Sourdough Basics Series!
Have you ever tried cooking 1 cup of rice in 1/2 a cup of water? It’s a silly question. It’s becomes an even more strange question as we consider whole grain, brown rice, or in our case, flour that isn’t straight white flour?
The truth is, most grains do well in a high moisture/water setting. And there are many great reasons why!
So, as a micro batch - micro baker who is committed to a high moisture/water/hydration sourdough baking approach, I want to share with you the many benefits that come with this type of bread making. High hydration dough, which refers to dough that has a higher ratio of water to flour, offers a number of health, textural, and longevity (shelf life) benefits that make it a superior choice for those looking to enjoy truly delicious and nutritious bread. What many of us in this world call #realbread.
One of the biggest benefits of high hydration dough is the health benefits it offers. When dough has a higher ratio of water to flour, it allows for the flour to fully hydrate, which creates the perfect fermentation process, thereby creating a more full and efficient fermentation. This means that the sourdough microbes are able to break down and digest the starches and sugars in the flour more completely, making it easier for the body to process and utilize the nutrients in the bread. Additionally, the fermentation process also helps to break down the gluten in the flour, making it easier for those with gluten sensitivities to digest.
Another benefit of high hydration dough is the textural benefits it offers. High hydration dough tends to be a softer and more open and airy crumb than low hydration dough, which gives the bread a lighter texture that is truly delicious. Additionally, because the dough is able to ferment more fully, it also tends to have a more complex flavour profile, with a greater depth of taste and aroma.
Finally, high hydration dough tends to last longer than low hydration dough. Because the dough is able to rise more fully and ferment more efficiently, it is able to keep its structure and moisture for a longer period of time. This means that the bread will stay fresh and delicious for longer, making it a great choice for those who want to enjoy truly delicious bread without having to worry about it going stale quickly.
I guess you can tell where our loyalties lie! High hydration sourdough baking is a truly fantastic, dare we say superior way to enjoy delicious and nutritious bread. With its health benefits, textural benefits, and longevity, it is the perfect choice for anyone looking to enjoy truly delicious and nutritious bread. So, if you're looking for a yummy bread bread, look no further than a high hydration sourdough baking approach.
I think most believe that the Thanksgiving holiday simply represents a time of community, celebration, family and feasting — cherished and good traditions indeed. We’re interested in Thanksgiving because it’s a holiday that has traditionally aligned with the harvest and agricultural practices and feasting…it’s in our cafe’s very name for example. It should be no surprise that we’re going to have something to do and to say about this. The problems begin with the fact that the holiday’s origin story is somehow tied into a questionable origin story - and is now far removed from our home base of the traditional, unceded, and ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations - best known today as greater Vancouver.
At Feast & Fallow, we’ve been wondering about this holiday and our move towards a better, more truthful, perspective as we seek to decolonize this practice. How can we best “celebrate” Thanksgiving at home, or should we even celebrate it?
Of course, the answer is always complex, but for the time being, it’s something like this: we celebrate the dinner at home with our loved ones, while simultaneously attempting to reject the colonialism that the day embodies.
We believe in the effort to decolonize and reinterpret the meaning of this day.
Decolonize: what does that mean?
Decolonizing can mean a lot of different things, but for the case of Thanksgiving, it can mean unlearning the harmful myths that have latched on to this holiday and instead, recreating it to honour First Nations peoples. Simply going on with Thanksgiving festivities with no acknowledgment of its true and horrific history isn’t just delusional; it furthers oppression.
The common narrative, a mixture of myths with few truths, is that Indigenous communities of present-day Canada, North America really, shared a meal of thanksgiving with pilgrims from Western Europe; unfortunately, the centuries of trauma, destruction, and harm that (we)colonizers inflicted on the First Nations communities that fed us, while subsequently seizing Indigenous homelands, all the while working to eradicate Indian cultures, is just starting to be fully discussed.
The undeniable harm that was caused to First Nations communities in all of North America, including Vancouver via some form of the belief in Manifest Destiny, has led many to question how to celebrate a holiday that blatantly promotes a story of invasion and colonization, while, for generations, sanitizing the truth from plain view.
How can we share truths of Thanksgiving, without undermining the holiday that is now more associated with family than with Imperialism? How can we share a more authentic, and local version of how this story has affected First Nations in British Columbia? How can we rethink what this holiday means so that we can continue to celebrate with our families with laughter and joy — while rejecting the oppression of Indigenous peoples at the same time?
For most people, Thanksgiving dinner is a time for us to be with our families and spend time together as a community. Most of us work busy jobs, have lives in the modern world within our traditional homeland and cherish the time we get to spend with our parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins and friends. During Thanksgiving dinner, we hardly talk about the origin narrative around the holiday, and instead use the gatherings as a time to say what in life we are grateful for, to laugh more than our fair share, and to enjoy an excuse to overeat. We imagine this is common throughout many homes, regardless of ethnicity.
We also know that we do not want THE story, or THE struggles, ignored or whitewashed as Thanksgiving becomes a common time for the public to think critically about issues of colonization and the holiday increasingly brings Indigenous issues and people into the center of the seasonal conversation.
