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Do you get overwhelmed thinking about making sourdough bread from scratch? Or homemade broths and soups? Mary Bryant Shrader of Mary’s Nest is a YouTuber and educator who has a knack for demonstrating how simple (and tasty and economical) traditional cooking can be!
Today, she shares some of her own story (including successes and failures along the way) of how she got into becoming a “modern kitchen pioneer”. She goes over the biggest hurdles we face (like feeling too busy or too intimidated to get started), how to overcome them, and even what inspires her to keep going with traditional food cooking.
Visit Mary’s website: Mary’s Nest
Go to our Real Milk website for info on raw milk
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Listen to the episode here
Episode Transcript
Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda.
Go to most farmer’s markets and you can find sourdough bread, bone broth, and even fermented foods. Why bother making them yourself when you can buy them? This is Episode 506, and our guest is Mary Bryant Shrader, best known as the creator and face of Mary’s Nest YouTube channel. With over 1 million subscribers for decades, Mary has taught thousands, perhaps millions, how to prepare traditional foods like bone broth, sourdough bread, canning, fermenting, and more.
Mary explains why these traditional skills are valuable and how to begin to take steps to acquire them. She shares some of her own stories with successes and failures along the way, and she goes over the biggest hurdles that we face, how to overcome them, and even what inspires her to keep going with traditional food, cooking, and education.
Speaking of traditional foods, are you curious about raw milk? Do you wonder if you should give it a try and where you can find it in the United States? Go to our website, Real Milk. That website is a project of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and it is a source of reliable information on real raw milk. There are articles, blog posts, videos, and even podcasts that explain the benefits of raw milk and where you can find it in the United States. You’ll also find insights into the politics behind raw milk and the economics of it, along with that of the conventional dairy industry. All of these resources are available on Real Milk.
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Welcome to Wise Traditions. Mary.
Thank You, Hilda. It’s so kind of you to have me here.
Introduction To Traditional Foods
You have been at the forefront of this traditional food movement for a while now, and I am very interested in so much of what you are doing, but I have to start with this very simple question. Why should we bother making traditional foods in the first place? I’m talking about things like sourdough bread and sauerkraut and bone broth. Why should we bother when we can buy them at the grocery store?
The bottom line is, number one, we want to make these foods and we want to eat these foods because they are better for us. They are easier to digest. We can assimilate the nutrients better and so on and so forth, but yes, why should we make them homemade when we can find sourdough bread at the store and we can find bone broth at the store? That’s true. However, I never want to criticize people who do buy those things at the store and the farmer’s market, and you can sometimes find very good quality things.
The Value Of Learning Traditional Cooking Skills
However, sometimes it can also bust the budget, and learning how to make these things homemade is often very cost-effective, and you never know what’s going to happen in the world. You never know where you may live. You never know what might be available to you or not available to you. Better to foster these skills and learn traditional skills for how to make traditional foods so that you can be more independent and more self-sufficient and not always have to depend on others.
That’s a good point. Not to mention that we can control the quality of the ingredients when we are making it ourselves from scratch.
That’s always the case, and yes, sometimes, at farmer’s markets you can find well-made sourdough bread and high-quality bone broth and high-quality ferments, but often, if you are shopping at the grocery store, many of the ingredients can be somewhat questionable. I often find it humorous when I see bread labeled sourdough bread, and yet the second ingredient is packaged yeast.
I have to tell you a story. I was in Florida with some friends making a wonderful dinner for a bunch of them, and I bought organic produce and all the things I wanted, I saw in the store they had organic sourdough, and I was like, great. I’m not sure it was labeled organic because I turned it over later and on the ingredient list it said, “This food contains bio-engineered products,” and I was shocked. That’s the new label for genetically modified ingredients.
That’s what I gathered. You just, never know what the ingredients are. It’s my understanding too that certain ingredients don’t even need to be on the label anymore. Sometimes you don’t even necessarily know exactly what may be in the food you are buying, even though you are reading the ingredients and you think, this doesn’t look so bad. I also have problems with the bone broth that’s on the shelves at the grocery store because they have pressure canned it in order to make it shelf stable, and then they have damaged the gelatin because the pressure canning process heats the bone broth to a much higher temperature than we would if we were making it at home and simmering it at a temperature where the gelatin doesn’t get damaged.
