For cakes and pastries:
Using organic wholegrain or wholewheat flour like most people would use all purpose flour for bread, cakes and pastries. I do mix different flours together at times especially for bread, but the base for cakes and pastries are mainly wholegrain flour. I never use white, all purpose or self-raising flour.
My flour comes from grains I grind myself. This ensures I have fresh flour with all the nutrients and minerals intact as wheat loses it’s nutrients very quickly when the wheat kernel is broken through milling. In order to preserve the flour for a longer time on the shelves of stores and warehouses, commercial milling also removes the bran and germ which contain much fibre, vitamins, some proteins and healthy fats.
Alternating between coconut and olive oil and butter
NEVER using baking soda/powder. If you prefer to use it, get the baking powder that is aluminium free – available at health food stores.
Using sourdough starter for some cakes INSTEAD OF baking powder
Using Quark or yoghurt instead of cream
Only free range eggs are used
Generally raw sugar is used but that that might alternate with other natural sweeteners such as maple syrup or honey depending on the recipe. Naturally I make my own pastry crusts. I have a preferred pastry crust recipe which I use for most of my pies.
For bread:
Flour must always be fresh.
At the moment I use a conventional oven to bake my bread at an average temperature of 240 C for about 10 mins and then turned down to 200 for another 30 – 40 mins. Always leave a container of water on the top shelf of your oven with the bread dough in the bottom, underneath it, to keep moisture on the dough.
All my bread is made solely with sourdough starter and no yeast whatsoever is used. Much of the commercial bread you find marketed as sourdough still contains commercial yeast. Please see my articles, baking with sourdough starter and Why sourdough starter? There are many recipes online on how to create a starter. So I will not provide it here. It is not difficult to maintain it. But if you don’t have the time you may buy your starter from my shop. Wherever you buy your starter from please ensure it is from a reputable person as we are dealing with wild bacteria and yeast.
I use a dough starter and so receipes that call for a 2 kg bread would require an estimate of 200 – 250g dough starter. If you are using liquid/batter starter, it would roughly be 6 – 7 oz.
As bacteria and yeast are living creatures, filtered water is important for excellent sourdough bread.
I bake all my bread still in a home conventional oven. Waiting for my husband to build me a woodfire oven 🙂
Other
Himalayan or Celtic pure salt
I never use a microwave
Receipes consist of what we eat at our country home which is mainly vegetables and some seafood. No meat is consumed so unlikely you will find any meat receipes here.
I would rather steam than boil vegetables to retain the nutrition.
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