I love using my freshly milled soft white wheat because it has less gluten. It works well for quick breads like these. I get lots of my grains from my friends at grainworks.   If you don’t have any soft white wheat you can substitute any whole grain flour for it.

Print

Sourdough Whole Grain Banana Muffins with Dark Chocolate

Benefits of sourdough added to whole grain soft white wheat.

Course Bread & Muffins

Keyword quick bread, sourdough

Cook Time 15 minutes minutes

Servings 24

Ingredients

• 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup starter discard
• 1 1/2 cup honey
• 1 cup white sugar
• 8 bananas
• 6 eggs
• 1/2 cup cottage cheese
• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 7 cup freshly milled soft white wheat
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 cup coconut
• 2 cup quick oats
• 1 1/2 cup dark chocolate

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 350F. Line 24 cupcake pans with liners and set aside.
• In a large bowl, combine butter, starter discard, honey and sugar. Using a hand mixer combine until mixed well.
• Add in cottage cheese and bananas and mix in. Add eggs one at a time, mixing just until combined.
• In another bowl, combine both flours, baking soda, salt, coconut and oats. Add to wet ingredients and gently combine with a spatula until combined.
• Add in dark chocolate and mix just until combined. Scoop into prepared pans.
• Bake muffins for 15-18 minutes or until the edges are golden brown.

Healthy and tasty. That’s my favourite place.

Lots of names for this soup exists like creamed veggies, summer stew, Mormon soup, and summer soup. No matter what you call it, it’s so so tasty.

All you need is potatoes, peas, carrots, fresh dill, heavy cream and cornstarch.

Print

Summer Stew

Course Soup

Ingredients

• 4 cups potatoes bite-sized chopped
• 3 cups peas freshly shelled
• 2 cups carrots bite-sized chopped
• 8 cups water
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup fresh dill chopped
• 4 tbsp cornstarch
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 cup heavy cream
• salt + pepper

Instructions

• In a medium-sized pot put carrots and potatoes and cover with water. Add salt. Bring to a boil with a lid on.
• As soon as the potatoes are fork tender, add the peas and bring it back to boil. Add in the chopped dill.
• Combine the cornstarch with water and mix together well. Add into the creamed veggies and stir well. Keep stirring the stew until it thickens. Add salt and pepper to taste.

I promise it’s the perfect summer meal.

Sometimes getting groups of youth together and planning something that they will enjoy can be a challenge. My husband asked me to come up with a group activity for boys that will help them engage with each other and have fun in the kitchen. So I came up with this idea.

We make cookies a lot around our home and they are a relatively easy thing for kids to bake. So I wrote out my base cookie recipe that I use for chocolate chip cookies at least once a week at home. When I make cookies at home I usually adapt the basic recipe to other cookies by making small adjustments. Chocolate chips are added with little less flour but adding in cocoa makes them double chocolate chip. Or a little less flour with some oatmeal and raisins makes them oatmeal raisin cookies. Which lead me to the idea of writing out the adaptations and letting the kids pick what they wanted to do.

So I wrote out my recipe on a big poster post-it note (they’re one of my favorite things and you can buy them on amazon here) And then made adaptations on the post-it notes. Each team had a colour and it told you how to adjust the recipe if you wanted to add that Ingredient. As a team, you had to decide what to add (and take away if needed.)

It was tons of fun to see them working together (or not working well ) and then tasting in the end.

Yup, one group made some terrible cookies when they added extra salt for some reason (boys!) but they all had fun. And ate a lot of cookies.

Here are some instructions and printable so you can use this idea too. Print if off and have one of the second page for each group. And then give them a marker or pen and they can choose together as a team what they’ll include and exclude.

This would be a really fun group date too for single adult kids and older teens.

Print

Double Chocolate Sourdough Whole Grain banana bread

*I always think you should follow chocolate amounts with your heart. Don’t let anyone tell you how much you can add.

Course Bread & Muffins

Keyword quick bread, sourdough

Author rhondasteed

Ingredients

• 1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup sourdough starter
• 4 eggs
• 6-7 bananas
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp salt
• 3 1/2 cup whole grain flour
• 1 1/2 cup dark chocolate chips

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 325ºF convention or 350F for regular. Line three bread pans with parchment paper.
• Cream butter, sugar and starter until smooth. Add eggs in one at a time and cream in. Add in bananas and use the mixer just until they are broken up.
• Add in dry ingredients and fold together. Fold in chocolate. Divide batter among the three prepared pans. Bake for 25-28 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Yes, it’s whole grains and still tastes good.

A few weeks ago I helped shoot a wedding where the bride asked me to take a specific shot of her and a group of women gathered around her in prayer. I took a few shots of them. And the images have stuck out in my mind and heart since then.
Seeing these women gather around her prayerfully supporting her at this important step moved me.

Lately I’ve felt my circle of women support around me. They have shown up with full hands and love in their hearts. And I have needed them. They have held me when I am hurting and listened to me as I’ve wailed and cried. Online and in person I have felt my circle of support.

I am in awe of the goodness of so many women.

