One Local Summer Update

This year, I signed up for the One Local Summer Challenge. This means that I've committed to eating one meal made from entirely local products each week. For this exercise, I will define local as originating from less than 150 miles of my house. I'm allowing exceptions for oils, spices, and items like flour that are milled locally but the grain itself may have originated from slightly farther away.


What did I eat this week?
The plan for yesterday was to head to a U-pick strawberry farm with a couple of friends so that I could make something yummy with local berries. We'd meet at 8 am, then carpool for 30 minutes to the farm to pick. That seemed reasonable, since this particular field is open 7:30 to 11:30 am, or until they are picked out of ripe berries. Unfortunately for us, their parking lots were nearly full when the gates opened at 7:30 am. When I called at 8:00 to make sure they were open, I was told that they were closing their gates at 8:30. Although we could have rushed to make it into the gates before they closed, it didn't seem make sense to drive all the way out there to hunt for the last ripe berries in the field.

Now what to do? We decided to head to the Tower Grove Farmer's Market to see if we could find fresh berries there. After a half hour stay at the market, I had nabbed a nice bag full of sunflower sprouts (an incredibly tasty addition to salads), a beautiful bunch of chives (Rob was planning on making cheese and chive scones later that day), a dozen local eggs, and three quarts of bright red, sweet smelling, organically raised strawberries. Though the berry vendor is not certified organic, a sign on their stand noted that they do use organic farming practices. I've found this is fairly common in smaller farms, because the certification process can be painful and expensive.

Anyway, enough rambling and let's get to the food. When I got home from the market I found a yummy sounding recipe for Summer Strawberry Bread in a cookbook I picked up earlier this year. We've made a couple of things from their recipes so far, and they've both been excellent. So, I pulled together my local ingredients and went for it. Here's how I made it.

Summer Strawberry Bread, Adapted for Local Ingredients
1/2 cup chopped local almonds
1-2/3 cups locally milled 10-grain flour
3/4 cup turbinado sugar (not local, but organic)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (not local)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda (not local)
1/2 teaspoon salt (not local)
3 large, local, free-range eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil (not local)
1/3 cup local, organic milk
1 cup small, local strawberries, thinly sliced

Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease an 8" loaf pan. Spread whole, raw almonds onto a rimmed cookie sheet and toast for 8-10 minutes in the oven. Cool for 5-10 minutes and chop finely.

Combine flour, sugar, almonds, cinnamon, baking soda and salt in a large bowl.

Whisk eggs in a small bowl until frothy; whisk in oil, then milk. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture and pour in the egg mixture. Blend until just moistened. Fold in the berries.

Spoon into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake for 45-50 minutes, until knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 5-10 minutes. Run a sharp knife all the way around the pan, gently running between the pan and the bread to loosen any stuck spots. Turn the bread out onto wire rack and let cool.

How did it turn out?
I really liked this bread, and I think it would work with a lot of other fruits. If you eat bananas, you can trade the almonds for walnuts and the berries for bananas. If you have fresh blueberries, you could probably swap those directly for the strawberries. I suspect that rhubarb would also be a welcome addition.

What would I do differently?
I would add another 1/2 teaspoon of salt and maybe 1 tablespoon of honey if your berries are not quite sweet. If you use anything but 10-grain flour, you should reduce your liquids to 2 eggs and skip the milk.

How did I eat it?
I brewed a pot of local Kuva coffee in the french press while the bread was baking and poured myself a big mug with turbinado sugar and a little warmed milk. Then I sliced a couple of pieces of bread and slathered them with a little bit of fresh goat cheese.

Yum.

My goal is to make my local meals more and more complex, but this was a simple and delicious way to start my local summer. Oh, and next time I'll try to have pictures.

Note: You can also keep an eye out for a post from one of my strawberry picking / farmers' market going friends, who is planning on posting her recipe for Strawberry Cupcakes. I tried one, and it was quite tasty...

Step #1 - Make your own bread

I'm starting to think about this adventure in becoming more sustainable as a journey down a really long road. I've been walking much slower than I would like so far, but I know that if I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, I'll get there. Corny analogy? Maybe, but it's working for me right now, and I'm sticking to it. That makes this the first post in a very long series to come that will chronicle each small step (including the occasional backward one) down the road.

On Wednesday night, I started my very first batch of homemade bread. I chose the no-knead variety, mostly because I'd heard it was easy and thought that would make me more likely to continue baking bread. I found the recipe in the New York Times, of all places. I made it exactly as instructed the first time, and plan variations in future iterations.

Recipe: No-Knead Bread
Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1½ hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting (I used half white, half wheat)
¼ teaspoon instant yeast (I used Fleischmann's Rapid Rise Yeast)
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed. (I skipped this for now)

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees. (I started my bread at 11:30 pm, in the hopes that it would be ready when I got home the next day. This seems to have been a fairly successful strategy.)

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes. (I didn't get to this step until 20 hours after I started the dough. In retrospect, this may have resulted in too many air bubbles, which could be why the texture was a bit odd.)

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger. (Here's where I started thinking the recipe had gone horribly wrong. My dough was much too gooey to form into a ball, and no amount of flour on my hands or the dough was going to prevent sticking. But I perservered. After the two hours, my dough had not doubled. It did not even grow by 50%. It also continued to spring back at this point, but I refused to give in and chuck this batch.)

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack. (I used our Le Creuset baking dish, which seems to have worked very well. This loaf needed just 15 minutes with the lid off to look and smell delicious.)

Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.

Here's a picture of the resulting loaf.



As you can see, the bread didn't rise nearly as much as anticipated. The texture is also a bit spongy, perhaps because I let it rise for too long in the first stage. But the flavor is good, and it has a great crust on it, so I'm thinking this was a fairly good first effort.

If anyone out there has more information on what I might want to do differently next time, including maybe changing the kind of yeast I used???, please let me know. For my next loaf, Rob has requested a full-on kneaded bread, so please also pass along any great recipes of that variety.

Hmm. Now I'm looking forward to spreading a bit of locally produced goat cheese on a couple of slices of yummy fresh bread....