More fermentation

There’s something about early spring weather in south Georgia that makes me want to brew. The afternoons are sunny and pleasant but the nights are cool enough that one can count on a vat of ale maintaining the correct temperature for fermentation. In the past week I made a big batch of mead, which will be combined with our harvest of muscadines from the fall for melomel or pyment. Currently the grapes are in the freezer, repeated freezing and thawing being an acceptable substitute for bare footed peasants in breaking the skins. As I’ve said before Ken Schramm’s method for making fruit meads is wonderful. By making a plain honey/water/yeast mead, letting it ferment to 80% and then adding fruit one can avoid any cooking or sterilization of the fruit, preserving the delicate aromatics and flavors. The alcohol present from the initial fermentation prevents infection and the slowing ferment prevents the scrubbing off of volatiles by CO2. Mead wants a slightly higher ambient fermentation temperature than beer so it’s in a spare room bubbling merrily.

While I went through the fancy beer phase that most home brewers succumb to early on, making raspberry wheats, peach lambics etc. lately I’ve been focussed on traditional British ales. My favorite British beers tend to be country ales from the southwest of England followed closely by London styles like Fuller’s and Young’s. I like a tad more floral hopping than the most traditional British beers but their dry, buttery malt flavor is the grail I seek. This week I made a london ale from Maris Otter Crisp malt and a Wyeast London ale starter, bittered with Northern Brewer hops and finished with Centennial, a new variety for me. I always add lots of honey (more about that later). The ‘07 hop harvest was a near crisis and prices are horrifying, some six times what they were two years ago. Centennial has notes of Cascade and Fuggles and is quite strong with a fine floral aroma for dry hopping.

Adding honey to beer does not do what most people think it does, like sweeten, thicken or darken it. Commercial beers with honey in their names tend to add it after fermentation as a flavoring, taking advantage of the positive connotations people have to seeing the word honey on a label. Dundee’s Honey Brown, made by Genessee is an example of this. Honey by itself has many ways in which it inhibits fermentation, one of which is a paucity of nutrients for yeasts. Barley malt on the other hand is loaded in these nutrients and combining honey with barley makes the honey ferment out quickly and cleanly helping to dry and strengthen the ale, leaving the faintest hint of floral honey flavor. By keeping the honey sugars as 20% or less of the total it doesn’t slow fermentation (a fast steady ferment encouraged by a high pitching rate is a key to good British ale) and tends to a good crisp finish on the palate.

For more about using honey in beer and ale feel free to contact me through the comments. Cheers!

Gratuitous camelias, because I can and for Red Barber’s 100th.

 

It’s alive!

It is a real pleasure to buy something that is exactly what it is supposed to be and that is why I’m pleased to report that we have an excellent new sourdough culture. We make most of our bread at home and have for years. For the last three years we’ve used a starter we got from the best bakery in Maine, Black Crow Breads. With Ellen at work I’ve been doing more of the bakery and at some point I forgot to keep some starter and we lost our line.

Fortunately the intertubes came to the rescue and we got a San Francisco sourdough from sourdo.com  . It’s been 20 years since I tried a dried sourdough culture and back then the results were terrible. I’ve learned a lot about sourdough since ( and beer, mead, lactobacilli etc. ) and this worked out really well. Following the instructions it took three days to really come alive but after a couple of trial batches I’m prepared to give it my unqualified approval.

Sourdough bread making takes endless repetition to be able to recognize and count on the growth curves involved. The way we do it is to take the starter from the fridge in the morning, feed it and let it come to room temperature. Then we make a sponge with two cups of starter, two of flour and one and a half of water, stirred, it sits for 2-4 hours. The remaining cup of starter is fed and after those same 2-4 hours returned to the fridge. The sponge is worked into 5-6 cups of flour and another cup or so of water, kneaded for 12 minutes by hand and left to rise over night. The fridge will do but it is better to have it in the forties (F). Cold rising lets the flavors develop a depth and interest. In the morning the dough is allowed to reach room temperature, formed into loaves and allowed to rise at 70F usually for about three hours, followed by baking in the usual way. The results:

 

What Mikey’s reading now

We’ve discovered the Chamblin Bookmine in Jacksonville.  A huge warren of a place full floor to ceiling with new and used books, it has become a twice a month habit.  A wonderful discovery for me is Shusaku Endo.  Writing ‘calm and understated’ novels of seventeenth century Japan, he is fascinated by the early interaction between feudal Japanese culture and the first Christian missionaries.  ‘The Samurai’ is melancholic yet beautiful and reminded me of Knut Hamsun  (high praise from me).  On our last trip to Jax I picked up another one, ‘Silence’ and I’m looking forward to it.

