Hows my little fermentor?

Seems like all I've been doing lately is making/repairing things, and I love it! Most recently I decided to tackle some other fermentations that aren't alcohol based.

This weekend Amanda and Andy visited us and Andy taught me his bread and yogurt making skills. We enjoyed the bread with some yummy fondue Laura put together and the Yogurt has been a fantastic breakfast addition over the last few days. Just so everyone knows, yogurt is so easy to make there is almost no reason to not make it yourself. Just look at this site. All you need is Jars, a cooler, a thermometer, and patience. Oh, and some other yogurt you like.

After they left we decided to thicken up our yogurt a bit, which is easy too, I just scooped it into a coffee filter that sat in a strainer over a bowl in the fridge, out comes whey and the good suff thickens, zero effort.

Andy rattled off a list of yummy things to do with the whey but after trolling around this cool blog I found something else interesting to do with it. Fermenting vegetables and sour kraut (part 2)! I've been reading ever so slowly a fantastic tome, "The Art of Fermentation" by Sandor Katz and I love it. The book along with a co-worker it inspired me to attempt my own fermented vegetables. Lucky for me I already had my ingredients before I had my Whey. Once again, super easy, chop veggies, add Whey (and water if needed), wait.

Sour Kraut on the other hand is a bit more involved, not particularly challenging, but nerve racking for me because of this fail last year. After freshly reading up on how its done in my new favorite book, I attempted it again. The process is similar to last year, but different mostly because I'm armed with more confidence.

Step one, cut off the nasty spot that started spurting goo and turned soft.

Step two finely chop. I remembered I did this poorly last year and tried to do better this year.

Step twopointfive. Add salt to your cabbage as you chop, liberally.

Step three. The salt has been busy extracting water from the chopped cabbage, now you have to help it along, smash, pound, twist, mush, and crunch your cabbage until it looks beaten to death. This breaks down the cellular structure and helps extract more water and aids the fermentation.

Step four. PACK! Pack, it into a bowl or jar, really tightly. It should be PACKED so tightly you can hold your jar upside down and none falls out. (Packing it is important)

Step fourpointfive. If you want to add some seasonings or other things to your kraut-to-be mix it in while packing or in your bowl before packing. (one of my jars I added mustard seed, oregeno, and hot peppers.

Step five. Add your whey and top with water if needed to fully submerge your veggies/cabbage. Close your lid to your jar and wait.

This is Whey cool! My yogurt is now thicker.

After your fermentation begins (within the day) don't forget to crack your jar lid a couple of times daily to let off the CO2 that is being produced and give your stuff a good sniff, if you're really curious don't be afraid to sample your work.

Be on the lookout for mold! I'm still leary of this since I'm so new but you can just scrape off your mold and discard it while your veggies/kraut are busy doing their thing. Apparently fun colored mold just means it has gone to spore and you should be extra careful when removing it. Another thing I learned is if you let you mold get too out of control for too long your food (that isn't covered in mold) while being safe to eat will be infused with a moldy taste, yuck. Another fun mold fact, apparently spicy things in your ferment help keep mold away.

That's it! I'm very excited for the results!

Hows my little Jelly Maker?

What's the difference between Jelly and Jam?
The answer to that pickup line/joke is being withheld for the sake of the innocent children (and my mother).

The real difference is jelly is made with juice, jam with chunks.

Laura's parents make some really good Jam and its always piqued a small interest in me to me to see how its done, I've never mentioned it before because they always pick their own wild fruit and I have absolutely no interest in being hunched over while picking for more than 15 minutes. So I decided to take a shot in the dark...one of the best ways to learn...right?

Laura and I harvested somewhere around 30 pounds of Vanessa grapes from work for this jelly. I've now realized that de-stemming grapes is a huge pain and appreciate our machine that does it for us at work. After that we shoved all the berries through our food mill to de-skin and seed them. The food mill attachment for our mixer is fantastic, still.

Grape skin food mill terd.

The next step is boiling, after the juice comes to a boil add you sugar and pectin and boil again for 1 minute.

