Culinary Ash Biscuit Recipe (and Rant!)

Culinary Ash Biscuit Recipe (and Rant!)

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Lam'bs Quarters Salt or Culinary Ash
Lam’bs Quarters Salt or Culinary Ash

Yes, this is another recipe blog post, but not before I rant a bit first!

It’s said in various places online that you can make Lamb’s Quarters Salt simply by burning the dried leaves, but nowhere does anyone give any indication of how this is done or best practices involved.

We first learned about doing this well over a year ago, and finally launched into making our own Lamb’s Quarter’s salt, by taking a weed torch to a bucket of dried leaves.

It turns out that dried Lamb’s Quarters leaves don’t burn very well or very fast. They do burn, but we quickly discovered that we had to regularly stir the bucket, because only the top inch would have bothered to turn to charcoal or white ash. Secondly, at just filling the bucket half full, it takes over an hour to go from dried leaf to light-grey, fine ash. If we just line the bottom of the bucket with leaf, it takes roughly 15 min or so to go from dried to light grey.

The flavour of the untreated ash is initially salty, then bitter, then salty again as it sits on the tongue.

Not happy with what the term “lamb’s quarters ash” was bringing up in my online search attempts to learn more, I changed the term to “culinary ash” where more information seems to reside. For starters, if it’s edible, you can make culinary ash out of it. Most search results online assume you want to learn about Juniper Ash, made from burning Juniper wood. If you persist in your searching, you eventually discover that you can even turn vegetables to charred remains, grind those and use them as spices and flavourings.  For those into sustainable living, this is a great way to keep vegetable scraps out of the landfill, particularly if you don’t have room for a compost heap.  Toss the scraps onto a tray, throw it into the oven on broil, pull out the charred remains and let them cool, then crush them to powder.  Some chefs online say this is a great way of adding more flavour to dishes whether as a condiment, in gravy, stews, etc.

Secondly, there is a common understanding culinary ash was used to leaven bread before the days of baking soda, but often, such mentions are met with vague how-to’s, if at all. The clearest how-to’s are for the Greek method of using culinary ash in baking, and it is quite similar to what I’d eventually learn is done to make “pearlash” but instead is a type of “potash”. North American natives across the southern US region, were known to simply take the white ash from the top of the burn pile, and throw that into acidic bread to help it rise.

Curly Dock Chocolate Chip Cookies
Curly Dock Chocolate Chip Cookies

Well, trying that last method did not result in any rising from use of my Lamb’s Quarter’s ash in tiny bread sample attempts. The salty flavour also disappears when used as anything other than a topping too. If we want a sort-of-salt replacement as we know and understand commercialized usage, it has to be added as a dusting to one’s food.  Using it in place of both the salt and baking powder in my chocolate chip cookie recipe turned out rather nice, but I wasn’t after a cookie this time round, I wanted something in the breadstuffs catagory.

Eventually, I ran across a comment where someone said the best way to get lift from culinary ash, was to add it to the dough at the same time as the acid. I decided to try this using lemon juice concentrate, stirring the ash into the juice before adding it to my tiny dough recipe, and the result was better.

However, even before I began those dough experiments, I was having incredible difficulty finding ANY actual recipes online that use culinary ash in baking! Restaurant chefs talked about it, foraging chefs talked about it, history nuts talked about it, people shared how grandparents would make it, but no one shared a single, solitary recipe!

Eventually I ran across a guy writing about the use of culinary ash in dishes, and his table of contents claimed to have step-by-step instructions. I had to read that section of his article several times before I realized that a set of paragraphs using very unorthodox language for baking, was the set of instructions.

I isolated key statements that read as follows:

“A common starting line is one part ash to three parts flour.

Add a pinch of salt to beautify the flavors and water to the flour and ash combination. Gradually include the water while kneading the dough until it reaches a cohesive and slightly sticky consistency. Adjust the water quantity as needed.

To increase the taste of ash desserts, keep in mind incorporating different flavors and spices. Try adding herbs like rosemary or thyme, spices like cumin or paprika, or maybe sweet additions like cinnamon or nutmeg.

Experiment with opportunity flours like rice flour, almond flour, or chickpea flour, and update animal-derived substances with suitable options.”

My first attempt to try this set of instructions resulted in a biscuit that tasted like it had a cup of baking soda dumped in! On the one hand, that let me know why ancients used it for leavening, but on the other hand, I had to drastically reduce the amount of ash and change things up a bit, perhaps, alot! I absolutely would NOT call the above instructions anything close to “desserts”!

Now it was time to play mad scientist in the kitchen. I make flatbread, baking powder biscuits, pancakes and waffles, etc. As with any recipe you use all the time, eventually you memorize them, and I began thinking them over wondering what to adjust for my desire to have something to bake using Lamb’s Quarter’s culinary ash.

