Native grains have been in Australia for at least 36,000 years, so why is the industry only kicking off now?
What is the importance of native grains and how do we use them?
In episode two of Bad Taste, Yuin farmer and author Bruce Pascoe and Gamilaraay researcher Jacob Birch speak about growing a sustainable and ethical native grains industry.
Aboriginal people have been making bread twice as long as anyone else on earth. Bruce Pascoe
Hosted by food writer Jess Ho, Bad Taste is a six-part podcast series that looks at who we are through the foods we eat.
Follow Bad Taste in the SBS Radio app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Each episode of Bad Taste is paired with a recipe on SBS Food. Try Jess' recipe for sourdough, using native grain if you can source it.
Host and producer: Jess Ho
Executive producer: Michelle Macklem
Series producer: Bethany Atkinson-Quinton
Sound designer: Nicole Pingon
Editor: Zoe Tennant
Theme music: Rainbow Chan
Art: Joanna Hu
Want to get in touch? Email us at badtaste@sbs.com.au
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Transcript
(sound of the highway from the interior of a car)
Jess Ho: After you cross the Wallangarra river bridge, keep going through 3.7. Keep in mind. It's a two-way road. Slow, slow, slow.
Jess Ho: I’m in the car with my producer, Beth Atkinson-Quinton.
Ho: Go slow and keep an eye out you may even see a lyrebird.
Ho: I am not the ideal person to give directions in a car, because I can't drive, but here we are.
Beth Atkinson-Quinton: Oh look that's a lyrebird. Oh, look at that— Ho: They run so silly. It's like they flap their wings behind them and they're like "run away, run away run away."
(gentle guitar music)
(the steady rumble of an engine; the car jostles along more slowly)
Ho: We transitioned to dirt roads a while back and we're surrounded by mist. There’s every single shade of green you can imagine and lyrebirds darting around the foliage. The trees around me are charred at their base. It’s a confronting reminder of the 2020 bushfires
Ho: I feel like this is the bridge that Bruce was telling us about.
Atkinson-Quinton: Yeah, this is the bridge.
Ho: We're in East Gippsland, about seven hours out of Melbourne, driving to Bruce Pascoe's farm, Yumburra. Bruce is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man.
Ho: You’ve probably heard of Bruce Pascoe. You might know him from his book Dark Emu. He is an educator, a farmer, and at heart, a humanist. Right now, we’re on the coast, on Yuin country.
Atkinson-Quinton: (high-pitched cooing) It’s a koala. I mean a kangaroo.
(Laughs)
Ho: There's two actually.
Atkinson-Quinton: Oh my God, there's a big one. Oh my God, there's three. There’s a whole family. They're looking at us.
Ho: We are obviously tragic city slickers because we are unable to identify two of the most identifiable animals in Australia.
Bruce is cultivating a grain called Mandadyan Nalluk which is Yuin for dancing grass. It’s native to Australia and more specifically, to Yuin country. I don’t know much about it, other than that Bruce has baked bread with it. As a sourdough novice, I’ve been consumed by the idea of a loaf made from Mandadyan Nalluk, which is why I’m at Yumbarra.
(music fades out)
(car grinds to a halt. The car windows are shut)`
Atkinson-Quinton: We made it. The car made it, more importantly.
(Yumbarra outdoors)
Ho: Everything is so green and lush and alive. There’s a blue house on the hill and tin sheds and kangaroos hanging about and lyre birds. I’m overwhelmed by how beautiful it smells.
Ho: I would like to acknowledge that this episode was recorded on the lands of the Yuin people you'll hear the grasses and animals of Yambarra Bruce Pascoe’s farm. I pay my respects to both elders past and present. It always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
(walking to Bruce’s front door)
Ho: Which one’s the front door?
Atkinson-Quinton: I’m not sure… Hello?
Bruce Pascoe: How you going?
Atkinson-Quinton and Ho in unison: Hello!
Atkinson-Quinton: I’m Beth.
