Sunday, December 30, 2007

Hello and happy holidays, my pickled friends!

So far this season, I've given our pickles as presents to three of my Dearies, and it has worked out well in two cases (the third loves my-quirky-self enough not to mind).

What I haven't managed is to eat much of the darn good stuff we've been making! I am hoping it is just a sign of the holiday crazy schedule and the whirlwinds, both of which will be abating with the ringing in of the new year tomorrow.

The Kvass is rather like radishes for me--I resist beginning to drink it, but once I've 'broken the seal' I really enjoy it. It is good & thirst quenchingly salty.

Let's make a date early in the new year to play pickles! And take that darn poll!!

Wishing you lots of peace, prosperity, & pickles in 2008!

IntraSpeck!

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

What NOT TO DO when pickling...

Hey kids...please take a look at the link I've posted...this is something that you really need to look out for when you are pickling...
Be a safe pickler!!!

Blas

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Making Vinegar, including honey vinegar and more

http://www.gangofpour.com/diversions/vinegar/vinegar1.html
http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/how-vinegar-works2.htm
http://vinegarman.com/VinegarMaking.shtml
http://www.countrysidemag.com/issues/83/83-4/Countryside_Staff.html
http://www.publicbookshelf.com/public_html/The_Household_Cyclopedia_of_General_Information/howtomak_bjc.html

The last two links are the juiciest, offering recipes for many kinds of vinegar, including honey and liquor based, as well as a home acidity test.

Less of a group event, making vinegar involves setting up cider or wine (or other sweet bacteria food) to sit and ferment for months. The vinegar crock becomes a near-permanent addition to the kitchen and then storage vessels begin to multiply as time goes on. A good working setup is a barrel or crock for aging vinegar and a separate barrel or crock for generating vinegar. Aged vinegar and a constantly maturing flavor in the crock become the fruits of this new course of regular, light labor. Wine vinegar is merely feeding a growing colony small amounts of wine regularly and occasionally drawing off vinegar. Other kinds of vinegar, such as the honey vinegar referred to in the Countryside Magazine, are better as stand-alone batches that turn and are then bottled. White wine vinegar is more challenging but will be worth the effort. Apple cider vinegar seems to be the best choice for the pickling we do.
Vinegar is the oxidation of alcohol as carried out by a growing colony of airborne bacteria; acetic acid is the result.Vinegar will make itself if you leave wine or hard cider open to oxygen but, more expeditiously, use existing vinegar or "mother" to turn wine or hard cider at close to a one to one ratio. Mother is the visible bacteria colony, appearing slimy and filmy. It forms initially on the surface, looking spongy and grey and signaling the start of its growth process. The oxidation process is fostered by surface area, so a good vinegar-making vessel is wide-mouthed and covered with something porous like a cloth. Ceramic such as CPB's crock is excellent, avoid plastic and iron. Light ain't good for growing vinegar, so use an opaque vessel. Like our other cultures, vinegar needs a warm temp, 70-80 degrees f. As the bacteria colony consumes the sugar or alcohol and grows, mother will form inside the fluid. It will sink to the bottom once all the sugar or alcohol has been converted. The mother is then strained and the vinegar can be put aside for aging. Left unstrained and unrefrigerated, vinegar will continue to grow until it spoils after a few months. Five percent acidity is required to culture vegetables like we do, lower strength is courting nasty problems.

