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Nice! my chickens and my dog both enjoy some whey when we make yogurt. I feel like we did something else with it, too, but can’t recall what.
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Apr 10, 2023 14:05
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Whey is good to kick start new lacto ferments as well
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Apr 10, 2023 15:51
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AngryRobotsInc posted:Is there anything I can do with the left overs from making grape juice besides composting? The rest of my stuff in this current batch of canning either doesn't leave any waste, or I already have something to do with it, but for this I have somehow entirely failed to Google the phrase that would give me an answer. Grappa 
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Apr 10, 2023 15:52
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Made skyrr overnight. Reduced 4L to 2L using a pillowcase, which was soo much faster than straining it through coffee filters and now my dog is in pillowcase heaven. I also found 60 cucumbers on sale and made lactoferment pickles. Not a bad Saturday!
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Apr 23, 2023 03:10
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The grocery store had roma tomatoes for $1/pound today. Did you know it takes three and a half hours to turn fifteen pounds of tomatoes and various other ingredients into canned salsa? Peeling, de-seeding, and draining the tomatoes was by a wide margin the slowest step. I halved the tomatoes, baked them on a cookie sheet until the peels were loose, peeled them and removed the seeds by hand, ran them through a food mill, and drained off the juice.
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May 4, 2023 03:00
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Boiling water peeling has always been my method. It is in all day thing, although many hands, light work, etc.
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May 4, 2023 11:13
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The baking is helpful in that it also softens the tomato's flesh a bit, which makes it easier to mill. I imagine that roasting the tomatoes a bit also deepens their flavor, but I haven't done a compare and contrast. The downside of course is that you can't do it continuously; you have to prepare a batch, put them in the oven, remove them, let them cool enough to be handled, then run your second batch. EDIT: went to open a jar of strawberry jam, and found little dots on the surface:  I opened three of the jars and they're all like this. Deeper in the jam isn't visibly affected, but of course that doesn't make it safe. Dammit.  I wonder what I did wrong? I admit I haven't been using recipes for jam for awhile. I just peel/pit/puree the fruit as needed, add plenty (like, >1/4 cup for a batch of 8 8oz jars) of lemon juice or balsamic vinegar (this one used balsamic), and then add sugar to taste. And then process, of course. 10 minutes in the boiling water bath, and I'm near sea level so that should be accurate. I don't bother with pectin because for my purposes it doesn't matter if the jam is spreadable. All of the jars were properly sealed. Any thoughts? TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 15:25 on May 4, 2023 |
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May 4, 2023 14:47
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is it crystalized sugar?
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May 4, 2023 19:17
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The benefit of likely chunky salsa is never having to peel and deseed. I’ve been making jams thickened with chia seeds, haven’t canned any yet, but I’ve been really happy with the fridge stuff. And oof on those white spots I would really wanna try it… but would throw it out.
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May 4, 2023 19:36
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City of Glompton posted:is it crystalized sugar? I wouldn't think so...the spots are on the surface only. They're also distributed in a way that's very reminiscent of looking at a petri dish.  Bar Ran Dun posted:The benefit of likely chunky salsa is never having to peel and deseed. I don't mind eating the seeds, but it's important to strain out as much of the juice as possible, to keep the salsa from being watery. Oh, and that raises another benefit of the "roast the peels off" technique: tomato juice is held in little, uh, pouches, inside the tomato. If the juice hits boiling then the pouch bursts. When I remove the halved tomatoes from the oven, there's invariably a lot of juice sitting in the pan, where it can be easily drained off.
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May 4, 2023 20:36
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Yeah, toss those jams out and start using a recipe again to make sure you have enough sugar to bring that water activity to a safe range.
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May 4, 2023 20:54
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effika posted:Yeah, toss those jams out and start using a recipe again to make sure you have enough sugar to bring that water activity to a safe range. Can you clarify what you mean by "water activity" here? I'd really like to understand the theory behind water bath canning better than I do. My (potentially mistaken) impression was that the boiling water killed off everything that couldn't survive in an anaerobic environment, except for botulinum, which is kept under control by the acidity. So what purpose does the sugar serve?
