Learning Traditional Baking and Cooking Skills

One of the things that we’re currently working on in our home is learning more traditional baking and cooking skills. While I do know some about preserving, I thought it would be nice to jump into learning more skills such as yogurt making, sour dough baking, and creating homemade treats for the pups. I love kitchen gadgets – just ask anyone who knows me and they’ll confirm that. lol! Yet, this time, we’re going a bit old school as I don’t have fancy gadgets to make all of this work.

The first thing that Munchkin attempted was making yogurt. She followed the directions that were in her Vintage Remedies for Tweens book and started the process. I think the most difficult part of the process was the wait to see if it would turn out. Unfortunately, we never did end up with a nice yogurt. The end result never really thickened up like we would have liked, and it tasted like sour cream. We’re going to be looking into some other methods as this is something that we’d really like to be able to tackle. We go through a lot of yogurt around here, and it would be nice to have some where we controlled the ingredients.

Next on my list was sour dough. Before we went gluten free, D and I loved eating sour dough bread. Yum! When I heard Vintage Remedies was coming out with a bread book that also covered the gluten free side of things, I was quite happy. When I ended up winning the book, I was thrilled. The Vintage Remedies Guide to Bread book arrived yesterday, and I immediately dove into reading it. D encouraged me to keep reading as he loves the idea of being able to have sour dough bread again. **grin** Obviously, this isn’t a short process, so I wanted to get going as soon as possible. This morning, I set up two sour dough starters. I’m trying the traditional method of harvesting yeast from the air. We’ll see how it goes.

Now, we didn’t want to leave the pups out of the equation, so I decided that it would be fun to make them some sweet potato chews as they love sweet potatoes. I do not have a dehydrator, so after slicing up the sweet potatoes, I laid them on stackable cooling racks, covered them with cheesecloth, and put them outside to “bake”. The pups were pretty excited when they saw me slicing up the sweet potatoes, so I had to give them a little taste before I put them outside. lol! If this goes well, I may try to make them some other dehydrated goodies.

I’m not sure what we’re going to tackle next, but I’m looking forward to gaining more valuable skills that will help us on our journey to healthier living. These will also be extremely valuable skills if/when we ever get our homestead in the future.