A couple weeks ago, K. Ruby Blume of The Institute of Urban Homesteading emailed us this message: “I have kept bees with the top bar system for 10 years. I have never once had a problem with mites. The bees build naturally, the cells are smaller which inhibits mite reproduction. We also work with feral bees who have had a chance to breed up their resistance living on their own without human interference here in our bioregion....the only time I had a mite problem was the one year I tried working with the traditional hives.”
Well, we’ve been thinking about running a top bar hive in addition to our two Langstroth hives. So I called Ruby to find out more information.
She’s sold on top bar hives as a way to raise bees.
“They’re good for a hobbyist backyard beekeeper,” she said. “Since you usually build a top bar hive yourself, and you don’t need to buy foundation or frames, it’s much cheaper than buying a Langstroth hive.”
Plus, she pointed out, it’s easier to work a top bar hive, as you’re only lifting one bar at a time to inspect the hive, rather than wrestling with an box full of 80 lbs of frames, honey, and brood (as we had to do last week).
“It’s easier on the bees too. When you open Lang hive all the bees have access to air and they fly around, but when you open a top bar hive, the hive stays closed except where the bar is out.” This means you can use less smoke, because the bees don’t get so upset.
And she says she can inspect her top bar hives pretty fast. “I have three top bar hives here, and I can go through them in less than an hour. But you have to manage them every two to three weeks [during warm weather] because they are building freeform. You have to prevent them from building crooked comb.”
So where do you get plans to build a top bar hive? You can find many different plans in cyberspace, including two top bar hive plans at Ruby’s website. “Top bar hive styles are not standardized. You can do pretty much whatever you want. Really, bees just need a dry cavity, and they will build.”
I'm not sure that every gardener would consider photo shoots to be perks, but I love them because they are so different from my day-to-day.
I get to fluff my veggies and my hair, and have some fun.
Today we shot the cool season crops for the One Block Diet, specifically how to harvest.
Much against his will, I coaxed staff photographer, Tom Story, into demanding, "Give it to me," just like the movies (though it was somewhat unclear as to whether he was addressing me or the arugula).
And I pretended that photo editor, Linda Lamb Peters,was my stylist.
After the fun and games it was time to get to work harvesting the bed for Margo and her team of chefs. It looks so barren!
Simmered eggs (aka hard-boiled eggs). These were a breeze to peel, and they're tender.
Every cook of any experience knows the frustration of boiling a nice fresh egg—and then losing half of it in the peeling. We've been through this a few times with our flock's output. Now we're patient: We wait three days for the membrane to loosen up. Otherwise, it clings to the white like Kevlar on Batman. For the scientific particulars of why this happens (with the egg, I mean), see the wonderful chapter on eggs in Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking.
Beyond patience, it's important to simmer, not boil, your egg if you want tender whites. That's why some cookbooks and magazine recipes call for "hard-cooked" instead of "hard-boiled" eggs, out of worry that readers will rush to the stove and boil their half-dozen till they're practically bouncy.
Our last pearl of wisdom: Immediately plunge the cooked egg into ice water. This forces the membrane to release its grip from the white. Then crack it gently all over and put it back in the ice bath for a few minutes, so water can seep in beneath the shell, further loosening what's below.
Here's a foolproof formula for
Simmered Eggs
Put eggs that are at least 3 days old in a small saucepan and cover with about an inch of water. Bring almost to a boil. Right before the boiling point, turn heat down to a simmer and cook eggs, partly covered, for 10 minutes. Scoop them out with a slotted spoon and plunge them into a bowl of ice and cold water. After a minute, take each one out, crack it gently all over and then roll it gently on the counter, and plop it back in the water.
Let sit 5 minutes. Peel under cold water and enjoy feeling the shell slip off the smooth surface of the egg.
A tray of our sodden, post-brew malted barley and wheat. Good only for livestock? We think not.
Yesterday, Team Beer gathered all its painstakingly malted grain and forged ahead with brewing. More to come on what was an epic and we hope ultimately rewarding day of beermaking.
For now, though, I have to ask a question of any all-grain beermakers who might be reading this:
Can that wet mash (all the sodden, crushed barley and wheat left from brewing) be used to make bread?
I've read about this "spent grain" being used to grow shiitake mushrooms and to feed cattle, pigs, and yaks, of all things. Supposedly it makes great compost.
Posted by: By Sunset, February 21, 2009 in Team Bee
, Team Beer
, Team Cheese
, Team Chicken
, Team Garden
, Team Olive
, Team Salt
, Team Vinegar
, Team Wine
Four of our chicks at about two weeks old, back in August of 2007.
If you've been enjoying our blog posts about our various one-block feast projects, and don't yet know about our downloadable how-to guides for each, check them out by clicking on the one that interests you.
Posted by: By Sunset, February 20, 2009 in Team Beer
By Rick LaFrentz, Beerless leader
The next time you take a sip of beer, ponder the process of the extraordinary journey it takes from seed to suds. The whole process is a series of procedures targeted to one end product, beer. It is indeed a long and tedious process, and Team Beer knows this first hand.
