Thanksgiving 2015

The kids were home for Thanksgiving, along with Bob and Sharon.  We took a couple of hours and got the greenhouse tucked in.  Lychee should have gotten the necessary chill hours over the past 2-3 weeks.  Citrus is ripening.  We've got a handful each of calamondin, Meyer lemon, and kumquats.  

The grapefruit are the size of olives.  And the chocolate pudding fruit (Diospyros nigra) is the size of a tennis ball yet hard as a rock and split.

In an hour we got the insulation up.  In a second hour we chased the calves out the the yard and repaired the fence. That was the extent of the work done over the weekend.

Adam has become a photographer, and the good pictures are almost certainly his.

We didn't stray far from the standard fare...turkey, stuffing, strawberry jello, seven-layer salad.

We made as much wine as we drank and we sent Sharon home with another dozen bottles, different varieties and styles.

Plateau of Productivity

The Hype Cycle is a graphical representation of technology adoption and diffusion. The part of this graph I most like to point out is the "Trough of Disillusionment." Companies have to recognize this point in a product or project lifecycle and push through it.

I was standing there looking at a dozen carboys yesterday and thinking I've been through this same cycle with winemaking. I had some early successes which led to inflated expectations. Then failures led to some disillusionment. Study and practice and a lot of bad wine pushed me up the Slope of Enlightenment. Yesterday I looked at a dozen carboys, confident that not one of them has undrinkable wine, I felt as if I'm approaching the Plateau of Productivity.

For Thanksgiving the family is home, including my parents. The Elderberry Persimmon wine Wednesday was a big hit, both in terms of taste and in terms of photogenicity.

We moved the blackberry-elderberry to secondary and kicked off the second run elderberry. Grandma Sharon helped with this batch. For Thanksgiving dinner we finished a bottle of last year's second run elderberry. This wine was bottled dry and came out terrific - fruity with strawberry and raspberry elements and beautiful ruby color. This wine cleared on it's own and was bottled after 9 months.  Here is the recipe.

Elderberry - seeds, skins, and pulp leftover from 2 16# 3 gal batches
3# bananas
3 cans Welch's white grape concentrate
4# 14oz sugar
GoFerm
Fermaid K
3t pectic enzyme
5t citric acid
1t tartaric acid

Place elderberry pulp in nylon straining bag in primary; add sugar and grape concentrate. Slice bananas, simmer, strain into primary.  Add boiling water to 3 gallons.  When cool, stir in acids, pectic enzyme.  Pitch yeast starter with EC-1118, step feed, kmeta when into secondary, usual care thereafter.  

Preserving a little bit of Arkansas

On Highway 65 heading south toward Conway, just past the Serenity Farm Bakery, there appears a sign every fall for Arkansas Black apples.  We've stopped many times at the bakery, but never for the apples, and we are running out of time.  But a patient last year generously gave us a large bag of Arkansas Blacks.  He said they will keep for weeks, if not months, if just left in a cool garage.

We left them out for about a month, but I became fearful of them rotting, so I threw them all in the freezer where they have sat for about a year.

But now I have a new toy.  Blame the blackberries.  The straight fruit blackberry came up short of 3 gallons, partially because of the fluffy lees from the bentonite, but mostly because I basically only had the free run, I couldn't press the fruit. That will not be an issue going forward.

For the apples, this press worked like a charm.  A 5 gal paint strainer bag fits perfectly in the basket and it is disposable.  This wine will be straight-fruit apple.  I came up just a little shy of 1 gallon in terms of volume, so I added 1 can apple juice concentrate and 12 ounces of water.  The OG was 1.060 and pH 3.51.  9oz sugar brought the OG to 1.085, which seems right for this wine.  Here is the recipe:

2 3gal bags Arkansas Black apples (sorry, didn't get the weight)
1 can apple juice concentrate with 12 oz water (for volume)
9oz sugar
1 Campden tab
1t yeast nutrient, divided
1/4tsp tannin
2t pectic enzyme
2g bentonite
2g Optiwhite
71B yeast

Press the frozen/thawed apples and add the juice to the primary.  Add the concentrate, water, sugar, Kmeta.  Wait 12 hours, add the pectic, tannin, Optiwhite.  Wait another 12 hours, add 1/2 of the nutrient and pitch the yeast.  Day 3 add the bentonite.  When 1/2 sugar is depleted, add the second 1/2t nutrient.  To secondary around 1.010 and usual care thereafter.

