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.

Low-Carb Black Walnut Pie

Although I have mentioned black walnuts before (more than once), I'm not sure I've ever commented on the flavor.  It's good and quite unlike English walnuts, which are more commonly available commercially.  Black walnuts are strong and it's probably accurate to call it an acquired taste.  My first exposure wasn't very positive, but I have grown to like them a lot.

Black walnut pie is a great way to eat them, and I have a few other recipes that use black wanuts, too.  The basic recipe is something like this:

1 cup sugar (white, brown, or a mix)
1 cup corn syrup or sorghum
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs, beaten
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 c nuts (all black or can mix 50/50 black/English)
1/8 tsp salt

Mix, pour into a pie shell, bake 10 minutes at 400, then at 350 for another 40 minutes.

That's pretty high in carbs, mostly because of the sweeteners.  Here's an alternate (I developed it for someone who's diabetic):

3/4 cup brown sugar Whey Low (aka Whey Low Gold)
1/2 cup Whey Low Type D
1/4 cup butter (4 tbsp)
3 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla
1 cup nuts
1/8 tsp salt

Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes.

For the shell (rolled or swaged):

1 cup whole wheat flour (could also use rye)
1/4 cup oil, butter, or lard
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup water (if rolling crust out; otherwise not needed)

I don't know what the carb content per slice is.  For the crust, the total net carbs are 76 grams (72 grams with rye); this is less than 10 grams per slice. The black walnuts have about 4 net grams of carbs per cup.  The Whey Low adds some carbs.  The carb impact is substantially lower than with sugar. The Type D is somewhat lower than the regular granulated Whey Low according to this analysis on the Whey Low site.  One cup of sugar has about 200 grams of carbs; 1.25 cups would have 250 grams--meaning the per-slice carbs from the sugar would be 31.25 grams (if sugar was used).  If the Whey Low impact is overall 18% of that, it would be pretty low per slice.

As noted previously, 100% whole wheat does not hold together well when rolling out a crust.  One solution is to add some white flour, but that a little to the carb content (88 grams per cup for white versus 76 for whole wheat).  Another approach is to swage the crust.  Swaging is probably not the best term, but basically it's just a process of dumping the flour mixed with the fat and other ingredients into the plate as clumpy powder, then forming it to the bottom and sides.  Maybe cold sintering would be a better term.  At any rate, it works, albeit at the cost of making a fairly friable and fragile crust.

So that's what I did.  I used sunflower oil and mixed it well, then formed the crust to the plate.  After that, I mixed the filling ingredients, adding the nuts last, and dumped them into the pie shell.

While this does not make for an award winning crust, it works decently well.  I put the pie in the oven and the result looked pretty typical for a black walnut pie, albeit somewhat compressed (the volume of sweeteners was somewhat lower than normal, so as it cooled it compressed a bit--still, it was decent and didn't look at all bad--the picture below is fresh out of the oven).

 

The flavor was fine.  Since I didn't bake a more-traditional pie at the same time, I couldn't do a side-by-side comparison but it was very tasty and not recognizably different.  My friend's blood glucose readings after eating a slice were comparable to what he sees otherwise, meaning it didn't cause a spike.

Nut pies have better low-carb potential because the main ingredient of the filling is essentially carb-free, unlike fruit pies.  It may be worth investigating if \dessert options that have a lower carb load are desirable.

Irma Walnuts

I think about 1/3 of my black walnut crop was knocked down during Irma.  A friend who has several black walnut trees had a similar loss rate.  I figured they wouldn't be ripe yet, but decided to process a few just to check.  As mentioned previously, I hammer off the husks, wash them to get them as clean as reasonably possible, then crack them.  These early nuts had no husk fly larvae in them; there either won't be any this year or the eggs haven't hatched yet (it's possible the cycle is temporarily broken at my place; last summer the whole crop dropped prematurely because of the drought--no husks, no new generation).

The husks from the first few have been extremely hard to remove.  It might be because they aren't quite ripe.  Hopefully later it will be better.  Pretty much everyone says you should let the nuts dry for a while after husking, but this time I cracked them within a couple of days because I wanted to see how good they were.

I used my Master Nut Cracker (also available from 855sheller and maybe a few other places) to do the cracking.  It went pretty well this time. 

The nuts I cracked were from my good tree--the one that I think is an improved cultivar.  As you can see, it has big nuts and they yield a lot of nutmeat.  The cracker easily breaks them up without damaging the nut meats much, so I can get out big pieces.

 

The container shown has maybe three nuts in it.  I only cracked five total as a test.  I'm going to husk the other early ones at this point and look forward to the normal harvest when they start dropping in another couple of weeks.

Irma

Irma was a tropical storm at most by the time it hit northeast GA.  Wind gusts generally in the 50s were the max as far as I know, with a particularly heavy band of wind and rain that moved through generally from about 3:00 pm - 7:00 pm on September 11.  Power outages were severe on the east and northeast side of the city and in the applicable suburbs.

I saw a lot of big trees down.  This area has a lot of oaks of different varieties, and many of them went down.  Pines fell, as well, but that's not a surprise.  The tree above--a chinkapin oak--was one of the larger ones I saw.  In terms of size, the trunk diameter was almost 36 inches where the knots are just below the branches.  That part of the trunk was about 5 feet off the ground when it was standing.

Another area where I saw a number of oaks blown down was a south-facing slope.  The winds were out of the east-northeast, so the wind force would've been generally pushing the trees in a downhill direction.  That seems like a bad mix of position and force, and the end result validates that (though it is also possible that the particular location was hit with wind forces that exceeded those elsewhere).

It's always sad when big trees fall--but given the force that the storm had farther south and the track it took versus what was predicted, it could've been worse.