Kate Downham

I’m determined to create a book that will help people to bake more bread, and I’m wondering if I’ve addressed every possible issue...

What are the things that have prevented you from making your own sourdough or yeast bread in the past?

Please feel free to give feedback and suggestions here to help get more people baking great bread at home!

The main roadblocks I can see are lack of time, lack of organisation, and unpredictable lives. I’m creating some strategies and recipes to address these - are any of these things that make it difficult for you to make bread? Are they something that you’ve overcome? How have you overcome these difficulties?

Also a couple of other things I think may be roadblocks for some might be perfectionism and analysis paralysis - too many bread experts saying that you absolutely have to do this and absolutely can’t do that, and conflicting experts saying different things, it’s hard to know where to start - I’m addressing this by going through every possible option for natural breadmaking and explaining why it is done, so that the reader can choose for themselves what steps to take, and create recipes and timelines that work for them.

What other things might prevent people from making bread as often as they would like?

Burra Maluca wrote:When I was involved with goats in the UK, which is a looooong time ago, there was a huge difference between the breeds.

Anglo Nubians would basically need to be bred every year to keep the milk flowing.

Pure Toggenburgs every year.

British Toggenburgs every other year.

Alpines and British Alpines mostly every year.

Saanen and British Saanen could be left for five, six, maybe seven years and still produce about a pint of milk a day at the end.

My own little British Toggenburg could give milk for three years after kidding.

I knew quite a few one-goat smallholders who would buy a recently kidded British Saanen from a reputable breeder and basically never have to breed.

I also knew a vegetarian breeder of Anglo Nubians who would put the male kids down at birth, though that never sat quite with me.

I am finding that here in Tasmania toggenburgs milk for longer than saanens.

We milked through for three years once, the milk supply dropped down quite a lot towards the end.

We’re just coming out of milking through for two years now and it’s gone really well. Supply didn’t drop down as much over winter as it would if they were pregnant, and then in springtime they picked right up, producing the full amount they would when freshly kidded.

Cheese quality is still excellent this late in the lactation.

Goats can be a good option for a vegetarian dairy if you have a market for pet/lawnmower goats. If I were doing this, I would also pick a breed that would milk through, so that there weren’t so many kids that needed rehoming. Miniature goats seem very popular here for pets, so finding some dwarf goats that will milk through reliably could work well.

Dennis Lanigan wrote:I've made sauerkraut in Fido jars with great success, so I have quite a few of them. I'm going to have access to a lot of apple cider soon and wanted to try and make hard apple cider with what I already have. Anyone try to make hard cider with Fido jars? I'm a little scared they'll explode.

I've made "apple core cider" in Fido jars without fermenting airlocks - it needs to be 'burped' everyday (or maybe twice or more) during the extra bubbly time, and if it's not burped on time it can fizz up a lot, but so far it has been fine under the pressure. If I were making it in larger amounts from juiced apples I'd probably use a glass carboy/demijohn with airlock - these are not very expensive, and the drinks I make in them probably last longer than the apple core cider because they aren't getting exposed to oxygen all the time like a burped fido jar is.

For cooking, any of the animal fats work well. You'd usually need to get the fat from a farmer or butcher and then render it yourself, which is easy to do. Beef fat (tallow) is what I mostly use, lard from outdoor-raised pigs is really good but harder to find where I live.

Ra Kenworth wrote:Oil items that may rust or wrap in cloth soaked in oil
I actually use clarified coconut oil myself because I can work the oil in with my bare hands

That's really good to know that clarified coconut oil will work - I've never seen clarified coconut oil - would ordinary coconut oil work?

Will any kind of oil or fat help to preserve tools?

Leigh Tate wrote:Experiment #1.

I took a look at Kate Downham's hummus recipe and compared it to the one Kevin posted, as well as one I found with Brave browser's AI. All three had similar ingredients, but ChatGPT's added water to thin to a salad dressing consistency. I used the ingredients I had and sort of melded all three recipes.

2 cups canned garbanzo beans
2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic
1 tsp dijon mustrd
1/2 tsp Himalayan salt
6 tbsp water

Whirred it up in my blender, adding 1 tablespoon of water at a time until I got a creamy, salad dressing like consistency.



Just taste testing right out of the blender, I wasn't sure I'd like it. It seemed to have too much dijon. But then I tried it on my salad and it was great! I didn't have tahini, which I like and would like to try in another batch. And I have ideas for flavor variety and some other ingredients to switch it up. I think it would make a good dip for veggie sticks too.

I've never added mustard, but I sometimes add cumin or smoked paprika (or sometimes both) and they are really nice in it. Lemon juice is good in it too if you have any on hand.

