By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator       

This is an exciting time for the Bay Area -- the acacias, magnolias, flowering cherries, and flowering plums are all in bloom!

Sadly, we have none of those in the test garden, and it's as slow as can be out there. To top it off, I'm feeling some disappointment about this year's big winter veggie garden. Last year brought us this looker:

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Remember when we featured homemade ricotta in our spring one-block feast? You'll find the recipe in the current (February) issue of the magazine and if you click here.

We learned how to make it by getting a hands-on lesson at Bellwether Farms, an excellent cheesemaker in Sonoma. Their ricotta is amazing—one taste and it's hard to go back to the substandard mass-market stuff.

Making ricotta normally takes at least 1 1/2 hours. It is slow, peaceful, and meditative. Here's my attempt to make it in 5 minutes, for TV:

And now, our cheese contest!
As I mentioned near the end of this clip, we're sponsoring a cheese recipe contest with California's Artisan Cheese Festival.

How it works: Send in a breakfast or dessert recipe using either ricotta or fromage blanc (the other cheese in the magazine story, which we learned to make from Cowgirl Creamery), or go crazy and use both!

The prize: Free tickets to the festival (March 26-29), in Petaluma. Plus, we'll announce you and your recipe on stage, and we'll publish your recipe on Sunset's main website, in the food section.

To enter, click here.

Let's see your cheese chops!

By Elaine Johnson, Sunset associate food editor

 We’ve been feeding our morel patch once a week with compostable materials to put nutrients in the soil and encourage the spawn to begin, well, spawning. The directions that came with our morel kit  note that it’s important to add fresh stuff that's not already composted.

 Here’s what came out of the Sunset test kitchen today:

        Artichoke trimmings from recipe work for the big Sunset cookbook*

        A few slightly moldy raspberries

        Assam golden tip tea leaves (my favorite morning brew)

        A stray rosemary sprig

        Charred cedar planks from grilled cedar-plank salmon (also for the forthcoming Sunset cookbook)  

 *A collection of over 1000 fresh recipes that reflect the way we cook today, to be published fall of 2010. Stay tuned!  

Of course the test kitchen also collects compost for the chickens, and we don’t want to deprive them of their greens. So Team Mushroom is collecting foods the girls might not eat. Charred wood, for example, is right out if you're a hen. But it might be perfect for mushrooms.

We're hoping that the addition of the burned cedar planks will mimic the forest fire conditions that trigger morel fruitings in nature.

Chopping up the cedar planks took some muscle, but Brianne and I kept at it until everything was in small pieces.  

We’ll keep feeding the patch for a couple more months, then wait for the warming spring soil to work its magic.  

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Rats. Adelaide has a staph infection.

This fuzzy, sweet-faced little Pie Ranch cow, whom we'd hoped to part-own, has an inflammation in her udder that is uncomfortable and lowers her milk production--and has prompted her owners to let her dry up, that is, stop lactating. (Her calf has already been weaned.)

Dede, the cow-keeper at Pie Ranch, apologetically explained that it's better for Adelaide's health to treat her this way rather than bombarding her with general antibiotics. Once she's dry, the affected part of the udder can be treated with a more specific and effective antibiotic.

Ah, Adelaide. She seemed so perfect. For a completely over-the-top Adelaide song by Anberlin, click here. (We're not really that torn up. It's just a good song.)

So, no milk for a while. The plan, according to Dede, is to let Adelaide recuperate and then breed her sometime this winter. Cows gestate for as long as women do, so around 9 months after hooking up with a bull--whenever that might be--Adelaide will have her calf...and Team Cow will have its milk.

Actually, we may have it sooner. We're investigating some options.

In the meantime, if you know a cow who wouldn't mind an extra owner, let us know!

Just another day at the Sunset Headquarters.  We took a quick break from our jobs to plant morel spawn in our gardens.  Paying homage to the small delicacies we hope will grow here, we opted to wear nice shoes and clothes to dig and turn the soil (or perhaps the attire was an accident). 

 (Katie Tamony, Editor-in-chief, and me turning the soil)

Two things we have learned about mushroom growing; The directions included are typically very unclear and the results can vary from size to shape to season of bloom. 

