Last summer, my friend Alex gave me a packet of kohlrabi seeds that she had purchased on a recent visit with her family in Switzerland. The instructions were in German, but I thought I could figure out what I needed to know: you plant them in early [...]]]>
Check it out: kohlrabi is NOT a root vegetable!

Last summer, my friend Alex gave me a packet of kohlrabi seeds that she had purchased on a recent visit with her family in Switzerland. The instructions were in German, but I thought I could figure out what I needed to know: you plant them in early spring for a summer crop or mid-summer for a fall crop. I thought it odd that the illustrations suggested starting the seeds indoors, but hey, who am I to question Swiss ingenuity?

So I planted my kohrabi and watched them grow. Huh, I though. They look a lot like broccoli.

Then last week I started poking around the soil. I had seem some kohlrabi at my local farmer’s market, and some of my beets were starting to show their shoulders, so surely the kohlrabi should be on its way, right? But when I pushed the dirt around, no sign of a root vegetable. Disappointing.

Then I looked up. Then I smacked myself on the forehead. As you can see in the picture, that little knob of kohlrabi deliciousness forms ABOVE GROUND, as a sort of engorged part of the stem. Um, obviously. That part of the description must have been in German.

My understanding is that I should harvest them when they reach about 3″. They’re planted too close together, so I may not have much choice in the matter…but now that I know what I’m doing I’m definitely going to plant another batch for fall, this time giving them more room to breathe.

Clearly, I’m a kohlrabi novice. What do they taste like, anyway? I’m guessing a cross between broccoli stems and turnips? Can anybody fill me in?

Herewith begins my contribution to the Tigress Can Jam! If you’ve missed it, the canjam is a yearlong canning challenge. Each month, canjammers will be asked to create a water-bath friendly recipe based on a seasonal ingredient. Tigress started us off gently, with citrus. I assumed—rightly as it turns out!—that this would turn into a [...]]]>

Herewith begins my contribution to the Tigress Can Jam! If you’ve missed it, the canjam is a yearlong canning challenge. Each month, canjammers will be asked to create a water-bath friendly recipe based on a seasonal ingredient. Tigress started us off gently, with citrus. I assumed—rightly as it turns out!—that this would turn into a giant marmalade fest, so I was looking for something just a little bit off-center. I found my inspiration in the freezer: a bag of sugared strawberries I put away last May. Technically, I guess that means I’m in violation of the seasonality rule, but given that these were local berries that I picked and stored myself, I hope you’ll agree that it’s in the spirit of the game.

I *love* the way this turned out. I started with a recipe in the Ball Blue Book, but reduced the sugar (I wanted it tarter), added more lemons, kept the peels, and eliminated the pectin…which makes it not really a Blue Book recipe at all. It’s more in the spirit of the tangerine marmalade I made last month, but with lemons and strawberries instead. Now, if you do the Twitter Thing, you’ll know that sugar has recently been a subject of much controversy. I tell you, people: yes, you can reduce the sugar in a marmalade. The safety question in water-bath canning is about acid. Lemons and strawberries have plenty of acid. As both the National Center for Home Food Preservation and the Ball Corporation’s Fresh Preserving Guide make clear, it is not a safety issue to reduce the amount of sugar in fruit preserves. Now, this is not to say that sugar isn’t a preservative—it is, my friends, it is!—but preservation is fundamentally a different question than safety. Sugar preserves taste and helps you get to the gelling point faster. It also prevents mold, which is why jams and preserves that are high in sugar will last longer once you’ve opened them. Sometimes low-sugar preserves aren’t as pretty as high-sugar preserves, and they often have a softer set. Some people, such as the USDA, say that you need to process low-sugar foods longer than high-sugar foods. (But keep in mind that the French don’t process their canned jams at all, and they’re still here.) In this case, though, there’s so much pectin in the lemons that I achieved an excellent set, without pectin and with less sugar than the recipe called for. And since the product is mostly lemons, it’s plenty acidic.

Tweaking canning recipes is a topic that gets plenty of food educators exercised. Those who object are, quite rightly, concerned about your safety. There is a growing consensus among some in the “new” canning community, however, that some of these rules are a tad too rigid. The spirit of the canjam is to improvise within the limits of safety. Part of the challenge of this exercise is to figure out what you can change (spices, fruit combinations, sweeteners) and what you can’t. If you change the recipe, there is, in fact, a chance that something will go wrong. Maybe your jam won’t set. Maybe it will grow mold in 3 months. But you know what? If you see mold, throw it out. Live and learn. And if you’re worried about botulism, don’t, so long as you’re working in a high-acid (i.e., fruit-filled) environment. My personal opinion is that the USDA rules should be taken as a guideline, not as hard and fast rules. Keep in mind that the USDA also recommends that you not eat raw fish or raw eggs, and that meat should be cooked through. Nevertheless, for the record, when you change a recipe, you are doing so at your own risk.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to business!

Strawberry Lemon Marmalade

1 qt frozen strawberries, in sugar
4 medium lemons, chopped
3 c. sugar
about 3 c. water

1) Wash your lemons. Slice them as thinly as possible, then chop them into pieces. Put them into your jam pot, cover with water, bring to a boil, and simmer 5 minutes. Turn off the heat and let the pan cool. Put a lid on the pan and walk away. Meanwhile, take your berries out of the freezer.

2) The next day, mash the berries and their juices (I use a potato masher). Toss them into the pot along with the sugar. Bring to a boil. Boil it until you’re just at the gelling point. Be careful: there at the end, it gets quite thick rather quickly, and my last jar is a bit thicker than I might like. There’s *lots* of pectin in the pith.

