Ashley is a homesteader/farmer living on a small farm in rural Nova Scotia, Canada with her husband, Daniel and their two children Ellie and Anderson. On the farm side they breed Wagyu/Angus cattle and forest raised pigs, on the homestead side Ash has her Dairy cow, Janet and their laying hens. She loves cooking and exploring in the kitchen and teaches online live sourdough classes for people to tune into from anywhere in the world.
There is no denying the fact that most of us wait all year long for spring and summer to sink our hands into the soil of our gardens, and harvest bounty to tuck away for the coldest months of winter. Traditionally when homesteading, the summers are spent working hard for the winter – harvesting, canning, cutting firewood, processing animals for the freezer. It is assumed that most of the harvesting/putting away would be done within these months, however, sourdough thrives in an opposing season.
Fall and winter is your time to shine with sourdough bread! It is the most forgiving time of year to dive into daily baking and experimenting. I spend most of the winter baking every single day and both feeding our family fresh fermented breads, but also stocking our freezer for the summer months. You see, summer time is a hard time to bake – it is so hot indoors that baking in an oven at 500F is daunting, but also, it’s difficult to maintain a proper starter in such intense heat and humidity. Heat = fast fermentation. When you feed your starter, you are giving the food it needs to thrive and become active enough to leaven your bread, but when it is so hot outside it eats through its food much faster. It can become a frustrating dance trying to catch the window for which it sits in its peak activity. In the winter that window can be up to six hours, in the summer it can often be less than an hour. Good bread begins with a nice active starter/leaven. Flat, unattractive sourdough can be a common experience for homesteaders in the summer months due to underactive leaven and over fermenting/proofing dough. The good news is sourdough freezes better than any other bread out there, it’s an excellent thing to stock up on in the winter months, but there are also some things you can do to help with your summer baking if freezer space is limited.
Feed your sourdough more “food” not more often:
Flour and water are the “food” for your ferment, in the winter I give my starter about five times the amount of food to the amount of culture, this means it can gets to eat and expand to its fullest potential rather than just a 1:1:1 ratio in which the culture itself has to compete to eat the amount of food that is there, resulting in a starter that ferments much faster and does not have the opportunity to reach its fullest potential. In the summer the time it takes to eat through the food is much faster, so to avoid being tied to multiple feedings each day during the heat, I feed it more food so it takes longer to eat through it. I feed a ratio of 60:60:10 flour:water:starter. This way there is plenty of food for the culture to work its way through and you still get a nice active starter that will triple in size.
Shorten your Bulk Ferment and Use the Fridge:
In the winter months I find the autolyse and bulk ferment portion of my bread process to be very forgiving. Many times I have accidentally left my bowl of dough out on the counter in February, only to wake up to it over flowing onto the counter. I can usually “bring it back” by building proper tension and a shorter proofing time, but in the summer months that would be so much more difficult. Sticking to a strict bulk ferment is key in the summer and usually it ends up being a lot shorter than you’d think. I typically autolyse for about 20 minutes, add my salt and let it sit on the counter another 1.5 hours – in that time I do two stretch and folds and then promptly put my bowl of dough (covered) into the fridge! The fridge will still ferment, but it will be a lot slower than if it was on your counter and a lot more manageable when the humidity is high. A trick to understand that if there is humidity outside, you will still have humidity IN your fridge, so even the time for which you put your dough in there will be less as well. The fridge is such an ally in the heat of summer!
DON’T overproof your dough:
When in doubt, underproof! When people plop their loaf out on the pan to score, a big issue many have is that it will immediately flatten before it ever gets to the oven. I always do a quick counter proof – in the summer that really is no longer than 1 hour and often is much less! After that counter proof it goes back into the fridge, I always bake right from cold. This trick is really helpful because when the dough is cold it will hold its shape a lot better for you to score, which ultimately results in a much nicer oven spring! I hope these tips are helpful! If you are curious about learning more about my process, you can visit turnerfarm.ca and register for any of the upcoming sourdough live classes!
Happy Baking!
I began my homesteading journey from the perspective of a Nutritional Therapist, closet herbalist, and beekeeper. This mentally gave me a few barriers to diving into the conventionally accepted tools for animal health such as antibiotics, injectable vitamins, generic minerals and mass produced bagged feeds…
I am not well traveled. I’ve never flown on a plane. I’ve never been north of Ohio or west of Texas.I’m not as well traveled as some may say one should be, but this piece of land has housed all of my fondest memories…
Do you ever worry that your kids will miss out because of this homesteading lifestyle choice? This fear crosses my mind time to time. I’m sure many, if not most of you, could agree that it can be extremely difficult to get extended time away from the homestead for more than a full day, especially in the busy summer months when daily chores demand our regular attention…
Try, what is the worse that can happen? Ether, it works and that’s great or its failed and you learn. One lesson I learned early was to own it. If you laughed the loudest at yourself, it gave less room for other people to poke and bug about it. Plus, if you can grow to the point of being ok just uncomfortable (its probably always going to be uncomfortable failing at something) in your mistakes you are less likely to ignore or forget the important lesson that you were being taught. Unless its leaving hoses running for hours or all night, why is that one so hard to remember?!
when we choose to live closely bonded with the land, to turn to it in reciprocity, tending to the soil and the water and the plants and the animals for our mutual thriving, we are reclaiming a pattern of collaboration with all that lives. when we take the responsibility for what we need back into our own hands, those intimate relationships become vivid and immediate. we bring it home….
“In some Native languages the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us’ … the land knows you, even when you are lost.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass…
Babies, Business, and Bumper Crops: How I am Learning to Homestead with Babies in Tow
Have you ever had one of those days? You know the days when you are cleaning the baby’s diaper, milking the cow, scooping poop in the barn, wiping noses, and cleaning more poop off of kids’ shoes…
One year ago, I resolved that I would learn to make all of the bread products my family needed. With an ever-shrinking bank account battling current inflation prices, I would walk the aisles of our local markets frustrated that I did not possess the skills required to make most of the things I needed to purchase…
Hey there, Homesteading Mama’s!
I’m Rachel from @frontier_homesteading. My husband Ryan, three children and I have been homesteading for about 10 years now, first in Wyoming and now in Alaska.
We currently have milk goats, pack goats, sheep, a pig, a cow, chickens, rabbits, bees and a dog. Seasonally, we also have more pigs, meat chickens and turkeys….
