Quarantine Kitchen Tips | Bags | Recipe: Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread
Issue No. 35
In this week’s edition, Jackie shares some of the kitchen lessons she’s learned from self-quarantine. Also, get a glimpse at how the super rich get their food during the pandemic and challenge yourself with our longest recipe yet!
We also want to hear from you dear readers! Tell us at sunshineandmicrobes@gmail.com about the recipes, rituals, and binge-watches that are giving you joy in quarantine.
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Here at the residency, most of my workday consists of cooking nine meals a week for the artists, all of which I eat with them. Because I work in a kitchen, it's been years since I’ve cooked at home with any regularity. With suddenly no artists to cook for, I’m having to remember what it is to feed myself on top of working full time.
There have been lunches of toast with salt and olive oil and dinners consisting of a few forkfuls of sauerkraut and a half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. But this woman cannot survive on bread and ice cream alone. So I’ve had to get it together and start taking cooking for myself seriously.
Like most of the country, I’m doing more home cooking than I have in years. So here are a few lessons I’ve learned (or remembered) over the last few weeks that have made feeding myself easier and more enjoyable.
A balanced diet doesn’t mean every meal needs to look like the nutrition plate. It’s totally fine to have a giant bowl of pasta with lots of butter and cheese and zero vegetables for dinner. I’ll just try and have a giant salad topped with fruit and nuts for lunch to balance it out. Maybe some eggs for brekkie. Meet your own personal nutrition needs over the course of the week. But also save room for dessert.
Ready-made flavor bases will save the day. At work, I love making elaborate flavor bases to add depth to my food, from long-aged miso to 20-ingredient chocolate mole. Once I get home, I don’t have the time or energy to pull that sort of thing off. While making a flavor base from scratch is an excellent leisurely Sunday project, there’s no shame in buying a jar (particularly from a small producer!). Having ready-made pesto, zataar, kosho, cider syrup, vadouvan curry, mole, curry paste, harissa, achaar, or sambal in the kitchen can elevate a meal without hours of work.
Stick with what’s working. I ate bean, kale, and mozzarella quesadillas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for multiple days in a row last week. Like seven meals back-to-back, no exaggeration. If I hadn’t run out of corn tortillas, I’d still be eating them. If it’s tasty, easy, ideally healthyish, and it’s what you’re craving, there’s no shame in repeating a meal. There’s a pandemic happening. No one is giving you creativity points.
These chocolate chip cookies. I’ve been trying out a lot of different chocolate chip cookie recipes over the past few weeks, for self-indulgent reasons. This one is 💯. I make them with whole wheat flour and they are DECADENT.
We’re living in the golden age of DIY educational food media. My Instagram feed has become a virtual culinary academy. Take this moment to learn from the culinary world’s best. I’m particularly loving Kirsten Shockey’s fermentation demos (koji-cultured oat milk!) and (king of my heart) Massimo Bottura’s Cooking in Quarantine channel (on-the-fly chocolate sauce!). And hunkering down is an excellent excuse to fall into the blackholes of Pasta Grannies and the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen.
Exercise like you’re a child. This isn’t kitchen-related, but it is health-and-happiness related, so fair game. Some friends recently turned me on to P.E. with Joe, daily 30 minute exercise videos from a very adorable man named Joe Wicks who wants to keep kids moving while schools are closed. The workouts might be aimed at 7 year olds, but I’m definitely feeling the burn. Plus I have a giant smile on my face throughout every high intensity interval of kangaroo hops, jumping jacks, and zombie kicks.
Food is one of my big sources of comfort and joy right now. We’d like to know what’s doing that for you, both in and out of the kitchen.
For next week, we want to share some tools and resources for resilience. Please email us (sunshineandmicrobes@gmail.com) with the recipes, daily rituals, podcasts, new hobbies, online resources, and heartwarming videos that are getting you through quarantine.
love,
Jackie
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Truth or Scare
🛍️What’s the deal with reusable shopping bags?
Folks should take whatever precautions they feel are necessary to feel safe during this pandemic. However, a recent outcry about the risks of transmitting coronavirus through reusable grocery bags seems fabricated. A closer look shows that the Plastics Industry Association and other plastic industry allies are behind the demands to overturn plastic bag bans in several states. Governors in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire have either delayed plastic bag bans or prohibited bringing reusable bags into stores. So has liberal bastion San Francisco. But there’s not much science behind their decisions. (and these are not the only environmental regulations getting rolled back under the cover of crisis).