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May 4, 2023 21:15
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Sugar doesn’t do anything for the safety of the canned food, it’s only for the taste and color of the end product. According to the National Center for Home Food Preservation you can can  berries in water, they don’t require syrup.I second the notion that it might be crystallized sugar. Did you happen to freeze any jars of that batch that you could compare it to?
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May 4, 2023 22:14
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Unfortunately, no, I didn't freeze any of the jars. I'm trying to avoid freezing glass because I've had repeated issues with jars breaking in the freezer, even when they aren't anywhere near over-filled. When I make jam, anything that doesn't get processed just goes into the fridge and gets eaten over the next week or so. I'm curious enough about this that I'd be willing to get the food tested, if there was some not-too-expensive way to do that.
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May 5, 2023 00:36
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm curious enough about this that I'd be willing to get the food tested, if there was some not-too-expensive way to do that. You can get an anaerobic plate count for about $30 bucks, a aerobic plate for about $15. When I’ve had to get mold and fungus ID’d by type that was like $100-150. You might be able to call extension and have it be cheaper or free depending on where you are. It’s amazing what some university programs will do for very small donations. I’ve gotten infesting bugs ID’d that way before.
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May 5, 2023 00:43
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Bar Ran Dun posted:You can get an anaerobic plate count for about $30 bucks, a aerobic plate for about $15. When I’ve had to get mold and fungus ID’d by type that was like $100-150. Will that differentiate between things that are present as spores in the food, vs things that are active cultures? I assume there's all kinds of stuff in those jars, but what I want to know about is the bit that's (apparently) growing inside of the sealed jars. But yeah, I need to figure out how to contact my ag extension. I should get the pressure gauge on my pressure canner tested, too...
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May 5, 2023 00:46
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The cheap stuff is just yep there’s stuff. To get it ID’d that’s the 100 to 150. You can call up a food testing lab and get a quote. Most big cities will have them. I’d call or email extension first they might just know by looking.
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May 5, 2023 01:00
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AngryRobotsInc posted:Is there anything I can do with the left overs from making grape juice besides composting? The rest of my stuff in this current batch of canning either doesn't leave any waste, or I already have something to do with it, but for this I have somehow entirely failed to Google the phrase that would give me an answer. It turns out that if you cook the must down into syrup, there are traditional Greek desserts based on it. https://www.thespruceeats.com/grape-must-pudding-1705373 https://eatyourselfgreek.com/moustokouloura-grape-molasses-cookies/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moustalevria
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May 5, 2023 01:28
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Can you clarify what you mean by "water activity" here? I'd really like to understand the theory behind water bath canning better than I do. My (potentially mistaken) impression was that the boiling water killed off everything that couldn't survive in an anaerobic environment, except for botulinum, which is kept under control by the acidity. So what purpose does the sugar serve? Joburg posted:Sugar doesn’t do anything for the safety of the canned food, it’s only for the taste and color of the end product. According to the National Center for Home Food Preservation you can can NCHFP is correct, but there is more to the story. There are many ways to render products shelf-stable. Home water bath canning uses heat and pH as primary controls against microorganism growth. The heating step is a kill step, and the pH should be low enough to keep anything remaining from growing at room temperature as long as the seal is undisturbed. (If the seals didn't take, storing the jars at a temperature low enough to control growth is an option.) Another way to keep microorganisms from growing is to limit the amount of water available for use. The amount of water available for use (that can become an active participant in chemical reactions) is called Water Activity. Keeping that under a certain amount will mean the microbes can't use it and won't grow. Salt and sugar are to common ways to keep more of the water off-limits to the microbes (as is simply evaporating it away). (It's also why bread bakers will sometimes use special yeasts in high-sugar breads.) So, why did I say to add sugar and decrease the water activity, if canning shouldn't depend on it? Honestly, I'd been working with people who have lab-tested recipes and a lot of lab equipment to measure stuff like water activity and pH all this week and it was in my mind. It isn't a primary control for home canning, and shouldn't be. But it can help if something starts to go wrong. It's another barrier to microbial growth, but it probably wouldn't have saved that no-recipe jam alone. And speaking of the recipe... Go back to using the recipe so you get more consistent results. Make sure you use a vinegar with at least 5% acidity. Boil longer, if it seems that's needed. Talk to your ag extension. Maybe you just got unlucky with something that day. Good luck on the next batch!