Pascoe: Bruce. How are you?
Atkinson-Quinton: Really nice to meet you, this is Jess
Ho: Hi, I’m Jess. Nice to meet you.
Pascoe: Right-o. What are we doing?
(dreamy synths)
Ho: As we walk into Bruce’s house, he starts showing us around.
Pascoe: All parts of the same story. This one is from a cousin of mine in the Lockhart river, uh, Susan Pascoe. Um, so you know, I'll feel surrounded by the family.
Atkinson-Quinton: Yeah, that's beautiful.
Ho: As we set up Bruce apologizes if his house smells fishy.
Pascoe: I haven't been in the house for two days. So, last time we were here we were eating crayfish and that's what you can smell
Ho: Apparently he went fishing on the weekend and they had a seafood feast for dinner.
Pascoe: We got a crayfish and we had abalone, and prawns, and mussels and we got so many, you know we're still eating them.
Ho: As we’re chat ting, I notice that Bruce is glancing out the window behind me. He feels me watching him and explains.
Pascoe: the country is me and vice versa, you know, It's just, I am part of the country. And that's why I'm looking over there because I'm looking at the two Birran dhurran dhurran, the two plovers. Who, um, I just find them constantly fascinating. They are super conscious of where I am, know, cause they're protecting eggs and you know, they think I'm clumsy, and I'm interested in what they're doing.
Ho: I turn to look over my shoulder and see two, black and white birds. They’re dotted in the rolling, grassy hills.
Pascoe: I'm surrounded by birds and animals, you know, Buru, kangaroos, and, Bodalla, the little Wallaby. They're all around and I'm just watching them constantly because of the joy it brings.
Ho: And around here somewhere are the native grasses that Bruce has been cultivating. I don't really know what and where they are yet, but I'm eager to find out.
Pascoe: We're probably concentrating on about four.
Ho: Those 4 are; Mandadyan Nalluk, Dancing grass; Buru Nalluk, Kangaroo grass; Manjamanja Nalluk, Weeping grass, and Garrara Nalluk, Spear grass.
(dreamy synth fades out)
Ho: And they’re in demand.
(theme song: ‘Ylang Ylang’ by Rainbow Chan - inquisitive bassline begins)
Pascoe: We’re besieged by restaurateurs and bakers who want the products and want the story but they don’t always want to give back.
Ho: So why are they in demand now when they’re native to Australia. How are native grains like Mandadyan Nalluk tangled up in the messy history of Australia?
(theme song whooshes and settles into background)
Ho: I'm Jess Ho and this is Bad Taste, a podcast about who we are through the foods we eat. I’ve been working in food for over a decade and writing about it for years, but why haven’t I heard of native grains until now?
Naively, I’ve never even considered that we had grain indigenous to Australia. As I walk down the aisles of the grocer, I scan the shelves and wonder, how much food on these shelves is actually native to Australia, and how many of these companies are First Nations owned?
(music fades out, culminating in a high final tone)
Ho: Let’s go back two years.
(futuristic zooming synth sting)
Ho: We went from a horrible bushfire season into rolling lockdowns. Like most people, I used that time to focus on what’s really important – sourdough baking.
(futuristic zooming swells into a cavalier plucked double bass bassline)
Ho: But, unlike most people, I got a headstart a decade ago— only lockdown made me realize how much I was cowboying it before.
As the world crumbled around me, I found the process of mixing flour, water and time to be a salve.
(sound of dough being mixed in a bowl)
Ho: Slopping dough around a bowl, learning how to check for visual cues, and holding my breath while every loaf baked. It kept me anchored in the moment. It was a distraction and a comfort.
(bassline ends)
Ho: But, I was faced with stock shortages. People were panic buying, and flour in all its forms was stripped from store shelves.
(groovy beat begins, soft hi-hat and bass-driven melody)
Ho: So, I turned to my friends who are professional bakers to tack on orders for me, and I was surprised by what I got. When I opened the bag, a sweet, rounded nutty smell would waft from it. It smelled fresh. Alive.
