Brooklyn Feed

I learned how to make sauerkraut in a workshop given by Sandor Katz. You can see his book Wild Fermentation in my booklist on the right. What I learned is that it is probably one of the easiest things you could make. So go ahead and impress all of your friends by making some.

What you need:

A variety of vegetables - You can go with just cabbage, but in the workshop Sandor used all kinds of fall veggies. I made a batch like that before and it came out delicious. In this batch I used a head of cabbage, a few giant carrots, a few radishes (the gorgeous finger-like ones above) a couple of turnips, an onion and  some bok choy. It’s a great way to use up fall veggies from the farmer’s market or your CSA.

Slice and chop up your veggies. I shred the cabbage and bok choy and cut everything else about 1/8″ thick. Place them in a large, non-reactive bowl and add a lot of salt. For this amount of veggies, I added 3T of salt. Then you knead the salt into the veggies to break down the cell walls and start drawing out the moisture. I’m not sure if you can tell from the photos, but the veggies are starting to get wetter as I go.

Once you have a fair amount of water, you want to put everything into a jar or crock to ferment. I use a big Ball jar. You have to really smush the veggies into the jar and press down on them very firmly. Add all of the liquid as well. I got a huge bowl of veggies to take up about 6 cups of space in this jar. As you push, the liquid rises above the level of the veggies. You want this to happen. Keep the veggies pushed down under the surface of the water. I don’t have a fancy sauerkraut pot (yet), so I put a glass on the top, which weighs the veggies down.

You don’t want to seal the jar, but you do want it covered. Wrap a cloth or paper towel around the top and secure with a rubber band. And then you let it sit for a week or so. Now you have to de-program your brain and let this sit out unrefrigerated. It will even emit bubbles, which made me surprisingly squeamish the first time I did this. The length of time it takes to ferment depends on how warm it is and also how strong you like your sauerkraut.  My batch is ready to bring up to my in-laws for the Thanksgiving weekend.

I am in the midst of making my first batch of fruit vinegar. If it works out, it will be ridiculously simple. You just take some ripe or even overripe fruit, add sugar water and wait. I’m going to see how it turns out before I post a recipe. My elderflower experiment wasn’t the success I had hoped it would be.

Last week we went up to my in-laws to celebrate the Jewish New Year. One of their big traditions is the making of kreplach, which is the Jewish version of a dumpling or wonton. It is filled with brisket and carmelized onions that are then ground together.

My father-in-law learned how to make them as a young boy by helping his bubbe (grandmother) and mother. His job was to crank the meat grinder. He has carried on the tradition, using his bubbe’s old rolling pin. They are extremely labor intensive, as you make and roll out the dough for each dumpling. And we’re not talking about making a dozen. He makes about 18 dozen at a go. He experimented with using wonton wrappers in the past to save some of the labor, but always preferred the real kreplach dough he and his bubbe made.

This year we decided to help him make them. I brought up my KitchenAid stand mixer, with the meat grinder and pasta roller attachments. I figured we could make the dough and then run it through the rollers to make it thin. If that worked, it could save a lot of labor. It turned out to work really well, and we set up an assembly line of sorts with each family member rolling, cutting, filling and folding the kreplach. We made about 19 dozen in exactly 3 hours. After they have been filled, you boil them for a few minutes and then lay them out to dry. When you are ready to eat them, you fry them in corn oil, or put them into soup. They are delicious and something to look forward to every year.

My father-in-law said that as kids, he and his brother used to fight to get the next kreplach out of the frying pan. And don’t you know that while we were making them, his brother called.

I can’t give you their family recipe, as it’s not mine to give, but here’s a link to a different one. They show very different fillings than what Neil’s family uses, but I’m sure they are delicious as well.

Elderflower syrup is one of those magical liquids that is a perfect mix of sweet and floral. It is the G-rated version of St. Germain. You mix a tablespoon or two with seltzer and you have a refreshing summer drink. Syrups aren’t as common here as they are in Europe, and therefore are generally pretty expensive. The one I have was brought to me by friends visiting from Austria.

With all the beautiful, creamy white blossoms popping last weekend, I decided to try making my own syrup. I did a quick search and found this recipe. It calls for citric acid, which I didn’t have on hand. I substituted a packet of EmergenC and hoped that it wouldn’t give it a strange flavor (which it didn’t).

You have to brace yourself for the insane amount of sugar used in the recipe. Also, I suggest having everything on hand, because elderflower blossoms are very delicate and start to wilt very quickly.

Recipe adapted from Hunter Angler Gardner Cook:

3 quarts water
entire bag of sugar
juice of 6 lemons
zest of 6 lemons
2 packets of EmergenC or 6 T citric acid (to prevent spoilage)
75-100 elderflower flower heads (I just filled the jars to the top) with the stems trimmed

Fill a bowl with the flowers, lemon juice and lemon zest. Heat the water and sugar on the stove until the sugar dissolves. Add the citric acid. Pour liquid into the bowl and stir.