Monday, December 10, 2007

composting

We got to talking about composting and under-sink worm bins lately. Keeping worms under the sink to feed table scraps to goes back a long way but current lifestyles could find it a bit funky- you have to put up with some smells sometimes, as well as fruitflies. Of course, some systems are cleaner than others but we are talking about a living process here.
This link: http://ecotality.com/life/2007/12/10/indoor-composting-made-simple/ goes to a new product featured on the Ecotality blog, an indoor composter. This one is sealed, with a fan and a heater, so it fits into the "modern" lifestyle by alleviating older complaints. The fan helps control the odor and the heater keeps the process running. Says it can handle meat because of the heater, which means it will kill worms (rather, take the place of). So, for lack of outdoor space, this isn't a bad idea but it has limits and it adds to your carbon footprint.
Keeping worms under the sink (or anywhere dark and quiet) is a much older alternative. Feed them your table scraps (no animal products or fat, though- this is the advantage the heated system enjoys), give them moist, shredded newspaper to bed in, empty the worm castings every couple months. A container with a lid, as well as the paper bedding, keeps the fruit flies to a minimum. Bigger households can run stacked containers to handle larger loads of daily refuse. While full containers are being converted to compost, the one on top is still receiving scraps. http://www.compost-bin.org/vermicomposting-with-can-o-worms/ is a good commercial site for seeing what you can buy towards this end, where here's the wikipedia entry on vermiculture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermicompost. This site is all about worms: http://www.wormdigest.org/.
Worm dirt is excellent plant food. Well-fed plants (i.e. not raised for commercial profit plants) are excellent people food. Table scraps converted to worm dirt saves landfill space and stretches our budgets, as scraps wind up in our bellies, just the way this planet has been recycling its upper layers for the last few million years. Oh, got a fishing trip coming up? Got worms!

Saturday, December 8, 2007

fermented beans and southern relish

Beans (black and red, soybean) will ferment. This makes them easier to digest and offer up more of their nutrients when fermented first. Now, if you're the singing kind, you might not appreciate this but fermented beans don't bring the wind nearly as much as unfermented beans. To ferment beans, just add a couple fingers of unpasteurized vinegar to cooked beans (soak them overnight before cooking) and let them sit for five to seven days. Soaking the beans starts the germination process, breaking down the enzyme inhibitors and unravelling some of the tightly-packed nutrients. Cooking raises the level of available proteins.

http://www.tigersandstrawberries.com/2006/04/27/beans-out-of-gas/
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jafcau/1998/46/i12/abs/jf980674h.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060426080023.htm:

~~ note: this article is easier to read if you click on the little
pencil at the bottom right of the post ~~


Ferment And Cook Beans For Gas-free Nutrition

ScienceDaily (Apr. 26, 2006) — Fermenting beans and then cooking them not only reduces the majority of the soluble fibre that leads to flatulence, but also enhances their nutritional quality. Now we know which bacteria are important for the fermentation, reveal findings published online today in the SCI's Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.

Beans are already an important source of nutrients, and many people would eat more of them if it wasn't for the flatulence. In many situations treating food to remove one problem often reduces its nutritional value, but a team of researchers at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, Venezuela, have shown how flatulence can be reduced, while the nutritional value is enhanced.

Flatulence is caused by bacteria that live in the large intestine breaking down parts of the food that have not been digested higher in the gut, and releasing gas. Led by Marisela Granito, the researchers had previous shown that fermenting the beans could destroy many of these compounds. Now this team of researchers at has identified the bacteria that perform this fermentation.

Publishing their work in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, they show firstly that Lactobacillus casei and Lactobacillus plantarum are the key bacteria. These can be encouraged to grow either by deliberately adding it to a batch, or by inoculating with liquor from a previous batch.

Secondly, they discovered that once these fermented beans are cooked, the amounts of nutrients in the bean that could be digested and absorbed had increased significantly.

"Our results show that L. casei could be used as a functional starter culture in the food industry," says Granito.

About the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture

Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture is an SCI journal, published by John Wiley & Sons, on behalf of the Society of Chemical Industry, and is available in print (ISSN: 0022-5142) and online (ISSN: 1097-0010) via Wiley Interscience www.interscience.wiley.com For further information about the journal go to: http://www.interscience.wiley.com/jsfa

Adapted from materials provided by John Wiley & Sons, Inc..