If you can find gelatin in the refrigerator section of your grocery store, it’s going to be quite costly. Yet I can buy a nice pastured chicken, have a lovely chicken dinner, maybe have some leftovers, and then have a great carcass, throw in a couple of chicken feed, some vegetable scraps that I keep in my scrap bag in the freezer, and I got a great chicken bone broth homemade with what I want in it.
I wasn’t aware of what you were talking about, that high-temperature process that can take away some of the gelatinous benefits of the bone broth. I was aware, because I have occasionally purchased on a convenience mindset a little package of bone broth, and I will notice how diluted it is and how it’s tasteless compared to what I make at home.
That’s because they are probably watering it down a little more than we are in our home kitchens. Also in order to make it shelf stable, they have to heat it well above about what is the correct temperature for bone broth around 180 Fahrenheit to simmer it as I say, those little tiny bubbles. When they put it in those commercial pressure canners, it’s going to go quite high. If you home pressure canned bone broth, you are probably going to be heating it to 240 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, depending, on what your altitude is, but who knows what their pressure canning is in a commercial factory. It could be even higher. When it comes to bone broth, I always try to encourage people to make that homemade and it’s not hard.
There’s something we haven’t even touched on yet. That’s also a special aspect of making these things from scratch. There’s a sense of self-satisfaction or contentment that comes with providing your family with something nourishing that you made yourself.
There is a sense of satisfaction from providing your family with something nourishing that you made yourself.
My husband always says that the secret ingredient is love.
I say that as well. We would get along. What food did you start with when you got into this traditional food movement?
Mary’s First Cooking Lessons
My mother was born in 1925, and she lived through the Great Depression. She lived through World War II, both her and my dad. Cooking these types of traditional foods wasn’t anything special to her. This was the way you cooked and the way you ate, and she had sourdough bread. She had pastured chickens, which back then, was not common. There was a farm down the street. She had farm-fresh eggs, she had raw milk. These were common foods that she had growing up, and then common foods she was making when I was growing up. I don’t remember this exactly, but my mother tells me the story that as a little girl, I was always in the kitchen with her. She had a little white pin of an apron for me, and she told the story of when I was about four years old.
I might be stirring things. I don’t remember what I was making, but helping her with a spoon and a bowl that she would give me. She remembered that when I was about four years old, I said to her, “Mom, how do you make toast?” My mother said she was so thrilled because this was her entree to teaching me how to cook, and how to make toast meant you learned first how to make bread.
This was very basic, and she did it with the packaged yeast so that I would have success. Home cooks years ago used to call it batter bread. It’s funny because the no-knead bread is very similar, but it was a watery batter in a bowl with the packaged yeast, some salt, and some water, and dumped it into a loaf pan, and I made my first loaf of bread. Then later on, as I got a little older, she taught me how to make a sourdough starter and sourdough bread, but that was her very entree. She was like, “Good. I’m going to teach you how to make bread.”
That helps me understand because I don’t feel like you are a purist. You invite people to start where they are, rather than saying, “Everything must be done exactly this way.” Am I getting that right?
That’s very true. I won’t lie that I used to be a bit of a fanatic when I was younger, but with myself, and it was being a new mother, and having a baby, I wanted everything. It’s my first child, my only child, everything. I was searching for the best of everything. I had to get this chicken and those eggs and that raw milk, and I was being very fussy. I’m an older mom. My son was born when I was in my 40s, and my social circle was of younger mothers. Sally’s book had come out, Nourishing Traditions, and my girlfriends were looking at it because they were all very natural-minded moms.
They saw it. I had the book when it came out. It was funny. I found it on Amazon online, searching. I said, “Gosh,” and it was cute because I showed it to my mom and I was like, “You are vindicated.” She says, “Everybody should be eating butter,” because my mother always ate butter. My mom cooked like that, and she’s like, “I’m so glad this seems to have a resurgence,” and whatnot.
These ladies had the book, and they said, “You know how to make all this stuff. Didn’t your mother raise you like this?” I will say foods like kombucha which I was not familiar with. I didn’t grow up with anything like that, but a lot of the other stuff, the bone broth, the cultured dairy, the ferments, the sourdough, these were all things that were a regular part of my growing up and my home, my home life, and what I was making for my own family.