Here is my best attempt at simplifying the process for growing morels.  The earliest we will find our morels is late this spring, but there is a very good chance that we may not see them for a couple years.  We will let you know when/if we find them.  If we don't find any in the next two years, I would recommend disregarding our method (the uncertainty of mushroom growing drives me nuts).   

Quiz: Do you have a potential morel habitat?

• Do you have a 4-16 square foot area of soil?
• Is the space well shaded with less than three hours of direct sunlight per day?
• Is the area out of the way of foot traffic?
• Is the soil moist and free of heavy clay and rocks?
• Do you collect compost?
• Is there a water source nearby?

If you answered "yes" to all, you are a potential morel farmer. 

 How to plant your morel habitat (How we did it anyway):

• Step 1:  Purchase morel spawn (www.gmushrooms.com)
• Step 2:  Refrigerate spawn until ready to plant (up to 6 months)
• Step 3:  Put on your fancy shoes and coats (optional)
• Step 4:  Scout an area in your garden with lots of shade and good soil that is near a water source
• Step 5:  Clear a 4-16 square foot space of branches and leaves
• Step 6:  Turn the soil 6-12 inches deep
• Step 7:  Crumble your morel spawn evenly over the area and turned it with the soil
• Step 8:  Turn in fresh compostable produce and burned wood and ashes 

 (Margo True, Food Editor, Katie Tamony, Editor-in-chief, and Elaine Johnson, Associate Food Editor, scattering morel spawn)

 How we will maintain our morel habitat

• Weekly turn in compostable materials 
• • 8 cups of biodegradable materials for a 16 square foot space (Less if the weather is warm)
  • Add remnants of burned wood to create a more natural habitat for morels since they commonly spring up in areas where forest fires have occurred
• Stop adding biodegradable materials 30-40 days before estimated "morel spring" (see below for "morel spring" seasons)
• • After we stop adding to the space, we will let nature take its course on our morel habitat.  Allowing weeds and grasses to grow and fallen leaves to stay will provide protection for the young morels
• Lightly water the area if the ground feels dry
• Fend off tourists that may find our morel patch

 Other information you should know

• When should you plant?
• • If you live in an area with a mild climate, you may plant anytime of year 
  • Otherwise, it is optimal to plant when the day time highs are in the 60's and 70's
• When will you find morels?
• • If you live in a mild climate "morel spring" may occur January through April 
  • If you live in an area with brutal winters, "morel spring" is likely to occur in May or June
  • A couple of weeks after a heavy rain, inspect your habitat for toothpick-like sticks: morels!  The morels will take a couple more weeks to fully mature 

For more photos, visit Sunset's Facebook page.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Real ricotta, made from the whey left over from cheesemaking, is one of the glories of Italian gastronomy--tender, delicate, and very versatile in cooking. We on Team Cheese have taken a few stabs at making it ourselves from reading recipes, but all we produced were little handfuls of gritty white stuff. We needed a ricotta master to show us the way.

Luckily for us, one of the best ricotta-makers in America happens to be not far away: Bellwether Farms creamery, in Sonoma. Even better, Liam Callahan, Bellwether's head cheesemaker, kindly agreed to give us a lesson. 

So one day Team Cheese piled in a car and drove off to coastal Sonoma to learn the fundamentals of ricotta. It's very beautiful there and reminds me of Ireland.

The buildings at Bellwether.

First, we met the milk producers: Bellwether's sturdy, handsome sheep. They're mainly East Friesian, a very productive Dutch breed, with some French Lacaune mixed in. "Very productive," though, means just 1/2 gallon of milk per sheep per day (compared to a cow's output of 6 to 8 gallons). But the milk naturally has a much higher content of whey protein--meaning more cheese can be made from a gallon of sheep's milk than from cow's milk. "It's harder when you get less milk," said Liam, because it's harder keeping up with demand, especially for their ricotta. "But it's such good milk."

Milk was not the initial idea for this property, and neither was cheese. His mother, the elegant and energetic Cindy Callahan, told us that she and her late husband, Ed, bought their first sheep "as lawnmowers" to control the 6-foot-high weeds on their new place back in 1986. A friend suggested they milk those sheep, and by the early 1990s the Callahans found themselves making the first commercial sheep cheeses in California.

