Vinegar Vinter

Winter began with me leaching sugar from apples I'd already squeezed the cider from. Then, my juice-aholic neighbor gave me a bunch of de-juiced pulp. Mostly carrot and apple, I think.

Luckily for me, there was plenty of veggie-fruit sugar, and I dumped it in a bin with some artesian well water, snapped on the lid, and walked away for a while. When fermentation slowed down, I strained everything through cheesecloth, put the liquid in the big jar (above), stashed it in a cupboard I rarely open, and walked away for a while.

This is the bacterial mat that made the vinegar. The small light patches are the newborn colonies of mold, I think. The vinegar is ready, and it's time to pull off the mother floccor, strain, and bottle the product before the mold messes it up.

 

I like the result. Smells as bright as it looks. At about 3.3 pH, it's plenty tangy, and tastes good. I think this one may get really good with aging.

So, it looks like I can continue to wring another product from leftovers of juicing and cider-making. Someone asked where I got the "mother" (the colony of flocculants some people call a SCOBY, used like a sourdough starter to get the ball rolling), but so far I haven't used one. I decided to try an approach that is lazy (or smart), cheap (or frugal), and unambitious (or stoic, maybe zen), and walked away for a while. Unlike beer, where a wild ferment will not yield what beer drinkers want, vinegar makes itself with the microbes ranging free in the Eastside Olympia air.

Kosher or not, Smoked Meat for Breakfast

With the warm dry summer this year, Northwest gardeners (or the people who buy from our farmers) got to have delicious tomatoes. Short days, cold nights, and wet marine air have shut down further ripening, but the memories are delicious. 

One of my flavorite reminisces has to do with the aroma of toasty bagel mixing with smoked salmon. The dance of cool tomato and warm bread on my tongue, of smooth cream cheese and poppy seeds vying to please, makes my mouth feel happy. The religion I was raised with is confusing enough, so figuring out whether mixing fish and cheese is kosher is way beyond my expertise; the fact that all my Jewish friends are fine with lox and bagels does not really convince me, since most of them are all about as devout as my own pagan, shiftless, skeptical self. 

Back East, I'd have lox and bagels now and then, but even in the '80s, tomatoes available in delis had begun shedding their flavor, and the lox was a cold damp minislab not so different from the other cold cuts. Here, I've finally been exposed to real smoked salmon, and as luck would have it I received a few jars of primo smoked salmon at a couple of tribal give-aways this Spring. Alder-smoked wild salmon crumbled over local cream cheese is to what I used to get in delis as a Northwest IPA is to a can of Bud...I'll take the latter over an egg mcmuffin or a coors light, but it ain't the same thing.

Not so Kosher, the Joy of Goy.

And then there's the other thing. Pork. At the Olympia Farmers Market, now and then you can get bacon made from organic pasture-raised piggies. No parev work-around on this, it's just straight-out not kosher. Damned delicious, I guess that's how I would describe it. Mix it with a bagel and cream cheese, or eggs, whatever. Blow the thin blue tendril of skillet-smoke out the kitchen window as an offering to whatever gods you want to please.

Too much of these good things may not be good for your body, never mind your spiritual health. But to deny yourself these deliciousnesses on the basis of archaic laws is a bit too much sufferation for this heathen, and maybe of other people with taste buds. But if an ancient law forbids you from eating this way, I wish you well, and will help dispose of your share. 

 

Salish Sea Salt

One of our most basic ingredients has made the passage from salt of the earth to gourmet accoutrement. Sea salt has even fallen to what I call the Chipotle Effect, a food once considered exotic, known primarily to epicures (who do not credit masses of Mexicans that knew first), that jumps into the mainstream and becomes commoditized to the point that it is featured in Applebees and the snack aisle at Walmart. When sea salt becomes commonplace among the lumpen-pretentious, sending gourmands to ever more specialized and expensive salts. If you have a connection, you can now season your food with salt from all over the world, seasoned with everything from alder to Veruca.


Ironically, some of this amounts to a return to days gone by, when salt was dug and dried from various sources, each with its own texture and flavor and character. Once, all things were artisinal.

