Once again the centennial hop plant has produced enough of a cone crop to use in a batch of homebrew. Check out the article on the Harvest IPA that I made, for more details on the homebrew batch.
But after all the picking was done, I had 1 lb and 4 ounces of fresh centennial cones to use however I choose. I used 4 oz of fresh hops to add to the secondary fermentor of the Harvest IPA. While the rest of the cones were placed on drying frames in the basement, and left to dry for about three days.
After the three days had passed, what started as 16 ounces of fresh hops became 4 ounces of dried hop cones. Talk about a loss in water weight! And of those four ounces, I divided them up into one ounces packets and vacuum sealed all four of them. And with the cones vacuum sealed, they’ll be sitting in the kegerator until I brew up another batch of beer in 2012.
It turns out that these flakes dried a lot faster then I had expected, go figure. It only took 4 days for them to dry out completely, and that’s only because I gave the peppers an extra day and half in the dryer, since the shredded Jalapenos were very slow to dry.
Looking over the final product, the Aji turned out much more like a flake from using the normal Cuisinart blade and pulsing the motor. Compared to the Jalapeno flakes in which I used the shredding disc on the Cuisinart. Since the Jalapenos seemed to have clumped up badly during the drying process.
But seeing how I had absolutely no information to start with in executing this cooking experiment. I kind of had to make it up as a went along.
I haven’t tasted any of the flakes to see how they turned out, since I was too busy choking on the capsaicin fumes from the basement. So I’ll leave the taste testing for another time.
As was briefly mentioned in the end of season garden post. I thought that drying these peppers into flakes would be something that you normally don’t see done with either aji limon or jalapenos peppers. Plus I’m just plain tired of canning this season, so drying these peppers is the lazy way of getting them processed into an end product. Continue reading →
You might remember these peppers from last year, when I received a random bag of them from my farmer neighbor, which I ended up canning into 2 pints of finished peppers. Well with the saved seeds from last year’s peppers, I was able to grow about 6 plants with varying degree of vigor. But after a roller coaster of a year, that included a freak hailstorm in early spring, as well as an early frost in the beginning of October. I thought that I wouldn’t take any more chances, and process all the ripen peppers before another frost rolled into town. Continue reading →
This hot sauce was one of those random ideas that I had, while looking at all the ripened jalapenos in the garden. At first I though about drying the red jalapenos into a red pepper flake, or maybe even smoking them for chipotles. But for some reason, I was more intrigued by the idea of making them into a hot sauce instead. Continue reading →
At first I thought that I was going to process all the pickles that I bought at the downtown Farmer’s Market into v2 & v3 pickles. But while processing the ~7lbs of cucumbers for v2 & v3, I thought that I would go a different route and try to make some brine fermented pickles. Years and years ago back in Michigan I tried to make fermented pickles, and the experiment was an utter failure. So now that I’ve got a little bit more canning and homebrewing experience under my belt, I thought that I would give fermented pickles another try. Before this fermented experiment begun, I stopped by the library to pick up a copy of The Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich(not the revised edition), to try and get a base recipe down, as well as some tips and tricks. Continue reading →
Since the downtown farmer’s market isn’t going to be around for very much longer, I though that I should take advantage of the situation and make some more pickles before the season is over.
After doing a quick walk around to gauge the prices, I finally found a vendor that was selling 1 1/2 pint containers of pickling cucumbers for $2.00 each. Wanting to get the price even lower, I offer them $15 for 10 containers. We eventually settled on $18 for 10 containers (a $2 total discount). I have a feeling that if I had waited until noon (when the market stops) instead of when I was there at 11am, I could have gotten them for $15.
But I still got a hell of a good deal, since the two bags of cucumbers ended up weighing ~15 lbs, so at ~$1.20 lb it was still a great deal. Later on I didn’t realize how much ~15 lbs of cucumbers were until I started to process them. After getting through the first ~7 lb bag, I decided to make the pickles two different ways, fermented/brined and hot processed vinegar pickling (like v1.) Below you’ll see the recipes that I used for versions 2 and 3 of the vinegar pickles. The brined pickles (version 4) will be getting their own separate post.