3) Meanwhile, sterilize 4 or 5 half-pint jars and bring your water bath to a boil. Heat new lids. Transfer the hot jam to the hot jars and adjust the two-piece lids. Process in a boiling-water bath canner for 10 minutes.

My version made 4 half pints and 1 4-oz jar, which I’m giving away! Leave a comment by Monday at 8 AM and I’ll select a winner by random number generator. Happy canning!

When you first asked me this, I thought it was an easy question. So easy, in fact, that I planned on conducting a little kitchen experiment to document both the reaction and its counter-reaction. But things didn’t work out that way, [...]]]> Sometimes garlic turns blue when I cook it. Why? Is it safe to eat?

(Andrew, Philadelphia)

When you first asked me this, I thought it was an easy question. So easy, in fact, that I planned on conducting a little kitchen experiment to document both the reaction and its counter-reaction. But things didn’t work out that way, as I’ll explain below. But first, let’s answer your question. The simplest answer is that garlic contains a set of pigments known as anthocyanins. Under certain conditions, the anthocyanins appear blue-green. They are harmless to eat, and may even go away depending on what you do to the dish next. Harold McGee explained his take on this in his inaugural “Curious Cook” column in the New York Times:

I hear every year from cooks who have been alarmed at seeing normally pale garlic turn bright green and even blue, sometimes when the cloves are pickled whole, sometimes when they’re chopped and cooked with other ingredients. I’d often been puzzled by little blue-green specks when I made garlic bread with loaves of sourdough, but I was really rattled the first time I puréed raw garlic, onion and ginger together in a blender to make chicken in yogurt from Madhur Jaffrey’s “Invitation to Indian Cooking.” When I fried the purée the entire mass turned turquoise blue.

I asked a couple of Indian friends who happen to be plant biologists whether they knew what was going on. They said they had never seen the blue purée, because Indian cooks don’t grind onions and garlic together. They grind or chop them separately and usually fry the onions first. . . .

According to chemists at the China Agricultural University in Beijing, aging the garlic gives it a chance to accumulate large quantities of one of the chemicals that generate the color; fresh garlic doesn’t green much at all. And a strong green color develops in Laba garlic only with acetic acid, the main acid in vinegar (also found in sourdough), because it’s especially effective at breaching internal membranes and mixing the cell chemicals that react together to create the green pigment. The pigment itself turns out to be a close chemical relative of chlorophyll, which gives all green leaves their color.

Two recent reports from the House Foods Corporation in Japan detail exactly how the garlic and garlic-onion pigments develop. Their creators are the same handful of sulfur compounds and enzymes that give the allium family its unique pungent flavors. Under the right conditions these chemicals react with each other and with common amino acids to make pyrroles, clusters of carbon-nitrogen rings. These rings can be linked together into multipyrrole molecules.

The ring structures absorb particular wavelengths of light, and thus appear colored. The two-pyrrole molecule looks red, the three-pyrrole molecule looks blue and the four-pyrrole molecule looks green, as does its cousin tetrapyrrole, the chlorophyll molecule. Like chlorophyll, all the pyrrole pigments are perfectly safe to eat.

Now, I was familiar with the explanation that says that the blue-green apparance is more likely to take place in acid environments. In my own experience I noted that garlic only tends to turn blue when cooked in lemon juice, usually in a metal pan. In fact, the anthocyanin/acid relationship is so strong that you can actually use some vegetables—the classic is red cabbage—as a home pH meter. (You can learn more about the chemistry of red cabbage color changes in this episode of Distillations, a chemistry podcast.)

It was with all of this in mind that I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. If acid turns garlic blue, shouldn’t baking soda, a base, turn it back? So for you, dear readers, I attempted to conduct a scientific experiment.

First I added lemon juice to minced garlic in a glass bowl. Nothing happened.
I transferred the contents to a metal pan. Nothing happened.
I heated it up, thinking maybe the reaction needed a jump start. Still nothing happened.
I added white vinegar, thinking maybe my lemons weren’t strong enough. Nothing happened.
We ate dinner, giving the garlic and acid time to get to know each other. Still no blue.

At this point, I did some additional research and learned that garlic actually turns blue for two reasons. Certainly the anthocyanins are the main culprit. But garlic also contains a lot of sulfate that, when combined with copper, creates copper sulfate, an insoluble, bright turquoise compound. (Again: still fine to eat.) Apparently the trace amounts of copper in water and other foods can be enough to trigger the reaction.

So, I added water. Still no blue.

More research: what food stuffs have high proportions of copper, I wondered? Leafy green vegetables, like kale, chard, and spinach, and certain nuts, like sesame seeds.

I dumped a big pile of sesame seeds into the pot and kept cooking. At this point the kitchen smelled terrible. But still no blue.
Table salt, perhaps, with its iodine content? No go.

This went on and on for about an hour before I finally gave up. So while I can certainly tell you what turns garlic blue, I cannot tell you whether you can turn it back by adding baking soda. If it happens to you, give it a try, and let me know.

What you are looking at is the sludge at the bottom of a gallon of cider I found in the back of my fridge. Tasted great while it lasted, but we weren’t quite quick enough to enjoy it. It turned the corner from fizzy to hard to ornery some time ago. Jilly tells me, however, [...]]]>

What you are looking at is the sludge at the bottom of a gallon of cider I found in the back of my fridge. Tasted great while it lasted, but we weren’t quite quick enough to enjoy it. It turned the corner from fizzy to hard to ornery some time ago. Jilly tells me, however, that I should embrace the disgusting gunk. Apparently it even has a name—it’s a “mother”—and is chock full of good bacteria that will turn my cider into vinegar, if I let it. She advises me to just cover it up with some cheesecloth and wait anywhere between two weeks and two months. When it smells like vinegar, it’s done. Updates next week.