Acorns

I have a lot of oak trees.  Mostly I have ones that yield red acorns, but I have some white oaks, too.  And near my suburban house, there's a subdivision with about six Shumard oaks planted at the front. At the office park where I work, there are dozens of water oaks planted at the edge of the parking lots and in small plant islands in the lots themselves.  Because the oaks fall on pavement, they are easy to find and if not collected by me or the squirrels, they get crushed by cars and/or vacuumed up by the landscapers for dumping in an inert landfill.
 

Oak trees in the fall are beautiful--at least some of them are.  Some have leaves that turn a drab brown.  The picture at left shows some of the oaks I'm talking about, in addition to other trees--hickories and dogwoods...maybe a few others.   However, I want to focus on oak trees for food rather than ornamentation.

All species of oaks produce edible acorns, and all of them have too much tannin in them to be palatable straight from the shell.  I have tried with a variety of oaks: red, Georgia, Shumard, and white. The whites are close, but still too bitter--and they are reported to have the lowest tannin level.  Apparently tannin matters to some degree to deer, as well; they like white acorns the best.

For humans, something needs to be done.  Many sites and books suggest using water to leach the tannin out.  This book by Samuel Thayer has an extensive discussion of processing acorns.  However, there are many subtle variations. Generally, 'most everyone I've read recommends several changes of water at temps from room to boiling.

I have been picking up acorns for years and doing nothing with them.  Although drying them for a while is recommended, there is a difference between processing and indifferent procrastination.  Now is the time of harvest; later is the time to figure out what to do with them--so I have told myself for the last several autumns. My co-workers think I'm a little odd for picking up handfuls at the office.  So far, I have nothing to show for the effort.  Finally, I decided to try a pilot project.

Acorns are often targeted by insects; Thayer's book covers this in detail and has recommendations for identifying bad acorns easily when processing a lot. For my pilot project I didn't need to stress about it.  I picked up some newly-dropped acorns earlier this week. I cracked three and one was good (for what it's worth, a much greater proportion of the ones I've cracked from the office park have looked good; they are very clean).  I diced the Shumard into about six pieces, put the chunks into a coffee cup, filled it with water and microwaved it for a minute--not enough to make it boil, but enough to get it to simmering temperature.  Every 12 hours or so I changed the water for a couple of days.  Each time, the water was less tan-hued by the time I changed it.

After several water changes, they were edible--the bitterness was (mostly) gone.  This is less than an epic finding; all I have done is verify what others have reported.  However, it is encouraging that it's a viable process, if somewhat labor-intensive.  The taste of the nut meat itself was pretty bland.  I don't know if it would be any different if I had dried it first, but during the leaching process I assume it'd rehydrate to whatever extent it could--so that might not matter much.

I'm not sure I will do this on a broad scale, but I certainly have the acorns available if I want to.

Update:  The above obviously depicts beginner-style experimentation with the concepts.  This blogger shows the results from decanting and leaching--the latter being quicker, given sufficient equipment to process the nut meats before leaching.

Black Walnuts

It's almost black walnut time in north Georgia.  I've had a few nuts dropping for a while, probably due to drought, but the main drop starts about now and lasts for a few weeks.  The ones that have dropped already probably are not mature.  The ones that dropped in July definitely were not ready.

Nuts are harvested when they hit the ground.  They're covered in a spicy-scented thick green husk, which is removed to reveal the nut itself.  English walnuts, which are the more familiar variety, also have husks but they split apart somewhat easier.

The nuts themselves are pretty tough.  A normal little hand-held nutcracker probably won't work well (though I haven't tried to use one myself).  Forget about the decorative ones that star in Christmas plays.  Once the husk is gone, what's left looks sort of like a normal walnut, except that the ridges are sharper.  The photo is of some of the nuts I harvested last year--you can see that some have mold on them; I'm not sure why, but I cracked a few of those and they were all bad.

The first nuts I processed I used a hammer on; I just carefully whacked at them using the driveway as a backstop.  It worked ok, but was very inefficient.  I damaged a lot of the nutmeat and probably spent upwards of 20 minutes per nut.  That was just a demonstration project to assess the viability of the nuts.  I soon decided that I did want to harvest my nuts and went searching for a better nutcracker.

I soon found one:

It's available at:  http://www.masternutcracker.com/.  The website is not the most user-friendly, but there's a form that can be printed out and you can e-mail in advance with any questions you may have. There is at least one reseller I know of, and may be others:  http://855sheller.com/.  The tool does a great job and can crack the nuts with ease (it works on other tough nuts, like hickory).  There do appear to be some knockoffs available for sale from a lot of outlets; they do not seem to function as well:  Master vs. copy.  I've ordered from the Master site twice and have had very good experiences.