One vital segment in making beer is a stage called malting. This involves converting the grain used for your beer, be it barley or wheat, from a starch storage unit (a seed) to a slightly sweet, crunchy grain that can be further converted, through a series of events, into a fermentable sugary solution called wort (pronounced "wert").
MALTING
To malt the grain, you need to soak the seed in 8-hour intervals until it starts to swell, a sign that it is about to germinate. You cannot soak the seed longer than 8 hours at a time. To do so would deprive it of oxygen and literally drown it. You may have to do the soaking a few times in order to achieve the swelling.
Once the seed starts to swell, place it on a large cookie sheet that has been layered with paper towels. This will help retain moisture that will be instrumental in keeping humidity while the seeds germinate.
Now enclose the cookie sheet in a large, dark garbage bag and tie the end. At room temperature, it will take 4 to 7 days for barley seed to push out a shoot. Wheat seed usually takes about 3 days.
Don’t confuse the root hairs for the shoot. The stem shoot will be quite a bit larger in size. When the shoot becomes ½ to ¾ the length of the seed, it’s time to stop the germination. This process converts the starchy seed to a fully modified barley malt that can be mashed for complete conversion to a fermentable product.
The next step is to take the germinated seed out of the enclosed bag, remove the paper towels, and put the grains, on the cookie sheet, in an oven at a temperature between 100 to 125 degrees. I should mention that the germinated root hairs sometimes grow into the paper towel, so you may have a fun time pulling them free. One of our ovens had a 125-degree temperature from only the pilot light, which was perfect. We kept the grain in the oven for 24 hours.
Try to move the grain around on the cookie sheet every ½ hour for the first 4 to 6 hours to help dry the seed in a uniform manner. After 24 hours, your seed should be dry enough to use for your mash. One way to tell if you were successful is to bite on a piece of grain. If it breaks a tooth, you failed. If it is crunchy and slightly sweet, you’re on your way to making a true home brew.
You should separate the fine dried root material from the grain before you mash to help the clarity of the beer. A lot of this may sound fuzzy, but once you’ve done the process, it will make sense.
This week, following Randy Oliver’s advice from last week, we prepared to kill the brood in Veronica and treat once again with formic acid, understanding that if we didn’t take this drastic step the hive might be doomed to fail against the mites. We first wanted to get a mite % of infestation to be sure the treatment was necessary (and we were curious). To get this, we gathered a sample of bees taken from a brood frame into alcohol, then counted the mites that fell after washing them and divided the mite count with the number of bees in the sample. A few must die for the good of the hive! So, we opened up our Veronica hive on Wednesday to get the bee wash sample. There wasn’t any brood in the top box (they are still filling all ten frames with honey!) so we took the box off to get to the bottom box. What a task that was! There was so much drone and burr comb in between the two boxes that it was extremely difficult to get the two apart. It took two of us lifting the estimated 80lb. box vertically while using the hive tool to break the propolis seal at the same time!
What we found in the bottom box was a shock! We were not expecting drone brood (white larva in photo) this early in the year, but as you can see in the picture we have LOTS of drone comb and the mites are taking advantage. (Click on photo to make larger-- I count at least five mites in that picture. How many do you count?)
We sampled about 125 bees from the brood frame into alcohol and only got five mites after washing, which would be a 4% infestation. However, I am not convinced this number is accurate. For the first time EVER, I saw several bees in the hive with mites on them, and the drone brood is covered in mites. We scraped off the ruined drone brood and burr comb from the top of the frames in the bottom box and put it in a plastic bag. Just in the bag I counted at least ten mites. And that’s just the number that didn’t jump off the brood and onto another bee while we were scraping!
In any case, we can see that Veronica is doing very well, despite the mites! She has at least sixteen frames of bees in her two boxes, which according to Randy is strong enough to hold up against the mites. Yay! We returned to the hive yesterday to scrape off the remaining burr and drone comb. We also inserted the drone frame, now that we know how eager Veronica is to make drones! We hope this will be enough to keep the mites under control, for now.
As crops for our winter one-block feast get bigger, we’re getting serious about the payoff: dinner! And to go with all the vegetable-centric dishes we’ve been dreaming up, we’ve gotta have good bread and butter.
Wheat we know about—we grew it for making beer. As for the cow, we don't have her just yet, but we’re working on the details.
I kid you not: we’re looking into going in on a “cow share” so we can get good local milk and cream. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, we’re experimenting making butter with cream from the store.
I’ve tried making butter in little jars with preschoolers. The idea is they shake and shake the cream, and after awhile, it forms a dab of wonderfully sweet butter and some sweet buttermilk, and then they understand where butter comes from, and get to slather it on a cracker, and become lifetime supporters of the dairy industry. Right?
