Sweet Pickles 2018, and Re-Learning Canning Lessons

I'm not growing cucumbers this year, but I still did some sweet pickles.  Unlike in the past, the cucumbers I got were pickling size, rather than the sometimes very large ones I harvested out of my garden (I still would prefer home-grown...maybe next year).  At any rate, sweet aka bread-and-butter pickles are mostly easy.  I have used Mrs. Wages mix in the past, but more recently have started making my own mix following the Pickyourown.org and NCHFP sites, as noted before.  Also as noted previously: I don't do the salt-and-refrigerate thing; it's unnecessary.  My standard recipe is, for about 8 quarts:

8.5 lb. cucumbers
2 large onions

3 tbsp canning salt (based on Mrs. Winner’s mix)

8 c vinegar

9 c sugar

4 tbsp mustard seed

3 tbsp celery seed

2 tbsp turmeric

This time around, I had about that much in cucumbers and ended up with 8 quarts, 1 pint (my canner holds 8 quarts, so I had to do two runs, alas).  So in comparison to the last time I wrote about this, I got a little less packed into each jar.

Packing cucumber slices is tough, and it takes me a long time.  As I have noted on a number of occasions before, I have no idea how these canning recipes can contemplate stuffing so much into each jar.  According to the NCHFP site, I should've been able to get over 50% more cucumber into each jar.  It just can't be done, as far as I can see.

The brine mix is pretty sinus-clearing and eye-burning as it heats up.  I mix everything together and let it start to simmer while I'm cutting cucumbers.  As I have noted elsewhere, I have gotten better and more efficient at canning.  One obvious efficiency is to start the dishwasher while getting everything ready to go into the canner--I always run my jars through a cycle before canning, both to clean them and heat them.

So I did that this time.  That being said, I didn't get it quite right and was done slicing cucumbers about 20-30 minutes before the dishwasher was done. Once it finished its cycle, packing the jars was slow, as noted above.  It took me about an hour to fill the 9 jars (quarts and pint).

That's s l o w.

Partly I think I have forgotten what worked well in the past.  As a glance at the 2015 picture shows, the jars were pretty decently-packed.  Cucumbers have a lot of air in them, and will shrink in the jars as they're heated--there's no getting around that with raw pack.  But this time around, despite having smaller/easier cucumbers to work with and taking a long time, I did not (at a minimum) improve on 2015's performance.  I may even have regressed a little, judging by weight per jar.

I both can a lot and don't can much.  I usually only do one batch of anything per year, although I did a couple runs of applesauce last year and I've done multiple batches of preserves some years.  I've done multiple runs of apricots.  But there's a long enough gap in between for me to forget a few things.  Sigh.  It's simultaneously familiar and new each time I do it, I suppose.

The pickles did (or will) turn out great.  The only time I've screwed up a batch is when I used 1/2 cup of salt as called for in the other recipes, but without rinsing it off before canning.  Those were still edible, but definitely weren't all that good.

More on White Sonora

My little cache of White Sonora wheat is almost gone so I decided to try a loaf of 100% (though I did add half a cup of vital wheat gluten).  The results weren't tremendously impressive, but not bad.

I certainly have had better and worse.  The floury seam in the middle is where I folded the dough over before putting it in the proofing basket.

The loaf is pretty dense, typical of whole wheat, and definitely has that texture.  The dough might have been a touch under-hydrated, but as it is, it's definitely usable.

As I have noted before (actually more than once) I often seem to get better results in the winter.  This time around I let the dough rise for about 10 hours before baking.

Actually, I probably shouldn't be too hard on the result: I usually don't get a whole wheat loaf to break along the top.  A rounded, smooth dome top is more typical (then again, there are occasional home runs [at least in winter]).

Well Water

Well, well, well...  I have a bored well that is about 45 feet deep, with (I think) about 15 feet of water at the bottom.  That nets out to around 270 gallons.  The soil is in many places clay-like, and I have noticed some sediment in the water before.

I'm just returning the well to service, and this is what happened when I turned the water on:

This is a problem (especially so given that it's after filtration with a nominal 5-micron filter).  Outside, filling a stock tank looked like this:

My initial assumption was that the submersible pump was too close to the bottom.  So I had a well man out to look at it, and drew him a bucket of water to demonstrate.  It wasn't cloudy.  There was some sediment, but it was mostly clear.

Before this, I'd gotten a couple of water tests done.  It passed on minerals, failed on bacteria.  No E. coli, but plenty of other coliform bacteria.  The test results noted that could be caused by a number of factors, including surface water contamination.

That's exactly what the problem is.  The well guy diagnosed it fairly easily, but the symptoms were telling: cloudy after rain, fine when it's not raining.  The good news is there's a fix.  The bad news is that it'll be fairly messy to do.  Alas.  It involves digging around the concrete liner to about five feet, sealing, and backfilling with bentonite.  Part of this all will involve demolishing the well house and moving all of the plumbing underground--which will eliminate the danger of freezing pipes.

Hopefully after it all I'll be back to normal well sediment issues, which are not insignificant but nothing like what you see above.  I might need a better filter than one that's nominally rated at 5 microns (nominal = average, more or less, meaning some pores are larger than 5 microns).  This publication from the University of Nebraska indicates that clay particles can be 0.2-2.0 microns.

My filter is a pretty basic 10x2.5 single cartridge model (shown here gloriously silted up).  Culligan's best filter is a nominal 1 micron, but there are other 10x2.5 filters out there that claim to be absolute 1 micron (absolute means the filter should stop over 99% of particles over 1 micron versus maybe 85% for nominal filters).  Finer filters are more prone to clogging, perhaps...but I have an abosolute 1 micron filter cartridge to try.  If necessary, there are further steps that can be taken. There are multistage filters that can go all the way down to an absolute 0.2 microns if necessary (albeit possibly with a hit to water pressure that's already not very high...).  I'll see how things look after the well is refurbished.

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.