our neighbour's kowhai tree this morning from outside our bedroom window :-)

Big Fair Bake

Yesterday I submitted an entry in the Big Fair Bake: a baking competition that aims to promote Fair Trade.  All entries must use at least two Fair Trade ingredients.  Here's my entry photo and my answer to the competition question "why did you bake fair".

When I heard about the Big Fair Bake, it inspired me to research some new fair trade ingredients.  I first started buying only fair trade cocoa and chocolate a few years ago when I learned that much of the world's cocoa is grown by child slaves.  I didn't want anything to do with that!  Later we switched over to buying all our coffee and bananas fair trade, too, as we didn't want poor people being abused so we could get our treats.

For the Big Fair Bake I decided to try out a new recipe: Earl Grey tea biscuits.  The recipe uses icing sugar, butter, flour, salt, lemon zest and powdered Earl Grey tea leaves. I'd never bought Fair Trade tea or sugar before, but here was my opportunity to research it!  I learned that there is forced labour and child labour in the sugar industry, just like for cocoa.  No one seems to sell Fair Trade icing sugar, so we bought some ordinary sugar from Trade Aid, ground it to a powder in a spice grinder and added some cornflour.  Voila!  Fair Trade icing sugar.  Unfortunately the supermarket was out of stock of Scarborough Fair Earl Grey tea so I used Trade Aid black tea instead.  The lemon zest still gave them an Earl Grey flavour. 

Researching fair trade sugar was interesting.  I went into this knowing very little about the sugar industry, but I decided that the time had come to find out whether people were being treated poorly to grow our sugar.

I learned that there is some forced labour and child labour in the sugar industry, but that in general the problem that Fair Trade is trying to solve is the precarious living sugarcane farmers make due to price fluctuations and the protectionist policies in and sugar dumping by some wealthy countries.  I decided that forced labour and child labour bothered me, but that the other problems would be better addressed by interventions other than price floors for certain farmers.  So it turned out that I did need to care about the provenance of our sugar!

I knew that, some years ago at least, Chelsea purchased all their sugar from Fiji.  As that wasn't on the list of countries where people were being enslaved to produce sugar, I decided to find out if that was still the case.  From their website, I found that they now actually purchase all their sugar from Queensland.  So, I now needed to know whether the sugar farmers of Queensland were beneficiaries of subsidies or other anti-competitive practises.  Turns out that they aren't.  So, while I bought TradeAid sugar for my competition entry, in the future we won't be doing so.

This process has still changed our sugar purchasing practises, though.  I'm no longer comfortable with buying 'home brand' or other sugars of unknown provenance: that sugar may have been farmed by slaves or children.  From now on, our sugar will all be from Chelsea (just as, for similar reasons, we buy all our tea from Dilmah).