All of Bellwether's cheesemaking takes place in one long, bright room absolutely packed with equipment.

l

It's warm and steamy inside, and smells of sweet, fresh milk.

Liam took us down to the far right end of this room, to a large rectangular steel vat tucked behind the taller vats and hoses you see here. We passed Pepato (a peppercorn-studded pecorino) in progress, and also Crescenza (a fast-ripening, lusciously oozy Italian-style cheese), both icons in the cheese world. It wasn't exactly like meeting movie stars, but it was pretty thrilling for cheese fiends like us.

Since cow's milk is what we'd be using at Sunset, Liam showed us first how to make the ricotta with cow's milk. The vat, its hollow walls filled with hot steam, was full of greenish-yellow whey, left over from making Pepato, plus half that amount in whole milk. The milk, explained Liam, gives the ricotta more body and also increases its yield, since cow's whey tends to be thin. 

The whey and milk had already hit the right temperature for action: about 192° F.  Liam drizzled in white vinegar from two bottles at once, measuring the amount by eye.

As soon as the acid hit the hot whey, curds began to form.

While pouring, Liam stirred slowly from the bottom up to disperse the vinegar evenly. Then he left it alone for 25 minutes so that fat, fluffy curds could form. "Don't mix it as it sets," Liam warned us. "That'll ruin it. You'll never get it smooth; the curds will be dry and dense instead of light, moist, and uniformly smooth."

Aha! We were guilty of some vigorous curd-stirring back at Sunset. Now we'll know better.

The quietly left-alone curds began to look soft and puffy, like melted mozzarella.

"It's something that takes a bit of practice," Liam continued. "You want to add just enough vinegar to get the curds to form and not be too fine. If you add too much, the curds will start shrinking in from the sides of the vat." Plus, they'll be grainy or rubbery.

Once the curds are properly set, the next step is hand-scooping them into perforated molds to drain and solidify a little. 

However, we missed this completely, because we'd all wandered off to the Pepato vat to watch Liam and an assistant cut up a vat of very firm curds with a flashy multi-blade knife. Two other workers had scooped out all the ricotta by the time we got back, and we found it draining in neat rows.

We all had a taste. It was soft, creamy, and utterly wonderful.

So that we could see the difference, Liam also made a batch of sheep's-milk ricotta—from almost entirely whey, with very little whole milk added.

Sunset's test kitchen director, Stephanie Dean, leaned in to check out the sheep's milk curds as Liam poured in the vinegar. We were all wearing these fetching hairnets, by the way.

This whey needed very little vinegar to be coaxed into curds; just the heat alone was almost enough to do the trick. 

As you can see in the non-shaded section, the curds are very white, almost snow-white, which is typical of sheep's ricotta. Cow ricotta tends have a buttery hue.

When it was ready, Liam ladled some into a basket and held out the warm, dripping curds for us to try. "This is as fresh as it gets," he said.

 It was like eating a cloud, only made of milk.

Once we were back at the magazine, Liam coached us by phone through a home-style version of Bellwether's ricotta. You can find the recipe in the current issue of Sunset, along with one for fromage blanc from our other cheese teacher, Cowgirl Creamery (to read about our lesson with them, click here.)

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor   

For ages now, I've been dying to get a cow into this one-block project of ours.

So far, we've been "importing" excellent organic milk from Straus Family Creamery, up in Tomales Bay. (I.e., we buy it at the store.)  But having our own cow would take us to a whole new level.

Especially a little doe-eyed Jersey cow, supplier of the richest milk in cowdom. We'd have her fresh milk for making butter, yogurt, sour cream, cream, ice cream, crème fraîche, buttermilk, and, most crucial, cheese for Team Cheese's multiplying projects. Plus, Jerseys are adorable. Large-animal husbandry, here we come!

Then, the questions, the doubts. Am I signing us up for Dairy Slavery? From what little (very little) I know, a cow has to be milked twice a day, at the same time every day (one being at dawn, I think), or she'll be in agony. We are in publishing, a profession not known for functioning well or even consistently early in the morning.

She also has to be impregnated and give birth so that she'll lactate. I'm not positive about the rest of the lovely staff here at Sunset, but I'm a little undereducated in the cow-insemination and calf-delivery departments.

