Wheat - The Staff of Life

You can't beat wheat for nutrition and long term storage. If stored correctly it will keep almost indefinitely. The uses for wheat vary widely from bread to wheat grass juice to sprouts. We have been buying wheat in bulk and grinding it for bread for over 30 years. For us, it's the only way to go.

First up, nutrition. It's packed, including calories and carbohydrates for energy and vitality. This is a link to the website I use to compare nutritional values for all kinds of foods.

Wheat flour, whole-grain

We haven't ever eaten wheat sprouts, or wheat grass, or wheat juice, but we have read about it. When it comes to wheat, the sky is the limit. In years past we cracked the wheat and cooked it for a breakfast cereal. Here are a couple of links that may give you some new ideas about how to add wheat, or more wheat, to your diet.

Wheat Berries - 7 Recipes You Have to Try

Wheat Sprouts: Health Benefits and How to Grow Them

Wheatgrass Benefits: The Superfood that Boosts Immunity & Nutrient Absorption

Bulk wheat is getting a little hard to find right now, but if you look, you can still find some. And if you do find some, I would highly recommend buying all you can. Wheat berries store much better than flours and they contain the nutrients of the entire berry, unlike any flour you can buy. For years I thought the whole wheat flour I was buying was just that, whole wheat. It is not. Some of the most nutritious parts of the wheat berry are removed to increase shelf stability and prevent rancidity. By the way, a wheat berry and a wheat grain are one and the same thing. I've always wondered why it's called a berry....

We have gone from making yeast bread to sourdough bread. The fermenting process of making sourdough releases more nutrients, lowers the carbohydrate count, and forgoes the necessity of having yeast on hand. For us that has been the way to go. Here are some past articles we have written using wheat.

Making Whole Wheat Bread

100% Fresh Whole Wheat Bread

Got Wheat? Fern's Sourdough Bread

Grinding Flax & Other Bread Making Lore

If you want to make bread from wheat, you will need a grain grinder of some sort. There are many different kinds and most folks have their own preferences. Here is our manual variety if we ever have the need to use it as opposed to our electric model shown in the previous articles.

Grain Grinder, Manual Type

There are other things you can do with wheat besides make bread. Such as.......

Making Graham Crackers & Pie

Fern's Low Carb Meat Pie

We consider wheat to be a very important part of our food storage. We eat bread everyday. If a collapse scenario occurred, making and eating bread would be one of the things I would try to maintain, for our nutrition, health and peace of mind. One of our newest traditions is having a fresh tortilla every afternoon with a cup of coffee. Now when I make bread, I freeze a large portion of the dough to use for daily tortillas. I keep a bowl of thawed dough in the refrigerator, set some out on the counter in a bowl to come to room temperature for use each afternoon. A fresh, hot tortilla with a little butter and salt is a very welcome part of our diet.

Folks, it is indeed a very hot summer. The 'events' in our country appear to wax and wane, but overall the heat and intensity of our nation's discontent cannot be overlooked. Food prices continue to rise. Growing conditions around the country are strange this year, with food production being impacted in very unusual ways. It appears that the days of taking for granted the fully stocked shelves at the grocery store may become a thing of the past. We seldom go to a store, but lately the shelves appear to have fewer thin or bare spots. The increase in prices, though continues to surprise us every time we go.

Think nutrition. Think calories. Think how deep you need to stock your shelves to provide for you and yours for the long term. We don't know how the plandemic will turn out. We don't know how the communist, anarchist attempts at overthrowing our government will turn out. We don't know if a war will break out. We don't know what is going on anymore, what is true, what is total lies, smoke and mirrors. What we do know is that there is a good probability that we will be on our own, left to our own devices. And in that case. You need food. You need nutrition. You need calories. For everyone within your realm of responsibility. None of us ever want to be in the situation where our loved one looks us in the eye and says, "Daddy, I'm hungry." Not when we had the opportunity to do something about it ahead of time. Folks, don't be too late. The consequences will be too much to bear if you are.

