My tia Connie made a homemade ham bone & split pea soup last winter. I didn’t think I liked split pea soup. I was wrong. Ever since then, I have been wanting to try making a hambone-based soup. Last week biking by The Swinery in West Seattle, it occured to me to stop and pick up something ‘ham’. That something turned out to be a ham hock.
Ham hocks are weird. And kinda gross. You definitely realize you are using some part of an animal. As obvious as that sounds, I think in our modern day supermarket culture it is not a common experience.
I also wanted to use some of my homegrown soup beans. I have already tried my Tiger’s Eye beans, so I decided to use the Yin-Yang, or Orca, bean, which is a kind of calypso bean.
Here is what I did:
- Soaked 1 pound of beans in 4c boiled water for 2h.
- Meanwhile, in a stock pot I simmered the ham hock in 4c water with a bay leaf.
- After 2h I removed the ham hock, saved the meat, and gave the bones, rind, etc to the chickens.
- I drained the beans and added them to the stock.
- While the beans simmered (1h), I sauteed one diced onion, 2 carrots, 2 celery ribs then added them to the soup with two minced cloves of garlic. I added a diced Red Sangre potato, and the shredded pork, and cooked them in the soup an additional 20 min. Salt and pepper to taste.
Wow! We decided this meal is a real winner. The photo didn’t turn out (I only took one was cause I was anxious to eat it!), so you’ll have to take my word for it. The flavours were very simple, but very tasty. You could do a lot with this dish (herbs such as thyme, cream near end and a splash of balsamic, more veggies…)
Of course, a loaf of homemade no-knead bread perfectly complemented the soup. This loaf is very similar to the one described here, but the flour was 1:1:11 rye flour, whole wheat, and AP, aged 1 week in the fridge, and sooo tasty.
BTW: The title of this post is a line from a poem. I will be very impressed if anyone but my sister tells me they know it!
The authors recommend making what is essentially a quadruple batch at a time in a 5-qt container without a tight-fitting lid. A round container is probably preferable so you could mix and store in the same container.
Because my container is obviously ill-suited to mixing, I mix the dough in this round bowl then store it in the plastic one.
The recipe instructs to first mix together the water, salt, and yeast. I know salt can kill yeast, so to be extra careful, I dissolved the salt (1.5 T) in the water (3 c lukewarm) first, then stir in the yeast (1.5 T).
Next is the flour. For this recipe, it is 5.5 cups of AP white flour and 1 c whole wheat bread flour.
Once mixed in, the dough is wet and sticky.
This particular dough may be a little too dry, because it should conform to the shape of the container.
After a night in the fridge, the dough has already risen significantly and could be used to bake bread.
24 hours after mixing the dough, I am ready to bake. You can see that the dough has risen even further in the 8 hours since I last looked at it.
After sprinkling the wet dough surface with flour, I grab a ‘grapefruit-sized’ ball of dough and cut it from the remainder. NB: those of us with small hands often do not attain the desired ‘grapefruit’ amount of dough and must either use two hands or settle for smaller loaves.
The dough is shaped by stretching the surface tight, collecting the ends under the ‘boule’, in this case. Cornmeal keeps the ball from sticking to the wooden peel.
Just prior to baking, dust the surface with flour and cut 1/4″ indentations with a serrated knife. This is an important step allowing the loaf to successfully rise (i.e not explode). As the dough is slid onto the hot baking stone (450F), 1 cup of water is poured into a pan beneath the stone. The steam paradoxically allows the crust to crisp.
35-40 min later, the loaf is dark and crisp, with delightfully spongy crumb.
Baracka ‘helping’ to level the soil
While we worked, we babysat the chickens. I was curious: How far would they roam? Would they walk onto the street? I was nervous that a leash-free dog would attack them. Resulta? They ranged one house up and one house down – pretty much sticking to where they could see us. When a family came by with a dog (on a leash, but still), I gently herded the chickens and they waddled back into the yard. Simple.
Sustainable Scientist 