855 Sheller also sells other crackers, including one that can be used with a drill to process nuts quickly--they have posted videos on their YouTube site showing it in action.  If I had more trees, I would probably have to do something other than crack them one at a time, but I don't get a very big harvest.  It's more of a novelty for me at present.  Maybe someday the trees will be producing more, and I have just planted a new improved cultivar tree (Thomas Myers) that is advertised to yield big nuts with thin shells (I think one of my existing trees is something like this, or another big variety; the nuts run 20 to the pound).

A much easier option is just to buy them; the little packages at the grocery store are expensive but chopped black walnuts can be had from Amazon and other places relatively cheaply thanks to the business model of Hammon's, a Missouri company that buys nuts from small-scale harvesters who pick the wild nuts up off the ground.  There do not appear to be very many commercial producers.  The trees themselves are more often grown for their timber value, which can be substantial.


 

Beans (and Dealing with Old Beans)

I love beans. I have grown Kentucky Wonder pole beans and bush pinto and cranberry beans (I have also planted cranberry beans from the store; as far as I know there are no hybrids [ditto for store-bought pintos]).  This post is about cooking with pintos and cranberry beans.  I like cranberry beans more--they're somewhat sweeter--but both are good. I'm not a real fan of kidney beans, black beans, or others--at least when i cook them myself.  I do have some Anasazi beans; they turn out okay.

Until very recently, my procedure was invariably this:  soak one pound of beans for at least six hours.  Before soaking, the beans have to be sorted through fairly carefully.  There are usually a number of bad beans in the bag, and there will often be some small dirt clods and rocks.  The beans themselves grow in pods above ground level (unlike peanuts), but modern harvesting methods make it pretty easy for foreign objects to get into the finished product (however, in a one-pound tranche of dry beans, you probably will not find more than a couple of rocks). After soaking, some sites recommend draining then rinsing, to limit gas byproducts of bean consumption.  Other sites say that doesn't help much.  Even if it helps some, it probably won't eliminate the problem: Beano and similar products can help with that.

After soaking, set the level of the water at just barely above the soaked beans; add two diced onions, a few cloves of garlic (4-6 usually, sometimes 10 depending on size), and bacon (4 ounces); then cook covered on low heat for about 90 minutes. When I lived in Denver at higher altitude, they had to be cooked for about two hours.  At that point, check for tenderness; if the beans are done, cook on slightly higher heat with the lid off for another 10-20 minutes or so--this will cause the beans to cook out some excess water (if there is any, which there usually is), and allow them to skin over a little.  The final result is usually really good.  I've been cooking them this way for a very long time.


The last few pots, I've switched to a pressure cooker. A friend in Denver suggested I do that long ago, but I never did until recently.  I stuck with the tried and true method above.  For pressure cooking, the procedures are similar, but the cooking time is less. I adjust the water level to just below the soaked beans (the onions release a lot of water while cooking and I don't cook them down like I do with the open pot). I upped the bacon to six ounces because the pressure cooker manual said a teaspoon of cooking oil should be added to cut down on the amount of foaming during cooking.  I figured the extra bacon would add enough fat.  So far, I do not seem to have any foaming issues, but I don't put much into the vessel (one pound of beans into an eight-quart cooker).  The manual says six minutes at pressure, but I cook them for 12 and the results are good.

It takes me about a half hour to cut everything up and add it to the pot--I'm not that fast--and then pressure cooking time is about 45 minutes overall: it takes a while to heat up to pressure, then still longer for the pressure to drop after the 12 minutes.  That's still substantially faster than cooking in a non-pressurized pot, and heats the house up less (a plus in summer).

Why'd I get a pressure cooker?  Trouble with old pintos.  I bought a 10-pound bag of pinto beans, and had a few that didn't get cooked for a couple of years.  They looked fairly old soon after I got them and looked worse when I finally tried cooking the last few pounds (old pintos turn dark brown).

Utah State University has guidelines on softening old beans.  Cooking the normal way didn't work.  Even after two hours, they didn't soften and tasted pretty gross.  The first attempt was just about the worst pot of beans I've ever made.

I then tried one of the suggestions--adding baking soda to the cooking water.  Didn't work.  Another suggestion was to freeze the beans after cooking.  That helped a little one time, but failed another.  Maybe freezing after soaking, before cooking might help.  I didn't try that.  Finally, I decided to get a pressure cooker.  I cooked the first load for 15 minutes and it worked--at least it made them tender.  The taste wasn't 100%, but they were ok.