But even long ago, salt's fundamentality in the human diet and its non-perishability made it a commodity (and money...thank the Romans for your "salary," working stiff). Saltworks seasoned trade before the other spices, I would bet, even though I'm a pepper man in my soul. Squeezed from the ocean, dug from old seas, alchemied from ashes, salt favors every cuisine, but in many places it is not available, despite the creative ways hominid cooks procure it. It was inevitable that something so unevenly distributed and valuable would become an article of commerce, and as societies became industrial, so too did salt production, and no place more than where it could be dug from geological domes and layers, thus the doleful workingman's epithet for a hard job: "working in the salt mines."

Throughout my childhood, salt flowed fine and easy from cylindrical canisters decorated with a MidCentury OldFashioned girl with an umbrella, distractedly wandering around in a salt downpour. Salt mines were bad and Soviet, we were told, while ours was delivered by kindly capitalists. It was iodized (For Health!), and it was pretty much your only choice other than pickling salt (Kosher!), which decent people did not put in the shaker. Now, afflicted with hardship and unaffected by outmoded (Modern!) prejudices against homespuntineity, we can make our own salt again.


For a sun-drenched six months that I spent mapping a Kona village, I made salt. The people of old had hollowed out bowls all over the pahoehoe, mostly a foot or two across, not deep like the bait-pounding cups. There was salt in them when we arrived, as well as kiawe twigs, crab bits and various other crap you don't want to eat, not to mention the hefty deposit of saltish-looking sand, which hurts to eat. So we swept out a few and poured in some fresh kai (ocean water). Then some more, and then again, because the thirsty lava, parched since the previous Winter's storms, drank til all the vesicles were full and the water could finally pool.


Then we'd wait. The top would dry, and at lunch we'd flip flakes to the edge to expose thicker brine, and then come back the next day to do it again. Sometimes, rain would come in during the night, drunk, reeling up the coast, ruining days of the sun's work, pissing away the salt. Or a bird would drop a carapace or a crap. But eventually, I ended up with a couple of mason jars full of beautiful salt and only a few pieces of sea urchin.


But there's an easier way for you to make salt, and it goes a little something like this:

Salish Sea Salt

1. Go get some Salish Sea Water (unless there's another kai close by)
2. Boil it in a stainless steel or enamel pot, stirring occasionally once salt starts sticking to the bottom.
3. When it gets thick, and the popping bubbles burn your arm, put the brine into a glass or ceramic baking pan, or even a plate. Put it in a 150-200 degree oven and then turn the oven off. You're going for evaporation, not boiling heat.
4. Go do something else for an hour.
5. Repeat, scraping any crust (Yum!) that forms to the edge each round, until there's no water. 
6. Honing your new scraping skills (and maybe your new Solingen steel salt-scraping tool), scrape the salt into something suitably pretentious or functional, depending on your needs.

Tails

The Salish Sea pulses with life, schools and shoals swarm forth each in their season. Americans have gotten used to suspending seasons, eating tomatoes year round, never fretting over dwindling root cellars, and forgetting for the most part about special treats summoned by a Spring rain or a Summer sun or a Fall run. 


A step removed from nature, we people have set what we call seasons when it is allowed to fish or hunt for most of the edible ones. Recently there was a season for Spot Shrimp (Pandalus platyceros, the largest species on the West Coast), and I happened to be a step removed from a fisherman who made a good haul. 


This was my first encounter with this bundle of marine protein, but a prawn is a prawn, and anything that you can prepare on the day it was caught will be at its novice-forgiving best. Better yet, Spots make it easier by not having that vein of poo running down the tail, needing to be laboriously cut out. The carapace stretching back from the eyes holds all the guts--you snap it off and get rid of it (skip over to the "Heads" post at Urban Greenstead for that and of this tale).

Easy. Done with 5 pounds in a few minutes. Tails in the fridge and ready to be dinner. 

This is where a food blog is supposed to have a beautiful picture of the prawns in prep, and another of plated sublimity. But I procrastinated, as usual, and when one of the shrimp-eaters bailed, and only one of my family likely to even try them, I found myself putting them in the freezer at 9 at night. So you get no photo spread, no great recipe, no companion dishes. The only thing of value this post really has to offer is that when you freeze these critters, cover them in water, or when they thaw, they'll be mushy. 

