Weed Roses

It appears I have some multiflora rose, aka weeds, growing here and there... I have some upright canes but mostly ones that snake along the ground.  The leaves and thorns make it obvious that they're roses; this is the first year that I have seen any blooms.

They're fragrant enough, but their invasive properties (and susceptibility to rose rosette disease) render them undesirable.  I'm going to be more aggressive about dealing with them.

They're growing mostly in a fairly shady area, competing with blackberries and other similar plants. At least they don't grow very fast, so cutting them and keeping them back should be relatively easy.

"Soft Wheat Is for Cakes and Pie Crusts..."

The title of this post is another thing I have heard from almost everyone.  I have ordered White Sonora wheat a couple of times and it makes great bread (as others have found).  Hayden Flour Mills and Breadtopia (and probably others) sell it. It's a heritage white wheat, but is classified as soft.

So far, I haven't tried to make 100% whole wheat with it, just my normal 50/50 sourdough blend.  It behaves about as well as any other white whole wheat flour, which is to say it's very mild and rises well when blended with white flour.

More on Pickled Asparagus

Previously I described the process I use to pickle asparagus.  Here's a little more detail.

I mentioned that I cut the spears to fit in the jars.  That's pretty obviously needed.  Below is a picture of my cutting board.  I use the two Sharpie dots as guides.  I line the tops up using the left dot then cut along the right, leading to the small pieces shown at the top.  I cut some of those into bite-sized chunks and fill them in around the longer spears as needed.   I also can a couple of quarts of just small chunks.  It might not have much eye appeal, but the jars are completely usable.  The whole spear more or less has the same flavor, at least as far as I can tell.

I always look before buying--and after opening the bag--for bad spears.  They usually seem to go bad at the tip first.  Frustratingly, some bags don't allow very thorough inspection of the tips before buying.  Sometimes I've gotten a lot of bad ones, but usually they're not too bad.  The one shown here is one of only a couple of culls in my latest batch of eight pounds (which went into nine quarts).  Even with the culls, the rest of the spear is often fine.  I just cut the tip off of this one.  Side note:  while trimming, I discovered the dog likes asparagus.  I only gave her a few pieces.

I also cut off the woody ends (if applicable), and at a minimum trim off the very bottom that's usually dried out and often uneven.  Then into the jars they go (as noted previously, with one clove of garlic per pint of jar capacity).

I used to try to use fresh dill, but since I don't have dill growing myself--yet--I just use seed.  One teaspoon per jar.  It works well and dill seed keeps a long time.  Also as noted previously, the canning liquid is 50/50 water/vinegar and it reliably shows a pH of around 3.0. I heat it to boiling

I ladle hot syrup into the jars, then process in atmospheric steam for 15 minutes.  It's quick, easy, and works well.  It took about three hours to do everything.  The eight pounds of asparagus cost about $24; the jar lids were another $1.50 or so; the dill seed and garlic together were less than $1.  That's nine quarts for $26.50 plus time (maybe add another $0.90 for jar depreciation).  It looks like the cost for commercially-pickled asparagus is about $13 or more per quart.  That's a $90 return for three hours of work.  Not bad...

Rye Bread

As noted previously, I have sometimes had trouble with getting rye bread to rise.  Rye has limited gluten.  Rye has other issues--the dough is usually gluey and messy to deal with, among other things.  One time I left some out of the refrigerator and it got pink mold on it.  I didn't even open the bag at that point but pitched it.

I've had pretty decent luck putting rye into cornbread.  And on occasion I've gotten rye/wheat loaves to rise well.

I recently baked a loaf of 50/50 rye/wheat.  The sponge after 12 hours was pretty dramatic.  The house was still relatively cool in mid-April, so I put it in the oven with the light on overnight.

I'm back to 12 hours' rise for the cooler months, but I may shorten that as the house warms.  Soon it will be near 80 inside again (meaning I have missed my window for sauerkraut this year...I just didn't get to it this winter/spring).

The loaf ended up okay--not great, but certainly much better than the fail loaf mentioned previously.  I don't know that I've ever gotten really vigorous oven spring from rye dough, but it's usually at least decent.