Doris and Jilly Cook » kitchen experiments

The Accidental Salt Mine

dorisandjilly — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:55:52 +0000

This has to be the coolest thing I’ve ever found growing in my basement. Fermented things, as you probably already know, require a lot of salt. To make sauerkraut, for instance, you mix approximately 4 1/2 T of kosher salt per 5 pounds of cabbage, stuff everything into a jar, and weight it until the cabbage is submerged in its own brine. Weight 3 to 6 weeks, and you’ve got sauerkraut.

Sometimes, fermentation gets messy. Your jars leak and leave little salty puddles on the floor. And because the basement gods were smiling, I got crystals instead of scum and mold. And although I do know that there’s a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation, I’m happy to chalk this one up to magic.

Dried Papaya

dorisandjilly — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:55:11 +0000

I like papayas. They remind me of the Dominican Republic, where I spent a week two years ago sitting on the beach, drinking rum cocktails, and watching people kite surf. (No kite surfing for me, thanks. I like my neck.) Here in West Philly, where we’re blessed with a large immigrant population, you can find papayas, mangos, daikon radish, bitter cucumbers, and other random produce at dirt-cheap vegetable trucks. I’m not sure that I would buy slightly damaged or B-grade produce off the back of a truck in any other city, but here, the stuff that you find on the truck is the same stuff that you find in local supermarkets because it’s all coming straight off the barge via the Philadelphia Food Distribution Center. I no longer buy anything from the truck that I can get locally, but with papayas I figure: hey, what the hell. No one’s growing those in Lancaster County, and everyone needs a treat now and then in winter, so why not? If you have the willpower to walk away from a $2, 3 pound, good-looking papaya, I salute you.

On a whim, I cut one up and stuck it in the dehydrator. I cut them into 1/3″ strips and dried them at 105°F overnight. After 15 hours, about half of them were done; the other half needed somewhere between 4 to 6 additional hours. The flavor is a little odd. I sort of like them, but my husband thinks they taste like cardboard….coral cardboard. Some foods just don’t dehydrate well on their own—my attempts at strawberries and raspberries were equally weird. If I were to do it again, I think I’d blanch them in a sugar syrup first, and maybe dunk them in coconut. Because, you know, if you’re going to fall off the local foods wagon, why not go all the way?

I do love the idea of dried papaya. Any suggestions on how to make it better?

February Can Jam: CARROTS!

dorisandjilly — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:58:31 +0000

(Photo from Chris Campbell’s Flickr photostream)

Attention all canjammers! The focus of the February Tigress Can Jam is CARROTS.

Got that?

Yes, carrots.

The Tigress and I made this choice with both excitement and trepidation. The excitement because vegetables are new territory for many water-bath canners; the trepidation because carrots are a low-acid food, and therefore come with certain rules. So. Let’s be clear. No matter what you find on the internets, you absolutely have to add acid to carrots to make them safe to can. In fact, a lot of acid. So much acid, in fact, that the Tigress and I strongly encourage you—nay, insist!—that you start off with a published recipe, and tweak from there. (If you have a home pH meter and/or are a master food preserver, you get a free pass.) Think pickles, relishes, and chutneys. Once you’ve found a recipe you like, feel free to tinker with the spices, the balance of salt and sugar, the exact combination of vegetables, etc. HOWEVER, be sure that you are not reducing the proportion of acid to the food.

Let’s give an entirely hypothetical (as in, don’t try this at home) example. Say you have a recipe that includes 5 cups of carrots, 2 cups of cauliflower, a handful of herbs, 1 T of salt, 1/4 c. of sugar, and 3 cups of vinegar. It would be fine to reduce the cauliflower to 1 cup and add 1 cup of peppers, throw in some mustard seeds, and add more sugar. It would not be OK, though, to just add a cup of peppers without adding more vinegar, because then you’ve lowered the acid content (that is, raised the pH).

Um, if this is at all confusing, that means you should stick with the recipe.

Have fun, be careful, and remember to post your fabulous creations between Sunday, February 14 and midnight, Friday, February 19.

Happy canjamming!

Applesauce vs. Applesauce

dorisandjilly — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:55:57 +0000

Last year, you may recall, I made a lot of applesauce. When I had time, I canned it; when I was lazy, I just stuck it in the freezer. Nine months later, we’ve been eating lots of each. The results?

No contest.

The canned applesacue is sooooo much better than the frozen. It has excellent texture, a great taste, and you don’t have to remember to thaw it. The freezer applesauce is…well…gummy. It’s fine to bake with, but I’d only eat it in a pinch. I suppose it’s possible that all of the gummy apples ended up in the freezer batches, but that seems highly unlikely, no?