They said, “You know how to make this stuff. Show us how to make this stuff.” Every Saturday morning, the fathers would take the older children, and the mothers would come with their nursing babies, I will never forget when I started talking about some of these things, and they were reading a little deeper into Sally’s book, some people were on the verge of tears when I started talking about how to make a sourdough starter. Other people were terrified at the thought of leaving something on the counter and letting it bubble. They were like, “I’m going to poison my family,” and this, that and the other thing.
The panic and revolt that was breaking out in my kitchen, I quickly realized, “Maybe my mother’s approach is right. Maybe I need to start with teaching these ladies how to make bread, even if we use packaged yeast and all-purpose flour.” That’s exactly what I did. It was amazing how everything was just the temperature in the room, everything would start to calm down when I would say it because most of the people didn’t know how to make homemade bread. I was like, “I’m going to teach you how to make sandwich bread, so at least you stop buying what’s in the plastic sleeve with the dough conditioners.” I would do that.
They felt such a level of success, and then I would say, “It’s not a big leap to make sourdough, so we are going to work towards that over the next couple of weeks.” Everybody was a lot calmer because they felt they had something under their belt to say, “I at least know how to make bread. I can move on.” The same with fermentation. People were like, “Can’t we make refrigerator pickles?” I was like, “This is how you pickle food, but we are going to take this one step further. I’m going to show you how to make homemade apple cider vinegar that’s going to be probiotic-rich, and good for our gut health, and we are going to put a little bit of that into the pickled foods that you are putting in your refrigerator.” I felt, at least, this was something.
I said, “We can go one step further and we can make something that’s going to be even better for our digestive systems.” Since they had learned the chopping of the vegetables and the pickling process, it was like, “Over the next few weeks, I’m going to show you and I’m going to teach you salt and water and a brine and good bacteria and the yeast.” This is okay. I had everybody one time, the very first time around my kitchen island, and they were doing the cabbage. We did sauerkraut. It’s easy to start.
Over the next couple of days, because we were homeschool moms as so I would see these ladies very regularly, and they would see the bubbles start forming. I would bring out the pH strips to give a sense of security to everyone, and so it snowballed like that, and I never was harsh with people. I remember one time my girlfriend was feeding her infant some white rice, and she saw me look at it and she went, “I made it with a bone broth as you said. I added butter, I added sea salt. I’m using the rice as a vehicle as you talked about,” and that it was so cute. I said, “You don’t have to explain. It’s fine. This is wonderful what you are doing, don’t worry.”
Sometimes when people felt, maybe they had 3 children under the age of 5, and they felt very overwhelmed and they were like, “I can’t keep up. I can’t keep it going. I don’t know what to do, and it’s hard for me, and I’m not always successful,” and I’d say, “Take a step back, take a deep breath, roast a chicken, put some onions and some carrots and some potatoes in the roasting pan. Put the chicken in the roasting pan roast it and serve it for dinner and call it a day. You are way ahead of the game because a lot of your compatriots are going through the fast food line, but you cooked a real meal.”
I was always handholding, always reassuring, and many times it was 2 steps forward, 1 step back, another 2 steps. I realized very early on, working with people who were new to these foods and new to making these foods themselves, that you had to go slow. You had to move gradually, and you also had to be very accepting of where they were.
It reminds me of trainers in a gym. They don’t have you do a 24-inch box jump the first time you come to work out. People would feel like failures and they’d walk away and they’d never go back. You start small, you start where you are at, and then you take on what seems very challenging and daunting. I love that about you. You talked about how not all moms always felt successful. I want to hear the story of one of your cooking fails, because I know you are not perfect.
Mary’s Culinary Disasters
Not at all. It’s funny because I call them my culinary disasters, and I have had many. I’m very honest about it. I hope that other people feel that, “She’s making mistakes too.” I will tell you that my girlfriend is of Vietnamese ancestry, as is my husband, and she said to me, “We are going to make fish sauce. Did you see the recipe? We are going to make real fish sauce.” My girlfriend is not originally from Vietnam. She’s of Vietnamese ancestry so she was not making this traditionally in Vietnam. She’s an American, but having an interest in the foods of her culture. I’m like, “Let’s do it.”