A few days later, I did get around to cooking up a batch, but again there is little to offer the reader. My sole method was to assume that melted butter full of garlic chives would fix any flaw.  I thought I'd steam them, but fat or something in the shrimp made the water boil a massive foam that forced me to lift post from burner and lid from pot. The daughter brave enough to try retreated before too long because the "feet-thingies creep me out." My shrimpficionado guest allowed that they were OK, but not spectacular. I felt about the same; the garlicky butter made it ok, but couldn't quite overcome the taint of failure to eat some that first day, or completely hide the mushiness I thought I sensed. 


But, no disaster, and no waste. Errors and lapses are alright if we learn from them. There will be another shrimp season, and I'll be ready.

My Grain Headaches

Locavore carb porn.

Lately, I've had more headaches. But there's nothing duller than a blog-drone about ailments--except maybe symptom tweets--so rest assured that this entry is not about actual headaches, but the figurative ones that come from searching out locally produced grains.


These turn out to be mild, lately. In her book on a year of locavoraciousness, Barbara Kingsolver reported that finding local grains was one of the hardest things to do, down there in the Virginia-Kentucky border highlands. Local corn is widely available, if you are willing to take it in flammable liquid form. But here, in the last month, I've found oats from an Oregon mill and wheat flour from a Bellingham mill. 


Not from my county, but then again, grain in southwest Washington is just substrate for fungus, and we don't want any ergotine madness breaking out, now do we? So we send geoducks out and ship in grain in return. Most of it is in innocuous bags that don't really say where it cam from, but what can you expect from a commodity distributed by a national grocery chain? They buy the commodity where it is cheapest, and pour it in the same bag everywhere. 


Local mills used to exist nearly everywhere before trains, and now trucks make it all the easier to fan out from a few mega-mills to the rest of the country. If there is any logic, the flour I buy at the Tumwater Safeway came from eastern Washington, but there's no telling; it may have crossed the Continental Divide to get here. The "local" mills a couple or three hours south and north of where I live are the closest source I know of, and Fairhaven even says only that they try to obtain northwest grain, which presumably means that sometimes it may come from somewhere further afield.


As with many items in the locavore pantry, there is an issue of expense, and as usual, the effect depends on your focal length. Close up, the flour is expensive, maybe twice what the generic store brand costs. But back away, and home-made bread or pizza dough, even with that precious local flour, earns back that money in a jiffy compared to buying a loaf of bread or a frozen pizza. Local organic products may be more expensive than the grocery commodity version shipped in from who knows where, but they cannot begin to approach the cost of processed foods. Sweat equity is not a term you hear much in the culinary realm, but it applies here. 


And the oatmeal? I think it was actually cheaper than the generic mystery-source brands. 


If these local grains are available right beside the usual stuff in Safeway and Top supermarkets, if locavore consumers don't have to go to the expensive artisan-food section or a specailty organic market to find it, then there is hope that local farmers and mills can make a decent profit. 

I'm not a huge believer in the Free Market, if such a thing actually exists, but I have to think that the easier availability of local grain means that the marketers have recognized a niche with potential. If more people buy it, there may be room for more farmers and producers. The more this happens, the less our money flows out of the region. When the farmers are more secure, so are a range of things from our food supply to the flow of lease money to the School Trust. 


It's a good deal.

Canned for Dried

Ripeberry Jam, not quite done.

Recently, I arranged for a serious breach of locavorism. Fortunately, I am no more orthodox in that movement than I am in anything else. 

But there's enough distance involved that I feel a need to rationalize a little. What's happening is that a friend of mine and I are trading local foods. I'm packing up some Northwest treats, and she's packing things from her farm in Honaunau. Sure, each package will travel about 2800 miles, but the contents were gathered locally. All the processing was done at home: I canned and she dried. (OK, if I'm lucky, there will be some coffee that was roasted down the road from her farm, adding a few miles.)


There are no middle men. No money. No corporate tentacles. Just some taste treats we cannot grow ourselves, could not obtain otherwise without great expense. Two medium flat-rate boxes stuffed with onolicious food, taking up a tiny space in jets that were headed that way anyway. Chewing on a dried banana, I'll travel by tastebud to a place I have not been in years, and I won't feel guilty at all.

War Against Terroir

Mmmm. Cascadian huckleberry.