I was recently talking to a friend who is struggling with something. And she said to me “where is my circle? Who can I reach out to about this?”
We need each other. Everyone is struggling thru heavy things. And all of us need support and love.
I hope that I am able to step in when others need that hand of support. This is ministering in action. It is what Jesus would have us do.

“The circles of women around us weave invisible nets of love that carry us when we are weak and sing with us when we are strong.” – Sark

“You sisters do not know the full extent of your influence. You sisters enrich all of humanity. … Each woman brings her own separate, unique strengths to the family and the Church.” – James E Faust.

I shared recently about how time affects sourdough and today I want to share more about how temperature affects your baking.

Awareness of the temperature in Sourdough baking means knowing how it will affect the outcome. You slow down the whole process of bread baking using a cooler temperature for things to rise and develop slower. As this process happens it adds more time (like the previous post) and makes the carbohydrates in the bread break down making the bread easier to digest and creating the familiar sourdough flavour.

Reasons for choosing a Slower fermentation could be are for the health benefits or for the familiar sour flavour or for fitting baking better into your lifestyle.

Reasons for choosing a faster fermentation could be you don’t care about the health benefits or want less tangy flavour or just want bread faster.

The total temperature of your completed dough is made up from the temperature of ingredients, temperature of the room where you are working, how you form the dough and temperature where dough rises. All of the different parts add to the total temperature of your bread.

The temperature of ingredients: Just like in cookie recipes where room temperature butter or eggs can be required, the temperature of the individual ingredients in sourdough affects the total temperature of combined ingredients that make up the dough. (science – homeostasis)

Temperature of the room where you are working: Mixing a dough in warm room makes the dough heat up quicker, just as having a colder room will slow down the process. Sourdough is especially sensitive to the room temperature. That’s why having a slow fermentation in the fridge works so effectively.

How you form the dough: When you mix a dough in a stand mixer the movement makes the temperature increase (again because of science: friction).

Temperature where dough rises: Again it can slow it down or speed it up. A warmer temperature speeds up the reactions happening in the bread dough, making it rise sooner.

Being aware of how temperature affects your dough so that you can choose to use it for your advantage. It can be used a problem technique to adjust your dough.

In every single yeasted dough, whether commercial yeast or sourdough, temperature affects the outcome but sourdough seems to be especially sensitive to temperature.

Learning to bake Sourdough was a popular covid activity. For some it was a new experience working with bread and doughs and for others it was a return to the kitchen. There are lots of things to continue to learn and I find myself continually discovering things the more I bake. As I was talking about sourdough with my mom this week (yup, I like to talk about bread a lot), I realized that baking with sourdough comes down to understanding how time, temperature and moisture interact.  All of your choices in how you use time affect how the dough and then the bread turns out. I’m not saying this to make it sound overwhelming, but instead to say awareness of time in your baking affects all of it.

One of the biggest difference from working with commercial yeast and natural yeast or sourdough is the time it takes to rise. The whole process of natural rising yeast happens over time. Years and years ago, all bread was made with the natural yeast that exists all around us. Some of the pioneers would mix up their bread, and haul it along as they walked. Then after a long slow rise throughout the day, they would then bake the bread over the fire in the evening. The commercial yeast production hurried that process up for bakers everywhere. I’ve read a whole book on yeast, but I assume most of you don’t want to take the time to do that so instead there is a great two part series here about the history of yeast. One of the biggest things to realize is how the time affects your working with the dough.

Sourdough and natural yeast are healthier for our guts of how the carbohydrates can start to break down even before you bake it. There is lots to learn about the science of all that. If that interests you, my favorite place for that information is the Sourdough school out of the UK. Slowing down the processes in the dough to let things help the flavours develop over the long rise in the fridge.

Knowing how use time to slow your rise allows you to adapt baking into your lifestyle. If your dough has risen and it ends up you have to leave or it’s night time and your tired, just put that dough into the fridge and slow down the rise. The next day, pull it back out and carry on. It is using the temperature (which I’ll share more about tomorrow) along with time to adjust the outcome.

Choosing to knead in a machine for 10 minutes or gently folding in every 30 minutes affects your outcome. As well as using time to fold the dough slightly with rests in between. In a way it’s letting the dough relax and rise and then reminding it how to keep together. This process with consistent timed folds helps the structure of the dough. Kneading the dough for a time (especially in a mixer) can be used to bring a tighter crumb. It is again the awareness of choosing for the outcome you want.

Even the being aware of how time affects the loaves and choosing for that reason: an ambient loaf (left to rise in the counter) or a retarded load (kept in the fridge at a cooler temperature for a slower longer rise.) If you are worried about gut health or tanginess of the bread, then you chose a longer rise. If you just want a sourdough loaf, then ambient loaves can work out great for you. When you learn to make the time work for you, it makes sourdough more possible. You’re life doesn’t have to revolve around sourdough to be a baker of it. You use the tools to make it work for you.

Sourdough seems so overwhelming when you first start for a lot of people. But it is understanding how it works together makes it adaptable into your life and it becomes realistic.