Eventually I figured out that the rubbery texture went away if I added a fat, and the flavour drastically improved with the acid/ash blend being added together rather than separately. Both my kids felt the dough was on the bitter side, so I added some sugar and vanilla extract (or rather, Flower Essence of Arrowleaf Balsamroot). When the little biscuits worked out, I tried expanding the recipe to a full-size batch, and that meant a bit more tweaking, but I now believe I have come up with a decent Ash Biscuit suitable for any spread or topping you may choose to put with it.

Culinary Ash BiscuitThe big thing you’ll notice about this recipe is that your dough will turn grey! It will turn decidedly grey! That is simply the colour the ash is imparting to the dough. The second thing you’ll notice is the texture, although culinary ash is very fine, somehow your teeth will still find the grit. At least mine do. If those two things aren’t a turn-off, then there’s one more thing you may or may not notice depending on your body’s level of nutritional calcium.

For a number of years now, I have struggled to maintain a decent night’s sleep, often having to get up to the washroom several times a night, sometimes literally once per hour. Now the body’s sleep cycle does have us go in and out of REM sleep roughly every 45 min to an hour, and for awhile, I’d come right up out of that cycle and have to visit the washroom! I began suspecting hormone changes and have had reasonable success with a few different tea blends over the years, and the current blend is hit and miss. However, since I began experimenting with ash recipes and nibbling on them, my sleep at night has suddenly improved! Many in the culinary ash space note that ash is high in calcium. First Nations peoples in the southern USA say that before the white man came, they got almost all their calcium from the wood ash they would incorporate into their recipes. I’m not a chemist, and I haven’t seen the chemical breakdown of Lamb’s Quarter’s ash, but I can say that Lamb’s Quarters does contain Calcium as a mineral observed in it’s general makeup in general.

One snack that many who are hypoglycemic use as a bedtime snack, is crackers and cheese. As a person with high metabolism AND hypoglycemia, a high-protein bedtime snack helps me sleep through the night without wanting to snack at 4am. However, to test that theory, I took a couple of my ash biscuit experiments the other night without my cheese, and observed two things: A) I slept from lights-out to 5am uninterrupted, but at 5am, I woke up hungry! The culinary ash is giving me more calcium than I was getting in my cheese crackers, but not necessarily the same level of protein, so I still need a high-protein snack to tide me through the night. Combined however, a biscuit and my cheese crackers, and I sleep very well now.

This tidbit is helpful. I personally thought all I needed was the higher protein, but it turns out I needed higher calcium too. Of course you don’t want too much calcium in your diet, as with any mineral your body requires, too much of a good thing can cause trouble as well. All things in moderation. If like me, you discover you are calcium deficient, culinary ash could be a gentle way to boost your calcium levels in a less-potentially-damaging way than using supplements.

Here is my recipe:

Culinary Ash Biscuit, open

Culinary Ash Biscuits

INGREDIENTS:

4 cups flour
5 tbspns ash
2 tspns salt
1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup lemon juice concentrate or vinegar
1.5 cups water (as needed)
2/3 cup olive oil or animal fat
2 tspns vanilla

INSTRUCTIONS:

  • Preheat oven to 350F.
  • Blend dry ingredients in larger bowl. Set aside.
  • Add oil or same measure in fat, coat flour to crumble stage.
  • Measure out lemon juice or vinegar and ash into a small bowl, stir together. Add vanilla and pour into larger bowl.
  • Blend/knead into soft, perhaps sticky dough.
  • Flour work surface and dump dough onto work surface. Knead a little to make pliable without being sticky.
  • Flatten to 1/2″ (1/4″ if you want wafer size) thick and use glass rim, mason jar rim, or cookie cutter to cut rounds out of dough and place on parchment papered cookie sheet.
  • Gather remaining dough together, lightly knead into lump, flatten to 1/2″ and cut more rounds. Repeat till all dough has been added to cookie sheet(s).
  • Bake for 40 min at 350F.

Serve warm, or allow to cool then put into sealed container for future use. Biscuits can be frozen and thawed at a later date.

I have tried a tiny version of this biscuit recipe minus the fat (that came after the last test) with curly dock seed flour, but I can say that the tests I did use it in, the crunchy nature of the ash was amplified. I’m currently working through a 10 lb batch of flour I’d made by roasting the curly dock seeds before crushing, and I won’t be doing that in the future. Unroasted curly dock seeds grind up into a far more agreeable flour with less grainy/crunchy texture. If you use another non-gluten flour with this recipe, I’ll be curious how it worked out for you.

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