Pickled Asparagus

I first tried pickled asparagus a few years ago.  It's pretty good and is more or less readily available in grocery stores.  Although I'm not yet growing my own asparagus--hopefully I'll get some crowns in the ground next spring--I wanted to try making my own so gave it a try.  The Ball Blue Book, NCHFP, and Pickyourown.org have essentially the same recipe, which, as I have noted before about other foods, calls for a density per jar that I can't match.  I get about one pound per jar.  The first time I pickled asparagus, I got way more than I could pack into eight quarts and ended up binging on it for the next few days to use up the excess (I usually try to avoid multiple canner runs back-to-back).

Here's what works for me--for 8 quarts:

8 lb. asparagus
2/3 cup canning salt
8 quarts water
8 quarts vinegar
8 teaspoons dill seed (1 per quart jar)
About 16 cloves of garlic (nominally, 2 per quart jar, but I also will just use one if it's huge as shown in the picture below).

This recipe is very easily scaled up and down, and of course can be used for pint jars, as well.  There are also 12-ounce jars that are taller than normal that can be used for asparagus, but I don't have any.

I cut the top part of the spears to 5.5" for quarts and 4" for pints, then either leave the rest intact or further cut it into smaller pieces to facilitate jar packing.  The ends of the spears are often tough; usually, they're white if so (although sometimes white ends are tender).  Each quart jar gets a teaspoon of dill seed in the bottom, then is packed with cut spears, then receives a couple of cloves of garlic late in the process, and last is filled with brine, leaving 1/4" headspace.

The 50/50 mix of vinegar and water yields a pH of about 3.0; it's the same as is used for dilly beans and other vegetable pickles.

The filled jars get canned in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes.

My recipe above yielded almost exactly eight quarts with very little excess of any ingredient: I used up all but about a cup of brine and had maybe a quarter of a pint of cut pieces left that I couldn't get into a jar.  I'll eat them fresh.  And I have had no failures to seal since I went back to single-use lids exclusively.

The picture below shows the jars after coming out of the canner (along with the aforementioned gargantuan garlic clove).  So far, I have had no bad results with pickling asparagus, but this was only my third attempt.  One batch a year is enough for now; I don't go through all that much.

As with most canning, labor excluded, doing it at home is cheaper.  A quick glance online shows pickled asparagus for about $4.50 per pint; I canned the equivalent of 16 pints for under $22 (vinegar $2, asparagus $16, dill seed < $1, lids $2, canning salt $0.20).  This is one of few canning exercises where it's a decent tradeoff even considering the labor involved: total time start to finish was only about 2.5 hours.

 

Onion Pie

I recently tried this recipe from James Townsend & Son's YouTube channel.  One modification is that I left out the hard-boiled eggs.  I had someone eating it with me who doesn't like eggs.  I also omitted the mace; I don't have any.

Even without the eggs, it turned out to be pretty heavy-duty.  I was able to mound the ingredients in the center of the pie; it didn't boil over and is fairly dry--I added water, as instructed--and the ingredients did collapse a bit as it baked.

I used heavy whole wheat crusts.  I used half whole wheat, half white flour.  Sunflower oil was the fat--I wasn't trying to make it flaky.

The ingredients I included were a layer of thin-sliced potatoes, followed by Granny Smith apples (actually just one large apple), then onion, then a few more potato slices.   The spices were salt, pepper, and nutmeg.  I baked it at 375 for 70 minutes.

The nutmeg was a little disagreeable by itself, but overall the pie turned out okay. The tart Granny Smith apples made an interesting contrast.  I might try it again using Italian seasoning.  That would be different but might work out well.

One slice (1/8 of the pie) was substantial; two slices made a very filling meal.  It was a bit messy to make, but much of that was due to the pie crusts.  I've learned that I really hate making pie crust.  I have yet to have one turn out well, but I have managed to get something passable most of the time.  Only rarely have I had to dump a first attempt and start over.

This has potential, but I'm still evaluating it.

Dehydrated Refried Beans Shelf Life

Dehydrated refried beans are not believed to have a very long storage life.  Some sites suggest they may last as long as 15-20 or  25 years, but other suggest as little as 5 years.  It makes sense that refried beans, which have been cooked then dried, would not last as long as intact beans, which are estimated to last about 30 years.

I have a case of dehydrated refried beans that I have been meaning to rotate, but I haven't gotten around to it.  One #10 can, once opened, lasts a long time.  I finally decided to haul one out and see how it was holding up.  It was canned in February, 2009, so eight years ago.

It's fine.  There's no detectable loss in quality.  This despite the fact that my house gets warm in the summer, as I have noted before, up to the low 80s during the day.  So my conditions are far from ideal.

I'm still going to work on rotating them.  If I use up all six cans and replace them with more I'll be eating a lot of beans.  But I fully expect that what I have will be good for a few more years (or more).

Dehydrated refried beans have a few issues.  Although good dry (someone recommended adding them to salads like bacon bits...an intriguing concept), more conventionally they will be rehydrated.  They're rather salty, at least to my palate, but as I have noted before, I don't use a lot of salt on my own and may be unduly sensitive.  The saltiness is more apparent when they are hydrated than when they are dry.

They're good: They're largely fat free and can be had fairly cheaply.  They last longer and are less costly than normal refried beans (by far, actually: some brands of refried beans cost $1.00 or even more for a single one-pound can vs. $12 or less for the equivalent of about 20-30 cans' worth [depending on brand]).  Worth a look...

Still More on Pinto Beans

As I have noted before, my recipe for beans is very easy, has wide tolerances, and usually produces good results.  Variations are possible; fresh onion and garlic can be swapped out for their dehydrated counterparts, and there are substitutions for the bacon, too--turkey bacon works okay, although not great, and even veggie pseudo bacon will produce serviceable results.  The person who taught me how to do beans long ago used fat back.

I mentioned in the previous posts that I had some bad experiences with old beans cooked at normal pressure in a covered pot.  Al dente beans are not that good.  They also had a bitter aftertaste. Extra garlic and bacon help with impaired beans, even when pressure cooked.  However...

...In addition to old beans, I made a pot a couple of months ago with old bacon.  I had frozen it and lost track of it in the freezer; when I found it I decided to give it a try. I don't think it was bad, necessarily, but it had aged to the point that it smelled off.  It did not improve when boiled with everything else.  I ended up throwing most of that pot out, alas.

My most recent pot went fine.  A win after a flop is helpful.  One bad culinary experience can imprint a memory that lasts for years (or more).  After I tried to use an excess of barbecue sauce to make a cooked jackrabbit edible (it didn't work), I had a negative association with barbecue sauce for a long time.  Foodborne illness after a mall food court gyro made me leave that food item behind forever.  So I don't want to have a string of failures with beans, one of my favorite dishes.

This pot was the basic two onions, about five mostly big garlic cloves, and six ounces of bacon.  Pressure cooked for 12 minutes, and it took about 23 minutes for the pressure to drop after removing from the heat so I could eat them.  Total time from starting prep to being ready to serve was about an hour and fifteen minutes.  I was using cranberry beans this time.  I'll do some pintos soon.