In her Heated newsletter, Emily Atkin points out that the very few studies showing issues with reusable grocery bags have some glaring flaws (too small in size, too old, funded by plastic manufacturers). It’s certainly not clear that coronavirus survives better on cloth surfaces than plastic ones. Even more important is washing those hands and perhaps sanitizing grocery carts. The CDC does recommend regularly washing reusable bags.
The truth is the bigger risk in grocery stores are not the food or the bags but the people there. That’s why social distancing and taking hygiene seriously are so crucial.
-Matt
Fresh links
💰The Private Chefs Risking Their Lives to Feed the Super Rich | Eater
A juicy look at how the upper crust lives and eats — and the chefs that must decide if it’s worth the risk to keep a job cooking for these wealthy families during a pandemic.
One chef’s clients in Southern California are demanding eggs, leading to her searching “grocery store after grocery store in search of a stocked egg case” and risking potential contamination. Some homeowners have asked their personal chefs to shelter-in-place/entomb full time with them.
In the face of ignorance, many personal chefs say they must take extra steps to keep everyone in the household safe. In the face of an economic recession, some chefs also feel they can’t turn down the job. Some personal chef online services have started using the epidemic as a recruiting ploy for desperate gig workers. Cooked food is not a likely culprit for transmission of COVID-19, according to FDA, CDC, and EPA safety guidelines. But when mansion-dwelling families still want to host dinner parties or can’t follow six-feet of social distancing, then the risks multiply.
🚜Farmworkers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs | Civil Eats
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🍓Coronavirus Forces Florida Farmers to Scrap Food They Can’t Sell | Miami Herald
There is a cornucopia of food available along the country’s supply chains. The question is who’s going to take it from Point A to Point B, and what happens when they get sick? Also, what happens when nobody is buying from farmers?
While the food probably won’t carry COVID-19, farmworkers often live in crowded quarters where it’s easy for the disease to spread between them. The agricultural labor force, which exists mostly on society’s periphery, has been deemed essential by the Department of Homeland Security. Yet many of those workers are immigrants without “legal work authorization and residency status” and remain ineligible for benefits like paid sick leave and unemployment, according to Civil Eats. The United Farm Workers (UFW) published an open letter in mid-March calling upon better conditions for laborers, including sick pay.
On the other side of the supply chain, there’s also not enough buyers for produce. In Florida, millions of pounds of fruits and vegetables will die on the vine and get mulched instead of harvested. Even non-profits — which are not turning away donations — “are having trouble moving the mountains of quickly ripening produce into the hands of hungry people who need it,” the Miami Herald reported.
🥖People are Baking Bread Like Crazy, and Now We’re Running Out of Flour and Yeast | Washington Post
Stuck inside with no social interactions? Gosh, sounds like it’s time to finally learn how to bake some bread.
Apparently, many people have had this thought since a significant portion of the U.S. started to self-quarantine. For a whole variety of reasons:
The coronavirus has created the perfect environment for a surge in bread-baking. People suddenly have time around the house to do fiddly things they wouldn’t normally, like proofing yeast and monitoring rising dough. Some are looking for a fulfilling hobby, or for sustenance for their families, or just something to do with the home-schooled kids that’s not another video game. Measuring, kneading and shaping dough can be a balm for the anxiety that has accompanied the virus. And some people, faced with the prospect of the conveniences of modern life being upended, are feeling the need to be self-reliant, even in small ways.
The baking trend has picked up so much steam that grocery stores and flour suppliers are running out of bread-making ingredients. There is no shortage, but (like with toilet paper) supply has failed to keep up with sudden demand. Emily Hoven, a grad student in Canada, convinced others on Twitter to start baking with a sourdough starter in a thread called “HOW TO MAKE SOURDOUGH AT THE END OF THE WORLD. Hoven happens to be writing her dissertation on sourdough in times of crisis.
Stress-baking is a well-documented activity. And during the coronavirus outbreak bread-making can feel like the perfect endeavor to start in isolation. Says Hovan, “We’re all so isolated now, but working with sourdough is an inherently collaborative practice. You have the yeast and all the bacteria that are making the bread with you.” And then you get homemade bread when it’s all over.
Are you ready to get started on bread baking? See Jackie’s recipe below 🙃
Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread
This is my attempt to document my process for baking a loaf of whole wheat sourdough bread. It is the longest and most in-depth recipe I’ve sent out to date. To make things simpler, I’ve put the whole thing on the Sunshine + Microbes website.
If you’ve got an active sourdough starter, you’re ready to start baking bread. If not, check out my method for building and maintaining a sourdough starter here.
What technical difficulties look like in the Year 2020:
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is the current Chef-in-Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a freelance reporter based in Colombia. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.