Ancestral Kitchen

Fermenting vegetables is a topic we all have questions on, whether we’re just starting with fermentation or we’ve been doing it for years. Today I welcome Holly Howe of makesauerkraut.com and we answer your real-life fermenting veg questions. Holly is amazing. I personally learned so much from the hour and a half I spent with her, and I know that wherever you are in your fermentation practise, you will too.

Supporters can also access an after show - I persuaded Holly to stay on a bit longer and talk to me about how to know...

Every month we ask our supporters to send us their questions so we can tackle them on a special podcast called kitchen table chats, which is shared exclusively with our supporters as a special bonus and a thank you for keeping the podcast on the air for all our beloved listeners around the world.

In these episodes we are much more informal and perhaps a bit more forward than we are in the main feed.

In the summer, it has become our tradition to take one or two of these episodes and post them to...

Today we’re bringing you an episode of the podcast that originally went out in 2023. It’s one of our favourites, all about fermented drinks. In it, we cover over 20 different fermented drinks, including:

And we talk to you about how you can incorporate these super health-giving, delicious foods into your life.

So if you’ve ever asked the question, “What fermented drinks can I make?” or “What other fermented drinks can I make?” This episode is for you.

For supporters of the podcast, there is a bonus e-book c...

If we understand the importance of eating nose to tail, preparing bone broth and fermenting our grains, we understand that these ancestral principles for preparing food help our body to benefit more from the food we are eating and to avoid some of the damaging effects of industrial foods.

But are there other areas in our life where industrialized habits, behaviors and products are damaging our bodies and lives and are there ancestral, traditional ways of living we can look back at and try to imitate or recreate in our lives today, for optimal human thriving, longevity...

Eggs seem the simplest of foods, right? Why would someone write a book with over 800 egg recipes? We both have this book: "Too Many Eggs", and it has blown our minds with its plethora of recipes, practical tips and fascinating history.

So we were very excited to talk to its author, Mimi Smith Dvorak. In this episode, she shares with us the story of this book. We talk about the crazy lengths she went to when researching and some of our favourite recipes in it. We also talk about the practicalities of eggs, with some really helpful...

Whether it's anticipating busy days between work and school, heavy project days writing or working in the garden or canning, postpartum or surgery recovery period - there are many reasons why having a stocked freezer supplied with ready to go meals and ingredients is an enormous benefit to living an ancestral, locavore style life. For many reasons - financial, ingredient concerns, sourcing concerns, access - many of us are not able to rely on the fallback of quick easy prepared foods from a grocery store or restaurants, and many of us don't have a village around us that can...

We get lots of questions from supporters and listeners about milling your own flour and thought it was about time we brought them all together a Q&A.

This episode is packed with information:

We start with troubleshooting bread made with freshly milled flour, including:

We then go on to talk about sifting, how to do it, and the nutritional effects.<...

What was the last thing you ate? This is the question we always begin our podcast episodes with. The reason is because we always want to know what the other is fixing and cooking! What’s going on in your kitchen these days? What’s fresh and good? One of our earliest episodes recounts everything in our refrigerators at the moment! That was a lot of fun to record.

Part of what drives this interest in what we are eating is developing the ideas and understanding of what a day in the life of ancestral food looks like...

Ancestral Kitchen Podcast is five years old! A birthday that, when we started this adventure in late 2020, we could never have imagined. In this episode we will finally take you inside the podcast. You'll hear what goes on behind mic including plenty of the disasters we've had. We'll share with you three exciting announcements about how you can get more Ancestral Kitchen Podcast in your life, We'll also go over all the ways we can support you (because we've amassed a lot more than just the podcast episodes). We'll talk about what's happened in our own lives in the...

How do you know if you are ancestral enough, and what really qualifies as "doing the thing"? Is there somebody out there with a list of ancestral things you need to be doing so you can "count" as being truly ancestral, or is it just a moving, non-linear line we are constantly progressing along with our intention and heart oriented the right way? It is this question, the always-haunting subject of imposter syndrome, and others that we are going to talk about today in this delightful interview with one of our podcast supporters and listeners, Jaycie, of Hazy River...