This step sounds simple but the naturalist in me wanted to find a way around using sugar and pectin. Which is a whole other blog, but since I've got time, I'll cut it short and put it in this one.

Pectin I thought was some sort of crazy food chemical found accidentally while doing research on coal...or something. Turns out it's a natural thing found in and derived from apples. Not so bad I thought, so Pectin became OK. If you're asking what is pectin, it's a substance used to thicken things like Jellys and Jams. It naturally occurs in all sorts of fruits.

Fun fact about Pectin, its advised all over to avoid making large batches of things as it wont set properly and you will have liquidy jelly. So we split our batch up into the sizes recommended by this handy website.

I did hear about another thing that could be used as an alternative to it along the way via Laura's brother, chia seeds! As in Cha-Cha-Cha-Chia! WebMD says "Chia seeds are a concentrated food containing healthy omega-3 fatty acids, carbohydrates, protein, fiber, antioxidants, and calcium" when you mix them into water they form a gel, or a jel-ly is what I interpreted that as.

Lastly I thought I should try to utilize some of the benefits of local honey, instead of cane sugar.

Back to the Jelly, of course since we had no idea how much pectin anything took I initially bought half of what I needed so it forced me to attempt the Chia seed jelly method, that I had previously chickened out from attempting.

So onto batch 3 armed with the two-ish remaining tablespoons of pectin and a about eight of Chia seeds we set to work. I did everything as usual, while ignoring the recommendations from the internet about adding water to the chia seeds first (thinking I was dropping them into liquid). We also ran out of honey so Laura also bought some sugar, and we had a surplus of Jalapenos from the garden, so I added a heaping pureed pile of them to the batch for good measure. Then processed as usual.

A couple of chili peppers mixed in just to make sure it got spicy.

So after your one minute boiling of everything I found this super useful trick in our new Preservation Kitchen book using a chilled plate to test consistency. It's super easy, put a couple of plates in the freezer when you start your process, and after your boil dribble some of your hot liquid onto your cold plate wait about 20 seconds for it to cool and spoon it back up, if it is your desired consistency you may proceed, if not add more pectin and boil again for another minute. This is a great test because otherwise you're relying completely on your recipe and we all know how that can often be a disaster.

Scraping to check consistancy...pretty good!

The final result?

Mixed. Batch #1 was the best consistency and Batch #3 the worst, kinda. Batch #2 although there was more pectin in it was a bit runnier, I blame this on the only remaining box in our store being different and more lame.

I was super nervous about the Jalapeno batch because all of the Chia seeds separated and floated to the top half of the jars, which made me think the batch was a failure. So this morning I set to unlock the truth. Turns out the jelly is indeed a bit thin but it still sticks to a knife and easily spreads! and the taste was phenomenal! Just enough jalapeno to give it a nice twist and just enough heat on the finish to surprise you but not enough to make you think about reaching for a glass of milk.

I'm excited. I learned a good amount and am excited to try making more next year.

Unfortunately due to a jar and pectin shortage we only made half of the juice into jelly, lucky for me I had some montrachet yeast hanging around and decided on making a gallon of wine with the rest of it...why not!?

Hows my little Biker?

On July first I got my first ever motorcycle, a Triumph Legend.

Laura and I went back and fourth on a few things before we were finally able to make the purchase (like the timing of the helmet purchase), but things ended up working out for the better because I was able to troll around craigslist a bit longer to find this exciting bike. Better yet I was able to drive my friend Diana's bike for a weekend, after riding hers around for awhile I found some things in a bike I liked and didn't like.

Like many things in my life, of course this hasn't been the smoothest ride thus far. After having the bike for just about a week I left the key switched on for a couple of days and completely drained the battery. I got the bright idea of roll starting it implanted in my head and the next morning I gave it a shot. In full gear in 85 degree heat I was running around the block pushing a 500 pound bike while hopping on and off of it...to a complete and sweaty failure. I was so bent on getting it to start this way I even managed to convince Laura to push it around that evening with no better luck, just more heat, humidity, and sweat. So I bought a trickle charger, learned how to take the seat off, and found the battery. The next day it fired up and all was grand, for another week...