I don’t know what went wrong or if it was correct, but here we were making this fish sauce, and it was in her house. I’m getting very happy, because I’m thinking, “My mother-in-law is going to be so proud of me, and my husband will like it.” She called me one night. She goes, “It stinks to high heaven. I put it in the backyard on the deck.”
It’s cute too because her husband is from Eastern Europe, and so this was a whole new culinary world to him. I’m sure he came home from work and was like, “What’s that stench?” She put it on the deck, and then the next day we were together, and I said, “What happened? Where’s the fish sauce?” She said, “It still was smelling so bad. I had to put it into the back corner of the yard.” The funny thing about it is we hadn’t gone that far off because at the time we did, but this is years later now, and I was talking to my husband about fish sauce, and he’s like, “It’s pretty potent. It’s got a pretty strong smell.” Maybe my friend and I didn’t do as bad as we thought, but she got a SCOBY, and she said, “I have had it. I’m not doing this. I’m giving this to you.”
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She gave me the SCOBY in a jar. The jar was wide on the bottom. It was one of those 1960s orange juice jars that were made by Pyrex, and they had a thin neck.
I have seen those, and to be clear, the SCOBY is the starter for the kombucha.
A symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. She gives this to me, and so I’m looking in Sally’s cookbook, “What am I supposed to do with this thing?” I’m trying to figure out how to make kombucha. My son was young, and I got busy. I got distracted. My parents were older, I was busy taking care of my aging parents and a toddler, my husband, and my household. I put it on the counter in that juice bottle, whatever you want to call it. I don’t know how long it went by. Months maybe. I noticed it one day because I had it sitting on the counter. The thing has grown to what looks now like a small tire.
I’m thinking that it’s mushy, and I’m like, “I don’t understand this. I need to learn more, so I’m going to throw it out.” I felt an uneven keel with my girlfriend because I had given her some kefir grains. I like kefir, or “kafi,” depending on how people say it. The cultured milk drink, and I had gotten them from some woman I didn’t even know online. She sent them to me in the mail from New Mexico. It’s funny how the traditional food world was back then. People were trading. I was making kefir, I liked it, and I gave some of the grains to my girlfriend. She got frustrated with it and she threw them out. I said, “What? I would have shown you. You should have waited.”
I said, “It’s even-Steven’s time now. I’ve got to throw this SCOBY thing out. This is not working.” The thing is like rubber, and I cannot get it out. The opening, the bottom of the juice jar is maybe 8 inches wide. This little rubber tire is now sitting, having filled up the bottom of this juice jar, and the top is maybe 2 inches wide. It’s not pouring out. It’s a disaster. I have to go in with a big steak knife to try and break, and t the thing. I looked like something out of a horror film. It took me hours to get it because I’ve got to return the juice bottle to her.
I see, because I was like, “Why didn’t you toss out the whole thing?”
I got it back to her, and I was like, “We are even. You threw out the kefir grains. I threw out the SCOBY.” It wasn’t until years later that we decided to try again, and then we researched and we educated ourselves and figured out what we were supposed to do right, but I have a lot of mess ups.
Thank you for sharing those. It does encourage people who feel like, “I have no idea where to start,” and it’s like, you may have some mess ups, but you are also going to grow in your confidence and ease in the kitchen, and there are so many resources at our fingertips now that maybe weren’t available when you got started. I wanted to ask you if you think this traditional food movement is growing. In other words, are more people aware of kombucha and sourdough and all the things than they were even several years ago?
It’s night and day. Even when I got the kefir grains, this was so long ago, and I was on some little chat group and it wasn’t even Facebook. It was like My Yahoo, and this lady says, “I live over in New Mexico. I will send them to you. Send me $1.25 for postage and handling,” and I get a little plastic bag with some white-looking cauliflower things floating around in some milk, and my husband is like, “How do you know what this is? This could be poison.” I’m like, “It’s a traditional foods community.”
I was the only one in my social circle making this, and I would show this to my friends. Like I said, my one girlfriend threw them out. My other girlfriends didn’t even want to try. They were like, “I’m still trying to cope with getting used to fermented vegetables. I don’t know what that thing is.” Now, you hear about it. There’s even the big, “Do you say kefir? Do you say kafir?” People have very strong opinions. It’s comical.