Also, there's the tiny problem of us not actually being able to house a cow here at the magazine--we'd be violating local zoning laws. Details, details!

So: How about a cow share? I've heard about them mainly on the East Coast, where farms tend to be smaller and, I guess, more open to unusual propositions. The basic premise is this: You buy part of a cow, and as part-owner, you're entitled to some of her milk. It's illegal to buy milk directly from a farm, so this is an entirely legal way to do the same thing—just a bit more involved. Which is exactly what we want.

After some calling around to farms in our area, I found her--our cow!

Adelaide, the Jersey cow.

She lives at Pie Ranch, the wonderful educational farm in Pescadero, and as it turns out she's already a shared cow—with nine owners, most of them neighboring farmers.

Jered Lawson, a Pie Ranch partner, explained that Adelaide is a whole new adventure for the farm. They'd kept dairy goats for years, but she is their first cow.

Her name, he told me, comes from a list of very old cow names unearthed at the Stanford University library, recording a herd (perhaps several) that grazed Stanford back when it was a dairy farm. (Irresistible tangent: During the Civil War, Stanford cows produced milk for giant cheeses sold to support the Red Cross.)

The Pie Ranch people don't milk Adelaide in a barn with suction cups and flexible pipes attached to her udder. Instead, they milk her out in the pasture, by hand.

This sounds so impossibly bucolic and lovely that I want to drive out to Pie Ranch immediately.
I blurt out something like this to Jered.

"Well, she is a little kicky." Oh. "When we milk, we put her in a Cow-Can't-Kick." Hmmm. What's that? Uh, it's kind of like a giant bicycle lock, from what I can tell.

Well, so maybe Adelaide is a tad fiesty. We're up for it! Especially since we could schedule our milking appointments twice a month, not twice a day, according to Jered. All I have to do is finalize the arrangements with farm apprentice and cow-keeper Dede Boies within the next week or so.

Over the next few days, as I tell people at Sunset about Adelaide (and even her lockdown gizmo), Team Cow collects many, many members. Clearly it won't be a problem finding milking volunteers, at least initially.

Next: What happened with Adelaide.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

Every Bay Area gardener knows that, in addition to a copy of the Western Garden Book, you MUST have Golden Gate Gardening in your library. Author, Pam Pierce, has come out with the third edition, and it will be in stores on February 1st.

Look forward to:

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

Nothing like a predatory bird to liven things up!

Today we spotted a hawk eating a squirrel on the main lawn. Jim was glad it was a squirrel and not a chicken (actually, Jim wanted nothing to do with today's events. He doesn't do so well with blood and guts). I'm all for hawks controlling the squirrel population. They are they only major pest I've had trouble with in the test garden over the last two growing seasons -- they decimated Team Beer's wheat and snatched some of the baby butternut squash from the vine. Bon appétit, hawk!

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

....take a picture of it!

...And then wait till it thaws and try it, because you're curious to see what frost does to radicchio.

I am happy to report that it suffered not at all. In fact, I think it made the radicchio a little bit sweeter.

Am I just deluding myself? No, suggests longtime garden writer Barbara Damrosch, among others. Cold weather turns radicchio not only red (ours was green for ages) but sweet. OK, sweetish. It's still kind of bitter. But I like that.

Frost-Sweetened Radicchio Salad

Rinse the dirt and tiny snails from your freshly pulled-up radicchio. Separate it into leaves and rinse well. Mix, if you like, with some other lettuce (I happened to have some redleaf in the fridge so I used that), parmesan shavings, and thinly sliced beauty heart radish (from my local farmer's market—so pretty, so sweet, and it grows here in winter). I tossed it with a quick vinaigrette of salt, balsamic vinegar, and good fresh olive oil. Gone kinda fast.

Here's my pick for a last-minute gift: Novella Carpenter's Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (The Penguin Press, $25.95). Of all the local-eating guides and tales that have been published this year, hers is still my favorite. 

With total honesty, she recounts the story of how she set up an actual subsistence farm in her dodgy Oakland neighborhood, complete with crops growing in the abandoned lot next to her house, a beehive on the deck, and turkeys, ducks, and chickens in the tiny yard—along with rabbits and two voracious pigs. (Because they can't really afford sacks and sacks of pig chow, she and her boyfriend, wearing headlight helmets, dumpster-dive at night to bring them food.) She manages to keep them alive, too, unlike her predecessor-in-prose, Manny Howard, who inadvertently killed off most of his livestock in his Brooklyn backyard a few years ago.

