Khorosan Wheat

 Khorosan, aka Kamut, is similar to durum wheat.  Durum is commercially used for pasta primarily.  Some day that khorosan is not that good for bread.  Out of curiosity, I got some khorosan flour from Azure and decided to see what it could do.  First up was pancakes, where it made a yellow batter.

The finished product was pretty yellow, too; I usually make pancakes out of 100% red whole wheat.

 The flavor was... ok, but nothing great.  Next up was bread, baked more or less 50/50 with white bread flour.

 The bread is fine structurally--the dough was a bit brittle (insofar as wet dough can have that property); it cracked a bit as I was forming it into the loaf shape before putting it in the proofing basket.  But the bread itself looks pretty much like normal bread.  It tastes like dry spaghetti, which validates its durum lineage.  That's not necessarily the best thing in bread, IMO, but I may try pairing it with red whole wheat to see how that tastes.  I'm not thinking I'm going to stock up on a lot of this.

 

 

 

 

Reviving a Sourdough Starter

 I have been baking sourdough bread for a long time.  The first few loaves were leavened with yeast, but then I switched to a sourdough starter.  I soon got another starter, but that one soon fell by the wayside: I got a couple of loaves out of it, but it soon began to smell like baby vomit, a not uncommon problem.  I tossed it.  But the OG starter survived, and I used it for the next 15 years.  Sometime last spring, someone gave me another starter, which I revved up and started using, as well.  It was more vigorous than my other one, which had been slowly declining.  My practice was to bake one loaf per week, putting the starter in the refrigerator in between uses.  I'd feed it, then a few hours later take off what I needed, and put the remainder away.  The decline was pretty rapid once I got the other starter. I was alternating weeks, so each starter was fed every 14 days or so, then put back in the refrigerator.  Soon, both starters were pretty weak.

 Doing two feedings on the new starter worked pretty well, and I started using it most of the time, eventually idling the OG starter altogether.  I did some reading and I realized I was doing a lot of things wrong.  There are a number of websites around on managing and reviving starters. I should've been feeding the starters just before refrigerating.  I will do that going forward.

After the OG had been in the refrigerator for a few months, I hauled it out and fed it.  And fed it again.

 

The above picture was taken a few hours after the second or third feeding.  It was not quite flatlined, but there wasn't much life.  I continued with the CPR, switching to 2x daily feeding (and discarding, to keep the jar from overflowing).  The house was in the 60s, and I also put it in the oven on proof for a few hours (temps when the oven is running on the proof cycle go as high as about 116, but are usually about 95-105).  Finally, after several days, I got this:

 

It is doubling well and has the normal lactose-tangy aroma.  No baby vomit. It's actually showing more life than my other, newer, starter at this point.  Going forward, I think it's apparent that using them once every couple of weeks isn't enough--or at least that if they are not used for that long, feeding just before refrigeration (and maybe weekly while refrigerated) will help.

 

Sloppy Hoppy

 As I have mentioned before, I have canned a lot of rabbit. With the bones, quart jars are more or less needed, and the odd-shaped pieces of meat mean the quart jars won't have as much meat in them as they would if they were packed with boneless chicken breast chunks, but the process overall works well.

Then one has to figure out what to do with the canned rabbit.  It can be used any way you would use canned chicken, and another option is to use it in place of ground beef--they obviously are not the same, but one idea I got from a few podcasts was to make sloppy hoppy--i.e., sloppy Joes using rabbit meat instead of ground beef.  I looked and found some Crock Pot recipes, which I then adapted.

 

1 quart canned rabbit (usually about 1-1.5 lb of meat)

1 can tomato sauce (or tomato paste; see below)

2 Tb dried chopped onion, rehydrated

1 tsp. powdered garlic

2 Tb mustard

1/4 c brown sugar (or Whey Low for low-carb)

2 Tb white vinegar

2 Tb water (if tomato paste used; omit if using tomato sauce)

1 tsp Worchestershire sauce

1/2 tsp salt

My first attempt used tomato paste, because I thought the sauce would be too watery.  I would judge that to be a swing and a miss.  It ended up being edible, but it was obviously dry and it over-cooked and burned a little at the top edge in the Crock Pot (cooking time is about 4 hours on medium, which I have done, or 2-3 on high, which I have not tried).  The second effort with tomato sauce turned out well.

It's worth keeping in mind going forward.