A book that really lit me up is ‘The Song of the Dodo, Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction’ by David Quammen.  Rare birds and animals, exotic islands, Alfred Wallace and discussions of current understandings of evolution and ecology, all subjects I’ve been interested in since I was just a little twitcher.  The first part of the book spends quite some time with Alfred Wallace.  I heard about him a couple of years after I first crossed the ‘Wallace Line’ between Bali and Lombok in Indonesia.  I had noticed, vaguely but distinctly, that there was a big difference between the islands and that I had crossed something.  Looking back at Bali with the sunset lighting up its clouds and mountains I felt I was in a new and different world but I assumed that perhaps all the Indonesian archipelago had the same variations.  What Wallace saw was that from Bali west and north to the Malay Peninsula there was a commonality to the flora and fauna that changed drastically to the east and south.  Bird species in particular are remarkably different.  Using this as a start Quammen looks at the importance of insularity in evolution and what it means for larger issues of rarity and extinction.  This is a very important, interesting and entertaining book, I can’t recommend it enough.

 

Holiday Thanks To Our Customers

We’ve had a busy holiday season what with moving bees around and sending out all the Christmas orders for honey.  Our commercial site, beeherenow.com, has been hearing from our wonderful customers and they’re really nice.  Here’s an example:

” Hi, everyone :-)  I’m ordering some of your wonderful honey for my auntie in PA.  She’ll LOVE it.  Thanks much for your hard work in providing such a precious product :-)”

And another:

“A long-time fan, love-love your products.”

One all-together excellent customer even sent us some of the mead he made from our honey.  How good is that?  Here’s a picture to prove it along with some of today’s camelias.  It’s nice to be able to pick flowers at Christmas time.  We had more much-needed rain last night and it’s a nice soft day in Georgia.

 

Powerful eggs

Using our own eggs means being a little careful with recipes.  Fresh, large whites can be explosive in the oven.  Ellen had a famous adventure with a honey pound cake that I caught on film but can’t find now.  Imagine pound cake batter in a pyroclastic flow all over the oven.

Here’s a good use of potent fresh eggs,  a carmelized onion and gruyere souffle that stopped just short of volcanic.

 

Here come the Bees

Here’s a sight to warm a bee man’s heart, a full load of bees safely delivered.  These girls sure were happy to get to Georgia after some chilly Maine December.  They’re all settled out in the woods now and seem glad of it.

 

We like shrimp, unlike, well……

A friend wrote with Biblical enthusiasm for raw honey, from Leviticus. While we always like to hear about theological reasons for buying our product, anything from Leviticus is tainted by the prohibition on shellfish. Georgia has a coastal eco-system that is one of the last not-over-exploited coastal fisheries in this country. Georgia white shrimp is an unrecognized culinary delight. We have the astounding luck to be able to go right to the fishermen and buy today-fresh white shrimp and we are really grateful and conscious of what a privilege it is.

I bought a month’s supply this week and we’ve had three nights of shrimp. First was a phø with shrimp, noodles and sprouts. Then steamed shiu mai of shrimp and fat with flavorings (ginger, sesame, scallion, soy). I’ve mastered dim sum wrappers thanks to the research of John Thorne in his book ‘Pot on the Fire’. Once you have the secret (hint: boil the water for the wrappers) dim sum seems easy, really. Then shrimp mosh with egg white, honey, fish sauce and starch, formed onto sugar cane sticks and grilled. The grilled shrimp paste is wrapped in lettuce leaves and dipped in nuoc cham. So, Vietnamese, Chinese then back to Vietnam. And yes, before we went out to a holiday party last night we steamed some and had shrimp cocktail. As she said, just a little pick-me-up.

Before I lived in Georgia the best shrimp I’d ever had were in Thailand, on Ko Chang, a large island off the west coast of the isthmus between Thailand and Malaysia. You can see Malaysia from there and many of the folks are Malay sea gypsies who have their own, non-Thai cuisine. Every day at dawn the boats would send skiffs in with the night’s catch, some days shrimp, some days squid and both were of world class quality. One could see the boats offshore at night, burning metal halide lamps to attract plankton which would then attract predators, large schools of ilex squid or big shrimp. I liked going down to the beach at dawn to watch the haggling, like fish markets everywhere, and know what I was going to be offered for meals that day. Tom yum was always on the menu, more hot and more sour than one could imagine but full of plump, fresh and delicate squid or shrimp. I liked the Malay curries, red with lots of spices and basil.

That’s a quarter in the picture, they’re not just good they’re big, big, big too.

 

Enough Birds Already

OK, how about winter flowers. We’re getting to the end of the sassanquas but they are still very good and the camelias are just starting.

And for a bonus here’s Mr. Innocent, Who Me?, Do I look like I want to slaughter beautiful ducks?

 

More Bird Action

Thanks to our cat who celebrated the new day by bringing a wood duck drake in just after seven.  It was barely hurt and he chased it from one end of the house to the other before I got hold of him (the cat) and put him in Chancery.

Getting hold of the duck was another story with plenty of hilarious cartoon action as it waddled from room to room, went to ground in Ellen’s closet, hid under the bed, ran to the other end of the house and generally acted daffy.  I let it rest for a while, opened the outside door and herded it that way.  Once it saw the door open it took off from the middle of the kitchen, flew through the house, out the carport and off into the air squeaking with pleasure and relief.

 

Merlin Tiercel!

Here’s one way to keep the population of songbirds at your feeder down.  This fine tiercel missed a cardinal and then perched outside the kitchen window.  The digital zoom ruined the fine slaty blue color but still, it was exciting.