Kombucha, even my local little grocery store out here is selling kombucha in the bottle and all kinds of fermented beverages. It’s amazing. We have sourdough bakeries now that do sourdough. Even my local grocery store will have a section where the chickens are, “These are the pastured chickens. These are pastured eggs. It’s grass-fed beef.” All these things that, many years ago, nobody was talking about. People were like, “Kombucha? What is that?”
Convenience Foods And Cooking Barriers
It’s so fun and gratifying as I look at the Weston A. Price Foundation which was established about several years ago. Sally wrote her book, Nourishing Traditions, and they were advocating for all these things that have now become more familiar to folks. Which is wonderful, and yet people are still facing hurdles or obstacles to rolling up their sleeves and getting in the kitchen. What do you think some of those obstacles are for people?
The fact is that convenience foods have grown tremendously. I’m not talking about your fast food, or drive-thru food from restaurants. A lot of people know that, for the most part, eating fast food every day isn’t good for you, and most people know they shouldn’t be driving through the fast food window every day. However, there are all these meal services that will deliver food to your door in little pre-prepared plastic bags or something. I’m not exactly sure how it’s packaged because I have never subscribed to one of them, and then you have to assemble it in your kitchen.
Even at my local grocery store, the meals are already made and there’s maybe a little piece of meat, some vegetables, potatoes, whatever, and you put it in the oven. What’s happened is and I find it interesting. I read a study that said that the meal companies that deliver the little bags of pre-prepared foods, found that they had to, for the most part, almost put the meal together for people because people were saying it was too much work.
It’s almost like pretend cooking.
It’s pretend cooking.
There’s broccoli with some spices. There’s the rice that’s already done, and you add some red peppers or something.
What’s happened is, especially with younger generations, that they have not learned the basic skills for how to cook. That’s why it’s so important to me. I love Sally’s expression of teach, teach, teach. Amen to that, because we have to get in the kitchen with younger people and we have to show them some basic knife skills, some basic cooking skills, sauté, boil, whatever the case may be so that they feel confident and I saw this with my social circle. You are not going to be able to get people to consider even making the effort to find a pastured chicken if the thought of cutting up that chicken is so beyond, as the expression goes, their pay grade. They will be like, “What am I supposed to do with a whole chicken?”
Are you kidding? They want the prepared chicken breast and the seasoning. We have trained our young people to be like that by what’s provided in the grocery store and these meal services. Instead, we need to bring young people into our kitchen. We have to say, “This is a whole chicken. I’m going to show you how to cut it up. It’s not that hard, and you don’t even need good knife skills. If you have a good kitchen knife and scissors, I can show you how to cut out the backbone, and we can even spatchcock it if you don’t want to cut the whole chicken.”
I wanted to ask you, is this what motivated you to start your YouTube channel? Is it to get those younger people with the skills that they need to get them trained and understanding so they could be comfortable in the kitchen, the importance of preparing these meals, and how to go about it?
Very much so. I had been teaching this for so many years right here in my kitchen to people locally, whomever wanted to learn. When my son went to college, he and my husband said, “There’s YouTube. You feel passionate about this and you get excited teaching people how to make these foods and keeping these skills alive. You can reach a much broader audience if you make videos and put them on YouTube.” It was funny because at the time I was 60 years old, and it was not something that I knew how to do. I had to search on YouTube, “How do you make a YouTube video?”
I took a little course to understand what was involved, and I said to my husband, “I think I have the basics.” He’s like, “I will help you.” He put the camera on the tripod, and then he ran a wire to a laptop in the dining room so he could watch what I was doing and make sure it was filming. Here I am at my kitchen island. I will never forget day one, while I’m in my kitchen by myself, and I’m looking at a camera lens, and I’m like, “This is a little odd,” and then I was like, “I’m going to name her Sally Sue, we are going to make bone broth.” That was my reason to reach a broader audience and hopefully younger people. I feel very encouraged by that because a lot of the comments and emails I get are from younger people who tell me they were never taught how to cook or how to bake.
That doesn’t surprise me. You were filling a need. Even when you were meeting with these young moms, you were an older mom and you realized, “They don’t know how to do these foods.” Now think of all the years that have gone by since that time. My question to you is, what are people enjoying that you’ve put out that is resonating with your younger audience?