As it turns out, their hot little hands warm up the cream so it doesn’t clump into butter, their wrists tire out, and pretty soon, you have a lot of moms shaking jars.
In fact there’s a much easier way to go: a food processor.
Just pour in the cream, and let ‘er rip.
In a couple of minutes, voilà—the cream separates into
buttermilk and little clumps of butter that look like fluffy scrambled
eggs, then the clumps form a bigger mass of butter
Next you pour everything into a strainer and squeeze the rest of the milk from the butter. This just takes a few minutes.
The butter is incredibly sweet and fresh tasting—and no tedious shaking required. You can use the milk in any recipe where you’d use plain milk—maybe some good homemade bread.
P.S. If you want to make butter this way with kids, just be sure to keep their fingers away from the sharp food processor blade.
Sweet homemade butter
MAKES 1 cup butter and 1 cup sweet buttermilk TIME 10 minutes
Here’s your chance to ignore all those rules you ever learned about not overbeating whipping cream. Commercial butter has small amounts of culture added, so when you make your own, it tastes extra sweet and fresh.
1 pt. whipping cream Kosher salt (optional)
1. Whirl cream in a food processor until it separates into buttermilk and clumps of butter that look like fluffy scrambled eggs, then keep whirling until butter forms bigger clumps; this takes 1 to 2 minutes total.
2. Set a fine strainer over a bowl. Pour milk and butter into strainer and let drain briefly. Squeeze butter with your hands to extract remaining milk (it’s okay if there’s a little left).
3. Turn butter into another bowl and stir in salt to taste, if you like.
Amateur winemakers are prone to first-timers’ mistakes. So it should be no surprise that we were bitten by bottle-shock not once but twice.
First off, what’s bottle-shock? If you’ve been following Team Wine’s blog, you’ll likely remember me and Sunset wine editor Sara Schneider talking about how our two wines have been alive from the day we picked and crushed the Syrah grapes straight through to bottling both it and our Chardonnay. And bottle-shock is literally the wine being shocked at being transferred into a new environment (the sterilized bottle) from the environment it was used to (typically an oak barrel; in our case, a glass carboy).
In response to this new environment, the wine gets shy and retreats into itself, tightening up, even acting a bit sour, for at least a few days (sometimes weeks) before settling down and remembering its true self—the wine we remembered sampling on the day we bottled it.
And it can apparently happen again when you travel with a bottle, getting it all shook up. Or when a truck rumbles a bottle too much on the way to a wine shop. I especially enjoyed this debate on Chowhound—I’d never heard “dumb” applied to a wine before.
What happened in our case? Our Chardonnay wasn’t quite ready to bottle when we hosted a series of One-Block dinners this past summer (to thank the people who helped us along the way, and to share our food and wine with like-minded locavores we admire). That's Thomas Fogarty winemaker Michael Martella (who sold us our Syrah grapes and pressed Chardonnay "juice") above, at left, with home winemaker Dan Brenzel (who loaned us his expertise and equipment), at our first party. Note that Michael's glass is empty; Dan said Michael refilled it several times that evening—a good sign that our wine was a keeper!
So instead of committing the wine to individual bottles, we filled up five 1-gallon jugs with Chardonnay to serve at the soirees. The following quotes are Sara’s impressions of our Chardonnay, from just after it we “jugged” it (her description matches what we'd thought earlier in the day, when we sampled the wine before transferring it into jugs) through a rough patch and back into glory.
Our Chardonnay's coming-out party, on the day it was "jugged"
“When we poured the Chardonnay the first day, for a party that winemaker Michael Martella came to, it was bright and vibrant, with acidity but in an elegant way. It had a softness and balance to it, so that the fruit flavors—racy citrus, green apple, and pear—were integrated. The wine was all in one piece; everything worked together.”
Eek, just a few days later
“When we poured it at the next party just a couple of days later, though, that great acidity was hanging out like an appendage or something—a part that didn’t relate well to the whole. The wine was in a phase that just wasn’t coherent and integrated. And in that stage, the fruit just isn’t as pleasant, even if it’s present. It needs to be in balance with the acidity and alcohol. Bottle-shock can knock it off balance for a while.”
Phew, a couple of weeks after that
“At a final party, the wine was showing well again, with an elegance that only comes from balance.”
And then the Syrah
You’d think that we would have remembered the slightly wrinkled noses as guests sniffed and sipped our Chardonnay at that second party. But that image apparently didn’t stick with us, because we were shocked by bottle-shock again a few weeks ago, this time with our Syrah.
We bottled the Syrah on a Friday, and the following Tuesday evening, Sara served samples of our yummy-at-bottling Syrah (and our Chardonnay, which is reliably back to being its dandy self) to some high-profile New York guests from our parent company, Time Inc.
What did they have to say? Well, the Chardonnay was well liked, but we heard that the Syrah did not show well … one taster said he preferred Sunsethoney to Sunset Syrah. Well, kudos to Team Bee, but ouch, that stings. Bottle-shock was clearly in effect again.
