Infused oils and vinegars

Necessity was the mother of invention for this project. Not that I invented this but it was somewhat new to me.

I grew quite a bit of purple basil for the first time this year and needed to find a use for it. The thought of purple pesto was somewhat strange so I started surfing the internet for ideas. I saw a picture of some beautiful purple-basil-infused vinegar and I had to try it.

I mixed cider vinegar and white vinegar at a 50/50 rate, which has a beautiful color even before infusing. In a half gallon of the mixed vinegar I added about 2 cups of purple basil leaves.


I let this set on the counter for a week, then filtered out the basil leaves and anything else that might have come off of the leaves.


Muslin was a good choice for a filtering material. I also use it in cheese making instead of traditional 'cheesecloth', which is almost worthless when actually trying to use it for cheese making. I could have left the leaves in the vinegar but I know from experience that the leaves start to fade and wilt quite a bit and do not look very good.

I also infused another batch with garlic. I smashed about 6 cloves with the flat side of a knife and let those sit in the vinegar with the basil for a week. It smells wonderful after a week, with the basil and garlic smell. It will probably be very good in many Italian dishes.

Nasturtiums are an edible flower that I grow, I haven't used them in any dishes yet but need to do it. I have read some nice ideas for cooking with them. A simple salad topped with a few nasturtium flowers would be a very nice presentation. I tried to keep some of the fresh flowers in a bottle of vinegar but the acidity of the vinegar wilts and fades them too much. However, in that failed attempt I found that the flowers color the vinegar with a beautiful color:

The bottle on the right is 50/50 cider/white vinegar right after adding the nasturtiums. The one on the left is a few days after adding the nasturtiums. Also in both of the bottles are stalks of garlic chives.

I also have started a couple batches of basil and garlic infused extra-virgin olive oil.


These leaves are green basil and not the purple basil (the purple might make an interesting looking oil though!) From what I have read I will have to let this sit for a month or longer to properly infuse the oil. Before adding the basil leaves it helps to smash the leaves quite a bit to help release the flavor of the basil. I also added about 4-5 smashed garlic cloves to this. I plan on filtering all of this out when it is completed. If I am going to use this to actually cook with, I am going to research whether this will require heating after the infusion is complete. I think that even if I don't find any information about it, I might heat it to a little over 212 degrees (boiling point of water, and a low heat for oil) for about 10 minutes, just to kill any of the 'nasties' that might be in there. I can't see that it will hurt it, and can only help.

Another herb that I grew again this year was tarragon. Simply cut the tarragon to the right length and slip into the jars of vinegar. It's very simple and look great.


The hardest part of this project is finding nice looking bottles to use. The ones pictured here with the spouts I found at Walmart for about $4 each. I have seen some very nice ones on sites online, but they can be pricey. If I decide to get any of those, I would probably make them into Christmas presents.

There are a lot of other ideas that you can find online, search with the term 'infused vinegar recipes' or 'infused garlic recipes' or something similar. Or simply use your imagination and think of what would look good or taste good with vinegar and/or oil.

Canadian bacon

I've made Canadian bacon a couple of times and it has really turned out well. It tastes good with a lot of things, but my son's favorite is homemade "Egg McMuffins"; a muffin, egg, a good cheese and a slice or two of this Canadian bacon. Use a pork loin, not a pork tenderloin. Mine was 5-6 lbs. In a nutshell the loin is cured in the refrigerator for 5 or 6 days, then it is smoked for a few hours.

My brine is usually something like the following. It varies a little, depending on what I feel like adding to it at the time.

Water to cover the meat, usually about a gallon, depending on the container you are curing it in.
For every gallon of water use:

- 2 Tablespoon of Instacure #1 (Prague Powder) for every half gallon of water.  Some recipes call for more Instacure, I tend to go lighter on it.  - OR use the appropriate amount of Morton's Tender Quick. I don't know the conversion factor, since Tender Quick has the salt and the curing salt combined.
- 4 Tablespoons of canning salt.
- 5 to 10 (depending on your taste, I use 10) smashed garlic cloves. Take a wide-bladed knife turned sideways or something similar and smash the garlic on your counter, but not so hard that it flies into pieces. This releases the garlic oils and taste.
- About a Tablespoon or so of onion flakes.
- 1/4 cup or so of sugar, preferably brown sugar.