Until next time - Fern

Our Normal Abnormal Life

In many ways, our life hasn't changed much. We milk goats, make cheese, plant the garden, eat at home and don't socialize. This is pretty normal for us. Now that I cannot visit my Mom in the nursing home except through the closed, glass door, which we did for the first time today, we seldom go anywhere. While we were in town today we went to the store. Frank stayed in the vehicle while I went in to get apples. I wore gloves and cleaned my hands with an alcohol soaked wash cloth when I was finished. I took note of some of the store shelves while I was in there. The produce section was fully stocked. There was very little pasta, no spaghetti sauce in jars or cans, and only a few cans of spaghetti-o kinds of foods. There were no dried beans or flour of any kind. Many of the canned vegetables were sparse. I didn't go down any other isles, so that is my report for the grocery store today. It is a smaller, local grocery, not the Wal-Mart type.

A few weeks ago we stocked up on animal feed, filling every container we have to the brim. That will last us well into summer if not beyond. We stocked up on fresh apples and cabbage, too, but that's about the only store bought items we wanted/needed. The new air lock version of making sauerkraut has taken a backseat to the fermenting crock again for now. Even though it will take us months to eat the full crock that is percolating away at the moment, that's okay. It's nice to know we have months of nutritious, probiotic kraut awaiting our dietary needs.

Most of our routines haven't changed, so here is a pictorial of some of the things we're doing during this normal/abnormal life. We're still making cheese and sourdough bread, although we have started making tortillas out of most of the bread dough, just because we like them. We eat them fresh everyday with a little butter and salt. The dough freezes and stores well in the frig, so I can take out what I need for each day, let it come to room temperature on the cabinet, then cook them when we are ready to eat. If we do happen to experience a collapse, making small, daily batches of dough for fresh tortillas will be easier than trying to bake bread or rolls. Just a thought I have had when we transitioned to making daily tortillas.

Bread dough in the bowl, cheddar cheese in the stock pots

Some of the seedlings are now in the garden. If we get a frost, we'll need to cover the tomatoes and squash. 

Seedlings hardening off from the greenhouse

Tomato seedlings

The large tomato that grew in the greenhouse over the winter.

Whey from cheese making to water in the tomato seedlings.

Tomato seedlings

Carrots

Yellow squash

It's been very wet and muddy for about a month now.

This week we had record high temperatures in the 90's. This weekend we will probably have a frost. It reminds me of the challenges farmers are having with the food supply and the issues with the solar minimum and how it affects weather extremes. The Ice Age Farmer is listed on our blog roll. He has some interesting things about the solar cycle and food supply. The pepper and beet seedlings will have to wait for the frost to pass to be planted.
 

Peppers

Beets on my planting wagon.

We thought a few more hoses were in order.

Frank used a garden hose to fill our storage tank from the water well by the greenhouse. We can use it for the garden or drinking water if necessary.

The world? Our country? Outside of the virus, the economy is on the verge of imploding. The effects of the virus don't appear to be near as devastating as the hysteria and overreach of the government indicates it was 'supposed' to be. There is some underlying sinister plot in play that hasn't raised it's ugly head into the light of day yet. When it does, I don't know if it will have the ugly head of a fire breathing dragon or the boot of the man upon our throats. It is difficult to find any clues or facts (how to know what is true or not is impossible anymore) that lead to any logical conclusions at all.

And then there are the 'essential workers' that have received their "papers" for safe travel to and from work. When I hear the term "Papers, please." it makes me think of a World War with major restrictions and controls upon the activities of societies across the globe. We know a man that received his "papers" a few weeks ago indicating he works in an essential industry, then received a comment recently with the same scenario. Is there a time coming when all travel will be restricted without official "papers"?

Phone apps are being developed to track people that have been infected, are suspected of being infected, have been vaccinated (once it becomes available) or haven't, and probably who is using all of that 'dirty' germ laden money. With many, many people staying home or drastically restricting their travel voluntarily due to fear, those that are out and about will be easier to track. Why is this really desirable? I don't really think it has anything to do with a disease.

