Wild-Fermented All-Buckwheat Bread

This recipe is perfectly elegant in the way I like best: few ingredients, magical transformations. Whole buckwheat groats, salt, and water ferment with ambient organisms to become a toothsome, nutty, wholly bready bread. 

Well over two years ago, Sandor Katz tweeted a link to this recipe by Conscious Catering. As far as I can tell, the Conscious Catering folks were the first to take the wild fermentation method used in making dosas and idli, and adapt it to buckwheat in a loaf shape. I've been baking it nonstop ever since, and it's gotten a bit famous among fermentation enthusiasts and wheat-avoiders.

I have used non-sourdough wild-leavened bread recipes in the past, and found them to give me inconsistent results. They often amount to creating a new sourdough starter at the same time as making the bread, which is a bit of a gamble, and can leave you with barely-leavened bricks for bread. Usually, I'd much rather have enough time to build up a powerful starter before trying to make bread out of it. So I would have foolishly ignored this recipe, except for knowing that dosas and idli do work.

The crucial part of the dosa method is that you soak whole grains, rather than starting with a flour-based dough. I've found that wild-fermented dough made of ground-up soaked whole grains is much more bubbly and active than a flour-based dough of the exact same age. The grains begin to sprout during the long soak, which unlocks the stored starches and makes them into more yeast-friendly sugars.

I did find that the recipe needed some adjustment, particularly during the colder months. Merely extended the dough's fermentation time (as the original recipe suggests) can give you some very fishy-smelling dough. Rather, I extend the soaking phase substantially.

Buckwheat Bread

Soak five cups of whole, raw buckwheat groats in a large bowl of spring or filtered water for 8-12 hours. Rinse and drain the buckwheat groats (the water becomes quite thick).

Add 2 teaspoons of salt and 2 cups of water. Puree with an immersion blender until a smooth batter forms. You can also mash them (minus the water) in a large mortar and pestle. Cover the bowl with a tea towel and let the batter ferment until it's bubbly and swollen--it may reach 1.25-1.5 times its starting volume, but after that it won't improve. In the summer, this takes another 12 hours or so, but in the winter, it may be more than 24 hours. If it doesn't look risen at all, give it a stir every 12 hours to keep the surface from getting funky.

Very gently, give the finished batter a brief stirring. It will have some larger, loose bubbles, as well as very fine bubbles like beaten egg white. Scoop the batter into two well-buttered bread pans and bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes (no need to rise in the pan). Turn the oven down and bake for 45 minutes more at 350. Let cool for 10 minutes or so before gently removing from pans. Cool on a rack, covered with a tea towel.

This bread is at its most convincing when fresh from the oven. It doesn't age very well. I keep one loaf out at room temperature, covered with a tea towel, and it doesn't dry out to too much in the few days it takes me to finish it. The second loaf I store in a plastic bag in the fridge and only eat toasted. Once it's stored in plastic, the crust softens in an unappealing way and is prone to mold growth.

Buttermilk-Soaked Buckwheat Pancakes

I never, ever vary my breakfast routine. I get up at dawn and putter about for a few minutes until my hunger wakes up. Then I move with a swiftness. I heat the skillet, toast a slice of homemade bread, and circle back to the skillet to crack in two eggs. The eggs barely make contact with the pan. (Over-easy is the term, but we called them "gook-out" when we were young.) Then the toast pops, and the butter drips down through its chewy holes, and I tuck in. Once my hunger wakes up it's a growling beast.

After dipping my toast in the warm yolks and sliding the whites through the dripped-down melted butter, I can more leisurely turn my attention to things like sauerkraut and tea. It's a splendid breakfast, so splendid that when I make fancy breakfasts for other folks, I still make myself eggs and toast.

Indeed, I never, ever vary my breakfast routine. Except for yesterday. And today. The folks at the farmer's market didn't bring eggs on Wednesday, being too busy with tomatoes. I am such a snob that I just can't tolerate the sight of ordinary commercial eggs anymore, not even the expensive organic omega-3 faux-family-farm eggs. They look flaccid and mucilaginous, not at all muscular and perky and bright like real eggs.

So I went back to an old recipe I was saving for the dark of the year when real hens cease to lay. It's a recipe that was outdated before it was published a century ago. Helen Marsden, the endearingly nostalgic author, bemoans modern methods and the modern fear of inconvenience. But back then, "modern methods" meant baking powder instead of soda. And "inconvenience" was taking the time to soak your batter overnight. These days, breakfast itself is the great inconvenience.

Take heart, though! She assures us that "the setting overnight ... is in fact a very simple and convenient process, consuming only a few minutes and doing its leavening work in accordance with nature's chemistry during the long hours of the night."

It turns out that nature's chemistry is delicious, and truly easy. There's nothing in our modern repertoire quite like these buckwheat cakes. You know the spongey sour Ethiopian flatbread, injera? The cakes are spongey like that, but more delicate on account of the milk, and not sour. Like a cross between crepes and injera. They're tiny little chewy toothsome morsels. She calls it "light nothingness." Yes, that's true, but they're also satisfying -- they fill you up without the midmorning pancake crash. I ate a dozen and they kept me humming till lunch.

Real Buckwheat Cakes

This recipe makes enough pancakes for two hungry people, with maybe a few left over for a third person who generally prefers coffee to breakfast.