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May 5, 2023 02:16
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Thanks for the added details! I appreciate the insight from a more knowledgeable individual. For what it's worth, I boiled this jam for quite a substantial amount of time; it went past the foamy stage and into the glossy stage. I think of jam as being kiiiind of like making candy, where the best results are found when you've boiled off "all" of the water. Not that I'm using a candy thermometer here, or that I'm going until I'm not getting any more steam at all, but this jam did get the heck boiled out of it. As for acid, I used a generous allotment of balsamic vinegar that's rated at 6% acidity, whatever that means. Would it kill people to give a pH rating? The balsamic was pretty old though...I suppose one possibility is that the jar of vinegar might not have been properly sealed (the lid is a bit gummed up with dried balsamic vinegar), which might permit the acetic acid in the vinegar to evaporate/escape? It's a better theory than anything else I have right now.
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May 5, 2023 02:52
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Thanks for the added details! I appreciate the insight from a more knowledgeable individual. 6% of it is acetic acid, 94% is essentially water. That's about 1M solution. Ka = .0000176 pH = 2.38
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May 5, 2023 03:17
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The grocery store had roma tomatoes for $1/pound today. Did you know it takes three and a half hours to turn fifteen pounds of tomatoes and various other ingredients into canned salsa? If you're using a food mill, you can pretty much skip the rest of those steps. Wash them, maybe halve them, and cook them a bit...baked, simmered, whatever is most convenient. The food mill will remove the skins and seeds for you. I only manually peel (usually by blanching) if I want whole or diced tomatoes. For sauce/juice/chunkless salsa, you can just let the food mill do all the work.
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May 5, 2023 16:42
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JoshGuitar posted:If you're using a food mill, you can pretty much skip the rest of those steps. Wash them, maybe halve them, and cook them a bit...baked, simmered, whatever is most convenient. The food mill will remove the skins and seeds for you. I only manually peel (usually by blanching) if I want whole or diced tomatoes. For sauce/juice/chunkless salsa, you can just let the food mill do all the work. My experience with the mill was that it did a good job of crushing the tomatoes, but a lot of the tomato flesh (which I wanted to keep) wouldn't get pressed through the grating, so I was doing a lot of scooping flesh out of the top of the mill and then dumping it into the pot. If I left the skins on at this stage then I would have had to hand-separate them from the flesh. I think I could have done what you suggest if I'd cooked the tomatoes for longer, though. There was just enough not-thoroughly-cooked tomato flesh present for it to be workable as it was. Hopefully I remember your advice for next time!
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May 5, 2023 17:35
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If you are often processing tomatoes in bulk, you don't want a food mill, you want a tomato press. The manufacturer of mine is now out of business, but here's a similar one from Amazon. This has two great advantages: it's a continuous processor, so there's no need to ever stop and pull out the pulp; and all the seeds and skin pour out a separate chute on the side. On the business end, all you get is fine tomato pulp. Back when we had a proper garden, we used to freeze fresh tomato puree, which makes a far fresher-tasting sauce than frozen or canned tomato sauce. It can also separate apple skins and seeds from applesauce. You can buy separate parts to strain berries, grapes, and salsa.