(shimmering synth sound effect)
Ho: And the flour didn’t look like the flour I was used to. It was sandy in texture, even though it was still white flour. It got me thinking about flour, which, admittedly, I never have before. To me, it's just an ingredient I’d pull from a shelf. A building block. A dead, indestructible packaged ingredient. But the more I read, the further down the rabbit hole I went.
(futuristic topsy turvy sting as music continues)
Ho: Soil health, grain varieties, stone mills, roller mills, extraction levels, nutrition. There was just so much I didn't know or understand. At the same time, there were a bunch of articles on Bruce. He was cultivating these native grains that are more tolerant to bushfires and drought. I became a human, possessed. It made so much sense. Why have Australians not already done this?
It seemed crazy that I didn’t know the flavour of a grain that has always been in our soil. Crazier still, that it’s not available on supermarket shelves. And that’s what I’m here to find out.
(abrupt reverberant end to the music)
(back in Bruce’s living room)
Bruce Pascoe: Normally we start work at eight o'clock and do the normal farm duties of looking after our crops. Some of their crops are new, so we're weeding them, until they get established and then they'll look after themselves. But as young plants, we're having to defend them against, the invading plants There's a bit of a metaphor there.
(expectant, shimmering synth music)
Ho: Bruce has been researching Aboriginal systems of food production and land management for years. His book Dark Emu challenges the accepted myth that Aboriginal Australians were nomadic hunter gatherers. Instead, he details how First Nations food practices have been blatantly ignored from history books. And through this research, he found that Aboriginal people were the world's first bakers.
Pascoe: When I found that out, I cried. Because I thought what a bloody insult to our intellect to have had this knowledge in this country and either not to join the dot together or to refuse to join the dots together. So there was a grinding dish found there was 36,000 years old. They put it in a plastic bag and stored it in a museum. And then ages later someone said, well, perhaps we should look at this grinding dishes, and looked at the grind and it had traces of flour in it. And they aged the grinding dish and it was 36,000 years old, not the dish itself but the flour in it. So I included that in Dark Emu. And just were at the last, proofing stage, there was another stone found in Kakadu Madjedbebe and it was 65,000 years old.
Ho: The team that analysed that grinding stone found that the wear marks on the stone were consistent with seed grinding.
(music key shifts, bassline begins)
Ho: So what Bruce is saying is that people were grinding seeds at least 65,000 years ago in Australia.
Pascoe: I looked up, google, as everyone does, and the first breadmakers were the Egyptians, 18,000 years ago. And, you know, I failed form 3 maths, but, I could work this out. That our Aboriginal people have been making bread twice as long as anyone else on earth… at least.
(music fades)
Ho: This is incredible. The world’s first bakers. Why isn’t this common knowledge? So I went back to find out more info, and what I found was pretty amazing. After Bruce’s book Convincing Ground was published in 2007, he received hundreds of letters from fourth generation farmers and other Aboriginal people that led him to the journals and diaries of early colonists. In these, he found evidence of Aboriginal agricultural systems, irrigation networks and even housing. This research eventually became his book, Dark Emu. He gathered information about harvest, storage and threshing. He then used those techniques with his own crops of native grains. Once harvested, he experimented with ways to cook the grain. It involved a lot of trial and error. But it paid off.
(peaceful guitar chords)
Ho: Bruce tells me about the first loaf of bread he made with the first batch of grain he grew.
Pascoe: Oh, look I remember that day. I'll remember that day happened over there sensational, you know, to have that very day harvested at the the grain, turned it into flour. Made the bread, everyone standing around drinking beer and wine and just waiting for the loaf to come out, and to bring the loaf out, stick it on the table, put the knife through. It was just incredible. We were proud and relieved because, you know, if it was rubbish, (laughs) you know, you'd be really disappointed
(music fades)
Ho: Bruce is concentrating on cultivating four varieties of native grain. And I’m desperate to know what Mandadyan Nalluk tastes like.