Southern Relish
2 cans white shoepeg corn
2 cans worth of cooked, fermented black and/or red beans
2 medium yellow onions
4 jalapenos
1 small carrot
half a head of garlic
The beans will bring some of the vinegar flavor, so some folks add sugar if the corn isn't enough to offset the sour taste. Serve with corn chips.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

It ain't pickled but

Unpasteurized vinegar is some impressive stuff. I'll let you do your own research for now but I do shots of escabiche juice (vinegar w/ fermented garlic, onion, peppers, &ct. essences) alongside my daily kvass shot. Lots of nutrients in there, lots of dietary power I can't get anywhere else, lots of dietary power lost to most folks on a Western Commercial diet. Did you buy your meal, as opposed to creating your meal from raw ingredients? If you "bought" your meal, chances are it's a dead one. Trying to feed a living organism, on a planet where other critters that eat dead stuff exist outside or atop the food chains- scientists still can't figure out how buzzards don't die from eating putrified meat- living organisms feed off other living processes. Milk was once collected and kept long enough for airborne bacteria to turn it to cheese. Some hungry fella ate it and then told his family about it. We all did it and lived healthily until we were convinced to buy the convenience food offered by the corporations. Perhaps it's a different enzymatic process from the buzzards but eating things that have fermented or aged or otherwise been altered by growing processes have a propensity for healthy benefits. Among others, vinegar prevents putrifaction.

White vinegar is an evil, in-organic by-product of the phenol production process (industrial waste material that Heinz found a profitable end for) but it's still worth knowing about. "57 varieties" is famous for when Heinze took common preserves and pickles and mass-produced them for commercial sale. Now, to run a profitable ketchup biz, you have to maximize price while minimizing your costs. Selling live, cultured foods is very hard to do on a wide scale, let alone a national one. It's too hard to keep a consistent product, let alone ship it somewhere. The feedback to this profit-based rape of your nutrition is part of why we're seeing a "locally grown" movement in produce lately. Not only is it contributing to global warming (14% of carbon emissions are from our transportation sector and 14% come from our agriculture sector) to buy food made somewhere else but it comes at the sacrifice of quality and nutrition. If you are in a bind, say weathering a hurricane or other "disaster" that shuts down the electrical grid, eat your food from the jar it's packaged in. When you are done, if you have nothing else, pour in some white vinegar, it will keep your food from going bad for a few days longer. Hopefully, you will have some living vinegar to use instead and can preserve what's at hand better but let's at least profit from our high-priced conveniences if not!

On a brighter note, Shit doesn't happen every day and we can pay attention to certain things that don't ferment well: citrus, fruits (tomatillo and tomato!), spinach.
I make pesto with equal parts cooked spinach and basil. I add many nuts, many living cheeses, and living vinegar. The spinach won't ferment but the vinegar and cheese cultures keep this sauce edible and aging for months in the fridge!
I take raw nuts (no peanuts) and soak them in seasalt brine overnight, then dry them at low low temps in the oven the next night. This kills the enzyme-inhibitors that evolution has built into seeds, which are what makes a seed a seed instead of a food after it's gone through your gut. Killing the enzyme-inhibitor allows your body to make the most of seeds, a rich source of varied nutrients.

Floaters

Our latest two batches have been concerning me- cut veggies have been floating into the oil layer. They shouldn't bother the fermentation process, the oil still keeps oxygen out of the way. They won't, however, get fermented with the rest of the batch and will have to be removed once refridgeration solidifies the oil layer. They will/should be worth eating but would otherwise destroy an aging batch of escabiche. Hmm, they just might botch the batch, we'll have to see...

The problem was dryness- all of our raw ingredients had time to sit and wait for us to get to them, between drop-off by the farmers at Central City Co-op and processing in Stelly's and Rowan's kitchen. Stelly, Rice, and Lewis now hypothesize that a two-step process, soaking overnight in water, will solve this problem. It's proposed that further batches be put into jars filled with water and soaked overnight, in the fridge if possible. The next night, an inner-circle crew can then join the host/ess in the final stages: decanting excess water (about two inches per jar), adding the vinegar, and topping with oil, before sealing and setting on the shelf.

ideas & requests for later

Please add to the list of upcoming cultures:

beets and ginger (pretty damn yummy, ask Patrick or Christy for some quick)
italian style, banana peppers, cauliflower, carrots, etc.
beets and turnips (thanks Anne)
tomatillo salsa (don't know if it will work but it's worth trying)

beet kvass

Beet Kvass

6 beets, peeled
1/2 cup whey
2 tablespoons salt

Chop beets coarsely- if they are cut too fine, their sugar will be converted to alcohol in the fermentation process. We spread the six beets, whey, and salt out between four quart jars but making this in a gallon jug works just as well. Cover the mix with clean water and let ferment for 2-3 days before storing in the fridge. Drink the kvass as a tonic, lots of healthy compounds in there. When the batch is almost done, cover again with water and let it re-ferment. There won't be enough goodies left for a third time, though.