Some optionals; be creative, there are a lot more options than these:
- 2 or 3 FRESH bay leaves. If you don't have a bay tree growing in a container, get one! Once you've had fresh bay you will never go back.
- a teaspoon of fresh-cracked pepper.
- a Tablespoon, or more, or less, depending on you, of a hot-pepper powder. If I add pepper I use dried jalapeno powder because I dry my own jalapenos.

Put the meat into a bowl/pot large enough to hold it, covered with the brine. It looks awful in this picture but that is because the water has spices and such in it. The piece of meat in the middle is the pork loin, the other smaller pieces were something else I was working on at the same time:


Place something on top of the meat to hold it under the surface of the brine. I usually use a small plate with a mug full of water to weigh it down. Keep it in the refrigerator for 5 or 6 days.
When the loin is done curing, pour out the liquid and replace with clean water. Let the meat soak in the water for about an hour, and change the water 2-3 times. This will remove some of the saltiness. You can get creative with your rub at this point, but I covered this one only in fresh-cracked pepper. I ran out of pepper, and usually cover the meat a lot more than this:


Next I place it on my smoker.


I have a small smoker and it is hard to regulate a good cooking temperature, so first I smoke it at a low to medium smoker heat for about 3 hours. I like to get it to a safe heat of 160 degrees, and I don't want to dry it out, so I finish it up in the kitchen oven. I wrap the loin in heavy duty aluminum foil and pour in a small amount of water.
At 350 degrees I think it took an hour or two to get it to an internal temperature of 160 degrees, checked with a meat thermometer.

After the loin has reached 160 degrees, I remove it and let it rest for about 30 minutes.


Next simply slice it up. I usually slice it about 1/8th to 1/4th of an inch, but the thickness is up to you.


I usually store half of it vacuum-packed in the freezer, it seems to stand up to freezing well. However, there is nothing like a fresh piece!

Pesto Making and Freezing

I had never even heard of pesto until maybe 7 or 8 years ago. I had been growing herbs for a few years and started looking into different ways to use and preserve what I was growing. Someone gave me my first taste of pesto, spread on a piece of homemade bread, and I was hooked. I started looking into ways of preserving it and found this idea, and I do this every year now.
We have frost warnings for tonight so I cut all of my basil, here is about a third of what I grew this year. Yes, it's a lot!


First you strip the leaves from the stems


I make my pesto by sight and taste and really don't follow a recipe. But if you need some measurements, I found a recipe that is probably close to what I do:

2 cups fresh basil leaves, packed
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan-Reggiano or Romano cheese
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/3 cup pine nuts or walnuts (I use walnuts, much more inexpensive!)
3 medium sized garlic cloves, minced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

If you want to freeze your pesto, don't add the cheese until you thaw it out and it is ready to serve.

Place reasonable amounts of the basil into your food processor, in other words don't cram it full. Add olive oil, garlic cloves, cheese (if not freezing the pesto),salt and pepper and process until smooth. Add the nuts after you obtain the consistency of pesto that you want, then process until the nuts are ground well but not so small that you don't notice them. If you put them in with all the other ingredients at first they will get ground too much.

Now here is a trick for freezing pesto in manageable amounts. Remove pesto from food processor and spread into ice-cube trays


Place trays in freezer until it is frozen well, then break pesto out of trays


Now you can place the cubes in freezer bags


I put some of my cubes in freezer bags, but also placed some in vacuum bags. These are for a longer storage time, I want it fresh in February!


I make this by sight and taste, slowly adding ingredients until I like how it looks and how it tastes to me. It is really good on a homemade French or Italian bread. It is also fantastic when mixed with pasta. I cooked enough pasta for 3 people the other day, added about a tablespoon of the pesto to it and that was all. It was fantastic and well received here at home.

