Sauerkraut, take 1 (and 2)

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I have been meaning to try making my own sauerkraut for years, so I finally bought some airlock lids for mason jars and some glass weights and made a couple of 1-quart batches. If these work out well, I might get a nice fermentation crock and try fermenting other things. Maybe kimchi.

Today’s batches: 800 grams cabbage, 18 grams salt, and 750 grams cabbage, 50 grams carrot, 18 grams salt, 5 grams caraway seeds. I’ll check in on them in a week or so and see how they’re looking.

I’ve got a copy of The Art of Fermentation, but today’s experiment is mostly inspired by https://www.makesauerkraut.com/.

Continue reading Sauerkraut, take 1 (and 2) →

Eddie Hall’s Salmon Sandwich

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This is probably Alexandra Hall’s Salmon Sandwich, actually, since in the video we got the idea from, I’m pretty sure Eddie said his wife made the sandwiches for him. And I can’t find the video now to see whether what we’re making is anything like what Eddie was so enthusiastic about, but either way, it’s a damn good sandwich.

Toast one slice of rye bread. I’m using Oroweat Jewish rye right now, but probably anything would be good. Definitely look for something with either dill or caraway, though.

Cut the slice of bread in half to make two very thin slices of bread, each toasted on one side. Basically, go halfway to making Melba toast. We’re not cutting the crust off, but you can see Jacques Pépin demonstrate here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1688198741345173

On the un-toasted side of one slice, spread 1/2 ounce of lowfat cream cheese. Slice a dill pickle (I like Nalley garlic dill pickles, whole, so I can slice them more thinly than their sandwich-sliced version is) into long, thin slices (not rounds) and add a layer of sliced pickle on top of the cream cheese. Put 1 ounce of smoked salmon on top, and cover with the other half of the toasted bread. Lox might also work; I haven’t tried that. Smoked salmon definitely does.

If you’re feeling fancy, you could cut the crusts off these, cut them into triangles, and serve them at a garden party. You might have to add another layer of cream cheese to make it hold together.

These are delicious, and way more satisfying than you might expect for something so small.

Smoked Sausage, Greens, and Bean Soup

Recipes

We’ve been making this soup with Good Mother Stallard beans, which may be taking away from how good the beans are on their own. But it’s a good soup.

Put one bag (one pound? 22 ounces? I forget how much is in a bag, but it’s at least a pound) of beans in water to soak overnight. In the morning, put them in the crock pot with a split onion, some garlic, a few bay leaves, and boiling water (to get the pot up to temperature more quickly). They should be ready in about three hours.

When the beans are creamy, remove the onion and bay leaves, and any of the garlic that hasn’t turned to paste. In a large pot or dutch oven, soften an onion, a couple of bell peppers, celery, and carrots. Probably at least a cup of each, although maybe less carrots than everything else. Don’t skimp on the bell peppers or celery. Add less than one chopped Kiolbassa smoked sausage, some garlic granules, and red pepper flakes. Add in the beans and their broth, and some Better Than Bouillon chicken stock base, probably around a tablespoon, maybe less. Toss in a whole bunch of chopped greens — collards, kale, turnip greens, beet greens, whatever. I just had half a pound each of frozen collards and turnip greens in the freezer, so I used those. If you’ve got fresh savory, scrape the leaves from a good hunk of that in as well. If you don’t have savory, thyme is probably good.

If you salted the beans while they were cooking and you put in too much chicken base, you might have to add some diced potato to bring the saltiness down. Simmer everything for 15-30 minutes. A dash of Cholula with a serving is delicious.

Mazurka

Recipes

Cam and I both have strong memories of getting Mazurkas after high school, her at the Rising Sun fruit stand and me probably from Espresso Express or PCC. They were cheap, tasty, felt just a step up from homemade, and great for eating as you walked home from school. And apparently they were a super local Seattle thing, made by Jessica Reisman at McGraw Street Bakery in Queen Anne.

You can still get “oat bars” at a lot of coffeeshops around town (or at least I assume you can; I haven’t actually been in one in over a year now), but they aren’t the same. I don’t know why we were thinking about them recently, but we were, and we found the recipe. Here’s how I made it tonight:

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The Best Gingersnaps

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This recipe comes from The Perfect Cookie, a cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen. It’s the first recipe I’ve tried out of that book, and so far it’s living up to its title. The baking soda gives these a great cracked surface, and baking them longer at a lower temperature makes them completely crunchy like a good gingersnap should be, not chewy like a molasses cookie.