The book is extremely funny and well written, but what I love most about it is its compassion and its fearlessness. Novella lets homeless people harvest from the garden--in fact, it makes her feel good. She butchers ducks and rabbits for dinner (the pigs she sends off to be dispatched, given their sheer strength), and when her turkey Maude somehow flies into the car yard behind the house and into the jaws of two guard dogs, she scales a razor-wire-topped fence to try to rescue her. (Sadly, the turkey doesn't make it, but Novella gets away unharmed.) One night, biking through an especially dicey area where she gathers weeds for her chickens, she runs into a gang of young kids--one of whom points a gun at her--and delivers a "strange oration, which at its heart was motherly." She tells him, "You have to be careful...I care about you. Please be careful or you'll wind up dead." He walks away, and all she can think about is not her own mortality or desire for revenge but the "stupidity and injustice in this world, the cycles of violence that seem they will never end, and my inability to change anything."

Anyone reading this book can see that it's people like Novella Carpenter, courageous and unsentimental and fiercely energetic, who actually do change things.

by Rick LaFrentz    Team Beer.

That is the question that the team contemplated when deciding what style of beer to next create. Our first attempt produced a beer that would be considered a white beer sans the traditional spices of a true white beer beer popular in Belgium.

When we malted the barley and wheat grain from our first shot at brewing we did no roasting to the grain except dry it in an oven at a fairly low temperature. This gave us an extremely light color in our finished beer, and when I say light color, I'm talking about a shade or two lighter then the mass-market beers popular with the American public. This time we decided to create a beer with a dark color and a roasted-toasted flavor.

The higher the temperature you roast grain, the darker the color of the finished product. The color of grain used for brewing is measured with a system developed by J.W. Lovibond in 1883 and is appropriately called the Lovibond Scale. The grain color is measured in degrees lovibond, the lighter color being 2 degrees and the highest and darkest color being 580 degrees, which is popularly called roasted. Coincidently, the higher the Lovibond number the more aggressive the roasted-toasted flavor appears in the finished beer.  

Some examples would be Miller or Pabst produced with extremely low Lovibond degree grain and on the opposite side of the scale would be Guinness with a rating on the highest level.

We wanted to produce a beer that had a pronounced toasted flavor so we set aside a very small portion of our total malted grain to achieve this goal. Team beer had 13.5 pounds of grain, mostly barley, to make this batch and roasted only about 1/2 pound.

One word of caution if you are going to attempt to make a dark, high Lovibond grain, don't roast over a pound of grain, for a 5 gallon batch, because too much may produce a grainy, bitter taste to your finished beer and roast the grain OUTSIDE. This type of roast will create a huge amount of smoke so if you don't mind repainting the interior of your house feel free to do it in your kitchen. The paint store will love you and you will be helping the stressed economy.

The hops that we had been growing for the last two years rewarded us with an incredible bounty so we were excited about adding them to this batch of beer. Because of the variety we had chosen to grow, Nuggets, we knew that genetically the alpha acids, which provide the bitterness to hops, were going to be fairly high so we either had to add a limited amount of hops or we had to create a beer that would be higher in unfermentable sugars. The unfermentable sugars will not ferment into alcohol, so now we can create a beer that will have a fuller body. A fuller body and a higher alpha acid hop combination should reward us with a balanced beer, at least it looks good on paper.

Again, as with our first batch, we were fortunate enough to recruit Chuck Schwalbach, the husband of Diane Schwalbach, one of our co-workers. Chuck, a product design engineer at Apple, has an incredible knowledge of brewing and a vast array of brewing equipment. I think it's a prerequisite that all engineers must procure the latest equipment available to complete a task.

When the team made our first batch of beer last year we crushed our barley-wheat combination about a month prior to making the beer. This time, Chuck suggested that we crush the grain minutes before we start to brew thinking that it would provide a fresher flavor, plus he had the equipment  to make the process flow a lot smoother. Crushing the grain for our first batch was with a hand crank meat grinder which made the job very tedious and the grind inconsistant. The grain mill that Chuck brought utilized a power drill, as the energy source to rotate the grain rollers, which produced a more consistent grind.

