Carambola Chips

If I had more starfruit, and carambola wine weren't so good, I'd make these all the time.  Slice them thinly and liberally dose half of them with chili powder before putting them in the oven.

2 firm-ripe carambola 
2 cups sugar
2 cups water

Slice star fruit crosswise with slicer into 1/16-inch-thick slices.
Bring sugar and water to a boil in a 2-quart heavy saucepan, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Add star fruit, then remove from heat and let stand, uncovered, 15 minutes. Pour star fruit into a sieve set over a bowl and drain 15 minutes. 
Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 200°F. Put liner on a large (17- by 11-inch) baking sheet, then arrange star-fruit slices in 1 layer on liner (discard extra along with any broken slices). Bake until dry, 1 to 1 1/4 hours. Immediately transfer chips to a rack to cool.

Chocolate Pudding Fruit, Chapter 1

I had never eaten the fruit of Diospyros nigra before today.  It's name gives an indication of the typical persimmon fruit lifecycle - astringent and bitter when unripe, soft and sweet when ripe.

I cut the first and only fruit from my tree last week when it started to turn from green to brown.  I patiently waited until the fruit was entirely brown and the flesh started to "give."

I cut it open and was pleased to see the chocolate pudding colored flesh inside.

I grabbed a spoon.  The flesh is still very firm, almost rubbery.  The taste is anything but chocolate.  I suppose I should congratulate myself for waiting long enough that any bitterness and astringency was gone.  But my first and only chocolate pudding fruit tastes a lot like an unripe pear.

The trees are supposed to be heavy bearers.  We'll what next year brings.

Chocolate and Blueberry

We kicked off two new brews this weekend.  I'll call them brews because one is not truly a wine - Chocolate Mead.

Each batch I make involves some research, and I found that chocolate mead recipes range from cocoa preferment to Hershey's Syrup postferment.  I went with the former.  I heat pasteurized the honey, added 8 ounces by weight of Hershey "Special Dark Chocolate" cocoa, and after much reading and hand wringing about pH in meads, went with no adjustments to the pH of 5.99.

We'll leave this on the cocoa lees for 2-3 months.  It is said to take 2 years for the bitterness of the cocoa to settle down.  I see why some would choose the Hershey's Syrup route.

The second batch is a second run blueberry hibiscus wine.  I saved the fruit/skins/pulp from my blueberry wine earlier this fall.  I thawed it and simmered it in a gallon of water.

Then in the primary I put the usual hibiscus flowers, a can of red grape concentrate, and sugar.

Then poured the blueberry water (with the bag) into the primary and gave it a good mix.  The kitchen smells like baked bread.  But the must is surprisingly fruity, with excellent deep purple color.

The plan is to let this cool, add OptiRed and pectic, then adjust the OG and pH and pitch the yeast in the morning.

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.