Beans, Beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat, the more you absorb valuable minerals and proteins, improve your cardiovascular function and the health of your arterial walls as well as cholesterol and fat absorption, boost your digestion and gut bacteria health, and enjoy an array of bright and colorful foods - but what about that other, turbulent side benefit?

In this explosive episode, we will break down, like an enzyme breaks down an oligosaccharide, the compounds in beans and the processes in your body that can cause the possible noxious side benefits, as well as what...

What foods will you find in an ancestral pantry in a modern world kitchen? Today we will share some of the foods we store in our pantries to keep our regional, from-scratch meals on the table on a daily basis, as well as talk about modern tools that help us to turn some inexpensive, bulk raw products into value-added products. We will travel back in time to visit ancient and old pantries and look at what people were eating and how they were storing it, and we will also talk about ancient tools, some of which we still use...

Fat is one of the cornerstones of ancestral eating. But getting hold of good saturated fat is not easy and can be eye-wateringly expensive. Making it at home, as Andrea and I do, you can cut your costs incredibly and also feel sure of the provenance and processing.

This episode will talk you through everything you need to know about rendering fat. We'll explain the different types of fats, their names, their properties and how you can use them. We'll then demystify the ways you can render fat in your kitchen, no matter what equipment you have...

When Alison and I were starting this podcast, she asked who was on my dream list of people to talk to. I said Tara Couture of Slowdown Farmstead and today that is what happened. In an incredibly long and appropriately slow morning we sat down together to talk for the first time and it was like visiting with an old friend I had waited a very long time to see again. Tara once shared her life on Instagram and I followed her avidly there, listening to her wisdom both practical and philosophical on butchery and growing and shifting, and...

Humans have been eating porridge (of which the American oatmeal is just one example) for, as you’ll hear, at least 32,000 years (that places it comfortably in the ‘paleo diet’ era!) Listen in to hear us cover just some of the history of this word and the comforting dish associated with it, as well as taking a tour of the many, many ways it is made throughout the world. Then we’ll focus in on oats - sharing surprising ways in which oat porridge has been served and eaten in the United Kingdom. We'll also explain the different types of oats...

Everybody always wants to know - is a nourishing diet an elitist, privileged ideal, inaccessible to people without a huge budget, and only for the super wealthy? In this episode we are going to share five complete meals. Each meal serves a family of five, and each complete meal can be made for about $5USD (£3.71GBP).

Balancing these inexpensive meals against the more expensive meals that can turn up in an ancestral menu is one way you can bring the overall annual food budget down. You can make all five of these menus, combined, for less than i...

Sausages, bacon, crackling – good pork can be heavenly food. But both of us know that, sometimes, in the ancestral food world, pork is viewed as the poorer cousin to grass-fed beef or pastured chicken. That needn't be the case and this episode will put real pork where it deserves to be - at the centre of our plates. We'll give you some fascinating history bites, we'll talk about how the Industrial Revolution changed mainstream pigs, and we will lay out how buying real, pastured, pork is a positive, health-giving and delicious choice for you and those you love. Expect to...

Why eat local? What if it isn’t easy? What if the things I want aren't available? What's the point? Alison and I have both considered these questions for ourselves and factored them into decisions that we’ve made about how we live our everyday lives. We didn’t make the changes overnight, and we don’t even suggest people do so. After the many books we have read, the real-life experiences we have had, and guests we have interviewed on the subject of factory farming vs humane peasant farming, we have come to some conclusions about eating local that mig...

Back in episode 117, we gave you 26 nuggets of ancestral wisdom. We’ve got more. Another 24 to be precise. And just because these are in this second episode doesn’t mean they are any less important!

Over the next hour, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, with cups of tea in our hands we'll be channelling our great-grandma wisdom and bringing you some ancestral truths relating to food, creativity, family, health, work and life.

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One Earth Health make the grass-fed organ supplements we use and trust. Get 15% off your first order here and 5% off all...

Khorasan rye, spelt, emmer, millet, quinoa - what do all of these delicious foods have in common? They are considered ancient grains, grasses harking back to a time before industrial development and heavy hybridisation.

You are what you eat eats, and that goes for grains as well as anything else. The nutrients your grains are pulling up out of the soil are the ones you will find in your finished product. Grains are an incredible source of minerals and micronutrients when grown in a regenerative manner.

