>>Can you explain a little bit about soaking flour (and other grains as well)? Do you use an acid medium? Do you soak all your grains?<<

Soaking grains and flours is something that traditional cultures have done for many centuries, tapping into an intuitive wisdom that I think we’ve lost.  They didn’t need the scientific explanations of why it was helpful; they must have sensed a difference when they ate things prepared one way or another.  But I found it helpful to learn more about it when I first encountered the idea, which seemed foreign to me.

Basically, whole grain products and the flours made with them are a source of many nutrients.  The challenge is that they also contain large amounts of phytic acid, which binds with the nutrients when ingested, and escorts them right out of your body.  So in order to benefit from the nutrients, you need to do something to neutralize the phytic acid.  That something is soaking the grains in an acidic medium, and there are a number of options to use: apple cider vinegar or lemon juice, whey, buttermilk, kefir, and plain yogurt are the ones that come to mind, but there are probably others that I’m not aware of.   

 I’ve tried using apple cider vinegar/lemon juice as an acidic medium.  It’s added by the tablespoon (1 T. acv and one cup water: one cup grain) and even though the amounts are small, my kids didn’t like the sour taste so I don’t use that anymore.  I’ve used whey, but that’s not something I often have around. When I made cheese, I had a good amount left over from each batch, and if I get around to making cheese on a regular basis, that would be a good option.  And I have a small amount when I let the kefir I make sit too long and it separates.  To use whey, you use a tablespoon and one cup of water in place of the liquid called for (just like the lemon juice or apple cider vinegar).  But what I’ve preferred using has been either kefir or plain yogurt.  It does change the flavor, but not so much that the kids grimace.  🙂  Seriously, it tastes fine with the yogurt as a soaking medium.  For baking quick breads like pancakes and muffins, it adds a very nice, light texture. 

I don’t soak all of my grains, though I’d certainly be better off nutritionally.  Some grains are more important to soak than others, since they’re so much higher in phytic acid.  That’s what I focus on.  The highest of them is oats, and that’s the grain that I most regularly soak.  This is very easy – I put half the water the recipe for oatmeal calls for in the pot the night before, and add some plain yogurt.  The next morning, I add the rest of the water and it cooks up very quickly.  When I prepared the baked oatmeal for today’s breakfast, I mixed it up the night before, and let it sit overnight before baking it.  (I’ve been wondering about the value of butter as an acidic medium, since it’s composed of lactic acid, so it seems to me it should work fine, too.  But I didn’t look into that, it’s just my own mental conjecturing.)  The hardest part is planning ahead so that you have the flour soaked and ready to be used when you want it, and a menu plan comes in very handy here.

The grains we use the most are brown rice, kasha (buckwheat), and millet and all of them are low in phytic acid.  So I don’t soak them, particularly since I usually prepare them for meat meals, and the options for soaking that I like are dairy.  I do usually cook them with a broth that has often been made with an acidic medium, though (adding a small amount of apple cider vinegar when making stock accomplishes this very easily).   

As far as flours go, I fall very short in this area.  Initially I soaked, sprouted, and then dehydrated wheat before grinding it to bake with.  I was very displeased with the quality of the flour.  It probably would be fine for cakes or cookies, but not for yeast breads.  And it was a long process to prepare it in that way, and didn’t seem worth it for mediocre results. 

But I do try to soak flour when I can, though definitely not always.  This is only when I’m baking for dairy meals, usually breakfast muffins, quick breads, or pancakes.  I’ve found that soaking the flour overnight gives a very nice light quality to those things, and adds a pleasant flavor, too.  In those cases, I generally soak the flour at a ratio of 1 cup flour to 1 cup  of thinned yogurt or kefir.  Other than this, I don’t use very much flour in our meals.  The main exception that comes to mind is baking challah, for which I unapologetically use freshly ground, unsoaked, unsprouted flour. 

I also soak beans overnight at the very least, though I don’t always sprout them.  I tend to sprout them more in the summer just because they sprout so much faster in the heat. I never soak or sprout seeds or nuts.  I wasn’t happy with the results I got when soaking nuts, and decided not to pursue that further.