A little background in case quinoa is not yet a staple in your diet:
Quinoa is a wonder food. It is grown mostly for its edible seed (not a grain, as it is often mistaken, because it is not from a grass) though the leaves are also edible. Loved by many because it is a complete amino acid, quinoa is unusually high in protein for a seed.
We wanted to experiment with including some as part of a winter feast.
Quinoa is indigenous to the high, dry climate of the South American Andes and thrives in places where the temperature stays under 90 degrees. So while Menlo Park isn’t necessarily high, it is moderately dry and definitely mild. Additionally, Seeds of Change has developed a variety, Faro, which is particularly well suited to sea level.
The problem? We didn’t realize we wanted it until September and quinoa is best planted in April or May.
Being the test garden we thought, why not give it a go?
Here’s why:
A few things went wrong:
1. The frost hit hard. Quinoa can endure a light frost, but the plants are
usually much larger by the time the frosts roll in. These were mere
pups when the cold came. I don’t think they could handle the
chill on their baby stems.
2. Quinoa is sensitive to day length. The foliage grows and grows while
the days get longer, and seed formation (reproduction) is triggered after the summer
solstice, as the plant prepares to die. Planting it in September threw them for a loop. They only grew about two feet before forming seeds, but the seed head was
small and not very robust. (They'll grow over four feet tall if planted properly.)
I guess that’s why we call it the test garden.
Lesson learned: Don’t try to cheat the seasons. Plant your quinoa from seed in April or May.
—Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford University Press, 1999)
Ophelia in the nest box, with her blue egg (the other is a decoy).Photo by Elizabeth Jardina
Every day, our chickens deliver eggs to us—anywhere between two and six, depending on the weather (in winter, they slow down). Even though we've been collecting them for over a year now, we can't quite take them for granted. Each egg is slightly different in shape, or color, or thickness of shell, and still seems faintly miraculous to me. I mean, put yourself in the hen's position. Reproducing yourself every day (or trying to, at least) is no small feat.
It's pretty hard to catch a chicken in the act of laying an egg, if you have a day job. The thing pops out in less than a minute (although we did get close with Ophelia, above). If you're really curious, watch this video, courtesy of a Barred Rock owner.
What about the preamble, though—the formation of a bulky egg with a shell on it, within the chicken?
Here's how it works.
Sketch courtesy of University of Illinois Extension
Every female chick is born with thousands of undeveloped yolks, or ova, grouped together near the middle of her backbone in a larger cluster, the ovary.
When a hen is ready to lay, these ova begin to mature, and every 24 to 26 hours, a fully formed egg yolk is released into the oviduct. As the yolk moves down this tube, it's coated with layers of gel-like albumen (that'd be your egg white) and wrapped in a thin, translucent membrane. If a rooster had been on the scene, sperm would probably have fertilized the yolk before it met the albumen.
Then comes the amazing part. As the soft, shell-less egg moves toward the exit, it passes through a floating cloud of calcite (calcium carbonate).
The egg's membrane, which I'd thought of mainly as that annoying film that you have to peel off a hard-boiled egg, is actually pretty wondrous. All over its surface are precisely spaced protein points. These attract the calcite particles, which build up on the membrane in crisp, geometric columns until they make a shell. Essentially, they form a thin crystal that covers the egg. How appropriate that Fabergé used eggs as the model for his fantastic creations.
Shortly afterward, the hen gets an urge and climbs into the nest box. After a bit of heaving and panting, out pops the egg. There it is, protein-rich, marvelous, ready to go. We take it away to eat, and the hen starts making another one, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
We had been so hopeful. Remember in my last post how I bragged we’d found only 4 mites in Betty? We thought surely the formic acid pad on Veronica knocked down her mites as well. After all, we treated Veronica with formic acid twice; Betty only once, and then only for a few hours a day.
Poor Veronica! Twice she lived with formic acid day and night for three weeks—once in mid December, then in late January. And yet, a week after removing the formic acid from Veronica, what do we find? 102 mites stuck to the sticky board after a 24-hour natural mite drop. And worse, a powdered-sugar dusting that same day yielded 132 mites in 10 minutes! Aye, Veronica!
But weak little Betty, the hive who had such trouble building up last summer, seems to be holding her own against the mites, with only 5 mites dropping 10 minutes after a powdered-sugar dusting.
We’re confounded. We don’t know what to do.
We have been advised: Tear apart Veronica’s boxes immediately, kill any brood we find (the idea being that there shouldn't be much egg laying going on this time of year), shake the bees into one box with some honey and treat them again with formic acid. Sterilize the empty brood box.
I
hate this idea. I’ve been doing some reading about beekeeping alternatives, and I tend to agree with the biodynamic beekeepers who try to preserve the unity, or the “bien” of the colony. Since the first time I went into a hive, I’ve thought of the hive—the girls, the queen, even the much maligned drones—as a single, complete organism. You know, like an animal. I often describe the hive to my friends as a tiger in a box. To cut poor Veronica apart and invade her “body” seems horrific to me.