We made a tasty flatbread appetizer on Friday, with caramelized onion, fig, walnuts, and balsamic truffle glaze.

Inspired Saturday

Inspiration comes from many different sources, and sometimes from no particular source at all. Saturday didn't seem particularly suited to work in the kitchen but that is the way it turned out. Breakfast was a crustless egg dish baked in serving sized Lodge cast iron serving pans we found a few years back.

Serves 2
2 sticks celery
2 handfuls of spinach, chopped
2T chopped onion
1T chopped roasted red pepper
seasoning salt
4 eggs
Cheddar cheese

Saute the celery and onion.  When translucent, mix in spinach and pepper.  Divide between two Lodge mini pans.  Beat the eggs with the salt, pour over the veggies, and top with cheddar cheese. Bake 25-30 min or til the eggs pull slightly away from the sides.

Imagine this cast iron pan filled with eggs and veggies

Next up, elderberry wine. The recipe has not been finalized, but this batch dials back the fruit to just under 15# in a 3 gallon batch, and it uses 80% tartaric, 20% citric acid. Today we thawed and simmered the fruit, assembled the must, and put it in the fridge for a 3 day cold soak.  I'm going to double check the acid measurments on this one.  I was aiming for TA around 7 and pH 3.5. According to my first set of calculations, I got a TA 6.6 and pH 3.37.  The plan is to ferment this on heavy toast American oak chips starting Wednesday.

15# of elderberries

The best elderberry wine recipe I've found online, oddly, doesn't come from a winemaking site, but instead it comes from a food blog, Hunter-Angler-Gardner-Cook by Hank Shaw.  I'm not a hunter and the site is heavy on waterfowl recipes, but the site is worth some time.  Inspired by this recipe, we're making elderberry liqueur.

1 pint elderberries
1 quart vodka
1 3" x 1/4" strip of Meyer lemon rind (from the greenhouse)
1/4-1/3 cup sugar

Combine elderberries, vodka, lemon rind in a quart jar.  Leave for 1 month, shaking occasionally. Filter, then add sugar and bottle.

We were on a roll.  Next up, limoncello.  Limoncello recipes on the web vary widely in terms of the base alcohol (everything from 80 proof vodka to Everclear) and ratio of alcohol to lemons. I found some inspiration in this recipe using vanilla from an abandoned blog called That Jew Can Cook.  The website has links to some interesting YouTube videos, including one, seemingly done without any irony, on Halal street food.

10 lemons (smallish)
1 lime
1 orange
1/3 vanilla bean (I got burned by vanilla once, OK?)
80 proof vodka
Simple syrup

Combine all ingredients in a quart mason jar.  Leave for 1 month, shaking occasionally.  Filter, add simple syrup, bottle.

Our patients have over the last several days given us several butternut squash. Lunch was a delicious, creamy, flavorful butternut squash soup.  I cut the cream cheese in half.

It is the holiday season. Coming full circle means digging into the last of our frozen fruitcakes and kicking off the new batch by getting this year's fruit in the rum to macerate.  We'll be baking cakes tomorrow.

Michigan won big, so we celebrated with a marinated flat iron steak, roasted sweet potatoes, and lemon-pepper-locally-grown green beans.  The wine is 2012 Penalolen Cab.

Frittata Time

I won't lie, I love bacon. But in light of recent media reports, we've been cutting back on our processed meat.  So when a patient brought us butternut squash this week, I thought it would be a good time to experiment. The result was a tasty frittata dinner.

Peel one butternut squash, then cube it.  Put a little walnut oil in a cast iron skillet, and toss with the roughly 2 cups of squash.  Roast 20 min at 400 degrees.  Then mash the squash with a fork into a layer in the bottom of the skillet. Add a thick layer of chopped spinach and a handful of chopped walnuts.  Then beat 6 eggs and add about 1/2 tsp seasoning salt, and pour that into the skillet over the spinach.  Back in the oven at 400 degrees for another 20 minutes.