Pascoe: Um, well, just a moment.
(heavy footsteps)
Pascoe: Um, we made a loaf of bread. That's mostly, that's 60%, what, you know, conventional wholemeal.
Ho: Mhm.
Pascoe: And 35% of of our grain.
Ho: It's a couple of days old, but the smell is pronounced. It's yeasty like beer, but also with a deeper, richer scent, like rye.
(ambient strings)
Pascoe: Mandadyan Nalluk, weeping grass that one and it makes a dark, makes a really dark bread.
Ho: So if it’s so delicious, why is Bruce only harvesting enough grain to make bread at home?
(ambient strings fade out)
Pascoe: One of the major grains that we harvest here is very difficult grass to handle, because to separate the orn from the grain is, is difficult process. It's tricky, you know, it's not impossible. It's just tricky. And so why did Aboriginal people choose to use it? because it's good for you. Aboriginal people chose it for its health benefits, not for its ease of production.
Ho: To go from the seed in the ground to the grain in your bowl is hard work, but native grains have adapted to the Australian soil and climate, they’re low-maintenance. As Bruce says, Aboriginal people have always used fire as a key tool for land management. They use back-burning as a way to encourage the regeneration of these native grasses and promote biodiversity. Burning also helps to reduce scrub, which often fuels Australia's intense bushfires.
Pascoe: So they’re perennial plants, they'll look after themselves from here on in. And one of the great attributes of these plants is that you don't need to do anything to them. They just love Australia. They love our rainfall, nutrition in the soil, which is not great, but that's what they've adapted to over millions of years. This is the thing that's gonna save Australia’s water.
Ho: If this is going to save Australia’s water, why haven’t we considered doing this years ago?
Pascoe: Racism, colonialism. Only five or six years ago, um, the Victorian education department are bringing out a policy, which said that school teachers should start talking about invasion rather than settlement. The world was about to implode, you know, the radios melted down because people couldn't abide the thought that we were talking about invasion instead of settlement, because that's the Australian sentiment is all of about settlement, settlement, settlement. Not invasion and theft. So all of things preventing us from looking at Aboriginal culture and agriculture. And that is the greatest impediment.
(outdoors; sounds of birds, winds in grasses)
(footsteps through brush)
Ho: Bruce takes me outside to show me the Mandadyan Nalluk, and to meet his duck, Sir Francis
(a duck quacks)
Ho: He points out the different plants around his garden.
Pascoe: Now that's an introduced plant. It's a weed. Agricultural weed,
Ho: And shows me a leafy plant with fuchsia-tipped leaves.
Pascoe: When this plant grew, our people loved everything. The old people, they watched this thing growing and they go, who are you? Who are you, where you come from? And what they found was that it has on it a red berry. And it has a real deep stain die. So the old people said, “Oh, you're an interesting thing.:
(walking through the grass)
Ho: We are on this vast, beautiful and expansive farm with rolling hills and trees in the distance. But I’ve got no idea where the native grasses and grains are. Bruce leads the way out of his garden and over to a hill. And I’m having my Julie Andrews moment.
(a guitar strums gently)
Pascoe: So when we burn, we come back to this grass, this is what will come up and that's Mandadyan Nalluk, dancing grass. Look at it in the wind.
(meandering guitar continues)
Pascoe: Look at it. That's our word for it is dancing grass. Mandadyan Nalluk.
Ho: It’s easy to miss Mandadyan Nalluk. I had no idea I’d been looking at it my whole life. You’ve probably seen it. It’s a long, thin stalk with whisps of seeds. And it really does dance in the wind - hence the name.
(guitar strumming ends)
Pascoe: Look at it's little seed. The seed is very small. This is what our country wants to produce. This is what Mother Earth says. With all the rain I get here and all the little nutrition that's in the soil, this is what I can grow. This is what I can give you, right? So we can't say, “Oh, no, we're not satisfied with that. We want you to do this, or we want you to do that. So we're going to add water. We're going to add super phosphate.” No, this is what she wants to do.