Still, I suppose radical surgery is often necessary. We’re discussing it—really, we're having a dispirited argument. Treat? Or don't treat? It's a huge controversy. But we're going to have to make up our minds, as time is drawing short. Queen Veronica will soon be laying frames of eggs, if she isn’t already.
We’re discussing other ways of raising bees, and are thinking about getting a top bar hive in addition to our two Langstroth hives. This is controversial in itself. And we're researching small cell retrogression. Readers, do any of you have personal experience with top bar hives or alternative beekeeping? Comments, please!
There’s no end of surprise in this winemaking process. Throughout cold soaking, initial fermentation, malolactic fermentation, and aging (even if in glass carboys), our wine has taught us, above all, that it’s a living product—minute molecular shifts along the way making huge differences in the yum factor in the glass.
And when we broke open our carboys to siphon off the Syrah, we were frankly a little astounded at the variation among the lot of them, considering that the dry young wine going in over a year ago had been from just one source: Fat Buck Ridge, a remote Thomas Fogarty vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Here’s a carboy-by-carboy rundown of our tasting notes, each shorter than the last—and that's a shot of Sunset staffers toasting our first carboy of Syrah.
Carboy 1: Caused spontaneous dancing in Sunset’s parking lot. “Great fruit and color; deep, brambly blackberries, turning to blue on the finish; leafy tobacco, mocha, and black pepper.” Now there’s a Syrah!
Carboy 2: “Slightly sweeter-seeming fruit, with a little molasses character; rougher tannins, but they smooth out with a little time in the air; still excellent extraction.”
Carboy 3: “Whoa! Tannins are a little rambunctious here. Pull these bottles out in about five years!”
Carboy 4: “Ahh, more civilized again; this one’s smoother and softer.”
Carboy 5: “Sweet, integrated fruit—a goodie.”
Carboy 6: “Hmm, a little stinky at first [that is, slightly reduced], but the sulfur blows off quickly.”
Carboy 7: No notes. Consumption got the better of us.
So we have not one, but seven, Syrahs to dip into, compare, and watch as they keep on living.
Posted by: By Sunset, February 10, 2009 in Team Beer
By Margo True, Sunset food editor
I just copied this encouraging emoticon from a website I can't believe I haven't found before: www.homebrewtalk.com, givers of free advice and dispensers of sudsy enthusiasm for all attempts to make beer at home.
As you may know from a previous Team Beer post, we are soon going to try what we thought few sane home brewers had done before, at least not in the modern era: make beer from whole grains and flowers (wheat, barley, hops). We've been getting slightly anxious about it, but Rick LaFrentz, our Beerless Leader (and Sunset's head gardener), has kept a cool head and a que sera, sera smile as we've moved into what we thought were fairly uncharted waters.
They're not. Here on homebrewtalk.com unfurls a whole forum addressed to makers of AG brews—All-Grain brews. "Attention new all grain brewers!" booms one post, from senior member RichBrewer of Colorado. He's advising us to use plenty of water during mashing and sparging (I love the vaguely troll-like sound of beer terminology), and how to hit the temperature "sweet spot" for mashing. There are even how-to photo guides for new AG'ers, including one called Partial Mash Brewing, courtesy of Deathbrewer, in Oakland. Thanks, dude.
This site covers everything, it seems, that anyone of any skill level would want to know (or teach) about beer, from brewing wild and funky lambics to brew-tracking software. There's even a neat little section on wine, cider, mead, and homemade soda.
Being a gardener, I am used to a bit of given thievery:
But a funny (or not-so-funny) thing happened in the test garden the other day. I am not always out there during this time of year but popped out to water the seedlings. There was an elderly couple out there, and something struck me as off about the woman. Namely, she was making a b-line for the chard plants. I'm used to visitors moseying about, pointing and pausing -- not speed demons.
May I help you with something? I asked.
Just looking, she said.
Apparently her "just looking" involved a paper bag and pruners.
WAIT! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
She told me that she had an agreement with the gardener from "many, many years ago" that she can come and take whatever she pleases.
I told her that I was very sorry, but that this garden is specifically for the magazine. The very plot from which she was about to pluck is being prepped for its photograph right now! I have editors scouring over empty spaces and leaf formation.
I couldn't believe it! It's such poor garden etiquette to harvest someone else's veggies. It's even poorer form to tell me that you're just looking.
The real kicker is that I waited outside for a few minutes weeding something or other to see if she would come back. Sure enough, she did -- peeking her head around the bend to see if I was still there!
Truth be told, I have totally mixed feelings about the incident. What I love most about gardening is feeding people and sharing the bounty. And there is a Jewish tradition of pe'ah, leaving the corners of your fields unharvested for the hungry to eat. This approach appeals to me. It rings true with the type of gardener I want to be.