Why go through so much trouble? After all, they cost less than a dollar a pound.  But sooner or later, I'll have more old beans to deal with.  So I was motivated to find a way to make them work.  As a byproduct, I have now implemented a way to cook even fresh(er) beans that's quicker and somewhat easier.

Above I mentioned that they usually turn out well.  That's not quite right.  Usually, they turn out heavenly.  It's probably a little weird to be so euphoric about beans, but for whatever reason, they are just about my favorite dish.  One pound when cooked will last me for several meals.  They're usually the main course.  I add a little bread on the side sometimes, or cornbread.  I know I don't add enough grains to get full protein out of the beans, but that's okay.  If I have to in the future, I can do that.

Many thanks to the person in Denver decades ago who schooled me in how to do these; she brought them to a party; I loved them; and she explained how she did them.  I've been making them ever since.

Pickled Okra

I pickled some (more) okra last night.  Most of it came from the farmers' market, but I did do another quart of pods from my own diminutive set of plants.  I'm growing burgundy okra and it has turned out well.  Last year I tried to grow it but the deer got it all before it produced anything.  Output has been modest and has trickled in, so it has been a challenge to do anything with it.

At any rate, I had about a half pound of my own okra plus six pounds from the farmers' market.  Flipping over to the NCHFP, one can see that six or seven pounds of okra ought to net out to around eight or nine pints.  I knew that was wrong.  As I have noted elsewhere, I usually don't get as much food content into the jars as the guides say for whatever reason--and for some things, I have been waaaayy off.  I knew that I'd get more jars of okra than forecast--I expected about seven quarts.  It ended up being the equivalent of seven quarts; I did six quarts and two pints.  Interestingly, I upped the liquids to seven cups each of water and vinegar, and probably had about two cups left over--so the quantities of water and vinegar were okay.  I also increased the salt proportionately by another two tablespoons.


It wasn't possible to get any more okra into those jars.  I packed them very tightly and even crushed one or two.  Hopefully the end product will be okay. The jar with the burgundy okra is at the right front in the photo to the right.

Thoughts on Tomatoes

I've been growing tomatoes for a few years.  I've had a variety of problems at times, but usually gotten a decent crop.  Some years (like this one) I get a very good one.  As I mentioned in July, I dehydrate most tomatoes, but also can them sometimes, too.  This year I had enough at one time to can, but I went ahead and dehydrated the lot.

I usually have blight problems--generally early blight.  This year the blight is more limited.  Generally my tomatoes are pretty well done by now, but then they get a second wind in September and I end up with some green ones at the time of first frost.  This year I'm still getting tomatoes in mid-August and will dehydrate them, as well.


 I've never had too much trouble with blossom end rot, which can be attributed to calcium and / or dry growing conditions as the tomatoes are developing.  Sometimes my tomatoes get mushy while developing and I toss them; occasionally I get severe bug damage.  There are usually a few stink bugs on them when I go out to the garden, but the damage they have caused is limited.

Last year--for the first and only time ever--I had some tobacco hornworms and saw one that had been turned into a host by parasitical wasps.  Very gruesome, but I was happy to help the biological controls work.  Otherwise, the hornworms haven't been a major problem, either.

I've become convinced that there are subtle variations in growing conditions that influence what varieties do well.  I always grow at least two or three types--almost always heirlooms--and individual types seldom do well in two consecutive years.  Cherokee Purple is an exception; it has usually performed very well but this year my two plants have been duds.  One year Amish Paste was worthless, yielding one tomato from one plant all year; another year it produced abundantly.  I used the same package of seeds to start plants both years.  One year some heirloom start from Home Depot whose name I can't remember produced about 60% of what I got off of five plants.  This year Mortgage Lifter has done okay but it usually flops for me.  Homestead is doing well this year; it might be the unknown Home Depot plant from a few years ago or it might be new (you can tell my record-keeping is not 100% of what it needs to be).  I tried Nebraska Wedding, a yellow determinate variety, never worked for me despite trying two or three years.  I never got a single tomato.  One of my favorites for flavor:  Frankenstein Black.  I started it from seed a couple of years and it produced a decent amount.

It might be there there are other factors: seeds and starts (I've done both) are variable, so that might be what accounts for the problems rather than growing conditions. I don't know--it may be a combination of things, some observable and others not.  In a practical sense, it doesn't matter: the solution is the same.  Plant several varieties and at least one will probably do well.