People had such an interest and this is because of the keto movement, how to make sauerkraut. It’s low carb and very digestible, and how to make sauerkraut is extremely popular. It’s cute because people have said, “Can you show me how to make kimchi?” I said, “I will have to get around to that one day.” After that, bone broth, and then a lot of people showed interest in a very basic sandwich bread that I shared with them, which was the original sandwich bread my mother showed me how to make. People appreciated that because they didn’t know how to bake. No one had ever taught them how to bake bread. I find it so rewarding because I get to know a lot of these people in comments and emails.
I call them my sweet friends on my Mary’s Nest YouTube channel because I feel that way. I engage a lot with my viewers, and I love it because people will say, “I wanted to let you know I have been baking the sandwich bread for a couple of months now and I have not bought the bread in the sleeve at the grocery store. My children like it, they are eating it, and I started my sourdough starter today.”
You’re on a traditional food journey and you start little by little.
It’s a journey, and I always say that you are on a traditional food journey and you start little by little. I always tell my viewers and like I told my ladies in my social circle, “This is a journey. This can take you a year or more, even two years to be up and running where you have an efficient, traditional foods kitchen where you are roasting your chicken, you are making your bone broth, you are checking on your ferments at night before you go to bed. You are feeding your sourdough starter. You are mixing your dough. You are maybe going to bake it the next morning, or you stick it in the refrigerator for 18 to 24 hours. It’s not the end of the world. It’s going to be fine.”
I always tell people, “You don’t need to be perfect. We are home cooks. Our sourdough bread does not need to look the way the one in the bakery does. The baker has to guarantee his sourdough bread will look the same for the most part every time he goes to sell it, but we don’t.” People walk in and they go, “You are baking sourdough bread.” It’s okay if it’s not perfect, people will never notice.
Our sourdough bread does not need to look the way the one in the bakery does.
The thing is now, I don’t think people are comparing it to the baker’s. They are comparing it to what they see on social media. I’m telling you, the sourdough I see out there, they have got all the little nice little designs and stuff on it. That would be intimidating to me. I’d be like, “I can’t possibly make something that looks as good as that.”
That’s why I always show, I always slice the bread I make. I always open them because I’m doing that in real-time while something’s baking, my husband and I have downtime and do something else. When the bread comes out of the oven, I let it cool a little and then we put the camera back on and I always cut the bread and I always show it, and I don’t do any fancy decorating. Sometimes I don’t even tell them, “Don’t worry if you don’t have a lamb. Please, if you have small children, don’t take out the razor blade and get all fancy. If you have a paring knife, even if it’s not that sharp, make a cut, or if you don’t even want to deal with that, dump it in the pan upside down and let it crack whatever way it wants to. We don’t need to be fancy.”
I always say something I pride myself on is I am the last person who will ever be, what do they say? Pinterest perfect or Pinterest ready or Instagram ready, because that’s unrealistic. You are making people try to obtain something that for most home cooks is unrealistic. That’s why I say, “Put a slash on the top if you want. Don’t worry about it. I always cut it.” Sometimes it’s got some pretty nice air holes, sometimes it doesn’t, and I say, “Good. Less butter is going to fall through.”
Advice For Novice Cooks
What else would you recommend for the novice cook? You have a term for the modern pioneer in the kitchen. I noticed that you mentioned roasted chicken and bone broth. Would that be the place to get started in trying these things out?
I feel that is the best place to start. Number one, when you learn how to become comfortable holding a whole raw chicken, I always tell my friends, because some would be squeamish, and some would be screaming. I would have them put the plastic disposable gloves on so that they would feel a little level of comfort. Whatever you have to do, become comfortable holding a whole raw chicken, and don’t even tie the legs. It’ll cook faster if you don’t tie the legs if you feel uncomfortable tying the legs. Don’t stress about it. You don’t need to do any of that. If you can get it in the pan and get it in your oven, you are so far ahead of the game. I always tell people to learn how to roast a whole chicken, because then you have that carcass.
I normally recommend saving it in your freezer until you have three carcasses if you don’t have any chicken feet because that will help you get a nice gelatinous chicken bone broth. If you have the feet, great, because that’s going to do the job, even with one carcass. I tell people, get all the meat off the carcass, throw the carcass in your stock pot. You don’t need special equipment. Most people have a very large saucepan or at least a smaller stock pot.