The following are the statistics that we came up with in the production of this batch of beer. For some of you this will be interesting, for others, well.

The photo on the left is Chuck and Alan milling the grain

As stated the total weight of the grain used for mashing was 13.5 pounds. Wheat made up 3.9 pounds of the total weight We chose to use a small potion of wheat because it will produce a nice frothy head when pouring and and it adds a different demension to the finished beer.

Of the remaining barley, we set aside 8 ounces to roast over mesquite charcoal on a barbaque. The finished roast could be compared to a pale chocolate malt. The roasted grains were not one uniforn color but a range of various shades.

After the grains were mixed together and milled, Chuck took a temperature reading of the grain, 68.1 degress, so that we could calculate what water temperature,174.5 degrees, we would need to add to our grain to achieve a mashing temperature of 154 degrees. A mashing temperature of 152 degrees would have provided us with more fermentable sugar but we formulated a recipe that would give us a wee bit more body, thus a
higher mashing temperature.

Pictured above is the roasted pale choclate malt.

We mashed the grain for 1 hour and 15 mintes using 1 quart of water for every pound of grain. For the sparge, we used 4.4 gallons of water.The addition of hops was interspersed at various intervals. At the start of the boil we introduced 1 ounce of hops followed by an addition of a 1/2 ounce at mid boil and a final addition of an ounce at 15 minutes before the end of the boil.

When the boil had reached completion, Chuck brought out his heat exchanger, which allows us to chill the boiling wort to yeast pitching temperature  within 5 minutes. We're talking about going form 212 degrees to 75 degrees in a matter of minutes. Amazing! In this case yeast was pitched at 75 degrees.

The faster you can achieve fermentation the faster your sugars are converted into alcohol. Bacteria love the sugars as a food source but once they are converted into alcohol, you deminish the chances for infection. This phase of the brewing process is the most vulnerable to infection.

We used liquid yeast for fermentation. This type of yeast is generally more pure and you have more strains to choose from when developing your beer. In this case it was Northwest Ale, which had a fermentation range of 65 to 75 degrees. This yeast will supply a malty and mildly fruity character with depth and complexity. Our enviorment gave us a constant temperature of 75 degrees to achieve fermentation.

The starting specific gravity was 1048 degrees, so we estimated that our potential alcohol content could be 6 percent . The finished gravity was 1010 degrees, which in reality made our finished alcohol content 5 percent.

Fermentation started in a little over 24 hours after we introduced the yeast. We racked the beer a couple of times to remove it off of the spent trub and bottled the beer 2 1/2 weeks later. Our next task is to open a couple of bottles and make a thorough analysis of our endeavor.. To be continued....

By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist

Note to the wise: If planning to make more than a few candles, DO NOT try it with only one candle mold.  It’ll take DAYS.

Supplies:

-Candle mold(s) of choice.  We chose the Bear and Hive mold purchased from Mann Lake Ltd.

-Heavy rubber band (ours came with the purchased mold)

-Kitchen scale

-Wax paper or foil to protect working surface

-Wick (Size depends on candle mold. Ours uses 2/0 ply)

-Wicking tool or large needle to thread wick through mold

-Beeswax (We used our filtered wax)

-Double boiler (we used a saucepan and a large bowl)

-Glass measuring cup, or pouring pot

-Bobby pin

-Scissors

-Wick holder tabs

-PAM cooking spray or candle release spray (optional)

Directions:

1.     We filled the saucepan about one third full of water and placed the large bowl on top. The bowl doesn’t need to be directly in the water. Given that pure wax does not clean easily from metal surfaces, we have designated a bowl to use for only candle-making.

2.     While the water comes to a boil, weigh your beeswax until you have enough to fill the number of molds you have plus a little extra. Our mold needs 1.8 oz of wax, so we measured 2 oz to be sure we had enough to fill to the top of the mold. (Some wax will stick to the edges of both bowls.) 

3.     Melt the wax in the bowl of the double boiler.

4.     As the wax starts to melt, dip the wick into the wax to coat it fully.

5.     Thread the wick through the bottom of the mold with the wicking tool. Pull through the mold until you have a few inches coming out the top.