To keep these conversations moving forward, focusing regionally here in the Vancouver area - we at Feast & Fallow want to offer three ideas for you to consider that work to bring visibility to the movement towards truth and reconciliation with the aboriginal peoples in our community and with a deep desire to help heal wounds that still affect our friends today:
1. Begin your Thanksgiving dinner with a land acknowledgement recognizing that you are on Indigenous Land.
Land acknowledgements go a long way in helping to educate. By adding that First Nations people are still present, we encourage us who might previously have believed what racist, old-school history books have said about First Nation’s culture.
A simple land acknowledgement before dinner can look like this:
Before we start this meal, we acknowledge we are on the homeland of the (First Nation where you happen to live) people who continue to live and thrive here today.
2. Learn and discuss contemporary First Nations issues that affect our community today.
As Thanksgiving is a time to discuss Indigenous people, our encouragement to us is to think with an open heart about how colonization is continuing to affect our communities today.
The ongoing pain and trauma from colonization is evident when traditional culture needs to be revived instead of being passed on inter-generationally; it is evident when, after a decades of effort to reaffirm our First Nations many nations, languages, and lands are still not recognized by North American governments. Lingering pain from colonization is evident. These are real issues that affect the local First Nations communities today. By raising awareness of these issues, we all work toward a future where these old wounds can be healed: a future where history is told honestly, First Nations’ sovereignty is recognized, and land and culture is returned and restored respectively.
3. After Thanksgiving is over, think of some actions to support Indigenous people.
There are countless ways to support and align yourself with First Nations people.
— Stevan, Feast & Fallow
New Community Partner: Flourist
We live in a fractured, hurt, and divided world. Our society is split, detached from one another, often incapable of empathy and communication. It is one group against another. Or one interest pitted against the other. In our highly polarized world, food, at every stage, invites us to make a system that connects humanity rather than divides it. We must all be haves in a world predicated on inequitable consumption and have nots.
Those of us who become aware of the role of food in a larger sense (I mean, how much larger can we get, it might truly be the most universal thing we do as human cultures) -so, when we can escape the dominant economic rhetoric, turning the sound of our own voices down, and can take the time to reframe the system, and then find a way to reintegrate the full circle (from seed to plate and back again) - we can then become bridge builders and community makers. And when we do that hard work of reconnecting all of the food systems dots, we’ll realize that the values of mutuality, reciprocity, relationship, and interdependence come right to the surface, and food, finally freed from the shackles of profit and gluttony where our dominant system has placed it, can then be there to provide an almost singular experience, universal and transcendent, local and global, truly unlike anything else in our culture.
At this point, those of us that are growing in our awareness of food justice issues and the system we’ve inherited and then supported, albeit our support was likely ignorant - we’re beginning to embrace our own culpability for the way that it is but also our own opportunity to be a part of the change - we must not choose despair, or anger, or judgement or deepening divisions I mentioned right at the start of this essay - Instead, we can know that food is far more than simply fuel (whether fuel for our bodies or fuel for profit) - but more, we will embrace food as our shared terrestrial experience, our cultural responsibility and we’ll know that food is not meant to divide us or to endanger us in those ways.
Bitterness, fear, and resentment have no place in how we cultivate and create our shared global system of food. Instead, as we cultivate a better food system, and begin to see the healing, the repair, and the reemergence of community, we will be best served when we can trust that food will actually heal our divides, rather than deepen them.
So there is a better story about food. Food is the tapestry and very fabric of our connection. When we embrace food, we’ll see it as it can be - a pathway to a better life — a shared life. A better life today - and tomorrow. A better story for our future, for our youngest generation. Together, we can ensure that they start from a more integrated place and with a certain renewed reverence for the role of food in our life.
Food connects. Rather than dividing and ripping apart, food bends everything towards restoration, inclusivity, and reconciliation. When we eat, or make, or produce good food and drink, we become connected: to ourselves, to humankind, and to the divine
The gardener, chef, or even dinner guest can be deeply reconnected to self and the creative spark in their growing, cooking, and eating respectively. With food at the fore, one can choose to be immersed, holistically drawn into the mystery of all they experience along the way, whether it’s the gardener and the ever miraculous growth of produce, or the chef whose masterful control of technique unleashes the potential of each ingredient, or, when we all eat, we can stop and experience inwardly the combinations of temperature, texture, and flavour - with each bit and morsel, a movement towards regeneration, a promise of wellness and connectivity.
Food can open our hearts and souls to our truest selves, our wildly creative beings.
They aren’t called the culinary arts for nothing.
Food making is rarely just a straight and logical process. It can be filled with twists and turns, success and failure, and it is almost always a process that is predicated on collaboration with the land, the people, and the systems and happens best when we choose to explore and discover along the way - rather than forming rigid designs. It requires patience too. And when we’re patient, and we stay committed to the process and exploration of food, for us, for our community, for our world, we will find our selves, our true senses, in our food. The faithful and respectful approach to each segment of the food system allows for a deeper alignment and integration, a process that has us, the individual at the core.
