Adventures and Misadventures in Fermentation

Experimenting with fermentation over the years, I've learned that you win some and you lose some. And then there are the ones that you really, really lose.

When something that has just been fermenting for a few days or weeks goes awry, it's no big deal. But when it's been a lengthy, elaborate, labor-intensive process involving a months and months of fermentation...then I turn for comfort to pop-psychology clichés about learning to let go and tired yet soothing bromides such as "life is a journey, not a destination."

Last fall we borrowed a cider press, our farm interns Ali and Dau gleaned a whole bunch of apples from a neglected nearby orchard, and six of us spent an afternoon making fresh apple cider.

First the apples had to be chopped into a mash.

Then came the pressing. Lots and lots of pressing.

What was left of the apples after the pressing

Then came the straining.

Fortunately, at that point we drank quite a bit of fresh cider on the spot and bottled up a bunch for drinking fresh in the week to come. It was ridiculously good.

The last three gallons of cider we set aside for fermentation into hard cider. Two gallons were poured into glass gallon jugs with a plastic bag/rubber band lid for a controlled fermentation and the last gallon we fermented in a cloth-covered crock for a "spontaneous" hard cider a-la Wild Fermentation.

The spontaneous cider was awful. We still have a dozen or so bottles of it around because I hold on to the notion that aging in the bottle might improve it and I can't bear to let it go. The glass jugs first fermented like crazy for a while and then once they were done "working," we switched out the plastic bag/rubber band combo for an airlock.

11 months later, I tasted it. The first gallon was tolerable. The second gallon was downright ¡guácala! as they say in Español.

Because I haven't learned that aforementioned "letting go" lesson, I bottled up the first gallon and decided to convert the second into apple cider vinegar. The vinegar-making is a nice diversion - I've convinced myself it's a great use for the end product of all of that work (something about lemons and lemonade comes to mind).

We use tons of apple cider vinegar for pickling, preserving, and everyday consumption, and it seems like a staple while hard cider seems like a luxury item.

The best apple cider vinegar is apparently made from hard apple cider and here is how it's done:

1. Pour the hard cider into a ceramic crock or wide-mouthed glass jar
2. Add a bit of live-culture apple cider vinegar (not pasteurized - with "the mother")
3. Cover with a cloth to keep bugs out and ferment for 4-8 weeks at 70-85 degrees.

The fermentation adventures continue. Here's hoping that my trusty 1-gallon crock will come through with its magical powers of transformation and we will have a gallon of delicious apple cider vinegar in 4-8 weeks. One year, lots of effort, and lots of microbial activity later . . . . lemons / lemonade, journey / destination, etc, etc, etc.

UPDATE (September 1, 2011): The end result was the best apple cider vinegar I've ever tasted. Since we actually use a much larger volume of apple cider vinegar than hard cider, I consider myself fully satisfied with this fermentation project.

Easy, Creamy, Dreamy: Raw Goat Milk Yogurt

So I have discovered that there is almost no work at all involved in making yogurt from raw goat milk. The goats and the microbes do all the work for you! Put some milk in a jar with a little bit of yogurt and viola: creamy, thick, sour-delicious yogurt.

Raw milk yogurt is so easy to make it's hard to even use the word "recipe" here, but here's the recipe:

Goat Milk Yogurt

1. Fill a clean quart jar almost to the top with raw goat milk
2. Add a spoonful or two of live culture yogurt
3. Screw on the lid and let sit for 18 hours or so in a warm place.
4. Enjoy. Save a couple of spoonfuls for the next batch.

Yum. After the past few years of perpetual move-busting, it's nice to do something that is easy.

I would like to thank the fabulous Ms. Foxy Brown for providing the milk for this adventure in cultured dairy.

Homesteading Summer Camp

Extracting honey

With our three interns and various visitors coming and going all through the summer, things have been very lively at the Red Wing for the past few months. "The 'terns," as they are affectionately known, are incredibly hard workers, smart as whips, and excited about all things garden- and homestead- related.

Because we don't want to exploit the 'terns and their youthful energy, we have tried to break up the hard work with fun and educational activities such as the Farm Tour, field trips, and kitchen projects.