But let's face it: This ain't that garden. This is the Sunset test garden! Sprouting, growing, and ripening for our beloved readers!
Team Chicken's breakfast on Friday: omelets and soft-scrambled eggs from our flock out back, with shavings of white truffle (left, in back) and black truffle.
This may seem extravagant until you consider that Elizabeth spent less than $25 on nearly 2 ounces of these things...which is a fraction of what truffles cost in Italy (T. magnatum) or France (T. melanosporum).
To be honest, Oregon truffles don't taste like Italian or French truffles. They're much, much milder. Still good and worth eating, though, especially at these prices. The blacks have an interesting pineapply sweetness I think I'd like to get to know better. The whites have a wonderful ripe earthiness, but it's just a whisper of what a white truffle from Alba, in northern Italy, can do. A good Alba truffle will suffuse the room, the house (or restaurant), and the inside of your head with its crazy, musky fragrance...in the best possible way.
The best way to concentrate the flavor of these truffles is actually not to eat them over or folded into eggs, although they were just fine that way. Later that day, we discovered that they were most powerful when finely shredded on a Microplane and mixed with butter. We dolloped the truffle butter onto hot linguine and spread it on toast. Slurp, slurp. The rest we've saved (in the freezer, where its flavor will, we're told, keep developing) for our next egg feast.
This week the formic acid pads came off Veronica, and the sticky board came out. The board, cleaned and vaselined only a few days before, was coated with clumps of mites. I counted over 200 before I gave up. Some of the mites were still alive, scuttling across the board when I poked them with a stick. Ugh.
I do think the formic acid treatment has helped the bees. There are fewer crawling and dead bees on the ground outside the hive; we don’t know for certain that the girls had tracheal mites blocking
their little breathing passages—you need a dissecting microscope to check that—but crawling bees can be a symptom of
an infestation. Formic acid is supposed to help control tracheal mites as well as varroa. (The USDA has some pretty gruesome pictures of tracheal mites. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!)
And our Betty is getting stronger. When we open her hive to put the formic acid pads in, the frames are full of bees. There is a steady stream of bees at the entrance bringing pollen and nectar. After her last formic acid treatment we waited 6 days and then did a 48-hour natural mite fall. I counted 4 mites and one thing I couldn’t quite identify as a mite. Woo hoo! Those are good numbers.
Hopefully all this mite treatment will give the girls a leg up for the season. Spring is starting up in the Bay Area. I saw a honey bee at the flowering almond outside my kitchen window yesterday. The acacias are puffing out with yellow flowers. and ornamental plums lining the city streets are covered in pink blossoms. Seems like a good situation for a bee.
The last time I posted, I wrote about visiting UC Davis to learn about harvesting big olive trees (we have 21 lovely 40-foot giants here at Sunset, and we aren't so happy with the idea of teetering on ladder-tops). While I was there, Dan Flynn, director of the university's Olive Center, showed me a cool new project that has started me thinking about how much easier our picking could be: high-density olive trees.
UC Davis's new plantings of high-density olive trees.
They may not look like much now, but many growers think that these kinds of trees represent the future of the California olive oil industry. Commercial olive trees are usually planted about 18 feet apart, and these little guys only need 5 feet; they're also short (8 or 9 feet), and trained on trellises like wine grapes—meaning they can be harvested by the same (slightly modified) machines used to harvest grapes. Plus, they grow fast: Two or three years to maturity instead of seven. And they are more resistant to the olive fruit fly than normal-density trees.
California Olive Ranch, in Oroville, California, has been growing these tiny trees, developed in Spain, for several years—and getting great results: excellent Arbequina and Arbosana oils that can be sold for far less than imported oils of similar quality. (Koroneiki, a Greek varietal, is the third type available as a high-density tree.)
High-density olive groves at California Olive Ranch (photo by Mike Kepka, San Franscisco Chronicle)
What if we were to get a few of the little guys? So little space, such easy picking...
A girl can dream, can't she?
In the meantime, we'll try to use what our land already provides. We just have to win our war with the fruit flies.
(If you'd like to look for your own little high-density trees, try the Olive Source.)
Some of the same folks that dreamed up the Civic Center Victory Garden (namely, artist/garden goddess, Amy Franceschini) have now launched an online "survey of urban food production zones."
This is too cool.
Wow. It's brand new and will take time to fill in, but I've already found a few gardens in my neighborhood that I never would have known existed. Hopefully people will use the "grower with surplus" feature, and I'll get to reap some of the benefits.
In 16 months, we went from zero hands-on experience to getting out in the vineyard and cutting bunches of Syrah grapes from the vine, crushing and stomping and destemming them into pulpy grape juice, fermenting this must twice (first with the help of yeast, and then with the aid of malolactic bacteria), pressing the must into young wine, learning to siphon and rack, struggling to be patient and wait while our wine matured a bit, and, finally, this past Friday, sampling our finished wine (yum!), transferring all 35 gallons of it into 175+ bottles, and manually corking them shut.