Try growing a larger patch of basil next year. You will have fresh basil from midsummer on, and pesto for the winter!

Canning Applesauce

Making applesauce is very easy if you have a Victorio Strainer in your kitchen arsenal. I think the Victorio company went out of business(?) and the new product that replaced it is the Roma, there may be others out there. Here is an example of the kind of food mill that I am referring to, on Lehmans.com

To make approximately one canner full of quart jars you will need about 20 lbs of a good cooking apple. Normally I use the ones on my tree, which I believe are Golden Delicious, but I am not sure since the trees were here when I moved to this house. However, my tree produces fruit about every other year, and this was the off-year. I went to an orchard in our county, Buckingham Orchards and bought 20 lbs of Cortland apples. This variety was recommended to me by the owner as a good cooking apple, and I was not disappointed. The applesauce had a great flavor and a pinkish color to it.

First we need the apples sliced up, I use an apple wedger like this



Don't throw the core away, the whole thing will be run through the strainer. After you wedge them, place them immediately in a large bowl of cold water and Fruit Fresh. Fruit Fresh is ascorbic acid(vitamin C), citric acid and sucrose. This prevents the apples from browning, and the Cortlands will start browning in a few minutes if not treated.

Now we want to soften the apples by cooking them in a pot of with about an inch of boiling water.



Cook them in batches that are just a few inches deep of apples in the pot. It only takes a few minutes to soften them, test them by poking them. Try not to cook them too long or they will fall apart in the cooking water. I found that using my pasta ladle was perfect for scooping the apples from the pot.

Next run the cooked apple wedges through the strainer. The Victorio makes this so easy. Place the apples in the hopper and start cranking. The seeds and skins come out of one chute and the sauce comes out another chute.


Run the scrap that comes out of the scrap chute through the strainer, this will get you quite a surprising amount of sauce. After it has been run through the strainer the second time, I dump the scraps into the compost area near my garden.


Place the sauce that comes out of the strainer into a pot and heat it on low to medium heat, almost to a boil. You have to heat it slowly or it will bubble up and make quite a mess on your stove.



Fill your heated jars with the applesauce and leave 1/4 inch of headspace, then place your boiled lids on, then the band, and place them in your canner.




Make sure there is at least an inch of water above the tops of the jars. Process pints for 15 minutes, quarts for 20 minutes.

I bought 20 lbs of the Cortland apples and the applesauce yield was 14 pints and 2 quart jars. I love using these Cortland apples for sauce, they soften nicely and give the sauce a nice color. These directions are basically the same directions for making pear sauce also. I think I hand cut the pears instead of using the wedger. If you've never had pear sauce you need to try it, it is outstanding!

Easy grape juice

I used to make grape juice by cooking the grapes then filtering through cheesecloth. It was a long process but it made great grape juice. Then someone told me about a way to make juice with a LOT less effort and a LOT less time. In a nutshell you put the grapes in the jar with a little sugar (or none if you want) filling up the rest of the way with hot water, and processing in a water bath canner for 25 minutes. THAT'S IT, you are done! I've been making it this way now for about 10 years now, and don't plan on going back to a longer, harder process.
I grow concord, Catawba and Thompson Seedless but use the Concords and Catawbas for juice.

Ingredients per jar:
1 1/2 to 2 cups of grapes (I use 1 1/2 cups)
1/4 to 1/2 cup of sugar (I use 1/4 cup)
Boiling water to fill jar the rest of the way.

First wash your grapes well, I do it in the kitchen sink. Remove grapes from vine, and sort out bad grapes, stems, leaves, leaving just the good-quality grapes.

Prepare a pot of boiling water to use to fill the jars. You will need a little less than a quart for every quart of juice you are going to make.

Prepare your lids by boiling in water. I heat my washed jars in the microwave by placing a half inch of water into each jar and microwaving until the water boils. Then I use my 'hold warm' function on my microwave to keep them warm until ready to use. Or you could microwave them for a minute every few minutes to keep them hot.

Pour 1 1/2 cups of grapes and 1/4 cup of sugar into each jar.



Now pour the boiling water into the jar, leaving 1/2 inch of headspace, and place in water bath canner.