Also, we've been hosting long- and short- term visitors, various friends and family who come to stay for days or weeks and sometimes help out with farm work or participate in Big Projects while they're here. Andriana is here from Manhattan, experiencing composting and chicken butchering for the first time, among other things. Fer was a "day camper" for two weeks while she was visiting from Mexico City, pulling weeds, spreading mulch, and generally jumping right into the fray.

Sometimes it feels like we are running a summer camp --the kind of summer camp I'd like to attend: one where the activities are shoveling manure, chopping vegetables, squishing bugs, extracting honey, discussing heirloom tomato varieties, saving seeds, identifying insects, and fermenting things.

Along those lines, we spent a day extracting honey and making mead with the 'terns and various visitors a few weeks ago. It was one of the stickiest and most delicious ways to spend a day you can possibly imagine. Here are a few shots of the process; you can view more photographs here: honey extraction and here: meadmaking.

Yesterday the campers (aka interns) convened in the kitchen and we made a big crock of sauerkraut and jarred up some brine-pickled (fermented) garlic scapes after a brief lesson on fermentation.

We followed up the festival of fermentation with a garlic tasting, sampling the ten heirloom varieties that we grew this year, cleansing our palates between rounds of baked garlic with a variety of homemade jams, baked brie, and sliced tomatoes from the garden.

Friends and family joined us to gorge on garlic and offer comments on the varieties to help us decide what to grow next year.

I was struck by how our collective work produced this incredibly delicious, nutritious, and beautiful food. Gathered around the table were people who had helped with all of the different pieces of the work of growing food: Shannon and Sharon helped dig and prepare beds, Ali and Nicole and Dau harvested and processed hundreds of heads of garlic this summer, Christopher and I chose varieties, saved seed garlic, and planted and mulched and cared for the plants. And we all savored the fruits of our labor together. It was lovely.

Best summer camp ever.

Monster Mash*

Earlier this week, my dear friend Pooma brought me a basket of gorgeous hot peppers -- a beautiful mix of several varieties of habañeros and jalapeños.

Above: some of the aforementioned habañeros plus the last Italian sweet frying pepper from my garden.

Locally-grown peppers are a rare commodity at the end of the dripping-wet summer we had in these parts, and an especially precious treasure now after the first frosts have hit.

I have for some time had a hankering to make homemade hot sauce, and these peppers presented the perfect opportunity.

When I started searching for recipes for hot sauce, I was delighted to discover that traditional sauces involve fermentation, of which (regular readers know) I am enamored. Fermentation is an old-timey way to preserve food, a creative craft that has been practiced in cultures throughout the world for thousands of years. I love fermentation, and have tried fermenting just about every vegetable you can imagine, and lots of other things too. I've added hot peppers to various ferments over the years, sometimes with extremely intense, mouth-scorching results, but I've never tried fermenting them alone.

Peppers and salt: all you need for a killer mash

It turns out that the most flavorful hot sauces are made from an aged pepper mash, which is just salted peppers fermented for a period of time from a few weeks to three or more YEARS. Then the mash can be used in small quantities for flavoring, or combined with vinegar to make hot sauce. Fermenting hot peppers seems like a good way to spread hot peppery joy throughout the year as well as a step on the path to superlative hot sauce, so I decided to give it a whirl.

It was surprisingly hard to find a recipe online that takes the hot-sauce maker all the way through the process from fresh peppers to fermented mash to the final sauce product. I did find a couple of posts from experienced mash makers here and here and some interesting variations on the basic mash (for instance, here's someone who uses kefir starter culture to innoculate his pepper mash with good results).

Since I have a good understanding of brine-pickling in general, and since making pepper mash seems to be a fairly straightforward brining process. Brine pickling is an ancient, low-tech preservation technique that uses no electricity and very minimal equipment and ingredients. You can read more about brining in earlier posts here and here and also at Sandor Katz's most excellent website, wildfermentation.com. Grist also has a good summary article on brining, including pepper mash making.

Mash-making in progress

In any case, here is the recipe I culled from reading lots of summaries of the process. My mash is atypical because it is adds garlic to the ferment. We have lots of extra garlic from the garden right now, since we're planting our garlic for next year now and there are lots of leftover small cloves, and adding garlic is almost never a bad thing in my opinion.

