Slippage confession
Confessionals are somewhat easy for me to write; they make up a lot of what I write in my zine Quitter. I take the concept of Cricket Bread very seriously, but I have found that there are certain food items that I am gravitating back to. These foods are well out of the 100 mile range.
The first is goat butter. I have been unable to find a source of local goat milk or local goat butter. So I bought a couple packages of Meyenberg goat butter from the co-op. This butter comes all the way from California. The food miles are pretty dense on that one.
The second is bread. The discipline I need to make my own bread is pretty lacking. After working, bike commuting and then making a from-scratch meal, I don’t yet have what it takes to get into making bread. When Stoneground Bakery closed I was at a loss. The freezer cache emptied quickly, and I had to buy some packaged bread. It sounds weird but it really takes less effort to go out and dumpster a bag of bagels than it does to bake bread three times a week. Call it a weakness or laziness or whatever. Add to that several failed attempts at making bread, and I am a broken local bread eater. It is not that I don’t have the stomach for effort. It is just that six months into this project I have not been able to break this chain and just make it happen.
Bread is a staple for me. It just has to be here, readily accessible and ready to eat. I was trying to set up a routine in the bread world. For now it will have to be from the dumpster or from the shelf. I consider this a failure on my part since I have covered most every other staple with a local source. If I can’t find it or make it I move on…except for bread.
Well, those are the two things. They are a pretty unsubstantial two things, but they are things I cannot live without at the moment. That is my confession…
November 25, 2007 at 10:14 am
I’m with you on the butter; it is my one concession to the 100 mile diet.
BUT! For about a year now I have been making, almost daily, a rather well-modified version of the No-Knead Bread recipe found in the NYTimes. It fits in pretty well with our schedules. I mix the bread after I do the dinner dishes, it sits out all night, my husband pulls it out of the container at 3 the next afternoon, and I throw it in the oven when I get home from work at 5:30. Dinner at 7 with fresh bread. I use all whole-wheat flour, and up the yeast to 1/4 teaspoon. You should give it a try. (And I’m a very experienced bread-baker and still do this recipe…if that gives you hope.)
here is the link:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE7D6113FF93BA35752C1A9609C8B63
November 25, 2007 at 12:29 pm
El:
I will give this recipe a try. I wonder how it will work with sourdough starter since I don’t have any baking yeast…
November 26, 2007 at 1:18 am
hey trace, selena said she will bake you some bread. want anything in particular?
December 11, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Hi Trace – I bet you can find someone who would make goat butter in NC. This lady, for example, makes soap, but mentions in her blog that she has tried making butter too.
http://hiddenhavenhomestead.blogspot.com/
If she had a market (Tidal Creek?) she would probably try harder, and it would be easy and not terribly expensive to put it on the bus in Fayetteville in a cooler. I don’t know if that would be legal to sell in the coop, but you could probably find a market among your friends. And Fayetteville is within 100 miles.
Also, I would be interested in contact info for the CSA. I may not be able to use enough produce to join, but I have been looking for info about one around here so I could find out for sure.
September 18, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Try this one out too- not only are these recipes no-knead, they are huge batches of very wet dough that keeps for up to 2 weeks in the fridge, so you can scoop out a hunk and bake it anytime you have an hour or so to wait for it to rise and another hour to hang out near the oven sniffing fresh bread smells until it’s done! I was skeptical, and have done a lot of baking in the past, but these work. Not the most amazing bread I’ve ever made, but it’s tasty and really easy… since I’m now living with my fiance in an unheated warehouse work loft with only a large toaster oven to bake in, I’m hesitant to spend hours or days on a dough… but am getting better at making real food in this “frozen pizza warming device”- the key is keeping it from burning on top before baking through- an old romertopf (german clay oven thing- like a lo-fi crock pot) on top of the pan makes a good “hat” and now we have fresh bread again. Yay! Love your blog and what you guys are doing- good luck!
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/Artisan-Bread-In-Five-Minutes-A-Day.aspx