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Firecracker carrot comparison

Recipes

I’m making a couple quick batches of pickled baby carrots today, to see what variations on Alton Brown’s recipe do. For the first batch I’m using the recipe straight from Alton Brown. For the second batch I’m adding 1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder, doubling the crushed chili peppers, adding 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and using white vinegar instead of cider vinegar. Oh, and I added a dash of cayenne, because why not.

The hard part will be letting them sit for a week before trying them. The last batch I made, I ate within the next 48 hours. It had no discernible heat, though, and in theory letting Alton’s recipe sit for a week could have brought that out. So these two batches I will do my best to leave alone at least until the weekend.

Note to self: the jar with the black tape on it is the experimental batch. Also, Alton’s recipe calls for 1/2 pound of carrots, which is nuts. That amount of liquid is more than enough for a whole pound.

Red and Green Sauce

Recipes

Posting this here because we keep meaning to try to recreate the recipe, and then losing the photo of the ingredients.

Javier’s Red and Green Sauces, from Veggie Alley, circa 2011:

Green: Cilantro, Parsley, Vinegar, Salt, Olive Oil

Red: Red Bell Pepper, Jabanero, Onion, Garlic, Salt, Olive Oil, Vinegar

Ginger Beer

Recipes

It’s summer, which means ginger beer! Or, I guess, force-carbonated ginger lemonade.

The batch I just made had these proportions:

  • 160g lemon juice
  • 150g ginger juice
  • 250g cayenne simple syrup
  • 1000g water

The cayenne simple syrup was made with 1 cup each of sugar and water, and 1 teaspoon of cayenne. It has a bit of heat right now; we’ll see if it gets hotter as it sits. If so, maybe cut that back to 1/2 a teaspoon, because I think where it is right now is good.

We originally set out to clone Rachel’s Ginger Beer, but our test batches kept tasting not ginger-y enough, and I haven’t had a reference taste of RGB recently. I’d be willing to bet that even without the cayenne, this has more of a kick now, though.

The recipe we started with called for 1 part ginger, 2 parts lemon, 3 parts simple syrup, and 10 parts water. After a bunch of experimentation, we seem to like it with roughly equal lemon and ginger, and a bit less sugar. The cayenne is a new experiment with this batch, based on really liking Columbia Gorge’s Meyer Ginger Lemonade, which has some cayenne in it. We’ll see if that’s worth keeping or not.

A note on carbonation: I’m carbonating this with a rig I put together myself after I’d crunched the numbers on whether it made more sense to buy a SodaStream or put together a carbonation rig from the homebrew supply shop. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:

“Basic ball-lock keg kit (regulator, gas hose, beer hose with party faucet, fittings): $55. New aluminum 5-lb CO2 tank: $65. Carbonation cap for PET bottles: $15. Shipping: $8. Fill-up of CO2 tank at local fire extinguisher supply house: $15. Total cost: $158. (And I have some extra parts that I can use to tap a corny keg should one of my homebrewing friends bring me one of his batches.)

The cheapest basic sodastream starter kit runs around $85, so up front, I’m down $73. (That’s the lowest-end sodastream kit’s online price, mind you, not including shipping or tax. Buying one of the higher-end models at retail, I might be breaking even already.)

A 60L sodastream tank holds 14.5oz of CO2. So one refill of the 5lb tank is equivalent to 5.5 sodastream tanks. Each 14.5oz tank exchange costs $15, and I’ll need 4.5 more of those to match the amount of CO2 in my tank. That’s $67.50, so by the time I need a refill of my tank, I’ll only be down $9.50.

By the time I’ve gone through my second tank of C02, I’ll have spent another $15. If I had gone with sodastream, I would have needed another 5.5 tank exchanges, or $82.50. At this point, I’ll be ahead $58. Every time after this that I fill my tank, I’ll be ahead by another $67.50.

And that’s ignoring the fact that there’s nearly 10% local sales tax on the sodastream tank exchange, while the $15 refill of my 5lb tank includes tax. It also ignores the fact that sodastream bottles (the ones the soda goes in, and which need to be replaced periodically) cost $10 each, while reused 2L or 1L bottles are essentially free for me.”