Tallow Cornbread

I've posted my recipe before (adapted from another one online) that I use for cornbread.  I've adapted it for use with rye flour, too.  As the recipe notes, some sort of fat is called for.  I use 3 tablespoons, plus whatever I use to grease the dish (which is maybe a half teaspoon more).

I usually use sunflower oil as the fat, plus lard to grease the dish.  I used to use Crisco--I got a huge vat of it that sat in my refrigerator for a couple of years before I went through it all.  However, I've grown more skeptical of the product, figuring that at a minimum it offers no advantages over animal fats. I switched to lard for greasing duty. I was initially using hydrogenated lard from the store, which is pretty tasteless.  I recently got some from leaf lard from Fatworks that has more of a flavor to it, and I will try adding it to my next batch.  In the meantime, it's doing duty greasing pie pans (including the one I baked my recent pumpkin pie in) and other baking dishes.

Before I got the leaf lard, I bought some tallow.  I had always wondered about tallow and wanted to see how it would behave and taste.  I was inspired by Jill Winger at theprairiehomestead.com, who renders tallow from her cattle and uses it for a few things--culinary and otherwise.

My initial plan was just to use it for greasing instead of vegetable shortening, and it is not really the best for that, although it will work at some level.  The texture is not as smooth as lard; it's clumpy (which can be ameliorated by heating it a bit). It also has a beefy smell and taste that's noticeable (at least I noticed it; when I baked pies I could usually detect the tallow flavor, though others who ate slices never commented).

Then I used it on some cornbread.  After a pause of a few months I'm making that again; I have some Blue Clarage to grind up but in the meantime I trekked to the only store I know of (Whole Foods) that sells organic cornmeal.  In most cases I'm not too concerned with non-organic foods, but in the case of grain, I don't really want to eat Roundup-ready varieties to the extent that I can avoid them...they're obviously in commercial corn products like grits, but avoiding when possible is relatively painless so I do so--as another example, before the Crisco I used to use Canola oil but have now ditched that, too.

At any rate...I made a batch of cornbread and could taste the tallow (otherwise, sunflower oil went into the mix).  In this instance it was pretty good, more so than when traces of tallow essence showed up in a blueberry pie.  Cornbread picks up the flavor of whatever fat is used, assuming there is one; in many cases, bacon grease is used which definitely impacts the taste of the finished product.  So I decided to give tallow as the fat in the dough a try.

It worked reasonably well.  Tallow cornbread might sound unappetizing but it isn't.  The tallow is definitely there and definitely flavors the bread much more so than the sunflower oil, which has a very subtle flavor that gets lost in the finished product.  I'm looking forward to trying lard with it and may get some that's not as neutral as the leaf lard for special applications in the future.

More on Processing Pumpkins

A couple of years ago I wrote about processing pumpkins.  My method wasn't very sophisticated.  I haven't tried putting the whole thing in the oven yet, but I have improved my approach to cutting the beasts. I think it was Erica Strauss, of nwedible.com, who gave me the idea.  I made an initial cut, then used a rubber mallet to finish the job.

First I removed the stem area, Jack-o'-lantern style.  Then I started the knife and hit the knife at the top of the blade/base of the handle.  It took a few taps to get most of the cut done on one side; I just rotated it as I went.  No seeds fell out as it was almost inverted.  I did the same on the other side, then split it open and processed as usual--face-down in a baking dish with some water, 45 minutes at 450.




I think the only way easier would be the whole-bake approach.  That would simplify cutting it, but then there'd be a hot steaming mess with seeds still inside.  It is comparatively easy to pull those out when the flesh is still hard.

This process was a success.  It took about 15 min to bisect and  clean each pumpkin rather than 20 minutes (or more) just to cut it.  It was a lot less tiring and dangerous, too.

More on Persimmons

Last month I commented on native persimmons.  The flavor was pretty good, although the harvest season was short-circuited by the hurricane that blew through: it knocked a lot of immature persimmons down.  Although still relatively early by persimmon standards, my friend's trees are done for the year.

There's another tree I noticed in the woods near where I run.  It dropped a couple during the hurricane, but otherwise was holding onto its few fruits.  Yesterday (10/12) a couple more were on the ground, so I picked them up.

The flavor was comparable to the ones from the other tree, but what I noticed was that they were much larger.  Also, the pulp was flecked with brown, which is common (the other tree didn't have it, or at least have it in many fruits).

I'm not sure I'm enough of a persimmon connoisseur to tell the difference between cultivars, but I've never had an improved persimmon, just the two wild ones.  Cultivars have other advantages.  Most are northern in origin.  Often northern persimmons, when fertilized, produce fruit but not large seeds down south--according to the University of Kentucky CES.   This would be nice; the seeds of persimmons are large and numerous (but otherwise not very objectionable).

I've ordered native seedlings.  Hopefully I don't get a fistful of male trees...

Lifespan of Canned Food

The standard published rule of thumb is that home-canned goods are fine for a year.  I've noted elsewhere that some of the things I have canned have been good for far longer.  However, I haven't yet had anything age more than about four years before using.

Home-canned foods aren't good for extreme long-term storage, as this picture shows.  This looked like fruit, probably peaches but there's no way to tell.  There's also no telling how long ago it had been canned (the Atlas mason jar was, as far as my quick online search can determine, probably made before 1964--of course, jars can be used repeatedly over a long period of time).

I found this collection in the basement of a house I was looking at a few years ago.

If you look closely, you can see some mold at the top of some of the jars.  I would've tossed these, and I'm sure whoever bought the house did...though it might have been interesting to do a nutritional analysis on non-moldy ones.

In the house I eventually bought, there were some 1994-vintage dilly beans.  They looked about the same and I tossed them intact into the dumpster.  The jars weren't anything different from what could be bought today--Kerr or Bell--as far as I could tell.

So when you can it yourself, it might not last all that long.  However, in most cases you'll be canning things you use, and even if you can more than a year's supply at once, if you diligently rotate you'll never be opening jars more than a few years old.

What about commercially canned products? There are websites suggesting that the storage life of undamaged and un-bulged cans can be essentially indefinite.  One even mentions a study from the Journal of Food Science in 1983 that examined several cans of food up to about 100 years old (though the authors apparently didn't go as far as tasting the century-old oysters or even the 40-year-old corn).  From personal experience I have seen a couple of things:  I decided to open a can of corn that was about 10 years past its use-by date one time to see how it would be; it wasn't as good as new but wasn't bad.  And I have also seen cans go bad; I have had a couple of bulged cans myself over the years and my mother occasionally had a can of beans or another vegetable rupture and spew.  Can perforation or failure to seal is another possibility.  One time a long-forgotten can of some pasta dish dessicated over some time period, becoming like a freeze-dried meal...except it wasn't.  I didn't open the can but tossed the whole thing.  Acidic foods are allegedly more likely to damage the structural integrity of the can.

Canning is only one of the ways to extend the life of food.  Dry-canning is another (putting already low- or no-moisture foods in an oxygen-free environment), as is dehydrating (with or without subsequent dry canning).  But canning (in the conventional 'wet' sense) has a role, too, even if it doesn't last forever.