So, when we pay attention instead of just consume, we can be awakened to our divine spark as we make and create food. The experience of knowing and connecting with oneself through food requires an openness to approach the planet’s gift of sustenance with wonder and awe. Our world is replete with eye candy, with noise, and with novel and glitzy things to do - and our desire to connect with our food somewhere along the way - can help us detach from that bustle of the rat race - and find afresh ourselves. *hold up food*
Connect with nourishing creativity - and disconnect, and detach, and let go of the hustle, the push, the striving.
In awe and wonder, each morsel of food is a new pathway to feeding our own souls.
And here’s the truth of it all: our own food making, gardening, cooking, and eating begins with the proto-gardener: the first planter and chef - because we’re made in the image of God.
Feeding Our Souls
This might feel like a strange place for me to start- with food and physicality being so central to my themes and interests. But the truth is that as humans, our tangible expressions are tied into much more than what we can simply see and feel. We are also spiritual, or soulful creatures. Just as our bodies experience hunger and require feeding, and play, and rest - our souls need also be deeply intertwined and connected in order to feel nourishment and care. Without that - our connected rootedness - we are not inhabiting the totality of the terrestrial human life that is ours to experience. Without soul care and transcendence, our material existence will be lifeless, stale even, and likely leave us feeling purposeless. But partnering those things together - our earthiness and our spiritual composition - can lead and guide you, and me, and our communities, into that new kind of life that is promised and fulfilled in Jesus.
Ok - so how does this connect to food justice?
We do not find much “real food” - soul nor tactile - in our industrialized world today. Our systems, especially our food systems, land management, and hospitality reflect our cultural norms of consumption, utility, efficiency, and speed. Rather than genuine nourishment of our world, our food systems are better characterized by their capacity to create corporate accumulation of capital through the production of consumable goods. While not necessarily and inherently wrong, per se, it’s important to note that we, and our planet, were not created nor designed to thrive in this context. What we’ve created almost by default is a reduction, wherein both our bodies and our planet are simply means to an end, and the end, it appears is mass production and insatiable growth. But we know and believe that the circle we call life, with our spirituality and soulfulness, points to much more within us. We feel and know this depth of meaning, almost innately when we declutter and turn down the noisiness of our industrialized world. We know that calibrated properly, life has meaning and deep resonance, together. We know that our cultivation and production is supposed to be much more than a means to an end.
In fact, when done with mindfulness and openness, our cultivation of the land and our experience with food, the earth, cooking, eating, and celebrating is not only how we feed our bodies, but our souls too.
Inspired by the bookends of the Christian cannon, we find some profound imagery and symbol about humankind, cultivation of land, eating and food, and of course, tables and meals shared for mutual edification and appreciation. It is in reflection on these that we can find this integrated approach we’re after at Pour and Kneady.
Genesis chapters 1 and 2 present a vision of our terrestrial, that is earthy lives, amongst plants, in a garden, being encouraged, or one might even say instructed to practice the art of gardening and cultivation. The story begins with a play on words. We are earthlings made of earth. Adam and Adamah in the terse Hebrew of Genesis, are understood to be in solidarity, almost quite literally. As earthlings moving about the earth, exploring the space, using our hands, feet, eyes, mouths to find and experience this multi-sensory world we’ve been given.
The story is a about cultivation and re-creation and is a multi-sensory food and connection experience: we see the jade like greens of the plants and the kaleidoscopic colouring of the fruit, we smell the sharpness of the warming herbs and mustiness of the soil, we hear the babbling brook or the pitter-patter of quenching rain, we taste the depths of sweet and sour citrus or the umami burst of fermented cabbage - and most importantly we experience God.
When as humans we work the soil with our hands and set a table for our friends we are doing so much more than eating: we, quite literally are feeding our souls.
What makes food so important? Farmers, field workers, producers, chefs, families, kids, animals even - have something to say. They have their reasons why they know that food is important. And so do grocery stores, restaurants, and online retailers. Food is universally understood on many levels but also complex and hidden on others. It’s actually hard to speak of food in its totality - it’s hard to put food in a global paradigm.
Now, when those same people answering the aforementioned question happen to also follow Jesus, then our answers take on even greater dimensions.
The exploration of food and community has long been embedded within our spiritual history. Whether in the ancient pages of scripture or the agrarian cultural norms of yesteryear - food, food production, eating, and ritual - to name just a few areas of intersection - have served pivotal and poignant moments. Today, however, as times have drastically shifted and we’ve moved headlong into an era of food and eating unlike any previous, it is hard to stay rooted in those norms and meanings.
Pour and Kneady believes that we can re-enter and re-discover those values and find how they can be expressed and upheld in today’s society. The emerging cafe and faith community will be safe echo chambers to work through the task of answering the question:
What makes food so important, today!?
Though this conversation about food and food justice is lofty, multilayered, and nuanced - it deserves attention like few other topics. It’s germane in the strictest sense and relevant in the broadest sense.