(fabric swishes)
Ho: Now that I know what it looks like, It was everywhere I grew up. I remember picking the seeds out of my runners and not knowing any better. And how was I to know better? I was being educated within a colonialist framework. To me, the tiny seeds were just an inconvenience, not a plant that was culturally and nutritionally significant for Yuin people.
(low synth pads)
Ho: And while Bruce and his team are cultivating these grasses, it's not on a commercial scale yet, but that’s what they want. And that’s why Bruce has created his company Black Duck Foods.
Pascoe: Black duck foods. Was an idea that my son and I had in order to protect the intellectual properties of those foods.
Ho: First Nations people have been dispossessed time and time again. So, Bruce and his son want to make sure this sacred knowledge of cultivating Mandadyan Nalluk is treated with respect, and that these farming practices continue to be led by his community.
(synth pads fades out)
Pascoe: We can’t rely on the good will of Australians. We have do something active ourselves. So we have to be in that market. We to demand our right to be this industry.
People say very early on Aboriginal people would have such wise and beautiful people and had a relationship with the earth. I'm happy for people to say that, but bloody believe it, and bloody do something about it. If you believe that that special relationship, make sure it can continue, and make sure it can continue in same hands. That Aboriginal people have this opportunity to being involved in this new industry. And that’s what it will be. This new agricultural industry where those grains become second nature to Australians
(curious synth melodies)
Ho: Black Duck Foods is a social enterprise but it’s still in its infancy. It’s in the process of learning how to commercialise products, protect cultural knowledge and make money.
Pascoe: It's a Western style system and it drives me to distraction. I hate it but it has to be done. And we, we try to be as culturally sensitive as we can.
Ho: So it’s a reluctant participation in capitalism.
Pascoe: Yeah yeah. We all make compromises. You know, I’ve got milk in a plastic bottle. It’s not what I want but until we come up with something better that’s what we’ll be buying. But we have to find a better way.
(curious synth stops abruptly with the slamming of a car door)
(car starts and begins to drive)
Ho: As we leave Bruce’s farm, I have even more questions. Native grains like Mandadyan Nalluk are being grown and Bruce has big dreams for it, but how many other companies like Black Duck Foods exist? I started doing more research and find out that only 2% of the Australian bush food industry is Indigenous-owned. I’m starting to understand why this is such an important endeavour for Bruce. So, what are the steps to get these native grains into Australian supermarkets and pantries?
Jacob Birch: Yama.. My name’s Jacob Birch.
Ho: Jacob Birch is a Gamilaraay man based on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland. He’s the project manager for Black Duck Foods and he’s also a researcher with years of experience looking into native grains.
(synth ambient music)
Birch: It's always just been Northern hemisphere crops we've mostly been interested in.
Ho: In Australia, the most popular grains being grown are wheat and barley. They originate from the Middle East and they made their way around the world through Egypt, Europe, and China. So, when we think about foods like bread and pasta, the grains used to make these products aren’t indigenous to Australia. Australian-grown doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Australian grain.
Birch: we haven't had the luxury of 10,000 years of breeding, like wheat or barley, and development of equipment. We just imported stuff from Europe, so we are going to keep talking about it. And that's the whole point of this research development
Ho: He’s in charge of the industry road map for the future of native grains. As part of his research, for the last few years Jacob has been yarning with a bunch people who have a stake in this industry— from farmers to Traditional Owners, and even retailers. His aim is to pool all the different localised knowledge into a national snapshot of the industry— hopefully to create a path forward.
Birch: There's so much research going on out there, but it's all in isolation. There's no coordination or collaboration, people doing their own little pockets of research and being very protective and secretive of what they're doing. And that's not First Nations’ way. First Nations’ way of doing businesses is sharing, a lot of collaboration.
Ho: So we know that someone like Bruce wants to help grow the industry, but with different kinds of grain growing in different parts of the country, do all First Nations people actually want to commercialise it?