So, we will continue to stay home, order a few things online to be delivered and continue our normal/abnormal life. There are times when the vision of what we see coming down the road is almost paralyzing. Other times, we continue our daily routine, just like any other spring, only with the feeling we need to keep an eye out over our shoulder for that sinister overshadowing that creeps ever closer. We used to say the storm is coming, get prepared. Now? The storm is here and it's too late.

We would really like to hear what you think and what is happening in your area. When it rains, it rains on all of us. We are all in this together. Speak up now while you still can. You never know when something you say may help another.

Until next time - Fern
 

Grinding Flax & Other Bread Making Lore

We finally used the ground flax we bought for our sourdough bread and have begun grinding our own. We found a place to buy bulk flax in 50 lb. bags that we pour into five gallon buckets with Gamma seal lids. This is explained in this article with our bread recipe, well what used to be our bread recipe, I have changed it somewhat - again.

We are grinding the flax using the KitchenAid grinding attachment. It is slow, but does the job. When making the last batch of bread, we switched the grind to a coarser setting than what we started out with, so it doesn't take as long and the texture is good. Some folks may want a finer grind, but we like it this way.

This grind is definitely more coarse than the store bought, and it also is more oily, which shows me that ground flax has some things removed to make it shelf stable, just like whole wheat flour. We are really happy to add our own ground flax to our bread.

The difference in the recipe came when Frank asked me to make biscuits and gravy one day for a treat. I dug out the sourdough biscuit recipe I had used before and realized the only real difference was the addition of two tablespoons of baking soda. I also didn't knead the dough with the KitchenAid dough hooks like I did for bread. The biscuits turned out really good, they weren't crumbly from lack of kneading, so now I make regular bread the same way. I stir it in the bowl with a spoon and my hands if needed, but no kneading. That's it. Doesn't take as long and reminds me of how I used to make regular whole wheat bread without the assistance of the dough hooks and a machine.

Everyday starter on the left, stored refrigerator starter on the right.

It was time to feed the extra sourdough starter I keep in the frig when I made this batch of bread, so I also put the everyday starter in a clean jar. I pour about half of the stored starter in the everyday jar, refresh what is left with more water and flour, then return it to the frig. It's then good to go for about a month or so. Did you know that the vertical ridges down the side of a half gallon jar have an indention on the inside of the jar? Me neither, until one time I was washing the sourdough starter jar, which takes more elbow grease than a milk jar. The starter leaves a film on the inside of the jar that needs to be scrubbed well. If anyone had ever asked me, I would have said the inside of the jar is smooth and flat. It's not, and starter wants to stay in those little grooves. An old toothbrush works well to clean the grooves.

One of our new buckets of hard red winter wheat ended up being white wheat, even though the bucket was labeled red. I knew the berries were almost twice as big as the previous bucket of hard red wheat, but didn't realize it was white wheat until we made a batch of bread out of it. It's okay, and some folks probably prefer the taste of white wheat since it is more like a store bought bread flavor, but we prefer the taste of hard red wheat. It is a hardier kind of taste and hard to describe. So we resealed the bucket of white wheat and marked it 'open' and 'white' so we can skip over it. If we need it someday, it will be there, but for now, we will continue to eat hard red wheat.

Do you know what you do when the squash starts producing? You eat lots of squash, even on your pizza. We use the same sourdough bread recipe for pizza dough that we use for everyday bread. The toppings change from time to time, depending on what we have available. This version has ground pork, frozen peppers from last summer, fresh crookneck squash, tomato sauce we canned last summer and our mozzarella. Well done, just like we like it. But the dough came out thicker than we like, so I'll leave the baking soda out of the pizza dough next time. Like Frank says, our bread and pizza never taste quite the same from batch to batch.

Enjoy what you have. Learn everyday. Appreciate the opportunities, talents and challenges you've been given. It's what makes life worth living.