Garlickey Hot Pepper Mash

Ingredients:

For the mash:

• 2 cups mixed hot peppers (I used green jalapeños; red, yellow, and chocolate habañeros; and one sweet red frying pepper)
• 1/2 cup peeled whole garlic cloves
• 1 Tbs fine- to medium- ground high-quality salt
• 1 Tbs coarse-ground high-quality salt

For the sauce (6 weeks to 6 months later)

• Raw apple cider vinegar to cut the mash to taste

Directions:

1. De-stem and de-seed the peppers. Be careful: this is serious business, because the seeds of hot peppers are really hot! You might want to wear gloves, and if you don't, scrub the heck out of your hands (I use dish soap, rubbing alcohol, and aloe vera to get the pepper sting out-I really should wear gloves) and do not touch your lips, nose, or any other sensitive parts after touching the insides of hot peppers.
2. Throw the peppers and garlic in a food processor or chop by hand. I chopped mine, because I was making a small batch. Some people ferment the peppers whole, but I decided to ferment them without the seeds because I am not one of those people who seeks out crazy over-the-top hotness in my hot sauce.
3. Mix in the regular-grind salt and stir or shake (easy to shake if you do it in a jar).
4. Gently pour in filtered, room temperature water to cover. Make sure that all of the peppers and garlic are completely submerged in the brine.
5. Cover with the coarse-grind salt.
6. Wait and watch!
7. Harvest the mash and make sauce by cutting with vinegar -- I haven't done this step yet, but will post when I do!

The mash in brine on day two.

*I must have heard the song Monster Mash hundreds of times throughout my childhood, always at this time of year, on record players of my elementary school classrooms, so I hope you'll forgive the gratuitious seasonal shoutout, dear reader.

Back to Basics

The thing about experimentation is that it is experimental. Experimentation by definition has unpredictable results.

I have experimented widely with sauerkraut over the past seven or eight years, adding various vegetables and spices and trying different methods, fending off mold and throwing in a wild card ingredient every once in a while. Let me tell you, some of those experiments have been disastrous. And some have been divine. Such is the nature of experimentation.

We grew Early Flat Dutch cabbage (pictured above) this year and I harvested some this week to make a bunch of kraut. Having nurtured this cabbage from seed through all manner of pestilence over the past six months, I was not willing to experiment with it. Instead of letting my creative juices flow, I decided to go back to basics and make some plain, old, traditional sauerkraut.

Inside the Early Flat Dutch

Here's the recipe, very simple, tried and true:

Sauerkraut

Ingredients:

• Five pounds or so of cabbage
• 3 Tbs. high-quality salt
• A scant or hearty handful of each: dill seed, caraway seed, and celery seed (adjust amounts depending on your flavor preferences)

Instructions:

1. Shred cabbage. I do this with a knife, slicing very thinly to make long, crimped strips.
2. Layer into a ceramic crock, adding a couple of teaspoons of salt and a couple of pinches of seeds after each layer of cabbage.
3. After each layer goes into the crock, smash it. I use a potato masher for this. Some people use their fists or a heavy wooden pestle-like tool.
4. Keep layering salt, spices, and cabbage and smashing until the crock is full or you are out of cabbage, whichever comes first.
5. If there is not enough water released from the smashing, add water to cover and a little more salt. Weigh down to submerge (I use a plate and a mason jar full of water as pictured below). I also use leftover whole cabbage leaves under the plate to keep the shredded cabbage from floating and thus being exposed to air.
6. Cover with a clean, breathable cloth, and allow to ferment! I like to taste it along the way, and the amount of fermentation time depends on conditions in the room and personal taste, but I like to let it go at least a month. Keep pressing down the weight whenever you think of it, and scrape off any scum that forms on top. Once it's nice and sour, enjoy!

Top layer of kraut weighed down before topping off with water.

Simple is good. Here's to plain, simple sauerkraut, a staple of old-timey food preservation and of my fall and winter diet. Sour, crunchy, salty. Yum.

See more on sauerkraut on Foodista, but don't follow their recipe and heat process/kill the kraut!

Making Herbal Meads

Fresh-picked feverfew, skullcap, and lemon balm for Migrane Medicine Mead.

I have been wanting to try fermenting herbal meads for a while now, and have been peppering my experienced mead-making friends with questions about making mead with herbs. This week I gave it a whirl.

A mead made with herbs is technically called by the very medieval-sounding name "metheglin" which derives from the two ancient Welch words--the word for medicine or healing (meddyg) and the word for mead or spirits (llyn). Metheglins can contain medicinal herbs, culinary herbs, and/or spices.