The night before, put two cups of buckwheat flour in a large bowl with a cup of sour milk (buttermilk, kefir, whey, or clabber), and a cup of water. Whisk until all the lumps are gone. Add a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of molasses, and whisk in. I think Marsden assumes you're using toasted buckwheat flour (the grey-colored kind, readily available), but I usually prefer freshly ground untoasted buckwheat groats.

Put a tea towel over the bowl, a plate on top to hold it on, and a thick dish towel over the whole thing. Set it somewhere warm. I put it directly on my stovetop over the hot spot from the pilot light. A radiator would also work. It shouldn't be so hot that it hurts to touch -- that would kill the fermenting bacteria.

In the morning, heat a cast iron skillet over a medium-high flame. Don't let it smoke. Add a teaspoon of baking soda to the batter, and whisk it in until it's all bubbly and evenly distributed.

Grease the skillet well (use ghee, lard, or bacon fat -- or butter, if you're careful not to burn it). Marsden says to use a "cooking-spoonful" of batter for each cake. It's not a lot. These are little guys. Put four or five in the skillet.

Flip them when they have bubbles in the middle. Remove when they're brown on the bottom and re-grease the skillet before you put the next round in.

Serve hot with gravy or butter. Or syrup, if you must, but I warned you about the pancake crash.

Hint

Helen Marsden recommends an innovative pan-greasing device: a piece of fat pork stuck on the end of a fork. I suppose I could keep it handy in a little jar on the back of my stove; no more running around for the butter knife between pancakes. In fact, I could even use the fat-pork fork for my ova over-easy.

The Joy of Grinding Grain & a Pretend-Prenatal Diet

There aren't many objects I lust over. My bicycle is my wings. My skillets are my magic fireproof hands. My dresses and books are quite well worn. The rug I made is lots of flirty dreams knotted together with hand-me-down tradition, etc. In fact, I don't own or long for anything fancier than what I can buy with a couple hundred dollars on craigslist.

Still. For the last decade, there has been a big something missing from my life. (No, W. Crawford, I am not talking about babies! Sigh -- more on that later). It's a grain grinder I've been yearning for. With a grain grinder I might finally be sufficient in the kitchen. I could make the most delicious and nutritious bread from the freshest, sweetest grains. I could make all sorts of exotic flours! I could make cornbread the REAL way, from freshly ground corn, which is orders of magnitude more sweet and satisfying than pre-ground cornmeal. I could feed my babies through the apocalypse!

So I had a birthday (a long time ago -- back in July) and reached my first QUARTER CENTURY. (Two weeks later, I discovered my first grey hair. A week later, I found my second). Anyway, William gave me a package all wrapped up in paper bags and stitched together with string and nails, and inside it I found the Wondermill Junior. He had called up all the best the-end-is-coming dealers and asked which grain mill they'd want their children to use during the apocalypse. The Wondermill Junior.

Of course I've been getting toned grinding nutty-fresh wheat and rye for my bread. But my biggest discovery so far has been buckwheat. Not only is it shockingly easy to grind (it's very tender), but you'd never guess how mild freshly ground buckwheat can be.

Most buckwheat flour is ground from toasted buckwheat groats, which is why it's dark in color, bold in flavor, and doesn't stick together very well. Even raw buckwheat flour has no gluten, and you can't make a very good dough from it. But I like it much better than toasted buckwheat flour for crepes, cookies, noodles, pancakes, and muffins.

Buckwheat itself is not a true grain, and much easier to digest than wheat. Plus, it's brimming with nutrients. I think about these things a lot, because frankly, I am so impatient to have babies, I like to pretend I'm on a pre-pre-natal diet. "Mmm," I tell myself, "this cod liver oil's for the baby's brain!" "Better have a bedtime swig of rich raw milk for the baby's bones," I say.

Yes, I'm crazy. I'm not planning on having a baby for a while. I'm not even married. But for whatever reason, I've wanted babies -- badly -- ever since I first got thighs. (I just found out in Real Food for Mother and Baby that thighs & hips are where mothers store essential fatty acids for their babies. The body only burns that fat when making babies -- and that's why a high hip-to-waist ratio is so attractive). From my growing library of prenatal-advice books I've also found out that in most traditional societies, men and women eat special nutrient-rich diets before they conceive. It makes sense.

And so I figured it wouldn't do any harm to channel my insane baby-wanting into something productive, like eating some good nourishing food. So I quit the refined sugar, and stopped drinking alcohol (which messes up my sleep, anyway), and found myself ten pounds lighter, clear-skinned, and chipper. By the way, nourishing to me means: two golden eggs for breakfast, topped with homemade kimchi. Sprouts and raw yogurt and walnuts and avocados and cheese for lunch. Chopped liver and beet salad for supper. Green tea to help me write and dark chocolate, walnuts, and raw milk for snacks -- mmhmm. And cod liver oil daily.

So this was a very rambling way to tell you what I've been up to for the past two months. In other news, I'm now a full-time freelance writer and editor. Sometimes I find myself clad entirely in heather-grey knitwear, and I am frightened. I love spending my days sitting with my cats, picking apart words, walking W.Crawford to the Apple bus, biking around, making yogurt.