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May 5, 2023 18:34
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Arsenic Lupin posted:If you are often processing tomatoes in bulk, you don't want a food mill, you want a tomato press. The manufacturer of mine is now out of business, but here's a similar one from Amazon. This has two great advantages: it's a continuous processor, so there's no need to ever stop and pull out the pulp; and all the seeds and skin pour out a separate chute on the side. On the business end, all you get is fine tomato pulp. Back when we had a proper garden, we used to freeze fresh tomato puree, which makes a far fresher-tasting sauce than frozen or canned tomato sauce. It can also separate apple skins and seeds from applesauce. Oh, that looks like it would make things way easier. When you mention applesauce, are you saying that you'd use this tool to make applesauce, with no mill involved at all? Just cook the applies down, then run them through the press? I guess the remaining question would be, what does a mill do that this can't do? Because right now I use the food mill pretty much just for applesauce and salsa. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 22:54 on May 5, 2023 |
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May 5, 2023 22:27
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Arsenic Lupin posted:If you are often processing tomatoes in bulk, you don't want a food mill, you want a tomato press. The manufacturer of mine is now out of business, but here's a similar one from Amazon. This has two great advantages: it's a continuous processor, so there's no need to ever stop and pull out the pulp; and all the seeds and skin pour out a separate chute on the side. On the business end, all you get is fine tomato pulp. Back when we had a proper garden, we used to freeze fresh tomato puree, which makes a far fresher-tasting sauce than frozen or canned tomato sauce. It can also separate apple skins and seeds from applesauce. I have a vintage Victorio one like that, that I got for $10 at an estate sale. That's what I use instead of a food mill, although I've used a mill before too. To answer TooMuchAbstraction's question, yes you can just cook apples to soften them then run them through. You'd think with it being hand cranked it would take forever, but I can run a bigass stock pot of tomatoes through it in no time. Maybe 10 minutes? Oh and when the skins and seeds come out the end, run them through a second time for a little bit better yield (I dunno, maybe 5%). Then dehydrate the seeds and skins and make tomato powder, which is a nice flavoring and doubles at ghetto instant tomato paste. Actually that's one thing I do like about manually peeling tomatoes for diced or whatever, the skins alone make a better powder than skins and seeds. And I haven't found a good way to separate the skins from the seeds either before or after dehydration, so you're kinda stuck powdering them all together.
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May 5, 2023 22:34
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Oh, that looks like it would make things way easier. When you mention applesauce, are you saying that you'd use this tool to make applesauce, with no mill involved at all? Just cook the applies down, then run them through the press? (2) The tomato press is a bit more of a hassle to set up and clean than the food mill. More parts to be washed after use. And yeah, mine is a Victorio; I couldn't remember the name.
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May 6, 2023 00:26
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Has anyone ever pickled fresh bamboo shoots? There's an orchard here in California that has branched off into a side business of bamboo shoots during the off season. They are absolutely, mind-blowingly delicious fresh, but one shipment is too much to eat in one go. I'd like to pickle half of it, but the caveat is that raw bamboo shoots have cyanide-adjacent compounds that need cooking to get rid of. So I'm hesitating between cooking them and then pickling them, which I think would make it almost impossible to grow a good lactoferment, or just pickling them directly, which is _supposed_ to also break down the toxins according to ancestral chinese cooking resources. Like, there's plenty of videos of Chinese homesteaders pickling "sour bamboo shoots" with just salt + water + a couple of weeks.
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May 26, 2023 03:46
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When it comes to making jam, strawberry jam especially, has anyone here tried just boiling the jam for a long time to see if that makes the foam go away? I would think that if you boiled the jam for long enough, eventually it would stop making foam, but I've never been patient enough. I know you can cut down on foam by adding some butter, or you can just skim it off, I'm just curious.
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Jun 1, 2023 20:57
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Boiling would cause more foam, if you actually mean boiling and not simmering. More air bubbles = more foam. Furthermore the longer you cook it, the more cooked it tastes, which is not good with strawberries or raspberries.
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Jun 1, 2023 21:04
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Add butter to your strawberry jam anyway; it's so good
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Jun 1, 2023 21:09
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Anybody got tips for where to get lots of fruit in a city? I'd like to make some jam, I'm in the SF Bay Area and poo poo's expensive at the grocery story. Farmer's markets also seem pretty pricey around here. There's a "produce terminal" nearby, never gone to something like that but maybe it's a good option?
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Jun 1, 2023 21:21
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Boiling would cause more foam, if you actually mean boiling and not simmering. More air bubbles = more foam. Furthermore the longer you cook it, the more cooked it tastes, which is not good with strawberries or raspberries. My theory was that if you boil off the water then you'd be left with just the solids, which wouldn't be able to foam. Kind of like when making candy. I hadn't realized that cooking for too long would negatively impact the flavor. Pham Nuwen posted:Anybody got tips for where to get lots of fruit in a city? I'd like to make some jam, I'm in the SF Bay Area and poo poo's expensive at the grocery story. Farmer's markets also seem pretty pricey around here. There's a "produce terminal" nearby, never gone to something like that but maybe it's a good option? Farmer's markets are your best bet, unfortunately, unless you're willing to take a long drive to get into more rural territory. The good news is that produce quality in the SF Bay Area is usually quite high. My advice is to go to the market regularly and hope for a sale. I'm making strawberry jam right now from a half-box I got for $20.