Bread and Butter Pickles

A couple of weeks ago I processed some cucumbers.  My overall harvest isn't going to be all that great; the vines are not looking like they'll produce that much longer.  But I did get enough for a load of bread and butter pickles, my favorite.  The Ball Blue Book and Pickyourown.org have similar recipes, which I generally follow.  One exception is that I don't salt and ice the cucumbers; I just fresh-pack them, cutting the salt a little. PYO mentions draining and rinsing after icing.  The NCHFP site calls for icing beforehand, as well, but skips the rinsing step. So although I use a bit less salt, my finished product might have more salt in the brine.  I end up with a brine that is about as salty as what one would get by using Mrs. Wages' bread and butter mix.

My cucumbers this year were all yellow (Edmonson from Southern Exposure and Miniature White from Seedsavers).  The recipes above call for onion, so I added some white onion slices, using store-bought ones (I haven't grown my own onions yet).

The procedure is pretty simple: slice; mix the brine (with the various spices indicated, plus sugar); add the slices (onion and cucumber) to jars; pour in the brine, and process.  I got about 1.1 lb. of cucumbers per quart (when mixed with the onion).  That's a bit less than anticipated by the recipes above, which suggest around 1.5 lb. per quart (or per two pints).  As I have noted elsewhere, I'm usually not able to pack as much into jars as the recipes suggest.  Hot- vs. raw-packing matters, but in this case the recipes are for raw pack, as well.  I had two bowls of cucumbers, not the one suggested by the picture above.  All that notwithstanding, I'm happy with the results (shown below is also a jar of pickled okra I threw in; I used a different brine mix for that).

Pickled Carrots

I don't grow carrots in the garden.  I have done radishes, but never carrots.  I don't have tilled soil that goes down far enough to accomodate carrots. I got some Paris Market seeds one year (a shorter variety) but never planted them.

Nonetheless, if I ever do grow them, I may end up with enough to need to preserve them somehow.  Then again, maybe I won't.  Excuses falling by the wayside, I decided to try pickling carrots last month--just because.  The concept is interesting, and I like pickled vegetables.  I've done cucumbers (dill and sweet), dilled green beans, and asparagus.  All have turned out well. I've also done peaches.  I've bought commercially canned okra.  But I had never tried carrots.

As I mentioned before when discussing peach butter, I usually don't get very creative with canning.  Canning guides admonish against that as a rule, but the keys with any canning recipe are that if it's destined for a boiling water bath, the pH has to be below 4.7, and with either boiling water or pressure, the temperature has to get to the required threshold for the required time to kill pathogens.


The National Center for Home Food Preservation has a recipe for pickled carrots and Pick Your Own has essentially the same recipe.

I used peeled baby carrots (note that the NCHFP has a separate recipe for pickled baby carrots, but it's basically the same except that it substitues a volume measurement for the carrots instead of weight).  Because no pre-processing is involved, unlike most things I can, this was a quick job.  I just dumped the carrots into a couple of large Cinderella-style mixing bowls and looked over them to see if there were any that needed to be culled or trimmed (ever eat a bad carrot? They are not good). I used six pounds of carrots (two bags of three pounds each).  This is about ten percent more than two times the amount in the recipes referred to above, but I think the syrup mix was adequate the first time (i.e., 11 cups of vinegar with 2 cups of water).  By the time I did the second batch, I forgot that 11/2 worked so I upsized it in the same proportion, using 13 cups of vinegar and proportionally more water, plus an extra 1/3 cup of sugar and a bit of extra salt.  The second time, I probably had almost two cups left over. 

When I can, I run the jars through a dishwasher cycle, which cleans and heats them.  So I didn't even start processing until the dishwasher was running.  Getting the syrup mix up to boiling was relatively quick, and once I dumped the carrots in, it took a relatively long time to get it back to boiling for the three-minute simmer referred to in the instructions (six pound of refrigerated carrots really cooled things down).

The dishwasher was in its dry cycle by the time I got the carrots back to boiling, so I started filling jars as soon as I could.  The first time I did eight pints and one quart; the second time I did three quarts and three pints.  If you're counting, you see I got more the first time, at least in terms of jars.   In the first batch, the last pint was only about half full of carrots; the rest was syrup.

To fill each jar, I pretty much just followed the directions--into each empty jar went two tablespoons of mustard seed and one tablespoon of celery seed per pint, then carrots were ladled in using a canning funnel; I shook and tapped the bottom of the jar on the counter top to settle the carrots as compactly as possible.  Then I put in enough syrup to get the headspace to about 1/2".

Overall, they turned out pretty well.  People who have tried them have either grimaced and walked away after just one or two or eaten them with gusto.  They are somewhat sweet, as you might expect given both the flavor of carrots and the added sugar.

The other methods for preserving carrots include dehydrating and freezing, but both of those require blanching.

So now I have a bunch of carrots, but I've already eaten a fair number.  I don't think I'll have any trouble going through these in the next year or so.