Making whey: separate the cheese from the living liquid component of unflavored, plain yogurt by straining through (surprise!) cheesecloth or a clean cloth. I tie up the corners and hang the bundle from a kitchen cabinet handle with a bowl underneath the catch the drippings. Don't toss the cheese, it has a fun, tangy flavor and spreadable consistency.

From the Weston Price website (http://www.westonaprice.org/foodfeatures/kvass.html):

"

Kvass and Kombucha: Gifts From Russia

By Sally Fallon

Visitors to Russia can observe the following typical sight on Moscow street corners: a large metal drum, larger than a beer keg, turned sideways and mounted on wheels. A spigot on one end releases a brown bubbly liquid into a glass. Customers line up to pay for a draught, down it in several gulps and return the glass to the vendor who wipes it clean for the next customer.

The beverage enjoyed by Muscovites, other city dwellers and villagers throughout Russia is kvass, a lacto-fermented beverage made from stale rye bread. It tastes like beer but is not alcoholic. Kvass is considered a tonic for digestion, an excellent thirst quencher and, consumed after vodka, an antidote to a hangover.

It is also recognized that kvass is safer to drink than water. Tolstoy describes how Russian soldiers took a ladle full of kvass before venturing from their barracks onto the Moscow streets during a cholera epidemic. Because kvass protects against infectious disease, there is no worry about sharing the glass.

Russians have been enjoying kvass for at least one thousand years. Wrote Pushkin: "Their kvass they needed like fresh air. . . " Lomonosov, a prominent scientist of peasant origins lived in "unspeakable poverty" as a student. "With a daily allowance of three kopecks, all I could have by way of food was half a kopeck’s worth of bread and half a kopeck’s worth of kvass. . . I lived like this for five years, yet did not forsake study."

But kvass was enjoyed by czars as well as by peasant. In wealthy households, various kinds of kvass were made either with rye bread or with currants, raspberries, lemons, apples, pears, cherries, bilberries and lingonberries. Peter the Great enjoyed splashing kvass on red-hot stones in the steam bath, to enhance the steam with the fragrance of fresh bread."

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Escabiche, taqueria table pickles, updated

Taqueria table pickles

15 carrots
15 japalenos (seeds in)
3 heads of garlic
10 stalks of celery
2-3 onions
oregano
2 bay leaves, crumbled
coarse ground pepper
2 fingers of unpasteurized vinegar per quart jar
olive oil to seal

By the quart jar:
1/2 onion
2 heads garlic
2 jalapenos
2 serranos
1 or 2 carrots
1 celery stalk

other possibles: cauliflower, cabbage, various peppers

Slice and chop to the size you want in your mouth- peppers very thin, carrots up to double-nickel thick, etc. Mash everything down firmly, cover with clean water then oil. Ferment for 5-7 days at 70 degrees or above. Smaller jars seem like a good idea for gifting but not with escabiche- you wind up with too much liquid, not enough goodies.

Cabbage, cauliflower, small, whole peppers, and dry carrots like to float, breaking the oil barrier and escaping fermentation. Presoaking in water overnight might help this...

