Ask Allie
What is “Ask Allie”?
Ask Allie is our fermenting-related advice column, where you can ask all your fermenting-related questions and get digestible answers! No question about fermenting is off limits!
To have your question answered in Ask Allie posts, please use the form on our website. If you prefer to be anonymous, just say so in the form and we’ll leave your name out when we answer it in the blog!
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Hello, Can we use UHT non fat milk for making kefir and other mesophilic yogurts?
— Silananda
Yes you can! You can use any kind of milk you want. I personally have used standard UHT, regular pasteurized grocery store milk (normally from Aldi), shelf-stable box milk (UHT), organic milk (normally UHT), lactose-free milk (isn’t actually lactose-free but rather has enzymes added to make it more digestible), and powdered milk (I’ve used non-fat and whole Nido), evaporated milk (seriously). You can also use buffalo, bison, goat, sheep, human breast milk, etc. If it’s milk, you can use it!
I am waiting on my scoby to arrive, can I brew the tea and sugar ahead of time?
— Barbara
I would not. You may at some point have tasted tea that was a day+ old and found it to not be so happy for your tongue. The same would hold true here. Tea that’s sat a while tends to get funky, so make your tea the day you plan to culture it.
I want to make this recipe "Ikarian-Style Sourdough Bread" It is said to be VERY healthy and has no salt or sugar which is good I think . It will be whole wheat sourdough. which kind is best for that? I AM A TOTAL newbie at sourdough just so you know.
— Danielle
Danielle, this is a particularly exciting question because I’d never heard of this style of sourdough. Yay for needing to do research!! As an academic, I tend to get pretty excited whenever I have the opportunity to stuff more facts into my brain! Happily, it took a little while to get an answer for you.
It turns out that all Ikarian-style bread is is sourdough bread. What differentiates sourdough from commercial yeast bread is that sourdough has microbes IN ADDITION to yeast, so the bread properly ferments instead of simply rising. Learning this is actually what took me the longest, because I was hunting about for basically anything that could differentiate it from sourdough as a category. I only saw one source that recommended desem wheat (khorasan). It turns out that what differentiates Ikarians from others is diet and exercise: they eat a lot less meat than Americans do, and it’s culturally normative for them to get exercise beyond what the fingers do while typing. This is, interestingly, one of very few cultures “that forget to die” where the birth records line up with the purported age of all the elderly present in the population. Most of the time, researchers are able to line up the purportedly long lives of a given culture’s people to inaccurate record keeping, which makes sense. Not so with Ikarians.
So, on to your actual question, which was what sourdough starter would work best for you. The reality is that the only way to make Ikarian bread is to import their flour, because much of what happens with a sourdough starter occurs because of the microbes on the grains themselves. As such, since it’d be cost prohibitive to import the flour, I have two answers to this question:
Any of them. I would personally poke around the What’s Your Flavor option on the website to determine which sourdough you’re most likely to enjoy (and therefore eat).
If you want something more specific, my inclination would be to explore all of the whole grain options we offer. For ancient grains, we sell desem (the only wheat I could find specified, but which was not confirmed in my research, which claimed Ikarians use only stone ground whole wheat. This means they likely use some kind of common wheat), a New England spelt, a Russian spelt, and an einkorn. I’m giving those as options because you said whole wheat, and I don’t want to assume what kind of whole wheat is in your house. For common wheats, we have a red whole wheat and a white whole wheat. My personal inclination would be to use the red or white, because in Greece they mostly grow and use those and durum. If you are interested in durum, the desem is the closest we have to that (desem is considered to be a derivative of durum).
I hope that gives you enough options to get rockin’ and rollin’ with the Ikarian sourdough! Once you’ve picked your poison, so to speak, make sure you check out the activation instructions for your culture!