This was a terrific dish. We added a wine club bottle, a 2013 Saint Gregory Pinotrois, a nice, smooth, medium bodied red wine.  Good evening.

Bob Ross is like Crack

Twitch is streaming all 400 hours of Bob Ross and The Joy of Painting. This is addictive stuff.  I am finding it hard to turn off.

Five Thirty Eight did a statistical analysis of his work and 91% of his paintings contained at least one tree.  Bob Ross is pretty good at painting trees.   This evening I watched him paint an "old tired tree," and it was asymmetric and lonely and beautiful.

I have a tree like this in my yard.  It is Diospyros virginiana, American Persimmon. It is solitary, large, crooked, and old. And it is a little tired. But it faithfully produces persimmons every year.  I have gathered hundreds of pounds of these persimmons. I have progeny growing nearby, in and around the pawpaws. Most of the persimmons I have gathered have gone toward futile attempts at persimmon wine.

Today, Lisa and I made persimmon cookies. The effort was much more successful than persimmon wine. Baking soda does strange and cool things to persimmon pulp.

We found a recipe with dates, which strikingly resemble chocolate chips.  These are terrific cookies, and there are enough persimmons left on the tree to get another batch or two.

We found some fresh salmon in town and had a nice supper of salmon with a roasted red pepper sauce, spinach salad, and cookies.

I'm feeling as relaxed as Bob Ross.

Fall Winemaking is Underway

The sauerkraut went into the fridge after 5 days of fermentation.  It is chunky and crisp with enough acidity.

We are home for the first weekend in a couple of months. This provided the opportunity to catch up on some winemaking. I bottled the elderberry-persimmon wine. This wine is unique for the large dose of bentonite and heavy toast oak chips in the primary, then a secondary treatment of some black currants. I think it is very good at 8 months, and it is supposed to improve for a couple of years.

We racked the starfruit and lychee wine.  The starfruit wine is not quite clear but will, once again, be fantastic.  I think we have the starfruit wine recipe dialed in pretty well. Getting the pH low enough with mostly citric acid is the key. No malic acid for this wine, acid blend or otherwise. The lychee wine unfortunately blew off all of the lychee aromas during fermentation. I anticipated this, and kept back 15 large lychees from the greenhouse.  These were thawed, destoned, chopped, treated for several hours with pectic enzyme, then added to the secondary. I expect a wine that is subtle but distinctly lychee.

We then kicked off the first of the fall batches.  This one is blackberry.  We are going with (almost) straight fruit. It is said that it normally takes about 11-12# for a gallon.  I had 29.5#, just under 10# per gallon for the 3 gallon batch.

To make up the volume I did use about 4 pints of water. I have some of last year's blackberry wine to top off with if the volume is still short.  The initial pH was 2.79 and it took 7t of calcium carbonate to get it to the desired 3.4.  Sugar calculations were perfect, we're starting at 1.084. I let the pectic work a full 24 hours. 71B will hopefully tame some of the malic acid.

Shawn and Suzanne came over for supper.  We had a nice veggie-based chili, then Suzanne make a delicious apple galette.  I was a poor host.

Spot the veggies?

Apple Galette.

Here is my recipe for 3 gal of carambola wine.

16# carambola
1 liter white grape concentrate
Sugar: 3# (SG 1.082)
Campden: 2 tab at start
Yeast nutrient: 3/4t Fermaid K divided
Yeast energizer: 1t GoFerm
Tannin: 1/2t
Pectic enzyme: 3t
Citric acid: 6t  (starting pH was 3.27)
Tartaric acid: 3t
Opti white: 6g (dose 1-2g/gal)
Water: 2gal
Yeast: QA23

Add Campden tablets at fruit thaw.  Bag the sliced fruit.  Add bagged fruit, grape concentrate, sugar to primary.  Boil water, pour over primary.  When cool, add Optiwhite, pectic, acids, and wait 12-24 hours. Double check pH and adjust if needed.  Rehydrate yeast with GoFerm and pitch.  Step feed the Fermaid K. Stir twice a day.  Bentonite on day 3.  Drip drain bag and rack to primary when 1.010 or lower.  Usual care thereafter.