This is why today I am so excited to...

In so many of our episodes over the last four years, we have explored how no food we eat is intrinsically ‘bad’. Instead, it’s what we as humans living in a rapidly globalising and industrialising world, have done to that food that causes problems. The topic of today’s episode, cacao, epitomises this. Originally, in its home, central america, cacao beans were revered and used unsweetened as a drink. Our world has taken and transformed them into an unrecognisable sugary commodity that fills the shelves of shops globally. A commodity that can, as Alison personally knows, through at 20, being ad...

Ancestral food is not just all livers and bone broth! You not only can find amazing treats and desserts in the ancestral food world, but this is where delicious, comforting goodness was invented. The modern and industrial versions of sweet treats are like looking through a glass Pyrex pan darkly, and when you are introduced to the ancestral food world and the amazing ingredients we have available to us here you can in fact meet the richness and goodness of delicious treats face to face.

In this episode we share some of our favorite treats including a...

As you know, if you’ve been cooking ancestrally for any length of time, the ancestral mindset does not stay in the kitchen! Some of us come to this as part of a health journey, already thinking about our life as a whole…others of us start with food and find the wisdom of our ancestors seeping into the rest of our lives. There are things we just can’t not see any more, things we feel are wrong; things we know are right.

We have, together, been living this lifestyle for over 25 years. And we were both o...

Leftovers again? Oh good, I can’t wait! I love it when half the work is already done. In this episode we talked about leftovers as well as scraps and items that are often discarded in home kitchens. Let’s maximize those precious food dollars and make the meal stretch as far as possible! We went a little bit crazy sharing about all the ways we love using the trash items in our kitchen - including some of the actual trash. We asked our supporters in Discord for their ideas on using commonly wasted food items and oh boy they...

When life is overwhelming or busy, or I don’t know what to cook - What are a few simple meals I can have in my back pocket? As a person new to ancestral cooking, how do I know if my easy meal is ancestral or not? Can I still use my old cookbooks? In this episode, we will share four favorite easy, go-to meals that our families love. You will see how each of these meals evolve with the seasons for us, and we will share some of our best tips for making your favorite dishes ancestral. As a...

Every month we record an entire extra podcast episode which goes up on our private podcast feed, Kitchen Table Chats, for our supporters to enjoy as a benefit of their financial support. In these episodes we chat about what is happening in our kitchens, big revelations or things we are studying or writing about, as well as answer questions sent in by our supporters.

Today we are sharing with you an episode that launched on the private podcast feed in March, and we answered a number of interesting questions from listeners including a very sticky one we...

Today, we're bringing you an episode of the podcast that originally went out in 2022. It's about fermenting, but fermenting with a twist – fermenting your kitchen waste to make microbe-rich compost that, as we know from personal experience, will transform the plants you grow.

This fermentation process, called bokashi, can be done in the house, it has no smell and neither does it attract flies. You'll get both compost and compost tea to use inside and outside the home.

In this episode, we'll detail how bokashi works, talk about the bacterial inoculant that is used to fe...

What plant was allegedly first discovered in Ethiopia by a goat, boasts an almost 270billion USD market worldwide, has almost 10,000 shops dedicated to it in the UK and over 35,000 in the US, and you very likely may have partaken of some time already today? That’s right, the elixir of which Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman, author and inventor wrote, “Among the numerous luxuries of the table…coffee may be considered as one of the most valuable. It excites cheerfulness without intoxication; and the pleasing flow of spirits which it occasions…is never followed by sadness, languor or debility.” In this ep...

Hands down the question we receive the most is:

How do you have enough time to cook this way?

Children, work, families, friends, community commitments, earning money, doing life's admin. It all adds up, and before we realise the time we need and want in the kitchen has just disappeared.

If you have ever thought, I just don't have enough time to do this, the next 90 minutes will help you.

Even though we'd love to, we cannot promise to double your kitchen time. What we will do is share practical, real-life...

Traveling and vacation is so much fun until you get the bill for all the meals you ate out, and you get a tummy ache for all those weird ingredients your body just didn’t like. If you have allergies and food sensitivities it’s even more difficult, finding somewhere safe to eat is just about impossible. We have both found that when we travel we just do better if we bring a lot of our own food with us. In this episode we are going to talk about our best tips for preparing, what kinds of food we brin...

