Lynda has a sourdough culture that she makes bread with, and has taught me and the other visiting students here how to make our own bread, which we need to do every couple of days because we eat a lot of it since it’s so good.
We begin by placing the sourdough starter (a couple cups of the dough from last time) in a big mixing bowl. It’s kind of an art because there’s no real recipe- we just keep adding rye meal flour and water until it turns to a batter. So far every batch we’ve made has turned out slightly different in densities and flavors which is kind of exciting, we never know what we’re going to get! The dough should be a lot moister than normal bread dough at this stage- there will be some liquid floating on the top with bubbles in it.
After this initial mixture is made we let it rise for many hours. How long it will need to finish rising depends on the heat and humidity levels, on a moist, warm day it rises much quicker than on days when it’s cool or dry. The way to tell that it’s done is just keep checking on it and when it hasn’t grown any higher for a couple hours, then it’s reached its peak. It’s quite surprising how big it can get! The dough practically doubles in size.
Now, the most important step of all is to grab a scoop off the top and put it in the cup for the next batch’s starter! Otherwise there will be no more bread making to come. Lynda has had this starter for 8 years and says she will cry if we accidentally bake the bread without saving the starter. To keep feeding it we mix in another cup of flour and some water.
With the remaining dough, we add flax and sunflower seeds that have been soaking in water to expand while the dough was rising. These are stirred in with a cup of wheat flour and a bit more water! After everything is mixed, the dough is laid out in the bread tins and left to rise for a few more hours.
Once the bread reaches the top of the pan, it goes in the oven to become soft, delicious, yeasty bread! The flavor is rich and savory, and it is nutrient dense and fills me up for much longer than preservative-packed white bread! This is one item that is much tastier and more nutritious when you bake it yourself rather than buy it from the store.
A very sweet italian girl, Matilde, who is staying at this farm told me that she is excellent at making homemade gnocci with her grandmother’s recipe. Well of course as soon as I heard this I darted to the kitchen and begged her to teach me her ways! Everyone else staying at the farm was excited to join too. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever made, the process is fun and the outcome is delicious!
There’s this crazy tool called a potato press (Crazy to me because I’ve never seen one, but maybe not to everyone). We peeled and boiled potatoes, then pushed them into the press causing little bits of potato to come out like rice.
The potato-rice is then mashed together to form a malleable ball, and we incorporate eggs and flour into it slowly. If I ever try this recipe on my own without an italian expert at my side, I’ll have to play around with the measurements because Matilde says you can’t go off a piece of paper, the true way to make it is by feeling it out. However on this occasion we added 12 potatoes, 2 eggs, and no one knows how much flour. We added very small handfuls at a time until the dough was able to stick together in one uniform ball without changing shape.
Here comes the cool part- we grabbed off sections of the dough and rolled them into long, thin logs. Then the logs were cut into tiny little chunks, only about a half of an inch in length. Everything was tossed around in flour, and the best part was getting to stick my thumb into the chunks to give them that signature gnocci cute tiny indent (it helps them cook faster and more thoroughly). Once the gnocci were formed they only had to boil for a couple minutes, they’re finished cooking once they rise to the top of the pan and can be scooped out with a slotted spoon!
The sauce was pretty simple to make and it was some of the best tomato sauce I’ve ever had/.All we did was boil some tomatoes (6, in this case), skin them, mash them up, and then let them simmer in a pan with dashes of olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano, and basil. I never want to buy canned sauce again!
Who knew gnocci could be this good? It didn’t taste at all like the starchy potato balls that you buy in the supermarket. They were soft, tender, rich little clouds of pasta paradise.
All I can say is that I was very impressed by the quality of our hand-made grain products. As someone who hates big food processing chains, I was very satisfied to try out making my own bread and gnocci with all fresh ingredients and no preservatives added.