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Jun 1, 2023 21:34
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:My theory was that if you boil off the water then you'd be left with just the solids, which wouldn't be able to foam. Kind of like when making candy. When you simmer jelly or jam, you are doing two things: reducing the amount of water and forming the pectin. When you stop cooking and let the jam cool, the pectin sets up. This is why some recipes have you pour jam or jelly on to a cold plate to see how gelled it is. If you boil a jam containing pectin too long, you will wind up with a very stiff jam. Pectin isn't gelatin; it's a vegetable starch found naturally, but in different amounts in different fruits. I would strongly suggest buying a copy of the Ball Blue Book, which is actually a pamphlet that's reissued every year. When you're canning, which jam-making absolutely is, you cannot afford to go by the seat of your pants. That's the pathway that leads to foods that make you very sick -- not just botulinism, but molds. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jun 1, 2023 |
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Jun 1, 2023 21:58
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Pectin isn't obligatory in jams; you just have runnier jam if you don't add it. For my use case I don't need my jam to gel; I'm mixing it with yogurt or spooning it over ice cream. I understand and appreciate your concern that I might gently caress things up and have unsafe food. I have no interest in ingesting botulin or any other toxins. My goal has always been to understand the underlying processes that govern food preservation, so that I know why recipes say to do things in particular ways. That's why I was pH testing my jam earlier, for example: I wanted to make sure that I'd achieved an acidic enough mix. I'm also careful about my preparation and processing times/temperatures. I do not feel like I am flying by the seat of my pants, especially now that I'm no longer blindly trusting that my acid sources are actually as acidic as they claim to be.
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Jun 1, 2023 23:15
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My wife got me a 2 gallon ceramic K&K fermenting crock as an early anniversary gift and I think I've truly become old because I'm really excited about it.
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Jun 19, 2023 05:17
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Oh man, I want one of those. Hoping for a major cabbage harvest this year.
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Jun 20, 2023 18:11
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I’m working my way through the all the info in the first few posts but had one quick question I recently tried Oh Snap's pickled carrots and absolutely love them. naturally, I've been trying to make my own approximation rather than pay $2 for eight baby carrots in a plastic bag, but the brine recipes I've tried don't even come close. they're all weak and the carrots taste substantially sweeter, even when I've cut the sugar down. I don't know enough about the process/science to feel comfortable making drastic changes on my own so I figured I'd ask the experts ideally I want a super vinegary, fairly salty end product that I could do in the fridge since I'd go through 2+lbs per week. can I make a brine with just vinegar and no water? how much salt per cup should I be looking at? any tips and/or tricks ?
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Jun 21, 2023 18:13
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If you're just doing fridge food that'll get eaten in a week or two, you don't need to worry about the science. There's no preservation or fermenting going on, it's just standard food prep. Where you start getting into trouble is if you're planning to leave the food out at room temperature for more than a few hours. It takes specific setups for that to work. I don't know about pickled carrots, but for cucumbers, what I do is soak the veggies in a saturated salt solution (i.e. keep adding salt to the water until the salt no longer dissolves). Let that sit in the fridge overnight, then remove the veggies from the brine, and lightly rinse them off to remove any salt crystals on the surface. Then stick them in the pickling juice, which, for my cucumbers, is generally 2/3rds white vinegar, 1/3 water, with pickling spice, garlic, and chilis added, simmered over a stove for 10-20 minutes, then the solids strained out. Let that sit in the fridge for a day or two before eating. The overnight soak in the brine pulls salt into the veggies, but it also pulls water out of the veggies, which leaves them more inclined to soak up the pickling juice, intensifying the flavor.
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Jun 21, 2023 18:30
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I’ve had good luck fermenting carrots in a crock. Not really any different than doing fermented pickles.
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Jun 21, 2023 18:32
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