What pan should I use to bake my bread? Metal, ceramic, glass, dutch oven…there are so many out there. What are the differences? What about non-stick? What temperatures can I use for each one? How can I stop my dough from sticking? How can I work out how much dough my pan will take? And what about pizza? How can I make the best one at home?

These questions, and many more, are answered in today’s episode with expert wholegrain sourdough baker and dear friend of the podcast, Elly from Elly’s Everyday. Prepare for over a...

We have some exciting news!

We are pleased to announce that we’ve left the Patreon platform behind and are now hosting our membership system on our website.

None of the benefits or support that the community, that we’re now calling The Kitchen Table, provides are changing. All this move means is that, instead of us paying Patreon (and you potentially lining Apple’s pocket) all the money that you pledge comes straight to our team.

In order to celebrate this milestone, we’re offering 20% off annual memberships at every level.

We’d lo...

George Orwell writes, “If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points. This is curious, not only because tea is one of the mainstays of civilization … but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.” In this episode I got to sit down with Meagan Francis, a supporter and friend of Ancestral Kitchen and veteran podcaster herself. She is the hos...

Bone broth, sauerkraut, milk kefir – fundamentals of an ancestral diet and foods that we know do us good.

So what do you do if actually they're making you ill?

Histamine is a word that most of us have heard of and, thanks to the proliferation of health news, were also probably aware of histamine intolerance.

In this episode we will deal head-on with histamine and how it interacts with an ancestral diet. We'll explain what histamine is and the problems it can cause. We'll explore which staple ancestral foods are high in histamine an...

It’s almost May, the month which the early medieval Anglo-Saxons called thrymilce, because according to the Venerable St Bede, “in that month cattle were milked three times a day.” We don’t know if you’re milking your cow three times a day, but ‘tis the season for lots of fresh and available milk. What to do with all that milk? - and if you don’t have a cow, what to do if you have access to raw milk and want to make staple value-added dairy products in your home, like cottage cheese, sour cream and yoghurt?

The dairy...

Combining gluten-free eating with ancestral eating need not be daunting. Today I talk with Rebecca Zipp, a beloved podcast guest and supporter. She's been gluten-free for the last 16 years – bringing her husband and her children along with her. In addition, for most of last year I ate gluten-free. Between the two of us we've a lot to talk about!

In this episode, we cover:

What are some traditional foods we can eat for breakfast, and do we have examples of ancestral breakfasts in history? In this episode Alison and I got together to talk about what we eat to start the day. We included a variety of “types” of breakfasts. First, we start out with fast breakfasts, things you can make very quickly. Whether you’re going to school, you have kids going to school, or you homeschool - there’s not a lot of time in the morning typically to linger over a long breakfast. We then included some longer prep but hands-of...

Download the free, 30-page guide Baking with Ancient Grains here

Alison has just released a free 30-page guide to baking with ancient grains and this companion podcast episode will give you everything you need to know to bring the world of ancient grain baking into your own kitchen.

We'll define an ancient grain, we'll talk about why they're different to modern wheat and how that change happened, Alison will share why she believes ancient grains are so important in our modern world and then talk about how you can bring them into your own baking.<...

The cost of eating an ancestral, nourishing diet, vs the cost of eating a conventional, supermarket diet: people are already stretched to the limit on their grocery budgets, so how can we ask them to spend even more on buying more nutritious or local food? Even if it’s important to them, what if the dollars literally do not exist? How are we to eat? These were the questions burning in my mind when I sat down with the Nourishing Traditions cookbook to make a list of ten easy, favorite recipes. I wanted to see how much more expensive th...

How, when you’ve got limited money, no spare time and family who are used to eating what they eat…

How when you can’t find alternatives, don’t have the room to grow it yourself and don’t have the headspace…

How do you get out of supermarkets?

In this, our Guide to Getting Out of Supermarkets episode, we’ll give you a stack of practical ideas (from us and from our supporters) that'll change things up.

You’ll leave inspired, tooled-up and as ready as we can ever help you be to have y...