I have now pressure canned using a wood stove several times.

Here are a few observations and tips:

I am doing this on a proper wood cooking stove. I’m not sure how it would work on a stove designed for heating.

To pressure can on a wood cookstove, I just use the same techniques that I use to adjust the temperature for cooking on it - adding more wood, adjusting the air intake, moving the pot around. I wouldn’t recommend canning on a wood stove unless you know how to cook well on one - if you can sear a steak in a pan or bring a pot to a rolling boil and then keep it at that temperature, then you can probably pressure can on it.

Because you can’t just set the heat and expect it to stay the same as you would on an electric or gas stove, it’s important to be nearby when it’s canning to make sure the pressure doesn’t drop because of the temperature getting lower - it’s not the end of the world if it does, it just means you’re supposed to start the timing again from when it gets back up to pressure again, so it will take more time and maybe get a bit overcooked. Right now I’m in the next room and I can hear the weighted gauge moving around, but I wouldn’t want to go outside for long.

I add some extra water just to make sure it doesn’t boil dry - instead of 3 quarts I add 4. So far there’s still been plenty of water left at the end of canning for 90 minutes so this probably isn’t necessary.

To avoid wasting wood, choose your canning time wisely - it’s best to can during a time when you are happy to keep wood burning in the firebox, not when it’s dying down for the night.

The process of bringing it up to pressure involves getting a decent fire going - any fire that would sear a steak or get a pot to a rolling boil is fine. I’ve used all the 3 main types of firewood that we have and they all work well, as long as I use them in the same way that I would for high heat cooking. During this time, the oven will probably heat up quite a bit, so it’s good to time it with bread baking.

I err on the side of putting too much heat into the canner rather than too little for time when it’s under pressure - the weighted gauge seems to be making a constant noise. Usually when I try to move it off the hottest spot on the stove it seems to quieten down a bit too much for my liking. If there is a healthy fire in the firebox I can usually slow the air intake down, keep the pot on the hottest part of the stove, and it stays under pressure nicely without using much wood.

Adding the extra weight to the regulator and relying on the dial instead might give a better idea about what is happening (I have the Australian version of the Presto canner, which has a dial and weights), I might try this sometime while my canner is still fairly new, but as we can’t get them calibrated here I prefer to rely on the weights in general.

Luna Silva wrote:getting a job is so hard and also iI measured my backyard on google maps, and it is 0.039  acres which sounds  small

Welcome to Permies : )

I have a son who is nearly 15 and grows a lot of food - last year was his first year with his own garden and he grew way better broccoli and cabbage than I've ever grown - beginners can definitely go well with gardening. He has 4 beds for veggies, each around 4 feet wide by 16 feet long, and also a 5th bed for berries which is around 30 feet long. He figured out what he likes to eat and then we designed a 4 bed crop rotation for this foods so that he's not growing the same thing in the same bed every year.

Have you heard of biointensive? That is one approach to getting huge yields and growing your own fertility on a small amount of land. We have a forum all about it: https://permies.com/f/231/biointensive

I am packing away the tiniest of woolly baby clothes and not sure when I'll next be unpacking them. Some kind of wool eating creatures have damaged our wool clothes in the past when they haven't been stored properly, and I want to keep these in the best condition possible without toxic stuff so I am wondering what would be the best way of doing this?

I read somewhere that using extra borax in the wash might help - would packing them in with dry borax sprinkled in damage them at all? Or is the borax washing the best strategy? How much borax would I put into a laundry sink full of washing?

I usually put a little bit of cedarwood oil in when I'm washing woolly clothes to store in the hope that it will deter the pests - is this something that actually works?

In the past I had blocks of cedar wood that I put in clothes drawers, but I have still seen damage with these. It might be that they need to be sanded to let the smell get out again.

Getting clothes really clean I think helps a lot- the worst damage I've seen is in the parts of baby clothes that get food spilled on them - it's hard to get all of this out and it seems to attract the wool eating insects. I've been careful since then to soak the baby clothes and carefully wash them myself.

I think keeping clothes packed away in tight-lidded boxes or drawers that the wool eaters can't get into probably helps a lot - the worst damage I've seen is in clothes that I had in an open cardboard box.

Is there anything else I can do to protect these clothes naturally?

I like to cook them in spiced syrup - the cooked spiced quinces can then either be eaten warm or cold, or put into jars and then water bath canned. They make a nice jam as well.

Here are my recipes: https://thenourishinghearthfire.com/2022/11/05/quinces-how-to-prepare-cook-and-preserve-them/