Fun with Fermentation

In trying to cut down on plastic, I figured one of the biggest sources in my home is plastic bread bags. We eat a lot of bread. I was able to get bread for my son at a local bakery and have them put it directly in a (clean) cloth bag for me to take home.

Unfortunately, I am allergic to wheat and cow dairy, which makes grocery shopping for me much more complicated. No local bakeries that I know of make gluten-free bread and the GF bread sold at the supermarket are either wrapped in two plastic bags or a hard plastic sheath that has to be cut open. I decided to try my hand at making bread. 

One of my favorite cookbooks is Silvana's Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free Kitchen by Silvana Nardone. I used her recipe for sandwich loaf bread and made a delicious loaf. I realized I need a bigger loaf pan though because when I let the bread rise in a warm oven, it overflowed the pan and dripped on the oven floor. Yikes!

My other experiment in fermentation was Harvest Apple Beer. You may be saying, but hey, beer and wine come in recyclable glass bottles and tin cans. Why not just buy beer? Actually, I found out that many wine bottles have plastic corks and plastic sleeves near the top of the wine bottle. The inside of cans is often coated with plastic. 

My apple beer recipe was given to me many years ago, and I no longer know where I got it from. It has apples, raisins, sugar, cinnamon and clove and uses wild yeast in a one-week long fermentation process. Now I have plenty of mildly alcoholic apple beer to share throughout the holiday season.