Cover the bowl with a cloth and let sit for a few days. Strain the liquid through cheesecloth into clean jars.

Since our trip was ending, I didn’t have the time to let everything sit in a bowl. I put the flowers and lemon juice and zest into jars and poured the sugar syrup into them. I saved some extra syrup, which I used to top off the jars once I strained out the flower heads.

The flavor is nice and lemony, but I still prefer my expensive Austrian syrup. I have to figure out how to get more of the floral perfume to infuse into the syrup. I’m not too disappointed because I know that we will happily use up our homemade elderflower syrup.

Today might win the gross winter day award here in Brooklyn with storm drains clogged with slush and the street corners filling up with several inches of slushy rain. I keep trying to remember to think like a kid, so I put on rain boots and enjoyed stomping in the puddles as I took Lindsay to school.

Here are some photos from a visit with my in-laws up in the Berkshires. We enjoyed the wintery day by snow shoeing on and around a lake. After that, Lindsay and her grandparents made a delicious pasta fagioli in their big colonial fireplace.

By this time, nobody in the family was reaching for apples. I still had a huge pile of them, so I decided to do my first experiment in canning. Apple sauce. I have made apple sauce before, which is ridiculously easy, but I have never canned it. I have the book Putting Food By, which is great, but should be subtitled Scaring You Silly About Salmonella. It gives very detailed directions about canning to ensure success. Here’s a site that gives some simple instructions for hot water bath canning, which is what you use when canning fruits, tomatoes or other items with high acidity.

I wasn’t really following a recipe and since this was the first time canning, I made a guess as to how many apples to use. Turns out that I could have double the amount, because in the end I only had 4 1/2 jars worth of applesauce. That was a disappointing yield coupled with the fact that I still had some leftover apples. Not too many though, so I think my work is donee!

Recipe for Applesauce (very loose guide)

Peel and core as many apples as you have. Add to a pot with some liquid like apple cider, apple juice or water. The liquid keeps the apples from scorching. Cook slowly over med-low heat. Stir often. Spice how you like your apple sauce. I used plenty of lemon juice and grated ginger. You could be more traditional and use cinnamon.

Stir and taste often. You can run it through a food mill if you like a liquid applesauce. I prefer mine chunky, so I attacked the apples with a potato masher once they were soft.

Next stop in tackling apple mountain was an apple cake. This recipe can be made with almost any kind of fruit. It’s delicious and not overly sweet. And it comes out looking gorgeous. The pieces are apple quarters that are sliced thinly, but not all the way through. You place them on top of the batter, cut side up. They sink in and fan out and look amazing. I just sprinkled the top with some sugar and cinnamon.

European Fruit Cake

2  Sticks of butter

1 1/2  cups Sugar

2  Cups Flour (all purpose)

2  teaspoons baking powder

teaspoon cinnamon or cardamom or vanilla, or any other spice you might like

Zest of one lemon

1 pinch of salt

4 eggs

Any fruit you like: plums, peaches, apples, or mixture

Lemon juice for mixing with fruit

1 to 2  tablespoons of sugar mixed with spice to sprinkle over fruit

• Preheat oven 350 F
• Butter your springform pan (10 to 12 Inches) well;
• In a bowl, mix the butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time; mix.
• In another bowl mix your flour, baking powder, spice, lemon zest and salt.
• Prepare your fruit, cut in pieces or halves. Use some lemon juice for your fruits – to taste.
• Add your flour mixture to your egg-butter mixture. Spoon batter into your springform pan; add all the fruit on top of batter (fruit will sink through the batter as it cooks). Remember you can add as much fruit as you like but the cooking time will vary slightly. Sprinkle the top of the fruit with some sugar and spice.

Place in oven for approximately 45 to 65 minutes, test with a skewer, it should come out clean.

After about a week of non-stop apple eating, I decided that I would have to be more creative to use up all the apples we had picked. I cut up about a dozen apples, dropped them in lemon water and packed them off with Lindsay for her class snack. I still had a mountain left.

We went over to a friend’s house for dinner, so I decided to bake an apple pie.

I used the recipe from The New Best Recipe cookbook. The crust was amazing, but I thought the pie itself could have used more pizzazz. Next time I will add a lot more lemon zest.

There was still a mountain of apples…

When you are interested in foraging, you really have to pay attention to the seasons. If you read about ramps in the winter, you are going to have to wait until spring to find them. Shopping at grocery stores seems to have made us forget that certain things grow at certain times of year. At least locally, that is. I had read about making acorn flour a while ago, but it wasn’t acorn season. I forgot all about it until I saw Stephanie mention it in her blog. I was going up to the Berkshires for the weekend and it was the right time of year for acorns.

