Bread-More Thrills of Victory and Agonies of Defeat

 Cold temps require heat-assisted proofing, but also generally provide for the potential for dramatic oven spring.  The oven proofing also has the potential to cause uneven gas pockets in the dough. However, sometimes cold-temp bread turns out great.  A couple of weeks ago, I baked a 100% red whole wheat loaf that turned out like this:

And once cut open, it was nice:

It was still denser than white or 50/50 bread, but whole wheat doesn't turn out much better than this (at least not for me).

As I often do, I followed the 100% whole wheat loaf with a 100% white loaf the next week.  I had visions of airy perfection. What I got was...disappointing.

It's worse than it looks in the picture.  Cut open, it's approaching unleavened status.

That may be a bit harsh, but only a bit.  The (minimal) rise was very uneven.  It looks like Swiss Cheese--big gas pockets and solid otherwise. I'm not sure what happened.  Conditions for the two loaves seemed pretty similar: a cold house, followed by oven proofing for a few hours, then baking.  There are obviously things about bread baking that I still haven't figured out.

Oxygen Absorbers

 As noted previously, sometimes bad things happen with stored food over time.  Food in a sealed container that has oxygen in it, as well, can suffer from infestation and oxidation / deterioration. Freezer burn is another example of this.  So it is best when storing things for more than a short time to vacate the oxygen.

Food Saver-style vacuum sealers do this, and there are also jar attachments for wide mouth and regular mouth canning jars.  I don't know offhand what concentration of oxygen they can reduce the interior of a jar to, but they're a decent approach. They may not drop it enough to prevent insect eggs from hatching.

Another approach is to use oxygen absorbers. They are sold in various sizes to accommodate different containers.  US Emergency Supply has a very useful chart on this. In addition to canning jars, mylar bags and buckets can be used (the bags do not need to be kept in a bucket, but a bucket needs a bag in order to store food--BYU researchers found that oxygen levels could not be reliably maintained at a low enough level using a bucket alone, probably because of seal leakage).

There are plenty of resources online showing the use of mylar bags.  In addition to oxygen absorbers, dry ice can be used to drive out the oxygen.  That's a more old-school approach that fills the container with CO2 rather than sucking the oxygen out of the air and into the iron powder in the absorber.  The Rose Red Homestead has a video that demonstrates both approaches.

When exposed to air, oxygen absorbers begin to react.  It does not necessarily happen very fast, but it does happen: so opening a package of them doesn't render them all useless within two minutes unless sealed back up, but they do need to be put in either their final destination or in another airtight container quickly (a canning jar that is then vacuum-sealed is ideal).

Some oxygen absorber packages have an oxygen indicator:

The Oxyeye is pink when it hasn't been exposed to oxygen, and it soon turns purple after opening the package (or after the package leaks and allows the concentration inside to exceed 0.05%).

One caveat is that in time, the indicator will turn a faded pink, looking almost like it did when unexposed:

The above indicator is a few months old; I just clipped it to the refrigerator to see what would happen.

A usable oxygen indicator will feel like a pillow stuffed with powder, which it is when it's in its unexposed state. If it feels rigid and crumbly, it's probably no longer able to absorb oxygen.  Some vendors repackage absorbers into smaller quantities.  The repackaged absorbers are quite likely to be at least partially depleted in this process, and may be completely ruined. While some oxygen reduction is better than none, levels have to drop below one percent to prevent insect eggs from hatching.  With functioning absorbers and mylar bags, this is achievable.

The above picture shows some pinto beans, packed into gallon-sized mylar bags (five pounds in each). After a day, a noticeable vacuum effect has sucked the package down around the contents as the oxygen has been removed.

After my infestation episode, I'm trying to put my wheat into mylar, even though wheat doesn't necessarily need oxygen-free storage for quality purposes over a relatively short time frame. Hopefully the day of weevils will not be repeated.

Black Walnuts, 2022

 In 2020 I had a bumper crop of black walnuts.  In 2021, I had hardly any.  I was expecting an alternate-bearing bigger harvest this year, and the trees did not disappoint.

I've been doing them one five-gallon bucket at a time; this is a manageable amount that takes me about an hour to process start to finish.  A full bucket yields very little once the hulls are knocked off.

After washing, they get arrayed in the sun to dry:

Now it's just a matter of cracking them...

The Arrival of Fall

 Fall is here.  There's a pretty serious drought going on (stage 2, heading toward stage 3), so leaves are dropping early, and some color started earlier than normal.  However, plants need less water as they're going dormant, so hopefully the long-term damage will be limited.  I've been watering trees and plants for over a month (during which time I've only gotten 1/8" of rain).

My paw paws have never produced. They've been in the ground for a while now and I keep hoping I'll see blooms in the spring.  Maybe next year.  This year they turned a nicer shade of yellow than I think I have previously seen (the above picture was taken about a week ago; the tree is leafless now after a couple of hard freezes).

The muscadine vines are now fully turned; the picture below was taken a couple of weeks ago as they were midway.  The vertical orange leaves in the background are poison ivy.

 

Now begins a brief four-month window of complete dormancy to get things done.  Spring is just around the corner.

Fall Bread

 With my sourdough starter, I get optimal rise in the dough (aka sponge) at about 75 degrees.  Above 80 the rise is explosive, and letting it sit on the counter for 7 or 8 hours leads to big prebake rise, sub-optimal rise while baking.  In the colder months, I have the opposite problem.  My dough doesn't rise much at all, so needs an oven proof session of about two hours.

This fall has yielded a rapid transition from warm (> 80 indoors) to cool (barely 70).  I baked one loaf that turned out great before I had to go back to oven-proofing.

Obviously, in the summer I could switch to a daytime rise, when I could control the time a little better than when it rises overnight.  But that would be disruptive to other things in the routine. So overnight rise it is.  That will work well for the next few months.

Another Gifted Tree

 A year and a half ago, someone took down a red oak and gave it to me.  Someone just a couple of weeks ago had a dead oak of some kind near his house, cut it down, and invited me to haul it off.  He cut it into max 6.5-foot lengths.

That enabled them to fit in the bed of the truck with the tailgate closed.  The tree was fairly small, so it fit easily into my log rack for bucking--and the individual segments were easy to handle even before cutting.

Bucking them only took 30 minutes or so.

It was described as being "dead but not rotten," and that looked pretty correct as I was bucking it.  But it's definitely not ready to throw in the stove next month. As I started to split it, some sections had the feel and smell of fresh oak, and the moisture meter gave readings of around 24% (though some were higher).  That's similar to the freshly cut (as of July) maple that I also have. Maybe by early 2023 some will be ready (if needed).

First New Zealand Litter

I got the breeding stock off someone on Craigslist, with no further information.   The first breeding didn't take, but the second one did:

They grow quickly.  The picture below was less than a week later:

And a few weeks later they were weaned and on their own...

They're older now, about 12 weeks, and at harvest weight.  The picture below shows a lot of them alerting to a noise off to the right.

They grow up so fast...