 

 

 

Learning Cast Iron

 A number of years ago I somehow stumbled onto the Kickstarter campaign for Stargazer, which was seeking to make a line of cast iron skillets (10 inchest first).  I chipped in and soon had my pan (it's an original run; no manufacture date is on the assist handle).  Then... I pretty much didn't do anything with it.   I cooked a couple of things in it, but it more or less just sat around, eventually developing a little rust in a few spots.  I hadn't ever really cooked much with cast iron.  It came nominally seasoned, and what I had cooked in it had worked out okay, but it never made it into daily (or even monthly) use.  Finally, I did a little research, got a cast iron eraser from Lodge to remove the rust spots (that worked okay, not great), and did two coats of avocado oil seasoning at 400 degrees for an hour.  That worked well enough that I decided to try fried eggs.

The eggs are working out great; mine don't necessarily slide around the pan on their own, but neither do they stick--exactly.  Usually a nudge from the spatula is needed to make them mobile. In the picture above, an egg is shown with about 3/4 tablespoon of butter.

I have also done cornbread and pancakes; all work well.  For the cornbread, I used the tallow recipe mentioned previously, and it worked very well.  The surface area of the pan is about the same size as that of an eight-inch square glass dish at the cooking surface, but then the walls slope outward and up.  It is probably an insignificant difference.  The cornbread was not noticeably thinner than when baked in glass, but the crust was much better-developed. I put the pan in the oven to preheat, then used some lard to grease the bottom and sides before putting the batter in. This may be my go-to method in the future.

There's a lot cast iron can do and much it cannot do well.  I'm going to be experimenting more with it in the future.

 

The Summer of the Gallinippers

 

This has been a hard growing season. Although rain has fallen, it has been in concentrated dumps over a day or two, with little rain otherwise.  July, for example, saw 8.5" overall, more or less, but almost all of that fell on three days.  I got 3.6" on the 28th, and soon thereafter had my first sightings of the Psorophora ciliata mosquito, aka the gallinipper.

At first, I assumed they were pseudo-mosquitoes--there are a few insects that look like giant mosquitoes but aren't--but these were real.  And as the University of Florida notes, they were aggressive.  The good news is that they're relitively slow-moving and easy to see.

 The article also mentions that they lay their eggs in damp soil, and they tend to emerge after heavy rains flood otherwise dry areas.  A three-plus-inch rainfall will do that.  They were only around for a few days, then diminished, as August turned dry again.

August was very dry, with less than 2.5" overall, 1.75" of which fell on a single day.  I got about 1.5" of rain in the first 24 days of September, then Hurricane Helene blew through, dropping over 10" in 3 days.

Not a drop of rain has fallen since then, which is now almost a month ago, but the gallinippers are still causing problems, although their numbers are down over the last couple of weeks.  Even a light frost hasn't crimped their style.

Presumably they've laid their eggs in more soil that's hopefully dry most of the time.  Their numbers are somewhat smaller than the more ubiquitous mosquitoes, like the Asian Tigers, but they're more bothersome nonetheless.

End of the Joros, 2023

 They're everywhere in north Georgia now.  They can be spotted early in the season, but they're tiny and inconspicuous.  By August or so, the successful ones have gotten big, and some get very large.

As the season shifts into fall and the nights become cooler, the Joros seem to be a little more resilient than the native barn spiders, which re-build their webs each evening at dusk to catch night-flying insects.  Cold nights = few bugs.  The Joros, although they stay in their webs at night, seem to primarily hunt during the day.

Eventually nights come along that are too cold for them.  I had a very light frost in mid-October, but it was very borderline.  They were fine.  Nights in the low 20s are a different matter, and in early November we've had a couple of those.  They're now mostly hanging dead in their webs.  They've laid eggs by now, so the cycle will begin again next spring.

Tractoring Chickens and the Impact on the Yard

 As discussed previously, I keep my chickens in tractors.  It works well to give them additional food for their diet, thus saving on feed costs, and in theory it helps fertilize the grass.  After some early predator issues, I set up some electrified netting and have had no further problems.

They spend most of the day in the tractors.  They're also out some of the time, but they don't free-range.  I often see hawks on top of the muscadine trellis posts, and I'd have serious predation issues if I let them out for the whole day.  The tractor moves back and forth until it covers most of the area inside the paddock, then they get moved.  As can be seen (both above and below), they do scratch down to bare dirt sometimes.  The area needs time to recover after they have been there (recovery can't happen in a drought or in the dormant season; in those cases, the tractor gets parked and hay is used inside the tractor to provide bedding and what Joel Salatin calls a 'carbon diaper').

The aftermath of the chickens' work in the foreground paddock can be seen here:

These pictures were from spring; they subsequently moved to the right, but now (a couple of months later) they are back in the center area again.  The other chickens move between two areas, as well.  Given enough rainfall, the system works well.

This ground-level shot shows that the grass is a little darker green in the area where the tractor was, and it also shows a few more torn-up spots than were present before the tractor moved through.  That's a pretty fair assessment of how it goes.