I was driving home from work and a few blocks from the house the engine died. I thought that it was just my novice self making some sort of clutch error when shifting because the bike started up just fine right away and I made my way home. The next day it happened again, only at the bottom of a valley between the only two big-ish hills within 50 miles of our house, this time it had a tough time starting and I was getting a bit nervous. It started eventually so I quickly did some research before work and found that when the engine isn't getting gas there is probably something wrong with the fuel pump. Lucky me the the fuel to the engine is gravity fed and I'm just an idiot and ran out of gas.

Newly gassed up my Grandpa asked to see my new bike, so I drove it over to the hospital he was staying at in Indiana. On the way home my Accelerator cable snapped. This made me sad because all signs seemed to be saying I wasn't meant to ride a motorcycle. My Dad came to the rescue with his truck and trailer. When we were pushing the bike onto the trailer we bottomed it out on the ramp hinge. When we had it parked my Dad said, well that went pretty smooth. But he wasn't staring at the oil that was pouring out of the bottom of my new motorcycle like me. That little scrape pulled the oil plug and about three inches of metal around it off of the bottom of the bike. Tragedy.

A golf ball could fit in this hole.

The reconstructed plate with the pieces we found.

When I bought the Triumph I was all sorts of excited to work on it myself and make my own repairs. I always thought they would consist of changing the oil and maybe a headlight or a loose wire here or there. Just in case though I bought my very own repair manual about the bike just in time for all this to happen. So it's been a hefty project.

It turned out I had to take off several big and important looking pieces just to get at my accelerator cable connections, all of which were pretty scary tasks for a novice like me. 

I just purchased all of my new pieces, I just hope there aren't many leftover bolts when I'm all done.

Hows my little mourner?

Sad.
Today my Grandpa died, 19 years to the day after his wife, my Grandmother died.

This has been a challenging entry to write because I've wanted to write so many funny/interesting/memorable/sad disjointed things about him. None seem to fit what I want to say.

The last time I saw him I admitted I had a weird question to ask. I asked him if he had any great words of wisdom for me.

"No Tony, just live a good life."

I think I'll do just that. In my eyes he did.

Not his best photo, but one of my favorites.

Thanks for all of the memories GRAND PA.

Hows my little Backdater?

Hello faithful followers! You may have noticed a lack of posts lately. Well it's not because I don't have anything to write about...I do/did. I need to start at the beginning, and due to the necessary but lacking photos I haven't posted. So feel free to jump back into May and June to find out what was exciting in my life. Backdating posts ins't something I'm fond of but shit happens. Sometimes exciting shit!

Hows my little Chili Beer?

Holy Ghost Chili Batman!

Awhile back I got lucky and scored some cheap ghost chili peppers from the Galena Garlic Co. at the Illinois Product Expo on the premise of me sending the guy a few beers I promised I would brew with them.

Handling with caution.

Well the beer is finally brewed and I got the pleasure to see my friend Ryan's new (homemade) homebrew setup in action. The rig goes under the name of 5Thumbs if you're interested in one of your own, and you should be, it's a thing of homebrewed beauty.

I wanted the beer to taste like a nice smoky Chipotle Salsa, with just enough fire to be able to finish a bottle but too much heat to want a second one. I used a honey nut brown recipe, a bit of smoked malt, 5 ghost chilis, and honey added after the boil to get my flavor. I'm thus far very excited about where the brew is headed. This was planned to be a big slightly malty and boozy brew but due to some technical difficulties we ended up with a 6 gallon batch instead of a 5 gallon, which is not a problem, when I racked it the beer tasted perfect. I can only hope it stays that way in the secondary and the bottle!

The one gallon test boil to find out how much heat the pepper would impart.

The scariest sip of water I've ever tried.

5 Ghost Chili peppers going in at the beginning of the boil!

This I'm excited for the brew to be ready! I hope you are too! 

Right now the name for it is awful, 'The Hot 'n Spicy Honey Nut Brown' any better ideas out there?