By Abbey Menza, Recipes by Luke Davin
Tenderfoot uses creative ways to cut down on food waste by incorporating sustainable eating practices and food waste protocols. Co-founders Lindsey Rudibaugh and Travis Harding emphasize various sustainable foodways, from the importance of using all edible parts of plants to sustainable food disposal, during their workshops, retreats, spring break and summer opportunities. Tenderfoot uses sustainably focused recipes and encourages the use of local ingredients to reduce food miles and support local economies.
Food miles refer to the transportation journey that a food item undergoes from the producer to the consumer. Food miles contribute to harmful energy consumption, increased greenhouse gas emissions and food safety concerns such as potential contamination. To combat this, it is encouraged to instead, eat local. This can be done by purchasing food at places that feature local growers, such as farmers’ markets, roadside stands and food co-ops. Eating at restaurants that use local ingredients in their menus and enjoying food when it is in season are other ways to reduce food miles.
The following are a few sustainability-focused recipes that utilize mostly local ingredients in Southeast Ohio and surrounding areas. The recipes have been written and shared by Luke Davin, Chef Educator, who works closely with Tenderfoot to enrich students with the tools they need to cook sustainably.
Pretty Easy Bread ( by Chef Luke)
This bread recipe has been shockingly resilient and reliable, especially when made with Frankferd Farms’ 50/50 wheat flour blend. The SAF Yeast in the recipe is insurance against the health of your sourdough starter. This recipe will work with sourdough discard and yeast, even if the jar has been in the back of the fridge and no one remembers the last time it was fed. If you want to bake sourdough bread entirely from the starter, this recipe is also a great place to start when timing your feeding and baking cycles for the first time. Just omit the SAF yeast and use an active starter with this same recipe.
The hardest part of this recipe is planning. If you give yourself some time the evening before, and aim to bake the following afternoon, this is a real no-brainer.
Makes one loaf
250 g sourdough starter or sourdough discard
300 g water
4 g SAF yeast
450 g bread flour
7 g salt
20 g olive oil
Day 1
Takes about 15 minutes of active work over at least an hour.
In a large bowl, combine the starter, water and SAF yeast. Mix these gently, encouraging the starter to loosen, until the whole mixture is largely creamy with no more than a few lumps of starter left whole.
Add all the bread flour and mix to combine. Get in there with clean hands. It’s going to be a shaggy, sticky mess. When there’s just about 20% of the dry flour left unincorporated, add in the salt and oil. Lift the shaggy mass and scrape the sides of the bowl as best you can to make sure the dry flour is mostly incorporated. You really don’t have to be too particular about this, though. It will work itself out. Resist the temptation to knead or work the ball. It’s all sticky now and more trouble than it’s worth.
Try to scrape as much of the dough as you can off your hands and back into the bowl. The dough is much less sticky as the process goes on. Cover the bowl and let the sticky mess rest for 15 minutes or so.
After at least 15 minutes of resting, you can come back to the bowl. The dough should be less sticky, but still a bit of a mess. Clean your hands after whatever you’ve been doing for the last 15 minutes. Rinse them well and leave them wet. With clean, wet hands, get under either side of the shaggy mass like you’re lifting a sleeping cat. The dough will stretch out as you lift. Let it stretch about as much as you can before it starts to tear. If it does start to tear a bit, that’s fine. You’re just going to work the whole thing into a ball either way. Collect the mass and as much dough as you can from the edges of the bowl into one big mass. Cradling your fingers underneath the ball, push bits of the dough upward into the ball as the top of the ball stretches a bit more smoothly. It’s harder to explain in words than it is to do, and honestly, whatever you do at this point to make one big ball, you’ll be fine. Put the dough back in the ball, getting as much back off your fingers as you can manage. Keeping your hands a bit wet helps with this, and doing the minimum without playing or working the dough too much also helps. Cover the bowl and let it rest again, at least 15 minutes.
You’re going to do this lifting stretch and ball rolling 2 more times at 15 minute intervals. By the 3rd stretch, it should feel snappy and much less sticky. Cover the bowl again and hold it in the fridge overnight.
Day 2
Four hours before you want to bake the loaf, take the dough out of the fridge. Let it rest at room temperature for about 2 hours.
Prepare a loaf pan with some oil or baking spray. Stretch the dough ball out about a foot long on a clean counter. Roll one end of the dough up like a sleeping bag until just about an inch is left unrolled on the other side. Press down firmly where the roll stops to make a bit of a seal, then lift the remaining lip up to finish rolling up the sleeping bag and pinch it closed with the rest of the roll. You can also pinch the ends of the roll, but this isn’t necessary. You can also roll the dough at this point in seeds, oats or both. Place the dough roll in the bread pan with the seam you just created on the bottom. Cover and proof another 2 hours while the oven preheats to 550F.
OPTIONAL: I find it helpful to bring about a quart of water to boil in a 2 qt pot, then put this hot water in the oven on the lowest rack in the preheated oven. Put the other rack just above this water and let it release steam into the oven for about 5 minutes. This isn’t necessary, but does give your loaves a little more lift.