Until next time - Fern

Got Wheat? Fern's Sourdough Bread

I had to look back at some of the previous articles on sourdough to see what we had written, and how this particular journey has evolved since that time. One of the last articles for bread is here if you want to do a comparison. Pull up a chair and a cup of coffee, this has turned out to be a rather lengthy article. Hope you enjoy it.

There were two small boxes of ground flax sitting in the cabinet, that I bought for some forgotten reason (You don't do that, do you?) and wasn't sure what to do with. The research on cholesterol and blood pressure we did lead me to flax. There are many, many articles about the benefits of flax, this one is an example. After reading the research, those two lonely boxes of flax got put to use after checking to make sure no weevils or other bugs had set up residence. 

By the way, when we moved here we had some weevil issues the first year. Then I found some traps (similar to this one) for the weevil moth, and other critters of that kind, that I hung around the area we had grains and food they prefer. After trapping them for two years, we have never had another problem. Our bulk grain is stored in five or six gallon buckets and transferred to a canister as needed.
Once we began using ground flax in our bread recipe, we stocked up on some from Wal-Mart, picking up a few bags each time we went. Then we researched online and found some bulk flax seed that we could store in some of our empty five gallon buckets that have gamma seal lids. The first time we tried the flax seed in our wheat grinder, we thought we had killed it. The flax is too moist and oily for our WonderMill. Frank was able to work and work and work on it. He ran through some wheat that removed the gummed up flax, and it still works like a charm. We have had this grinder for at least ten years and would highly recommend it.

Flax

You see that piece of blue tape on the bucket? That is a date, which will help us determine how long our stock will last at the current use rate. When we're trying to prepare for the long haul, estimating how long our supplies will last is critical. They may not last as long as we do, but if we have a rough idea, we can plan accordingly. 

Wheat

Next, we found a grain grinding attachment for the KitchenAid mixer, which is designed to grind oilier seeds like flax. It works well. Which mixer? Well, the KitchenAid is okay, but we now have purchased three of them since moving here. The first red one died after a couple of years so we got the yellow one. After a year the gears started grinding and we thought it was dying as well, so we ordered a second red one. In the meantime, Frank removed the top cowling to see if there was anything he could do for the gears, there wasn't, but since looking in there and putting it back together a couple of years ago, it still works. The red one is just sitting in the wings waiting it's turn. I guess we could put it away, but as you can see, we haven't. Do any of you have stand mixers like the KitchenAid you would recommend? What are your experiences? We also have manual back-up grinders in case the grid goes down. You can read about it here. 

 And speaking of grinders, see that cord coming out of the bottom? Frank has given up trying to figure out how it wraps up and stores in the bottom of the grinder, he just leaves it for me. He just can't see how it works anymore than he understands how yarn (he calls it a piece of string) can turn into a sweater, or thread keeps fabric together after it goes through a sewing machine. Now, Frank is a very intelligent man and can fix just about anything I ever bring to him. He can wire, plumb and build a house, learn and install a solar system and a myriad of other things, but he just can't see how these things work. Our point is, different people have different talents and it's no sin or crime to not 'get' something. Me, physics and the realistic interaction between things - I just don't get it. Things that are simplicity in itself to Frank are like kryptonite to me. Sometimes this causes friction (another scientific term, right?) and sometimes it causes laughter. There is nothing wrong with not getting something, or understanding things at a different rate, it's the blessing of being individuals instead of robots.

Okay, so, making sourdough bread. Our starter lives over here in this corner away from the kefir and jars of oatmeal. We discovered years ago that most cultures don't play well together so they have their own 'areas' of the kitchen. Our starter now lives in a half gallon jar with a piece of cheese cloth over it to keep the little gnats out that show up here a few times a year. It also has a sprouting lid on it. Why? Well, we had a catastrophe with our starter a few years ago. I was keeping it in a ceramic pitcher in this corner. It had

cheese cloth over it held in place by a rubber band. One morning when we got up there was a hole in the cloth. Upon removing the cloth we could see a live mouse looking up at us trying to keep his head above the surface. The catastrophe of the situation is that I had not kept my backup starter in the refrigerator fed and it had died. I was left without any starter. I was upset. Then Frank remembered that I had shared some starter with a friend, Grace, down the road, who was happy to restock our supply. Lesson learned. Now the starter lives in a jar that is mouse and bug proof. One of those experiences I would never have thought would happen. You know that old saying, "You just never know." I think there is a reason it is an old saying. And remember, two is one and one is none.