A lot of the metheglin recipes you will find online are for madrigal dinner or ren-fair types of spiced meads heavy on the cinnamon and spice. Those recipes don't generally appeal to me in terms of taste and also because they aren't made with herbs that grow easily here in the southern US. And although some of their components may be medicinal, the "Christmas spice" metheglins do not seem to be intended primarily for health and healing.

I love the idea of a tonic or healing cup of wine, and I relish the process of making medicine with simple ingredients picked fresh from the garden. So it was high time for me to make some medicinal mead.

I made two 1-gallon batches of herbal mead to start out with. With advice from some more experienced metheglin-making friends and herbs from our garden, it was a simple, quick, and easy process -- only a bit more complicated than brewing a cup of herbal tea.

My first batch was made with mostly lavender (stems, leaves, and flowers) and a small amount of rosemary (leaves and stems).

The second batch was an attempt at a migrane tonic mead for Christopher. I combined feverfew (leaves and flowers), two varieties of skullcap (leaves, flowers, and stems), and lemon balm (leaves and stems) for the Migrane Medicine Mead.

Here's a recipe for herbal mead as I made it:

1 gallon of herbal mead (metheglin)

Ingredients:

• 3 quarts water
• 3 cups honey dissolved
• Fresh herbs (amount will vary based on herbs used and desired strength)
• A pinch of yeast (I used champagne yeast)

Equipment:

• Gallon jug
• Rubber stopper & airlock

Instructions:

1. Make a tea from the herbs and 2 quarts of the water. Allow to steep, cool to room temperature and strain out the herbs.
2. Dissolve the honey in the other quart of water, heating until warm and whisking until the honey is completely dissolved. Add yeast and allow to activate for a few minutes.
3. Pour the tea and warm honey/yeast water into a 1-gallon jug (we use old apple cider bottles scavenged from the natural foods supermarket's dumpster).
4. Cork with a rubber stopper topped with an airlock. Allow to ferment for a few weeks until bubbling stops.
5. Rack after a few weeks. At this point you can either allow a second fermentation of a few more weeks in an airlocked jug and then bottle, or just bottle and age after the primary fermentation. We like to keep our mead-making moving, so we usually bottle after the first, most active fermentation period and allow the last bit of fermentation, aging and mellowing to happen in the bottle.

I'll post about how the meads turn out...they're bubbling away already!

Mead on Foodista:

Elderberries Galore!

Elderberries!

Our friends Paul & Jude have a beautiful urban homestead in West Asheville with gardens you would not believe. Their little city lot is bursting with edible and beautiful plants -- including a superabundance of elderberries in their back yard.

Paul planted two elders a few years ago, and now there are more berries than one family could possibly use. Luckily for us.

Paul invited me to come pick elderberries earlier this week to help stem the elderberry tide, and we ended up with several gallons of elderberries piled in various vessels on our countertops. As the week has gone by, we have gradually preserved the elderberries in various ways, as I will detail below.

But first, a few words about the elder.

Paul's elders are English cultivars, varieties developed over hundreds (maybe thousands?) of years of cultivation of the plants that began as wild European elders. Elderberries are widely used in Europe, and have a long history there of medicinal and culinary use.

North America is home to wild native elders, including some growing wild in the valley where we live. The common American elder--the kind that grows on our land-- is a close cousin to the European elders, and like the European elders has a long history of being used for food and medicine. Native peoples of the Americas used various parts of the native elder to treat a variety of ailments, and also used the berry for food.

Elderberries are super-nutritious--high in vitamin C, potassium, beta carotene, and antioxidants. The berries of both European and American elders can be used in jams, pies, and other fruity concoctions, and of course to make elderberry wines. All of which are delightful ways to boost your vitamin C and antioxidant intake.

Among the medicinal uses of the various parts of the elder plant is the use of elderberries as a cold and flu fighter. According to Peterson's field guide to medicinal plants, studies have shown elderberry to be effective in the treatment of cold and flu.

Here's a link to a good summary of the nutritional content and medicinal properties of elderberries, as well as some info on the use of elderberries in folk medicine. And here's more on the elder from Wild Man Steve Brill.