6.     Center the wick in the mold and clip the wick with the bobby pin to hold it in place against the top of the mold. Place rubber band around the top of the mold to secure it.

 

7.     When the wax is melted, pour from the double boiler into the glass measuring cup (pouring cup).

8.     Slowly, to prevent bubbles, pour wax into mold until it reaches the top edge of the mold.

9.     Set mold aside and wait for wax to harden. We found about 45 minutes to be adequate, but several hours is best. The candle comes out of the mold more easily with less risk of breaking off ears and such.

10. Once wax has hardened, remove rubber band, carefully open mold, grip the wick and pull candle out.

11. Finishing: Trim the wick to 1/4 inch at the bottom of the candle. Scrape bottom several times on an empty piece of foundation (or any rough surface) to smooth out. Dig out the wick from the wax and reform into firm string. Place the wick holder tab on the bottom of the candle so the remaining wick threads through it. Push wick holder tab into wax and fill hole with the wick by smashing it down until the candle sits level on the table.

Tips:

-We found that in a cold kitchen, it’s best to keep the pouring cup in a 175° oven so that the glass is warm. Otherwise, the wax will cool too quickly and harden on the sides of the pouring cup and you will not have enough to fill the mold completely.

-Coating the wick with melted wax will help prevent you from pulling the wick too tight through the mold, which may cause a problem with burning later.

-If you thread the wick through the bottom of the mold (which would be the top of the candle) with a significant length of wick at the end, the mold will automatically re-wick as you pull the finished candle out of the mold.

-We also found that the bottom of the candle will get an indentation of the bobby pin if you do not raise the bobby pin somehow. After trying several different ways, we found two small pieces of cardboard on either side of the mold (see photo above) worked well.

-Instructions for candle making usually suggests using Mold Release, or PAM to make it easier to remove the candle once hardened.  We used PAM cooking spray for our first candle and decided not to use it for the remaining candles. The lubricant did make it easy to remove from the mold, but we suspect it also pooled in one of the ears of the bear and caused deformation. Use at your own discretion.

-HAVE FUN!

TA DA!

By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist

Visiting the bees this morning

found nothing

but icy water.

In these unusually cold (for California!) December days, even Califia and Veronica know when to keep warm inside.

I was the crazy one-- outside, taking pictures.

BRRRR!

We’ve been carefully saving all the wax from our hives, melting it in the solar wax melter and storing it in Kimberley’s office. We ended up with a stack of creamy white and light yellow wax discs to use in cosmetics. Last year we made lip balm, so this year we decided to be kind to our skin and make hand salve just in time for the holiday gift-giving season.

Supplies

Large double boiler (We used a large bowl over a big saucepan of water.)

Scale

Ladle

Measuring cup

Salve containers (we used 2 oz. metal tins from Mountain Rose Herbs)

Basic recipe

We measured all ingredients by weight, not volume. We had plenty of beeswax; all the other oils came from Mountain Rose Herbs.

30% Coconut oil

25% Cocoa butter

20% Beeswax

25% Avocado oil and Vitamin E oil (we measured these together to make up 25% total)

We suggest you make a small batch first and adjust the recipe to your liking. More beeswax and cocoa butter will make a stiffer salve. Less will make a more easily spread salve that some in our office described as greasy. 

Directions

1. We filled the saucepan about one third full of water and placed the large bowl on top. The bowl doesn’t need to be directly in the water. We brought the water to a boil while we measured the ingredients. 

2. We weighed the measuring cup and used that weight to zero out the scale, and measured all our ingredients.

3. We reduced the boiling water to a simmer and began adding the ingredients. Since the beeswax has the highest melting temperature and so takes the longest to melt, we put that in first. (If we had broken it into smaller pieces it would have melted faster). While the wax was melting, we set out the tins for filling.

4. With a ladle we filled a glass measuring cup with the melted wax and oil mixture. 

 5. We poured the mixture into the tins, and waited for it to cool and harden before putting on the lids.

It took about an hour to measure the wax and oils, melt everything together, and pour the wax. In our warm test kitchen, it took another half hour for the salve to cool and solidify completely. 

Make and apply labels, if you choose, and you're done!

As requested, a photo of our finished (and cooled) product.