Wednesday, July 23, 2014

rain!

Yay! First we've had so far this month. Weather.com claims it's half an inch so far, but I think it may be a little more. I'd like to claim responsibility for it -- I watered almost everything in the backyard yesterday -- but it seems much more likely that it was the neighbor washing his car who spurred the clouds into action. :)


Next time I can get some photos uploaded I need to make happy noises about foraging blackberries, too.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Parts of dealing with the garden are frustrating or disheartening -- trying to figure out an efficient way to manage water supply, discovering blossom end rot on the first Amish paste tomato, watching the little pear struggle with fireblight -- but some of it is just plain cool.






I honestly harvested these earlier than I would have in a perfect world; the heat this past week made the plants at the less-well-watered end of the row just keel right over. But there they are! I apparently forgot to note which variety these were, but they're lovely. Deep purple skins, creamy interiors. I planted a pound and I think I got five or six pounds back. Nowhere near enough for a winter's supply, clearly, but I'm treating this as my training wheels year. And tonight I'll make something with the ones whose skins got scraped in the digging. Maybe the purple green beans, too. Food season!

Sunday, July 13, 2014

kitchen adventures: sourdough!

I've just eaten the first slice from my first loaf of from-scratch sourdough! This feels like a big accomplishment even if the technique for future loaves could use some refining.

I started this project about two weeks ago, when I collected a bag of hard red wheat flour from a local farmer (wheat they grew over on the Olympic peninsula, their own milling). I cultured the starter from scratch, following the instructions in Wild Fermentation to feed and coax and fuss over the flour soup until its yeasts developed enough to make it thick and bubbly. Yesterday I had a fluffy, rising jar of starter, so I figured it would be a good time to give the rest of the process a shot.

So in the morning I mixed one part starter, one part water, and two parts flour (more of the same bag) into a sort of porridge ("sponge"). The bowl got covered with a damp towel and ignored all day, 12 hours or so. Last night I took it down and added another two parts flour to make it a stiff bread dough, then kneaded it by hand until it had some spring.

At this point I diverged from instructions. It was bedtime, and we're having a heat wave, so very early and very late are the most comfortable times for baking. The book's instructions for the most basic sourdough loaf call for a double rise, first in a bowl/bucket to +50% bulk, then punched down and given a second rise in loaf pans. I just dumped the oiled dough into a loaf pan to leave it overnight.

And I think I can blame that for the ultimate texture -- well, that and the use of all whole-wheat flour, probably. But what I have is denser and flatter than commercial sourdough; it doesn't have the airy interior texture that I'm used to. When the weather is cooler sometime I'll try switching up the timing so I can do the double-rise and see how much that changes.

And the flavor? Pretty interesting! Less tang, less sharpness, than I expected, probably because I started it pretty much as soon as the starter seemed willing to play along. A sweet graininess in there somewhere from the whole wheat. The starter smelled, well, weird, and I wasn't really sure if I liked it, but that note has backed off a lot in the finished product.

It's not a perfect product by any means, but for a first attempt at a completely new process I'm pleased.