(glittering synth pads stop)
Birch: Yeah, it's such a diversity. You know, you've got 300 language groups, all the dialects within those language groups. Some people see the commercial value in it, and we would want to sell the product for a commercial return because this is also about food sovereignty. If we can do these grains and get a return, while at the same time, we're caring for Country, and we're caring for our communities and revitalising culture, yeah, like that'd be awesome. You need to be able to financially support yourself too. Food security and food sovereignty is dismal in this country for First Nations people.
(upbeat double-bass)
Ho: And this reminds me of the macadamia nut, the most recognised Australian native food that’s commercially available. It’s indigenous to Northern New South Wales, Southern & Central Queensland. But now, it's in supermarkets and airports worldwide. It's also been exported and cultivated in Hawaii and South Africa. I wonder, how much of the profits go back to First Nations people in Australia? This is what Bruce and Jacob mean when they speak about the importance of food industries being First Nations-led.
(bass-line ends)
Birch: That's another reason why we need some sort of body set up, representing the best interests of First Nations people, to make sure it says on the vision. ‘Cause yeah, otherwise it will just be commodified, bits and pieces of it. So we need to keep that strong First Nations governance so that we can keep it on track to be this vehicle of change that we want it to be.
(wandering synth pad, a melodious cascade of notes)
Ho: Gamilaraay people, like Yuin people, have intangible cultural links to the grasses and grain they produce that are specific to their country.
Birch: For me, my favourites— and this is, this is the ones that I have the cultural connection to— is Ganalay, which is the Mitchell grasses. Mitchell grass is just this like humble little grass that you find in the rangelands. And, I think from like Northern Victoria, Northwestern, Victoria, all that through South Australia, Northern territory, Queensland, New South Wales across the Northern territory into WA. And for me, that's going to be the most important crop. So I think that's gonna really put Australia on the map and change this whole narrative. It's ridiculously nutritious, this stuff is a superfood. It's proteins in the high twenties. So low carbs, which has substituted by a higher protein. Which is good for vegetarians and vegans, for people trying to have more of a plant-based diet. It's one of the species with really, really high calcium. It's got more than twice the amount of calcium as cow's milk. With really good ratios with the other similar elements like magnesium and phosphorus. When you mill this stuff up, even unmilled, it's got this really sweet malty aroma to it. And it cooks up beautifully as well.
(synth waterfalls subside)
Ho: I remember seeing a picture of the Native grain belt when I read Dark Emu. It's huge. Imagine a massive arc travelling from the bottom of Western Australia, up through the Northern Territory and finishing around the bottom of Victoria. It even covers parts of South Australia. But, if we look at where northern hemisphere grains are grown, it’s only in small isolated pockets of four states.
Birch: One way I sort of saw that encouraging that is like embracing this biocultural bio-regional food story in Australia. Like countries like France and Italy, such small countries in comparison to Australia, yet they have so much diversity within their regions around food. Every little region has its own type of wine, it’s own type of cheese, specialty meals, all this stuff. Each region… and people travel through these places to experience all of these, this food trail and these food experiences. The culture around food. For example, if you're on Gamilaraay, that bioregional, bicultural food is going to be ganalay bread, for example. But then if you go down to Yuin country, it's completely different. If you you’re on Gamilaraay, you might have, some, I dunno, emu egg, on ganalay bread, for example. But if you you go down on Yuin country, and you could have like, seafood on your Mandadyan Nalluk which is their dancing grass. I think there's power in just doing bread there's this whole idea of breaking bread. It's a powerful metaphor to break bread.
Ho: So the literal multi-million dollar question is when will the average Australian be able to buy these native grains off the shelf?
Birch: This roadmap is going to drop and, you know, fingers crossed, we're going to articulate this well enough and signpost it well enough that you will have a product that you can purchase in 10 years.
Ho: As a part of the roadmap, they’re developing blockchain technology. Basically, when you grab something off a shelf, there will be a QR code you can scan that will tell you what it is, where it came from and who was involved in the production.