It’s been a thrilling ride, and we’ve loved all of the sweaty, sticky, back-straining work along the way. But perhaps the biggest thrill came at the conclusion of our pet project, when Team Wine leader and Sunset wine editor Sara Schneider dipped a wine thief into our first carboy of Syrah and passed out samples.
I could try to re-create the moment, but I think you might enjoy seeing it for yourself—just click the video below to join us in our joy (I shot it in HD, so select "HQ" for an unfuzzy view).
Now that was only Carboy 1 (these big glass jugs + toasted oak cubes stood in for oak barrels in our humble winemaking endeavor). It, and Carboy 5, were amazing—Sara S. thinks they could command $75 to $100 a bottle. Yowsa!
But each carboy's wine had a fascinatingly different personality, as each has been feisty and unique along the way. We loved some more than others (Carboy 3, we won’t be seeing or sampling your bottles again for a few years—you’re still a bit of a stinker, but we’re pretty sure you’ll improve with age). But, as Sara S. said, we wouldn’t kick any of them out of bed. (For Sara’s complete, carboy-by-carboy flavor profile on our Syrah, tune in next week.)
After we sampled a carboy, it was time to drain it—by siphoning the wine into sterilized bottles and eventually into glasses (but not directly into our mouths, as tempted as we were by Carboys 1 and 5). Starting a siphon isn't that hard—for all the details, read how we did it with our Chardonnay. We were happy we had that practice with a white wine because while we knew our Syrah would be inky, it seemed jet black in the morning-shaded outdoor area where we bottled.
It was impossible to see the end of the siphon tube until the wine level within the carboy had dropped to just a few inches, a danger zone in which we risked losing suction—by gulping up air instead of wine—if the tube end accidentally turned toward the sky instead of steadily sipping (and we can't restart a siphon when the wine level gets this low).
So we developed a few tricks: Before sticking the siphon tube into the wine, we measured the sterilized tubing near each carboy's exterior (but not directly against it, to preserve sterilization), aiming for a length that was a couple of inches above the bottom. And as the wine level dropped toward the bottom, we titled the carboy, concentrating the wine into one "corner" (can a cylinder have a corner?) and nabbing as much wine as possible. After figuring this out, we were able to confidently transfer our wine via siphon and maximize our in-the-bottle yield.
We had quite a few cases of Rhône bottles, a tall style with sloping shoulders that’s traditionally used for Syrah. These were clean, label-less bottles that we paid nada for, thanks to nightly wine drinker and vigilant bottle recycler Dan Brenzel, our home-winemaking benefactor. But a quick headcount, just as we began sterilizing with bottle wash, revealed that we were going to be three cases short in our quest for 182 bottles (that’s 26 bottles per 5-gallon carboy, not counting samples and sips and spills).
Two pieces of good fortune: 1. Former Sunset photo style coordinator (and constant Team Wine member) Sara Jamison had been rinsing out empty bottles for the last year and bringing them to the office. 2. We had expert label scrubber-offer Dan Brenzel on hand, and Sara S. set him up with a tub of sudsy water, a tub of plain water, a grill brush, and a paring knife. (That’s a shot of Dan attacking a label with a knife—no matter the glue, and there are many different ones adhering labels to bottles these days, it was no match for Dan.)
So Carboy 7 and half of Carboy 6 ended up in a hodgepodge of bottle shapes, colors, and slightly different sizes, which made for some occasionally tricky wielding of the bottling rod, as the bottles all seemed to have different widths and heights of punts, that indentation in the bottom of the bottle—it projects into the bottle interior, where you’re fumbling in a tight, slippery space with the bottle filler. Here’s a little footage of our bowling alley of bottle shapes—check out that nearly clear one at the end of the line (we decided not to fill it … we weren’t sure it would keep the wine safely cloaked from light). Note Sunset recipe retester and Team Wine member Sarah Epstein’s calm, efficient siphon-starting technique—she doesn’t spill a drip while slipping the bottling rod onto the siphon tubing. (I, on the other hand, managed to splatter poor Sara S. and tattoo my hands again.)
But we managed to fill (and, in some cases, slightly overfill) all of those extra bottles. And then it was back to our trusty and slightly rusty floor corker to seal the deal. When we were researching corks, we decided to go with “First” quality ones for our Syrah, as we knew we’d want to cellar them for a while. For our Chardonnay, which can’t age like a red wine, we went with “Grade 3” corks, and we thought we got a pretty good deal at 100 corks for $36.
Just to check, we poked around on eBay and Craigslist, honing in on First quality “seconds,” overruns from Napa and Sonoma wineries, which can’t put a 2003 cork in anything but a bottle of 2003 wine and therefore hand off most of their extras to recyclers to put out on the market for reuse. And they were cheap! Only $19 for 100 corks.
