Today I'm talking with Morgan at C&M Homestead. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Morgan at C&M Homestead. Good morning, Morgan. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. How are you? I'm good. Is it still super cold in South Dakota? You know what's warming up? The last couple of days have been bitterly cold, but today...

00:27
The sun is shining and the temperatures are warming up. So hopefully we're done with that little cold snap. Well, considering I'm your neighbor to the east in Minnesota, we're in the same boat. The sun is so bright this morning and I think it's actually above zero right now. I think it is here as well. I think we're maybe at like four degrees maybe. So not far above, but it's above zero. So that's good.

00:52
Yeah, last I looked at my phone, my weather bug app was telling me it was minus two, but that was at like five o'clock this morning. So I don't know what it is right now. Okay. So we've done the obligatory weather check-in because that's what I do with all the podcasts and tell me about yourself and what you guys do. So I am the C or I guess the M of C and M Homestead. My husband would be the C, Corey. So probably about two years ago, we...

01:21
decided that we wanted to do better for ourselves and kind of that's where the whole bread, baking bread started. I started kind of taking the deep dive into sourdough and it's just kind of transformed since those two years ago. But about a year and a half ago, we moved out to my grandma's farm. And so we rent now from my mom and dad, a house and two.

01:48
two acres and we've kind of just turned it into our own little paradise out here. We started with some chickens and it grew to ducks and turkeys and we had a couple of friends who could no longer take care of some of their animals. So we inherited some geese and it just kind of seems to keep growing out here. And it's just fun to watch our boys. We have a

02:14
nine-month-old, a four-year-old and a 16-year-old. It's his birthday today. And it's just fun watching them be involved in caring for the animals and seeing the four-year-old come into the house with a handful of eggs. And he's like, Mom, look what these chickens did. So it's just fun. We kind of just wanted a slower lifestyle for ourselves from in town in Aberdeen. And so we moved out here.

02:43
We're just slowly kind of making transitions to being able to be more self-sustaining. Awesome. Happy birthday, 16-year-old. Yeah. And boy, do I know what it's like to be a boy mom. My first child was a girl, but the next three were boys. So it was basically a boy household once she moved out. Yes. And it's a lot. It's a lot to be the only girl in the household. It is.

03:10
They are like, what do you mean you want to paint your nails? Like, let's go outside and like play trucks in the dirt. And I'm like, oh, all right, we'll do that. Let's go. Yeah, mom, just run a brush through your hair, pull it back in a barrette or a ponytail holder and let's go. Yes, I understand completely. Yes, they are all about being outside in the dirt with the chickens, in the duck pond with the ducks. You name it, they want to do it outside. Yes.

03:39
Yes, I have a husband who's like that too and he is chomping at the bit for this weekend because it's actually supposed to be not freezing tomorrow and Sunday. And when he got up this morning after he got his coffee, I said, so should I just plan on you being outside all weekend? And he said, yep. Didn't even bat an eye. So it's a male thing. It's not a kid boy thing. It's not an adult male thing. It's just a male thing. Boys and men like to be outside. Most of them.

04:09
And if they don't, then they like to be in a room with a desk and a computer playing video games or coding things. So they sure do. So when you started making sourdough bread, I need to know, did you kill your starter when you first started it at least once? Did you burn a loaf? I got to know the failures and the successes. So no, I did not kill my starter. I made my own starter. Okay.

04:37
I had great success with it. I didn't have any issues kind of going through that process. I have a couple of friends in my mother-in-law who've made starters multiple times and they're like, it died and I just, I don't know how, but it's very common. So I must have been very grateful and I'm very grateful and I was very lucky that I didn't have that problem. But have I burnt a loaf? 100%.

05:08
have quite the following for our Facebook page and we do some drop-offs for bread. And last week I was just struggling with my sourdough. It wasn't rising the way I wanted it to. I had to push back some orders because they weren't rising and they were like two inch pancakes. So I just took a little bit to like kind of figure out like what was changing. I don't know if it was the temps. I don't know if it was just that it wasn't.

05:38
The starter was more hungry than what it usually is, and so I needed to adjust the feeding ratios, but we did some adjusting and I got it figured out and it's now making beautifully risen loaves. Awesome. I always joke that cooking is better living through chemistry because all the reactions that happen in cooking are chemistry.

06:03
And I did really well in chemistry in school. I was miserable at physics. So I'm really glad that I like to cook, not like do rocket science, because I would fail. But yeah, the ratios and the temperatures and the time all impact how things work. So sometimes it happens. But I mostly wanted you to tell me that you had burned a loafer too, because people think that excellent cooks were born excellent cooks.

06:33
And that's not true. You have to learn and you have to practice and sometimes things go wrong. They do and that's one thing that I really struggle with. I very much so like wanna produce a good loaf of bread or whatever I'm making, bagels, to my customer. But I also would maybe say I'm a little bit on the perfectionist side where if it doesn't look perfectly like I want it to, I'm like, I can't do that, nope. And my husband has been like, Morgan, there's nothing wrong with that loaf.

07:03
There might be a little crack in it where you didn't want it to crack, but it is fine. It'll taste just as good as if that crack wasn't there. So I've had to adjust a little bit of my expectations of you can't have a perfect loaf and what is a perfect loaf? But I've also had some very imperfect loafs where I've, the timers went off and I got busy with the kids and forgot the loaf in the oven. So had to restart.

07:29
Yes, and the perfect loaf is the loaf that somebody bites into and just hums as they taste it. Yes. That's the perfect loaf right there. Okay, so I've said this on the podcast a billion times, but I'm going to say it again because you and I have never talked. I don't make bread. My husband makes the breads. He is excellent at yeast breads. I am terrible at them. I have attempted to do it like two or three times in my...

07:56
in the last 30 years and I have screwed it up all three times and he's really good at it so he's the one who makes the bread. I make quick breads like dessert breads and cakes and cookies and brownies. I make a killer brownie like he will never attempt the brownies I make because he's like you do it perfectly and like good you make the breads I'll make the brownies recover. But not everybody bakes the same things not everybody loves to bake the same things. So do you do other things besides sourdough?

08:27
I do not. I sourdough is kind of my realm. My husband though will bake bread with the like yeast and he will do he'll do a little bit of like the baking if it uses something other than sourdough. I usually stick to the sourdough. It's what I know. And he told me he's like, you should try just making some like regular bread. And I get intimidated by it because I'm like, I don't.

08:57
I don't know how to do that. Well, the big difference between making a sourdough loaf and a yeast bread, like, I don't know, a honey oat bread, is that the sourdough, you've already got the yeast. And with the yeasted breads, you have to bloom the yeast. And that's my downfall because I always kill it. No matter how careful I am at following directions, I always kill the yeast and I do not know why. So

09:26
It's a different process and I get it because I have not tried doing sourdough yet and I keep saying I should, but I haven't. I suspect that if I did a sourdough starter and tried making bread with that, I would probably be fine. But I can't keep the dry yeast in the packets alive to save my life when I try to use it. I would say you should give it a shot. I feel like sourdough is very forgiving. Whether depending, I mean for...

09:52
I feel like for the most part, depending, no matter what stage you're in, I feel like there's usually a way to bring it back. I mean, maybe not after you've burnt a loaf, but like the inside might, the inside is still probably good. But I've had our 16 year old help a...