We went on a hike and I brought a backpack along to gather nuts. I had no idea how many I would need, so I summoned my inner squirrel and kept gathering and filling my bag. When we got home, I weighed the nuts I had found and had 8lbs. After pulling off the tops and discarding the ones that had worm holes in them I had 6lbs. I read in a couple of places that you place the acorns in water and the ones that float aren’t viable. I tried that and almost all of mine floated. I decided to check inside and see what they looked like. Some were bad, but most were good, so I decided to skip that theory.

Now comes the gross part…grubs! Many of the acorns had grubs. The fat, white, wiggly things totally grossed me out, so I decided to bake the acorns at 170 degrees F to kill them. A dead grub is still gross, but a wiggling one is much worse.

After discarding the acorns that were discolored or had grubs in them I think I was down to about 2-3 lbs. Acorns are full of tannins, so you have to soak them for several days to remove the bitterness. I tried soaking them when they were chopped, but thought that the water wasn’t getting to the inside of the acorn meat. I ran them through a meat grinder to chop them smaller.

Directions for how to make acorn flour:

• Gather a ridiculous amount of acorns
• Discard any that have obvious problems (squirrel bites or worm holes)
• Bake acorns at 170F for 1 hour to kill grubs
• Shell acorns tossing out any that are discolored or have grubs. It is pretty obvious which ones are good and which ones aren’t
• Grind acorns in a food processor, or a meat grinder
• Wrap in several layers of cheesecloth and soak in water. You will need to do this for several days, until the meat isn’t bitter.
• Lay the acorn flour on a pan and either dry in the sun, or in the oven on the lowest setting. Make sure it’s completely dry or it will mold.

I will post some recipes within the next few days.

Kombucha scoby

A few weeks back I took a fermentation workshop with Sandor Katz. One of the many foods and beverages he covers in his book Wild Fermentation is kombucha. Kombucha is a fermented beverage made from sweetened tea. What gets the fermentation action going is a gelatinous clump of bacteria and yeast called the scoby, the mother, or the tea beast (love that one!) It’s a rubbery disk that is pretty unappetizing looking.

I was lucky enough to get a scoby from a generous person at the workshop, who brought extras. You see, when you make kombucha, you use a starter scoby, but then a new one forms. So then you have two, so you can then get two jars of kombucha brewing. But then you have 4 scobies. You can see how this can get out of hand quickly. In fact, if anyone lives near downtown Brooklyn and wants to try their hand at making kombucha, I can pass along a scoby to get them started. Just email me!

Fabric lid

Kombucha Recipe adapted from Wild Fermentation. To make 2 quarts.

Ingredients:

2 quarts of water

1/4 c. sugar

4 teabags of black tea

1 c. mature kombucha (you can buy it at most health food stores) This is like sourdough starter for kombucha.

kombucha scoby

Add sugar to the jar and boil water. When water has reached a boil, pour it into the jar (in this case a 2-quart jar) just to the point of where it starts to taper in. Stir to dissolve the sugar.

Add the teabags and let steep at least 15 minutes. Allow the liquid to cool to body/room temperature.

Add the mature kombucha and then the scoby. Put the scoby in opaque side up. Cover with a cloth which allows air circulation but keeps flies out. I take the metal disk out of the 2-part mason jar lid and put the screw ring on over a piece of fabric.

After a few days, taste the liquid (I pull some out with a straw. You know the trick where you dip the straw in and then put your finger on the end and pull up the liquid in the straw…). This part is really subjective. Kombucha ferments faster in warm weather, so keep that in mind. It’s been crazy hot here and I’ve still let my kombucha ferment on the counter for a couple of weeks. The longer it ferments, the more of a tangy, sour flavor it will have. If you let it go too far it will turn into vinegar. When it is to your liking, remove the scoby and store the kombucha in the fridge. If you like to flavor your kombucha, this is the time. I added lemon juice, some chopped ginger and some raspberry purée I happened to have on hand. I was emulating the trilogy mix by Synergy. I fill Synergy bottles, which are 16oz with my finished brew. To this I added juice from 1/4 lemon, a few slices or chunks of peeled ginger and about 1 t. raspberry puree. I have some in the fridge now with a few blueberries floating in the bottles.

When I pour the kombucha into my drinking glass, I always strain it to remove the ginger and any slimy bits (I know. Real appetizing. Makes you really want to run out and make some when I mention slimy bits) . It’s a little effervescent and very refreshing. And much to my dismay, kombucha is very trendy right now.

And if you don’t have any takers for the scoby, you can compost it, bury it with fruit trees or give it to your chickens. Mine wolfed it right down.

UPDATE: After several months of brewing kombucha, I’ve decided to take a break. I don’t have any more scobys to pass along. There are sites that explain how to grow a scoby from commercial kombucha. Here’s one.