Process in boiling water bath for 25 minutes and you are done. This is so simple and makes great juice. When serving, pour slowly and usually the grapes will stay in the jar. Or you could pour over a strainer to keep the grapes out.

Bad recipes online; I'm venting, sorry.

I was just browsing around for good recipe ideas, and I just had to vent about something. For one thing, I was reminded of sticking to USDA-approved recipes. Yes, I can hear some of the black-helicopter-fearing folks now, and how the US government is in the pockets of this, that and the other groups. However, I want to live a long and happy life, and there is a LOT of research and data behind their recipes. There are some very dangerous canning recipes online. "But Marty, my ma and her ma used this recipe and nobody ever got sick." Yeah, and a few people live to be 92 years old and smoke 2 packs per day.
Another bad-recipe finding I have seen is bad measurements. "Use 3 onions". Uh, duh, is that 3 onions-the-size-of-Buicks? Is that 3 small onions? The difference can be huge, and costly in the results.
How about recipes where the author doesn't know the difference between a 'T' and a 't', or a TS and a ts. It would be nice if they all used TBSP or tsp, or TB and ts, or simply TABLESPOON and teaspoon.
I just saw a recipe online where the person said 'fill a bowl with sliced cucumbers'. What's a bowl? Sliced how thick?
Proofread, people! 13 TBSP of turmeric (instead of 1 or 3 TBSP) is enough to taint the waters of a large swimming pool, and not to be used in a recipe.
The worst offending website is cooks.com, where anybody can post anything. It's almost funny, some of the recipes; "Cook until done", "Hete on hi heet til it looks like itz about reddy" "Add enuf habeneros til you think yu have enuf"
OK, I'm not perfect, but things like this really drive me nutso, and I will strive to never post anything like these examples. If you see me straying off the beaten path of common sense and proper English usage, PLEASE post a comment and whack me upside the head.

Next: bread and butter pickles

Thanks
Marty

Sauerkraut-making pictorial

Last year I posted a how-to for making sauerkraut (Here), but I didn't post any pictures. Since I made a new batch of kraut today, I wanted to show some pics of the process.

This was a 13.5 lb cabbage I picked. Honestly, I waited too long to pick it, I should have picked it a week ago.

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A big'n, 13.5 lbs. The variety is Late Flat Dutch

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Coring the cabbage

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Cutting/shredding the cabbage

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Shredded cabbage

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Work in batches of 5 lbs at a time. Add 3 Tablespoons of CANNING SALT to each 5 lbs of cabbage. Iodized salt(table salt) will discolor the kraut.

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Squishing down the cabbage until each batch is covered in its own liquid. I use an inverted flat-bottomed coffee mug that is made of pottery. A glass could break in your hand! There are some tools that are made specifically for squashing down cabbage, but a mug works fine for me.

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I use an oven roasting bag with a half-gallon of salt water (3 Tbsp of canning salt to a half-gallon of water) to cover the mixture

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Then let it set at room temperature for 4-6 weeks, until no bubbles rise to the top when the side of the crock/bucket is tapped. Then its just a matter of processing in a water-bath canner. See recipe post HERE.

Waiting for the 'storm'

I'm in 'hurry up and wait' mode for the tomatoes and the Great Annual Salsa-Making Event. In the meantime there have been a few things to harvest. All of the garlic has been pulled, see previous post on Pickled Garlic.

I got my first tomato this year on July 16th, I think that is my record:

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Zucchinis have been coming on religiously. I had read where you can freeze zucchini, grated or sliced, and have frozen some. You can also blanche and freeze grated zucchini for winter bread making. Freezing zucchini, like many vegetables is easy. First you slice it:

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Then blanche for 3 minutes in boiling water:

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Cool it immediately in a sink of cold water. Ice water is nice, but I usually don't have much ice on-hand:

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Then place in freezer bags and immediately place in your freezer.

Eggplant has been coming on strong, and I will be experimenting by blanching and freezing it also. I have never done it, but have read that you can freeze this also.