ALSO OPTIONAL. Just before the loaf goes in the oven, you can make one long cut down the top of the loaf about ⅓ of the way in from one long edge of the loaf pan. This cut should go in horizontally more than down vertically. A very clean, sharp knife or lame will leave a very clean line, but ultimately even a pair of kitchen scissors making little snips along the way will get the job done. Opening a long line in the loaf here will help the loaf expand as it rises, but if this feels like too much fuss, you can skip it. You’ll still have a great loaf of bread in about 30 minutes.
When the oven is at temperature and you have done or skipped the optional steps, you can put the loaded loaf pan onto a rack as near the center of the oven as you can manage. Bake the loaf for 8 minutes at 550F, then spin the loaf 180 degrees, reduce the oven set temperature to 350F, and bake the loaf another 20-30 minutes. You’re looking for an evenly golden brown crust that sounds pleasantly hollow when tapped. For extra assurance, you can check for an internal temperature of 205F.
For crustier bread, slide the loaf out of the pan carefully while it is still warm and let it rest on a lifted rack. For a softer, more easily sliceable loaf, let the bread cool in the pan until just a little warm before resting a few minutes on the rack.
Pond Pork (by Chef Luke)
For a Spring Break program one year, we were at a loss for things to forage as wild local ingredients. Even that week, we’d gotten snow and a frost. If it was a plant out there it was not poking its little green nose out for anybody. “Best I can do is some cattail stumps and a big wad of birch leaves that never fell” was Travis’ optimistic estimate. “I’ll take it.” I said.
Typically done with cordyline leaves, or “ti” in Hawaiian, kalua pork is a very simple recipe, more a technique than a recipe, even. The meat is salted, wrapped in ti leaves, and buried in a pit with hot coals. After some cook time, you dig up and unwrap the package to the fanfare of a most amazing roasted meat aroma. The leaves against the coals with the juices of the meat running through create a distinct and intoxicating smell that goes straight back to your limbic system.
You can find ti in the states often enough as it’s a favorite ornamental plant for it’s wide fan of often colorful leaves. That year in late winter, we just substituted what leaves we could find. The cattails that were left through the winter were a lot of work to clean, but brought their own magic of earthy spice and a warm touch of vanilla that none of us expected, but instantly made this a dish unto itself. The birch leaves definitely helped fill in the gaps left by the thin cattail hearts, but in the rush of summer growth now, we usually just use cattails. This will probably work with any non-poisonous leaves you want to try, with mixed results depending on the flavors from the plants. Clean them well and explore.
We haven’t done this in a pit of coals… yet (maybe next year, Travis), but it works great in a crock pot. The recipe laid out below works tidily in a 4 qt stock pot.
4 lbs Local pork shoulder and/or pork side
4 tsp sea salt
4 cattail stalks, about 4 ft high, or the rough equivalent
You can work with whole chunks of shoulder or pork side, although cutting the meat off the bone and into 1-2” chunks makes it easier to serve directly from the crock pot. You’re still going to throw the bones into the crock pot, so don’t toss them. If doing large pieces of shoulder or side, make sure to score any skin about ½” deep in hash marks or a grid every 2” before seasoning. It’s best to season the meat and then let it rest overnight in the fridge, but try to let it sit on the salt at least an hour, refrigerated, before adding it to the crock pot. Don’t worry, cleaning the cattails and prepping the cattails will take a minute anyway.
You want to clean the cattail stalks very thoroughly. You can cut close to the root on harvesting and not have to worry about dealing with them. If you just pull them up, it’s best to hose these off a bit outside and remove them first. You then want to split the cat tail in half with a sturdy knife, starting at the base and working up. You are then going to rinse the layers in a tub of clean water similar to cleaning leeks.
Cut the cattails into roughly 1 foot lengths. Stand a layer up around the outside of the crock pot. If necessary, you can lean the pieces out slightly for stability. Then come back and lay pieces across the bottom. This is not quite as intricate and refined as basket weaving, but try to get as much coverage as you can. You’re going to push these down into the crockpot and make a bit of a nest, then put the pork in the middle to hold them down. You can then go back and fold over longer pieces and stuff any pieces you have left around the sides or over the top of the meat. Cover the crockpot and poke whatever bits you can in under the lid. This will get easier as the meat cooks and the cattails steam.
Settings on crockpots vary more than is reasonable to try to proscribe here, but something kinda like “medium” for at least 6 hours works pretty well so far. You’ll want to add ¼ cup of water per hour of planned cook time, and add more water if you start to hear anything “sizzle”. We typically run this in a crockpot on a “10-hour” setting overnight. To make sure you are working safely, take the temperature of the center mass of cubes or the surface of larger pieces and make sure you’re over 160F at the 1 hour mark. If not, maybe turn up the heat until you do get to 160F and then let it run on the lowest setting you can manage for a total of 6 hours or more.
Most of the cattails will be too tough to really eat, but the hearts at the bottom will be soft, jiggly delights in with all the pork juices.
Serve the meat warm with rice, or as a burrito filling, or just eat it by the fistful.
Food waste in itself puts an immense strain on the environment while additionally causing economic disruption. By focusing on more sustainable food practices such as composting unused food or scraps, using recipes that utilize local ingredients and eating fruits and vegetables while they are in season, we can make everyday choices that are kinder to our planet. The climate crisis is not something that can be fought alone, and can feel daunting at times, but by implementing more sustainable practices into our lives, we can collectively work towards a brighter future for our planet!