The bread. Warning. I don't measure much, so everything will be estimated amounts. I will list everything here then show you the process.

3 cups starter
1/4 - 1/3 cup olive oil
1/2 - 1 cup filtered water
Approx. 2 tbsp. sea salt - no iodine
1/4 - 1/2 cup honey
2 cups ground flax
5 - 6 cups fresh ground wheat

 

We start with the 3 cups of starter, then to that add the oil and water. The amount of water I add depends on how much liquid is in the starter. Sometimes the starter is thicker and sometimes it's thinner, just depends on how much water I put in when it is fed. 

Here is how the salt and honey are measured. Very precisely........

 

We have gradually increased the amount of ground flax in the recipe. I started off with about half a cup, waited to see how it tasted, then gradually added more. Now it's about 20% of the recipe, not quite, but almost. 

Once these ingredients are in the mixer, we start it up and start adding the wheat flour. I usually start with five cups and add the remaining amount as needed until the dough clings together in a sticky ball. Sometimes I need more than others, it just depends on how fluid the starter has, and how much water and oil I put in, since I don't measure precisely.

After enough flour has been added, I set the timer to around seven minutes (it depends on how long it took to get it to the right consistency) and let the machine do the kneading for me. 

 







 We mix the dough in the morning while fixing breakfast, put it in a glass bowl and set it on top of the frig for the day.

One time when we made bread, Frank noticed this glass lid, that goes with the stock pot, fit perfectly on the bread bowl. Up until that point I had been using plastic wrap. Interesting.

 In the evening after doing the chores, it's time to bake bread. I start with pouring some (about this much) olive oil on a large cookie sheet and putting it in the oven to warm as it preheats to 450*. We use virgin olive oil, not extra virgin. We just don't care much for the extra virgin taste.

As the buns or rolls are made, I coat one side with the oil, then turn them over. I've tried a number of different ways to do this including using lard, which works fine, we just prefer the taste of olive oil - while it is still available.

Unbaked

We have tried loaves as well as buns, but we prefer these for the crusty nature of a bun. They also travel very well when we have to be out and about. We take four buns, a couple of boiled eggs, a piece of our cheddar and a quartered apple. Lunch on the go. Besides that, it has been over a year since we have eaten out anywhere. We just don't like any food but ours and if we eat anything 'off the home menu' we feel sick. Part of that may be age, but it's also an indicator of what we're used to, what our bodies are accustomed to dealing with. Another thing to consider if a collapse occurs. Store what you eat and eat what you store, otherwise your body may not cooperate when you start feeding it 'foreign' objects.

Baked

Most other rolls or buns I have baked with past recipes bake for about 20-25 minutes. These take 45-50 minutes. The bread comes out fairly heavy and dense, plus, we like the crust on the crunchy side. If you try this you will need to adjust the time to your personal preference. Upon removal from the oven, I coat the tops of the buns with olive oil.

On bread nights, we usually have a lighter supper because regardless of the meal, we always have bread for 'desert'. One for me, two for Frank. It's tradition. Buttered, of course.

We just finished pouring the last wheat from a six gallon, 45 pound bucket into the canister when we made bread a couple of days ago. This bucket of wheat will last us approximately 12 weeks, which means we consume about 3.5 pounds of wheat per week. More than we thought, but it gives us a baseline to use in estimating how much wheat we want to store. It's interesting collecting data on yourself.

How do you make bread? We always enjoy hearing other versions of our recipes, it makes good 'food for thought'.

Well, I'm sure your coffee cup is empty by now, mine is long gone. And I think Frank is wanting another piece of bread. We have one every afternoon for a snack with a cup of coffee. Another tradition we have started.

Until next time - Fern