Orange Relish

~~~Slingshot's Pickled Pepper Relish~~~
4 large yellow onions
8 pods of garlic
4 red bell peppers
2 yellow bell peppers
1 green bell pepper
2 lbs. japaleno peppers, sorta deseeded
2 lbs. serrano peppers
4 carrots
chipotle chili powder
4 peppercorn mix, coarse ground
2 fingers unfiltered, unpasteurized apple cider vinegar per jar

this recipe fills eight and a half quart mason jars

clean all jars and lids, you're gonna ferment in them, so you need to insure that your vinegar culture doesn't have any competitors. The fermentation will prevent spoilage by excluding bad bacteria, as well as add nutrients and digestive aids.
clean the produce and chop into bits easily processed by your machine.
process everything in a quisinart or similar machine. The Vitamix leaves a saucier consistency unless you're very patient and quick on the buttons
add the vinegar to each jar and then fill w/ the processed mix. leave an inch of room from the top of each jar and clean the glass inside down to the waterline. Gently shake each jar to level the top of the mix.
float a layer of olive oil gently onto the surface to seal, making sure all the veggies are completely submerged, and seal the lids. The oil prevents oxidation, which is an enemy of fermentation, and is easily mixed in later.
leave the sealed jars in a calm spot no cooler than 69 degrees F for four to eight days. Look for fine, well-distributed bubbles to indicate CO2 production- that shows fermentation. Also look for a sediment (harmless) of dead lactobacilla bacteria in the bottom of the jars. Refrigerate after fermentation. They'll last six months or more unopened, developing a finer flavor profile as they age.

Option: use whey instead of ACVinegar but consume faster- ACV seems to preserve the pickles longer.

vary the coarseness of the cut to suit your cooking styles- coarser is easier to make stay in place until you close the sandwich and it leaves more juices for flavoring or juicing (pickle juice shots!), where the Vitamix leaves a saucy consistency that's good in a squeeze bottle.

Uses: use as a base for salsa (add tomatoes, cilantro & lime, carrots, etc), use on sandwiches, omelettes, in soups, as sauce base or add-in, anywhere you'd like a shot of power-flavor with lots of vitamins, minerals, and home-grown cultures. When cooking, add the relish at the table, to keep from killing the active and beneficial cultures with heat. Sick folks love this stuff in their broth, vitamin rich!

Note: Most of the heat in this relish comes from the japs and serranos. Deseeding most of the japs keeps this under control. Ratio of sweet to hot peppers is important, too. The carrots add a bit of body and help round out the flavor profile. This is a concentrated recipe on purpose and will produce a rowdy relish!

26 Nov at Pat n Christy's

Beets night. Four jars of Co-op beet Kvass. Yogurt is strained to separate the cheese from the biologically-active whey. Whey and salt are added to water (refer to newer post on Beet Kvass) that covers the beets. Ferment for 2-3 days. Drink the juice but don't eat the beets yet. Once this batch is done, top off with more water, ferment again for a second batch. Won't work a third time. The batch came out nicely, good clean taste. Have a small glass per day.
We also used the whey to ferment some local, homegrown beets, they are delicious-- I drink kvass because it's good for me, not from being a beets fan (hell, I'm a recovering picky eater) but these beets tasted really good! Check Christy's comment for a couple more details.
The dikon radish did not work out, whew! I suspect it was too far gone already.

2 Dec at Stelly's, updated 11Dec, 12Dec

Stelly has a bangin' kitchen!
escabiche with cabbage and cauliflower added, eight jars
orange relish, four jars
ginger fermented with whey, five small jars (one fine-sliced, like for sushi)

Problem: cabbage, cauliflower, and small, whole peppers like to float- the oil seal isn't looking good. We'll have to pull the bits out of the oil once fermentation is done- they won't have fermented. Larger jars or using the crock can help with this, also require less oil.

Update: we'll pull almost 25% of the stuff out and eat it quick, depending on smell. We're waiting for the oil to congeal to ease this process- should be able to pull the whole layer out whole.

Possible solution: soak veggies in water overnight (cabbage would need to get cut first for this)

Chicken stock: three packs of chicken feet made eight ice-cube trays. Very clean flavor, very rich, too! Cooked for almost four hours, sufficient.

Materials cost is working out to about $5 per jar, not including glass. Folks, please be on the lookout for free/cheap jars with good lids... There is a chance that Central City Co-op will be able to offer wholesale pricing on vinegar and oil.

Update II: the sliced ginger looks great but there's mold at the oil/air boundary on top. If it passes the smell test upon opening, we'll try to cleanly scoop out the offending bits and see if the ginger below held its own. The rest of the ginger came out fine, so it's surmised that this particular jar wasn't cleaned well enough.

Sunday, December 2, 2007