I’ve been getting some questions about the phytic acid in whole grains and sourdough, and thought it would be a good idea to go into detail about how this works, and why you don’t need to be alarmed about it.Along with a bunch of good stuff that is not in refined flours, phytic acid is present in whole grains. If phytic acid is not broken down by the phytase enzyme by soaking, sprouting, or fermenting, it can bind to the iron, zinc, magnesium, and calcium in the grain, making it so these...

I grew up in a time and place with weird measurements. Often the handwritten recipes on my mother’s recipe cards would have some ingredients in grams and some ingredients in cups, some cookbooks would be in metric and others in cups, and for some reason our measuring cups were bigger than other ones from around the world. In my early days of learning to cook from scratch, I would always measure by volume, because I didn’t own a scale, but in more recent years I’ve found that a scale can be a...

Einkorn is an ancient grain that is rapidly gaining popularity for its nutty taste and easy digestibility. Swapping einkorn for wheat is not as simple as swapping wheat for other ancient grains such as emmer or Khorasan. You can simply use emmer and Khorasan in sourdough bread as if they were wheat with no adjustments at all, but einkorn behaves a bit differently. Much of the einkorn flour out there is refined in the same way that sifted wheat flour is refined, and will behave even more...