If you, too, want to can applesauce, you have some choices. The National Center for Home Food Preservation says 15 minutes for pints and 20 minutes for quarts in a boiling water bath. If you’d rather use a pressure cooker, they recommend 8 minutes for pints, 10 minutes for quarts, both at 5 pounds of pressure. When I’ve done this, I’ve always used 10 pounds of pressure for 0 minutes, which seems to work pretty well, too, but note that you do so at your own risk.

Canning Sauerkraut

dorisandjilly — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:10:50 +0000

Remember my pink sauerkraut experiment? It worked! And it’s delicious! And it made 2 1/2 quarts! Fortunately, sauerkraut cans well, so it’s now safely tucked away in jars. It will also keep well for months in the refrigerator if you have enough space.

Pink Sauerkraut (can be canned)

5, 10, or 15 pounds of red cabbage
lots of salt
a big jar or crock
a large plastic bag

1) Shred the cabbage very thin. If you don’t have a kraut board, a mandoline is your next best bet. If, like me, you’re frightened of mandolines, you can use a very sharp knife.

2) Combine each 5 pounds of cabbage with either 3 T of pickling salt or 4 1/5 T of kosher salt. Using your hands, make sure it’s evenly distributed.

3) Pack the cabbage as tightly as possible in large jars or crocks. The tighter it is, the better the fermentation will be. As a guideline, I was able to fit 8 pounds into a 3/4 gallon jar.

4) Move it to a cool dark place and wait one day. By now, the cabbage will have started forming its own brine. If the cabbage is not yet covered in liquid, make a new brine by dissolving 1 1/2 T pickling salt or 2 1/4 T kosher salt in 1 quart of water. A trick to keep the cabbage submerged is to insert a food-grade plastic ziplock bag in the jar and fill it with brine.

5) Wait patiently for 2 to 5 weeks, depending on the temperature of your basement or other cool place. It will ferment faster at higher temperatures, but you’ll get a better flavor in the 50 to 70°F range.

To can:

Pack as tightly as possible into clean, sterilized jars. Process pints in a boiling-water bath for 15 minutes, quarts for 20 minutes.

Doris and Jilly Make Cheese

dorisandjilly — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:05:19 +0000

As you’ve surely gathered by now, Jilly, the Southern Indiana sister, has some goats. Until a few months ago, however, she didn’t have any goat milk because her goats had never been bred. Recently, though, she and my brother-in-law increased their flock to include a goat in her milk. For better or for worse, they’re now getting somewhere between one and three quarts of goat milk every day. It’s delicious to drink, but if you have that much goat milk, inevitably your thoughts will eventually turn to cheese.

There are as many ways to make cheese as people who make it, so we’re going to spare you the blow-by-blow. Suffice it to say that it’s straight of out the 1970s-era Joy of Cooking, a time when mainstream cookbooks assumed that a typical housewife could get her hands on a gallon of unpastuerized, unhomogenized cow, sheep, or goat’s milk without too much trouble. To make a really nice cheese, you need a cheese culture—much like a yogurt culture—that will give you cheese a distinct flavor. For goats, obviously, a chevre culture would be most fitting, but a cheddar or mozzarella culture would also do pretty well. Without a culture, you can make surprisingly good cheese, but it’s somewhat less predictable.

In our version, we simply relied on rennet, a natural enzyme that will separate the parts that will become cheese from the whey. After we added the rennet, we heated the mixture to 104°F and held it there for half an hour. This is where things got murky. If you do this right, Jilly tells me, you end up with a big block of cheese-to-be that you can cut with a knife and then knead in the pan. We didn’t get that. We ended up with something that looked more like cottage cheese. Nevertheless, I “worked” it by running my hands through it for about 15 minutes, supposedly extracting much of the extra whey. After following the rest of Joy‘s somewhat convoluted instructions, we eventually drained the cheese into a form wrapped in cheese cloth, weighted it, and stuck the whole thing in the fridge.

Then we let it sit for 24 hours.

Given the odd texture at the beginning, our expectations were fairly low for this batch. But to our shock and delight, this pretty much turned out like feta. My sense is that you’d have to have a pretty hard-core sense of smell and/or taste to distinguish this batch from your basic sheep’s feta. It definitely had a little goat whanginess that separated it from cow’s milk cheese, but on the whole, we were pleased.

Neither one of us knows much about cheesemaking, but we’d very much like to learn—if you’ve figured out how to do it well, especially if you’re breeding your own cultures, can you please drop us a line?

Pink Sauerkraut

dorisgoat — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:27:52 +0000

Thank you all for your wonderful suggestions about what to do with all of my red cabbage. The folks on Facebook were big fans of various braised cabbage options, but I’m sticking with the blog favorite: sauerkraut. Let’s hold off on sharing that recipe until we see if it works, shall we? Nicely salted and stuffed in a jar, it’s now hanging out in my basement. Progress report in two weeks.

Update: It worked! Recipe and canning guidelines are here.