I don’t use wheat germ, or wheat/oat bran, because I think it’s best to eat foods in the complete package, not one part or another.  If I did, I’d try to soak them as much as I could, treating them like flour.  I also stay away from puffed wheat products, and very rarely have rice cakes, because the processing for these foods has been shown to be harmful.  I sometimes have shredded wheat for breakfast or baked wheat crackers (like shredded wheat in cracker form), but I don’t fool myself that they’re healthy.  I consider them treat foods that are best used in small amounts. 

I’ve learned to adapt most recipes so that they nutritionally conform to guidelines I feel are helpful, though I don’t always post my adaptations when I share recipes.  If something says flour, I may or may not soak the flour as described above, but generally it can be done without drastically changing the recipe. 

Avivah

I think that almost everyone knows that margarine is bad for you, though most people probably don’t know just how bad.  In the kosher kitchen, women often feel that whether it’s healthy or not, they don’t know what else they can use for baking.  Others argue that the cheapness of margarine justifies its use, but I don’t agree. It is cheap – and I’m always up for a good deal – but it’s a false economy. By shopping carefully for the bulk of your groceries, you’ll be able to create room in your budget for the expensive high quality ingredients you can’t get cheaply.  We got rid of margarine and all so called healthy substitutes (eg. Earth Balance spread) a long time ago. The fun part is that it’s really easy and the healthy alternatives work just as well but taste better.

We use butter for dairy meals (I stock up when it’s $2 lb), and coconut oil for baking for meat meals. We buy two kinds of coconut oil – a) extra virgin raw, which still has coconut flavor – because of the flavor it is harder to use in cooking/baking; b) organic but with the coconut flavor removed – I use this for all baking, except challah, when I fall back on regular vegetable oil. I buy it by the five gallon bucket, and it’s not cheap (though it’s lots cheaper than by the little containers in the store), but I think it’s worth the price for our health – it’s a major factor of why I can now consider the baked goods we eat to be in the ‘good for us’ category.  It seems we keep going through this faster and faster all the time. 

We use extra virgin olive oil for salads, not much else. When I roast a chicken, I save the gravy in a container in the fridge, and the fat at the top that congeals is shmaltz – great for frying veggies for a meat dish, and the gravy that congeals below the fat is a delicious addition to grains or stews. I do the same thing with lamb and beef, but I use those less often.

Several months ago, an email friend who follows similar nutritional guidelines that I do recommended another high quality oil to me – palm oil.   I started to look into it, discovered that there are actually two kinds of palm oil – palm kernel oil, and palm fruit oil.  The palm fruit oil has a stronger flavor and color, and I was looking for something that would be a good substitute for the regular coconut oil – specifically, with a bland flavor for baking.  Palm kernel oil was the solution.  I began researching buying it in bulk quantity (it seemed pretty expensive to me to buy in the 24 oz tubs in the health food store) but didn’t see it through – the company that had it certified kosher didn’t answer their phones, and the emails I received in response to my pricing queries weren’t clear.  So I put it on the back burner.

But then I finished my bucket of regular coconut oil, and was dismayed to find a huge price increase when I went to place my order.  So when I went to the health food store (somewhere I rarely go into), I bought several containers of palm oil.  If I hadn’t been tipped off about this by my friend, I would have walked right by it, because of the way it’s labeled.  It’s made by Spectrum, and marked as Organic All Vegetable Shortening – and to me, shortening is a word with only negative nutritional connotations.  But in spite of that, it really is just pure palm oil.   It’s pure white and flavorless, so it’s perfect for non dairy baking.  I went to the health food store on their 10% discount day, so it was a little under $7 for a 24 oz container.

Some of you may be reading and cringing at the thought of all that saturated fat.  Doesn’t everyone know that saturated fat bad for you?  Actually, it’s not.  If you want to start learning more about fats, what’s good, what’s not, and why, start with this link: http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/index.html.  It’s very helpful in dispelling a lot of the nutritional miseducation out there surrounding fats.

Avivah