Americans who want to seem high class sometimes adopt Britishisms, but when they want to seem sophisticated, they often resort to French. Sometimes, as with "laissez faire," it's to hide the ugly truth ("unfettered capitalism" sounds more sinister), but the general idea is to make something ordinary sound fancy--"C'est magnifique" has a flair that "yum" just ain't got. Eventually, the word may become American as apple pie, or at least quiche. 

Food is a realm where these migrations occur regularly, and one of the newer arrivals is "terroir," which refers to the peculiarities of flavor bestowed on a food by its place of origin. There is no obvious Engish word that conveys the same concept, which makes sense when you think of most English cuisine (ah, see? the very word "cuisine" had to be imported--I rest my case). But in wine country the soil, climate, and a host of other influences affect the outcome, sometimes on a scale so minute that a location 100 meters away--but on the wrong side of a ridge--cannot replicate the terroir of a prized place.

Americans cling to some remnants of this concept, and seem to be rediscovering it. When I was a kid, Hanover County tomatoes and Smithfield ham had this kind of aura. But for most of my life, farming has trended toward uniformity and commoditization. The 'market' allegedly wanted not just all wheat to be the same, but all cucumbers, tomatoes, hams,...everything. Micro-breweries (and wineries, for you fancy drinkers) and farmers markets, which continue to sprout in new places and thrive where they gain a root-hold, offer hope that we're turning around as a culture, remembering and reviving local flavors.

However, if you get beyond the surface, you see we have a long way to go. The new locavores rail against the authoritarian uniformity imposed on the food supply by Monsanto, ADM, Con-Agra, and...well, the point is that the list is not very long. A lot of ink (how much of it GMO soy-based?) is devoted to lamenting and opposing the monotony of the produce, the loss of diversity and heritage varieties that occurs when all corn is Silver Queen and all cukes are Marketmore. Being a staunch evolutionist, I'm with them on this. Besides being boring, it is incredibly stupid to put all your eggs (mostly laid by just one breed) in one basket. And as a lover of things old, a conservationist at heart, I hate seeing old varieties disappear.


Fortunately, gardeners and small farmers have done a huge amount of work preserving and spreading old varieties and the genetic diversity. There are breeders selecting their way back to plants and stock that were impossible to get a generation ago, and for that matter, coming up with new varieties that do something other than maximize shipping durability and superficial attractiveness. 


Meanwhile, the war against terroir is still winning on the terre itself. Relentlessly pressured by that 'market,' farmers try to eke out more production with bigger machines, mechanized irrigation, and chemicals that kill the soil and pump up the produce. Now that there are enough buyers for organic produce, industrial production techniques have emerged in that realm as well, from hydroponics and greenhouses to cloistered chickens that never see the sun or drink the rain. Organic or not, most of hat you find in the grocery store could have been grown anywhere; there is no terroir when the earth is a platform for industrial agronomy.


I am fortunate to live in Western Washington, where there are abundant small farmers who take good care of their land. Like just about everything else about me, my palate is not refined, but I still think that food grown in black prairie loam tastes better than the same thing trucked in from a mega-farm in California. (And it's not entirely about locavorism, either, coffee from my friend's farm in Honaunau tastes like the volcano, not chemically assaulted Brazilian dirt.) 


So I guess I am a terroirist. For the time being, it's not illegal. The US may have decided that it's OK to snoop without warrants, to detain bystanders and citizens indefinitely, and launch missiles at people who disagree with its policies, but consumer choice remains sacrosanct, for now. But when Monsanto can sue a farmer for planting seed that, simply because the wind blows, contains some of its patented genes, we are experiencing a level of corporate power that suggests even that freedom may be imperiled. What happens when the industrial producers--too big to fail because they control the food supply, after all--bribe enough politicians to have non-industrial production be labeled dangerous and subversive, outlawed? Maybe this sounds silly to you, but the harmless hippies who sat in old growth trees were transformed into "eco-terrorists" even a generation ago. 


We are still free to taste terroir. When we support the Columbia River winery and Yakima hops farmers, we support local roots. When we eat a Quilcene oyster or a Mima camas bulb, we enjoy flavors that exist nowhere else. When we learn to appreciate terroir, we develop senses dulled by our bland modern culture.