We figured that if these corks were good enough for commercial wineries, they’d be good enough for our Syrah. Just look at this shot of the major players that are capping off our Syrah. And is that a bottle of Ravenswood or Sunset Syrah? Guess we’ll have to slap our label on the bottle to prove we made it—which means I’ll be back in the labeling game soon. Uh-oh.
Planting cucumber seeds was one one of the first tasks given to me during my starting week at Delaney Community Farm outside of Denver, CO. They were the first seeds I'd ever planted, and I was to drop them in several 30 foot rows that I had just carved with a hoe.
I was horrified at the idea of releasing these tiny, baby seeds into that dry, crumbly soil. It seemed simply impossible that they would know how to grow and survive in such seemingly harsh conditions.
Sure enough, they sprouted, grew, and matured into fabulous slicers and picklers. And with them grew my fascination with the knowledge that I can really grow something big from a tiny seed.
I highly encourage you to plant a few of your vegetables from seed this spring. You can expose yourself to far more variety than what's available that week at the nursery. It can be cheaper than buying seedlings, though potting soil can add up as an expense. It's also a fascinating science project and an exercise in patience and care.
This is a great time to plant one final succession of cool season crops in the Northern CA area (though this weather is making me want to start the tomatoes and melons!). Don't have a greenhouse? Try a windowsill.
Tips for starting veggie seeds:
Seeds are dormant until placed in an environment that encourages germination - essentially a dark, moist place. I either start mine in recycled cell packs in the green house or sow them directly into the ground, depending on the time of year and preference of the crop. Read the back of the seed packet to find out specific instructions.
The general rule of thumb is to plant double the amount of seeds that you think you need. For example, sow 8 tomato seeds if you want 4 tomato plants. This is useful in case any of the seeds fail to germinate. You can always gingerly separate the starts, pot them up, and pass along to your neighbor.
Another general rule is to sow seeds twice as deep as the seed is wide. This means barely under the surface for tiny seeds like lettuce or carrots, and about 1/4 inch for crops like squash. You don't need to pat down the soil. It really is OK just to sprinkle soil on top of the seed.
Make sure you use potting mix or potting soil instead of planting soil or compost. Potting mixes/soils contain all the necessary ingredients (perlite, vermiculite, peat moss, etc.) to stay light and fluffy, and drain properly.
Water gently and thoroughly. Be extremely diligent about keeping the seeds moist through germination. I like to cover them with floating row cover to help contain moisture.
Road Food Guide: The new online Eatwell Guide plots out sources of local, sustainable, organic food all along your planned path. You can preselect for several different categories (only want to see butchers? cheesemakers? The Guide will steer you). And then you can download your customized PDF.
Going overboard on local food? These cultural preservationists in Lucca, Italy, are convinced they're shoring up their eroding culture. Read and see which side you're on in the battle of salt cod vs. burgers. (Oyster Food & Culture)
Design your own lovely and useful edible garden: It's been out on the shelves for a while, but Georgeanne Brennan's little book, In the French Kitchen Garden: The Joys of Cultivating a Potager will have you dreaming of what and when to plant and harvest next.
Several years ago, I spent some time in Finland, writing a story about a Finnish family and their summer food traditions. They had a cozy pine-scented house on an island in the Southern Finnish archipelago. A freestanding sauna lay a few hundred feet away, and below it, a small dock from which you could plunge your sauna-steamed body into the frigid Baltic Sea. They went mushroom- and berry-picking regularly and had giant crawfish feasts whenever they could.
They also made their own fresh cheese. To them it was as routine as blending a smoothie might be for us. Pia, the mother of the family, whipped it up one night in 20 minutes, and it was the first time I thought of cheese as something the average person could actually do.
She also had a handy square mold into which she packed the cheese, with a decoratively ridged bottom (to imprint the top of the cheese) and a channel on the inside edge for draining the curds. As soon as I got back to Helsinki, I bought one.
My Finnish cheese mold.
Once home, I put it in my Culinary Curiosities closet (i.e. the closet in the spare bedroom) where it mingled with a curvy Turkish glass teacup, my Indian bread-rolling board, and some panettone liners from Italy. I planned to use it someday, really.
Three days ago, it rose in my memory as I was thinking about making a batch of the Fresh Chive Cheese from our One-Block Diet summer feast. Instead of rolling the cheese into a log, I'd put it in my Finnish cheese mold.
As long as I was at it, I changed the recipe a little, too. This time around, I mixed in chervil and tarragon along with the chives, and lots of lemon zest as well as the lemon juice used for curdling. And some red chile flakes.
I skipped the kneading step and put the seasoned curds right in the cheese-cloth–lined box, covered it with its lid, and put 4 pounds of weight on top. The whole thing went in a big metal bowl to catch drips, and then into the fridge.
Curds in the box, left. Right, two weights (totalling 4 lbs.) compact the curds into sliceable cheese.
A few hours later and with a drizzle of olive oil on top, it was ready: Fresh lemon herb cheese.
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