Spelt Salads

dorisgoat — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:55:49 +0000

Somewhere out there is a reader who’s upset that I never actually posted the uses for spelt that I promised you. Ian, these are for you. (Both recipes, if you can call them that, are mine.)

Spelt, Barley, and Walnut Salad

1 c. cooked spelt
1 c. cooked bulgur
1/4 to 1/2 c. walnuts, chopped
about 1/2 a small red onion, chopped
a nice handful of tarragon, chopped
juice of a lemon or two
about 1/4 c. olive oil
salt and pepper

1) Combine the spelt, bulgur, waluts, onion, and tarragon.

2) Make a vinaigrette by mixing the lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper.

3) Toss everything together and let it sit at least an hour before serving.

Spelt, Brown Rice, and Bok Choy Salad with Sesame Oil

1 c. cooked spelt
2 c. cooked brown rice
a big pile of bok choy, cut into little ribbons
a small hot pepper, cut into little strips
a couple of scallions, cut into 2 inch pieces, then sliced in half
1/4 c. soy sauce
1/4 c. rice wine vinegar
2 T sesame oil

1) Mix the spelt, brown rice, bok choy, hot peppers, and scallions.

2) Make a vinaigrette from the soy sauce, vinegar, and sesame oil.

3) Toss everything together and let it sit at least an hour before serving.

The Big Picture

Considering their ingredients, both of these were surprisingly tasty. The second one needed a little extra something: add more salt, or soy sauce, or lime juice, or hot sauce, or even nam plah (fish sauce), depending on what you like. If you want to create your own spelt salad, the basic pattern is:

1 c. cooked spelt
at least 1 c. of another grain (otherwise the spelt is just overwhelming)
something to give it character: nuts, vegetables, possibly even fruit
a vinaigrette that goes with the nuts/vegetables/fruit

Please leave a comment if you come up with a good one!

Strawberry Freezer Smackdown

dorisgoat — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:55:11 +0000

Assuming the weather holds, this weekend I plan to pick gobs and gobs of strawberries at Gaventa & Sons Farm in New Jersey. We’ll eat some, make some jam, and freeze the rest. But how to freeze? That is the question.

All the old home ec books say that the best way to freeze strawberries is to put them in a simple syrup and freeze in solid containers. For years I have resisted this on advice from my mother, who sold me on the idea of individually quick-freezing berries. If done right, you end up with bag fulls of individually frozen berries that you can then dump into smoothies, pies, or whatever else you’re making without thawing the whole bag. The basic procedure is to put clean berries in a single layer on a cookie sheet, then stick them in a freezer for a few hours, then transfer them immediately to freezer bags. Last year, though, I had so little room in my freezer that I was forced to use both methods.

Now, you may recall that I’ve been on a strawberry and rhubarb compote kick. So, a couple of days ago I pulled a quart container of berries from the freezer, stuck them in the fridge, and promptly forgot about them. When I finally opened them up, I was amazed:

Those are some fine lookin’ berries! Seriously: they look like they could have been sugared earlier this week. I would gladly put these over ice cream or yogurt, stick them in a fruit salad, use them to make a pie—whatever. The point is that they look and taste great.

Compare, then, with a bag of the “individually frozen” variety:

I’m not quite sure that the picture conveys how nasty these were. They’re clearly freezer burnt. Some are quite dried out. At some point they also thawed and refroze into a giant clump, defeating the purpose of the individual freezing technique.

I have no idea whether this is a question of competence (did I do it wrong? was my freezer not cold enough? eh? eh?) or simply about unrealistic expectations for the lifespan of frozen food, but for me, it seems pretty clear that the sugar pack method is foolproof. Those berries are AT LEAST a year old, possibly two, and they taste like they were picked yesterday. I’m sold.

Fresh Chickpea Salad

dorisandjilly — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 03:05:52 +0000

We know you’ve been on pins and needles wondering just what exactly we did with those fresh chickpeas. Today we bring you the answer.

Jilly was in town for this experiment, and I must confess that we were both a bit stumped by the chickpeas. Raw, they sort of tasted like regular peas, only milder, or like a regular chickpea that had soaked overnight. On the theory that they were vaguely pea-like, we first blanched them, then just tossed them with some regular salad ingredients and a citrus vinaigrette. Lemon juice would have made more sense, but as I had neglected to go lemon shopping and all of mine were disconcertingly mushy, we used orange juice instead. The final result was neither stunning nor disappointing, but the psychadelic colors made it all worthwhile.

For the vinaigrette:

Use any sort of basic citris vinaigrette:
juice of 1 lemon, or an orange, or probably lime (try it and see!)
3 T olive oil
salt
pepper

For the salad:

a handful of fresh chickpeas, shelled
1/4 small red cabbage, thinly sliced
handful fresh herbs: parsley or basil and/or tarragon or some other combo
1/4 red onion, finely chopped

Toss everything together and add more salt to taste. Let it marinate for at least half an hour before eating. Best served at room temperature.