Peppers are coming on strong too. I haven't had much luck in getting peppers to ripen at the same time as the tomatoes, so I chop and freeze those also. I will keep some fresh for making stuffed, grilled peppers and hope to post that soon.

After a couple of good rains recently, I looked in the garden this morning and I got a these goodies:

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I still have to pick some green bell peppers, and I have some "Fooled You" peppers. These look just like a jalapeno but are mild. I also have some oh-my-goodness sized cabbages and need to start a batch of sauerkraut.

Soon the 'maters will be coming on strong and it will be time to make salsa. Plus I will have all the fresh tomatoes I want for eating fresh! Yum! There is nothing like a simple burger graced with a slice or two of fresh garden tomato.

Pickled Garlic

I grow a lot of garlic, much more than I could ever use in a year. Like many things I grow and make, however, it makes GREAT gifts. Whether it's simply giving a bulb away or a jar of pickled garlic, people appreciate home-made/grown things.
Pickling garlic is a good way to store garlic for gifts throughout the year, and it is really easy.

Here are my ingredients:

About 10-12 large bulbs of garlic
3 cups of white vinegar
1 cup of sugar
1 tsp canning salt (don't use table salt in canning, the iodine will ruin your product)

First I break the cloves from the bulb

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Then you want to blanch the cloves, dropping them in boiling water for about one minute. I used my tomato basket that I use to blanch many other vegetables with.

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Immediately drop them into a sink or large pot of COLD water, to stop the heating process. When you do this, the outer skin slips off of the garlic fairly easily

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Slip all of the skins from the cloves. Heat the vinegar, sugar and salt in a pot to boiling and boil for one minute. Place the cloves in the jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace (space between top of product in the jar and the rim of the jar.)

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Now process in a boiling water-bath canner for 10 minutes (at least it is 10 minutes at my Ohio elevation of 900 feet.)

After 10 minutes of boiling in the canner, remove from canner and allow to cool on your counter.

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I still have a LOT of garlic left. I will probably braid some together, give some raw bulbs away, and keep some for myself. I will also keep a few bulbs for planting more in the fall for next year. To give you an idea of how long some garlic varieties will keep, my garlic from last year kept well, at room temperature, until this past April. That's about 9-10 months!

Hot Dog Relish

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The zucchini is coming along strongly, as it normally does this time of year. Personally I get tired of fried or steamed zucchini easily, and am always searching for new ways to use zucchini. So about 10 years ago I started making homemade hot-dog relish. I have tried several recipes and they have all been fantastic. This year's recipe goes something like this, with a little improvisation thrown in here and there, see notes.

12 cups shredded zucchini, core but do not peel (I peeled about half of them before chopping. I also substituted 2 of the 12 cups with 2 cups of chopped cucumber)
3 large onions, chopped fine (I used 5 medium-sized onions)
2 large green peppers, chopped fine
2 large red peppers, chopped fine
1/2 cup pickling salt
3 cups sugar
1 quart vinegar (you can use white or cider)
2 teaspoons celery seed
2 teaspoons mustard seed (recipe called for seed, I used dry mustard powder)
2 tsp. turmeric

I chopped the zucchini, peppers and onions in a food processor until it was the consistency that I liked in a relish, some people like it a lot chunkier than I like it. Combine the chopped zucchini, onion, green and red peppers, sprinkle with the salt and cover with cold water, let stand at least 2 hours (I have done it overnight in the fridge.) Drain well and press out excess liquid. I did this by pouring the pot of chopped veggies into a couple of colanders that were placed in the sink, then running cold water over them for several minutes. If it is not rinsed well it is too salty.

In a large (6-8 quart?) pot boil together the sugar, vinegar, turmeric, celery and mustard for 3 minutes. Add the chopped vegetables and bring to a boil again. Simmer for about 10 minutes, then spoon into hot sterilized jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace, tighten caps.

Process 15 minutes in boiling water bath.

Yield: I got 8 pints, a half-pint jar and one quart jar. I did the quart jar just for kicks and giggles. Hopefully I can take the quart jar to a church event or a large picnic sometime.

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