Birch: To protect the provenance of the product, and protect the story of the product. Native grains have sustained us for 60,000 years. So we have to make sure that it's not appropriated and manipulated and it's not dispossessing First Nations people.
(thoughtful guitar)
Ho: I wanted to know more about Native grains after staring into a bag of flour ground from introduced seed. My original question was about access, but after a trip to Yuin country to meet with Bruce, and a virtual trip to Gamillaraay country with Jacob, my thinking has changed pretty dramatically. I didn't really understand exactly how colonial farming practices impacted Indigenous food production, and what it means for what we find on the shelves today.
(guitar shifts; moodier, oscillating tone)
Ho: I've been raised in a food system that constantly compares parts of Australia to Europe. Heathcote is Italian. Tasmania is Burgundian. It makes so much sense that Australia has its own complex food history, but I guess I never appreciated it. These comparisons are part of an ongoing colonial framework that tries to replicate a European way of eating onto this country, rather than celebrating it for its own, distinct uniqueness.
(music fades out)
Ho: Colonisation in my mind was always genocide, a displacement of people, erasure of culture and theft of land, but I never considered how it impacted food history. And many First Nations people are still trying to recover that knowledge, today. Like Bruce and Jacob trying to reclaim the narrative around their foods and the commercialisation of it.
(return to thoughtful guitar)
Ho: Even though I started with that bag of flour, I'm ending with a deeper understanding of regionality and the power and potential of a seed. In a decade when I buy Mandadyan Nalluk, or ganalay, I'll be sure to check the label, scan the QR code and confirm the Indigenous-owned certification… hopefully, amongst an array of other native foods.
(theme song: ‘Ylang Ylang’ by Rainbow Chan - inquisitive bassline begins)
(a bright dinner bell rings and reverberates)
Ho: If you keep listening after the credits, I’ll give you the fastest recipe for bread you’ve ever heard.
Nicole Pingon: Bad Taste is an SBS podcast. It’s hosted and produced by Jess Ho. Our executive producer is Michelle Macklem. Our series producer is Beth Atkinson Quinton. And I’m Nicole Pingon, the sound designer. Our producer is Bez Zewdie. Our editor is Zoe Tenannt. Thanks to our old ball and grain, the SBS team: Rachel Sibley, Caroline Gates, Joel Supple and mix engineer Max Gosford. Our theme music is Ylang Ylang by Rainbow Chan. Our podcast art is by Joanna Hu. Thanks to Bruce Pascoe and Jacob Birch. Plus special thanks to Miyuki Jokiranta for her editorial insights.
We’re back next week with more stories that definitely aren’t crummy, so make sure you follow Bad Taste in your favourite podcast app so you get every episode hot and fresh out of the oven, and straight onto your device.
If you enjoyed the show and want to support us, stop loafing around! Follow @SBS and @SBSfood on your socials to see our appetising episode art, and hit the share button. It’s the yeast you can do.
(upbeat and fun jazz-inspired song)
Ho: This is a recipe for standard sourdough, with 20% rye. When native grains become available, sub the rye flour for the native grains. You'll need 100g of rye flour, 400g baker's flour, 350g water, 10g salt and 100g active starter.
Dump your flours in a bowl with the water and mix it until it’s shaggy. Cover with a damp towel and stand for 30 minutes. Add your starter and mix. Add your salt and mix. Fold until you can make a smooth ball and cover. Bulk for 4 hours, doing 4 sets of stretch and folds spaced out over that time. Preshape. Sit for 30 minutes. Shape, put your dough in a banneton and proof. Bake at 240 degrees in preheated cast iron, covered, for 20 minutes and then 8 minutes, uncovered, or until the crust is your desired colour. Cool completely before you slice into it.
(sound of a serrated knife cutting into a hard crust)
Ho: For the full recipe and instructions head to our website on sbs.com.au/badtaste.
(jazzy outro to song with drum flourishes)