I always teach people that when you cut up vegetables, save the onion skins, save the carrot shavings, save the bottom of your celery. You can even throw those in. You don’t need special dedicated vegetables. If you want to do it, it’s fine, but you can also throw in your scraps, pour some water in there to cover, bring it up to a boil, immediately turn it down to a low simmer, and let it simmer for six hours. You’ve got something that is so incredibly nutritious, and it was not hard.
The level of success I see amongst people when I’m teaching them how to cook is that they are able to roast a chicken. It’s like they learned how to fly a spaceship to the moon. The joy and the happiness I see when people tell me that, and then the first time they taste their homemade bone broth. I remember my girlfriend Sue called me up and she said, “While it was simmering, it still had all the onion skins, everything was like floating around in it. I took a spoon and tasted it. It was delicious.”
That’s the easiest place to start, and then I generally tell people, that I usually leave sourdough more towards the end because that’s a little more getting your sourdough starter going. It takes a little patience, and depending on the conditions in your kitchen. There are a lot of variables, but usually what I recommend is after you make roasted chicken and mone broth you can do beef bone broth as well, then I usually say, I show people how to make homemade yogurt because yogurt is a very popular food. I show them how to do it with two bowls and some warm water and an oven that’s been turned off but may have a pilot light or electric light, and I show them how to do this. No yogurt maker is needed. You got two bowls, you’ve got some milk. Get a little yogurt from the grocery store that’s got live cultures in it.
It’s not perfect. What you make at home is going to be a lot richer, and then after that, save a little bit and keep making it, and that’s another thing. People will say, “I haven’t bought yogurt in six months. I’m making my yogurt. It’s so much better. It’s so easy. Thank you.” Then we move on to ferments. I often tell people it’s a little persnickety. It takes a little more of a learning curve, but pH strips have been such a godsend to people who are afraid of ferments because when they see that their ferment has become a high-acid food 4.6 or lower on the pH strip, then they feel, “This is safe to eat,” because most bacteria, bad bacteria is not going to do well in an acidic environment. They are like, “I am not going to make myself or anybody else sick.” That is cute because I didn’t have those when I was starting. I had to wing it.
Ending Advice For Better Health
Which I’m sure is how our ancestors did it. I remember when I was first trying to make kombucha thinking, “My kombucha is going to kill me.” I got nervous about it the same way. I love how you allay people’s concerns and take them step by step on the journey. I’m grateful that we have had this conversation. Now I want to pose to you the question I love to pose at the end of the show here. If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?
I’m a firm believer that when you sit down to eat, take a deep breath, say a prayer, and assume that you are eating a traditional foods diet, you are probably eating some animal products there. Be grateful and give a thank you to the animal for making the ultimate sacrifice so that you can eat and enjoy it. Eat nose to tail. Don’t waste anything.
Perfect words to end on. Thank you so much, Mary. It’s been a pleasure.
It was so nice meeting you, Hilda. I look forward to talking to you again sometime.
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Our guest was Mary Bryant Shrader. You can visit her website, Mary’s Nest to learn more. I am Hilda Labrada Gore, the host and producer of this show on behalf of Weston A. Price Foundation. You can find me at Holistic Hilda. Now for a review from Apple Podcasts. CK Foodie says, “Great show. This is an excellent show that brings to light a variety of issues related to health. I have learned so much by reading over the past few years. The topics that are discussed are unique and thought-provoking as well.” CK Foodie, thank you for your review. It means a lot, and you too can leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. Go to ratings or reviews, give us a bunch of stars, and tell the world why they should read it. Thank you so much for reading, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.
About Mary Bryant Shrader
Mary Bryant Shrader lives in Central Texas and publishes traditional nutrient-dense cooking videos on her Mary’s Nest YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/marysnest and website at https://marysnest.com . For over twenty years, she has taught home cooks how to make traditional foods, such as bone broth, cultured dairy, sourdough, ferments, and more. Her YouTube channel has over 1 million subscribers and over 59 million video views. Her bestselling book, The Modern Pioneer Cookbook, is published by Penguin Random House/DK.
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