Version 2.0
Brine:
(note: less vinegar & more water compared to v1)
3.5 cups vinegar
4.5 cups water
2 TB pickling spice mix
1/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup canning salt
Bring Mixture to a boil, then simmer for 15 mins.
Per quart jar add:
(note: added black peppercorns & celery seeds compared to v1)
2 bay leaves
4 cloves garlic
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp whole black peppercorns
3/4 tsp celery seed
2 tsp mustard seed
3 tsp Dill seed
Process 15 mins in a boiling water canner Yield: 3 quart jars
Version 3.0
I had some remaining brine from v2, so I just strained it. I then added 1.5 cups vinegar, 2.5 cups water, 4 TB white sugar, 1/4 cup of salt. This addition was just a little bit short. So I topped off the jars with a mixture of 1/4 cup vinegar & 1/4 cup water.
Brine:
(note: less vinegar & more water, also removed the pickling spice compared to v1 & v2)
3 cups vinegar
5 cups water
1/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup canning salt
Bring Mixture to a boil, then simmer for 15 mins.
Per quart jar add:
(note: increased the red pepper flakes to 1/2 tsp, and increased the celery seed to 1 tsp compared to v2)
2 bay leaves
4 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp whole black peppercorns
1 tsp celery seed
2 tsp mustard seed
3 tsp Dill seed
Process 15 mins in a boiling water canner Yield: 4 quart jars
Side Notes: 1) Add the celery seeds after removing all the air from the jar with the food saver attachment. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a lot of seeds inside the attachment, instead of inside the jar. 2) One of the v3 jars doesn’t have any garlic inside, since I used up the rest of the garlic for the other three jars in v3. This was a one time problem, since I then ended up purchasing a 3 lb jug of peeled garlic. 3) Don’t over fill the jars, since it looks like with v3, I had a bit of a boil over in the canner kettle. Since the water was a little bit green after processing.
When I saw the Labor Day ad from my local grocery store, it had a sale item that I had to pick-up. And what food item got me so interested, that I had to get it? Why none other then Michigan grown green beans for $0.58 lb. Yes, you read that right $0.58 a pound. And having finally cracked open a jar of the wax beans, and enjoyed the results. I thought that I would give it another try, but with green beans, and also with a couple of recipe modifications. Here are the results: Continue reading →
This year I’ve eaten more then my fair share of fresh tomatoes from the garden. So instead of letting a lot of tomatoes rot on the vine. I thought that it would be a good time to can all the tomatoes that are currently ripe. So this year, instead of using only “roma” type tomatoes, I’m basically going to be using a blend of all the tomatoes in the garden. Since a few weeks back I used of blend of tomatoes (roma, cherry/grape, heirloom, big boy) to make a quick tomato sauce, and it turned out awesome. Continue reading →
This year I went with a theme for making jalapeno hot sauce of “go big, or go home”, which I think that I more than accomplished.
When I was in Michigan two weekends ago, I had a little bit of free time on Saturday morning before I needed to go to a wedding in Northern Michigan. So I thought that I was swing by the Pontiac Farmers Market with my sister to see if they had any deals on peppers (jalapeno specifically) like they did last year. And once again I wasn’t disappointed. After a quick walk around to gauge the prices for a pint container of jalapenos (they ranged from $0.25 each to $2.00 a pint.) I finally found a vendor at the edge of the open air section of the market that was selling jalapeno’s for $1 per pint. I also noticed that the vendor had about 1/2 a peck’s worth of jalapeno’s in the back, which was in addition to the 3 pints on display. So I inquired how much they wanted for all the jalapeno’s they had, they quoted me $5.00, and I told them “sold”. So for $5.00 I ended up getting about 3.5 lbs of jalapeno’s, which is about $1.43lb, so not too bad price wise. Combine that with the 2.5lbs of El Jefe jalapenos that I picked from my garden, and we are talking about a lot of jalapeno’s. Continue reading →