Now, without further ado, here are some ways to make use of nutritious, delicious, medicinal elderberries.

~~~~~~

Elderberry mead in the first flush of fermentation

Elderberries are one of the most famous fruits for winemaking, and elderberry honey mead is an ancient brew. Here's how we made ours.

Elderberry Mead

Ingredients:

• 1/2 gallon of elderberries for every gallon of mead (we used 2.5 gallons for a 5 gallon carboy)
• 1 gallon honey per 5 or 6 gallons of mead
• water
• yeast (we used champagne yeast)

Equipment:

• Glass carboy
• Airlock

Instructions:

1. Do your best to de-stem the berries. This can be tedious if you are processing a large quantity of berries, and you don't have to get rid of every last tiny scrap of stem, but especially be sure to remove the large, woody stems, as they contain cyanide. We pretty much completely de-stemed ours, just by hand, despite various online reports that de-steming with a plastic fork may be an easier way.
2. Put the berries in a big pot or crock and squish with your hands until you've created a mushy, juicy mash.
3. Add honey to a gallon or two of water in another large pot and heat until the honey is dissolved.
4. Combine everything in a carboy or crock. You can let the mead ferment for a few days in a crock covered with a cloth (which will allow you to capture some wild yeast from the air) and then transfer to a carboy, or you can put it directly into the carboy, add storebought yeast (we used champagne yeast) and cap with an airlock. Either way, when it goes into the carboy, top off with water up to the shoulders and cap with an airlock.
5. Ferment! After the initial bubbling stops, siphon off the liquid and compost the fruit, an allow to ferment again; bottle, age, and enjoy!

~~~~~

I also wanted to preserve some elderberries for medicinal use. I dried some of the berries, an easy way of preserving for teas or poultices, but what I really got excited about was making cough syrup.

Here's a great post on the medicinal properties of elderberries and making elderberry syrup from Dandelion Revolution, and here's a good overview of making herbal cough syrups from Kami McBride.

Elderberry syrup is a beautiful deep purple color and has a sweet, medicinal flavor.

My recipe for elderberry cough syrup includes brandy for preservation purposes and taste, local honey for its immune-boosting properties and as a sweetener, and ginger because it is a warming herb and just plain tastes good.

Elderberry Syrup for Cough & Cold

Ingredients:

• 2 cup ripe elderberries, de-stemed and washed
• 2 cups non-chlorinated water
• 1/2 cup local honey
• 1/2 cup brandy
• 2-3 inches fresh ginger root, sliced

Instructions:

1. Combine the berries, ginger, and water in a medium saucepan and heat to a low boil.
2. Simmer over low heat for about 30 minutes until the berries are mushy and you have a beautiful purple liquid thoroughly infused with elderberry and ginger.
3. Strain with a fine mesh strainer and compost the berry/ginger mush.
4. Return the hot liquid to the pot, add honey and stir until dissolved and incorporated.
5. Remove from heat, add brandy, and stir.
6. After cooling, bottle in dark glass bottles. Keeps for several months, and even longer if refrigerated.

~~~~~

Between cough syrup, mead, and drying, we managed to preserve just over three and a half gallons of elderberries this week. There are purple stains from the berries throughout the house, and I keep finding purple patches of skin on my body, temporary elder tattoos from the week of elderberry overload.

You would think that after such a total elderberry immersion, I would be burnt out on the elder, but I actually found myself wishing for just a few more berries when my friend Sandi mentioned that she makes an elderberry liquor by soaking elderberries in brandy. Maybe next year!

Autumn Olive Mead

Dozens of small, shrubby autumn olive trees are speckled across our five acres of river bottom land. Autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata) is an invasive exotic. . .and an abundant, nutritious, wild fruit. Of all of the invasive species I've encountered, autumn olive is the hardest to hate.

Autumn olives are one of the first trees to leaf out here on our land, and one of the earliest plants to flower. Their silvery green leaves are beautiful, and their tiny yellow flowers are heavy with a sweet scent that makes me feel drunk with Spring. Honeybees and other pollinators love the flowers, which provide an early spring meal for many beneficial insects. Then, around the time that blackberries start to ripen, the trees bear fruit. Autumn olive trees in fruit are covered with tiny red berries, packed with fruit, bursting with fruit. The berries are pearly, almost opalescent in some light, and flecked in such a way that they almost seem to be dusted with glitter. Autumn olives are magical. A hard plant to hate.

Need more evidence? Autumn olive trees are nitrogen fixers. At Sugar Creek Farm, where we took a class last spring, farmer Joe Allawos has experimented with the benefits of the nitrogen fixing capacity of autumn olive trees by planting fruit and nut trees next to autumn olive trees, and at the same time planting the same variety of tree in a spot away from any autumn olive trees. The trees planted next to the autumn olives grew much faster and when we saw them were about 50% larger than the ones planted away from the autumn olives. Autumn olive trees planted or allowed to grow in a garden or orchard will accumulate nitrogen around their roots, which is then available as on-the-spot fertilizer for other nearby plants.

Finally, there is the nutritional value of the fruit: autumn olive berries contain vitamins A, C, E, essential fatty acids, flavanoids, and carotenoids. They are especially chock full of the antioxidant carotenoid lycopen, which is considered a powerful fighter of cancer and heart disease. Tomatoes, which are the most common source of lycopene, contain a fraction of the lycopene found in autumn olives. One study by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service showed that autumn olives can contain 17 times as much lycopene as a fresh tomato.

So there it is. Beautiful. Nitrogen fixing. Nutritious. And invasive.

We have cut dozens of autumn olive trees in clearing space for gardens, but we've left a smattering growing for the time being, and we harvest as much of the fruit as we can. The taste of the fruit is a tart burst of summer--I can stand at an autumn olive tree for a good long time picking and eating on a summer afternoon.

I can never eat an autumn olive without thinking of my friend Holly, who introduced me to autumn olives on a hike in the woods almost ten years ago now, when she was six years old. She knew far more about wild foods than I did, having spent a lot of time in the woods with her knowledgeable parents, and I am always thankful to her for helping me begin to appreciate the food that is available all around us for free!

All of this said, I feel compelled to offer at least a couple of links to information about the noxious, invasive nature of Elaeagnus umbellata, so here they are:

• Morris Arboretum invasive species fact sheet on Autumn Olive

• Nature Conservancy article on Autumn Olive (this article is written with a specific focus on autumn olive in one state, Indiana, but is more widely applicable, and is a good summary).

• Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center Threat Summary on Autumn Olives

What To Do With Autumn Olive Fruit

As long as these beautiful and edible invasives pepper our landscape, we might as well enjoy their delicious fruit.

We knew we wanted to try a batch of autumn olive mead, which we did (more on that below), but I took to the internet in search of other interesting things to do with autumn olives, since we have so many and they are so yummy.

Here's a blog with all kinds of autumn olive recipes, including a delicious-looking jam that I intend to try later this month: Dreams and Bones.

I also discovered on one of my perennial favorite blogs, Fast Grow the Weeds, a post with a recipe for an autumn olive chutney that looks divine. There will definitely be some chutney happening in my kitchen later this week -- thanks El!

In the meantime, here is the recipe for the mead we made last evening, which smells outlandishly delicious already and is a gorgeous deep, purple red color as it begins its fermentation.

Autumn Olive Mead

Ingredients:

• 1.5 gallons autumn olives
• 1 gallon of honey
• Water as needed

Equipment:

• 6 gallon carboy (glass jug for fermenting)
• Airlock (see photo)

Instructions:

1. Wash and mash the autumn olives. Use your hands and create a nice, mushy, juicy slurry!
2. Heat a large pot of water and dissolve the honey in it.
3. Add water to the fruit slurry to make it easier to pour. Combine the honey water and fruit slurry in the carboy and add water to fill the carboy up to its shoulders.
4. Cap with an airlock and wait!
5. The mixture should start to bubble and continue for several weeks. If the mead is not bubbling, or develops mold, you can add storebought yeast for winemaking (champagne yeast is good). If you're lucky, the wild yeast that is present on the skin of the fruit will suffice.
6. After the bubbling stops, siphon off the liquid into another carboy and compost the fruit dregs. Allow to ferment again until there is no more bubbling; transfer to bottles and enjoy right away as "young" mead or age for a mellower flavor.

Below: mashing the fruit to create a slurry. . .

. . . and the mead ready for fermentation!

On Preserving Garlic...Featuring Pickled Garlic Two Ways

Garlic was the first food crop that we planted here on our land. We planted garlic before we had even a temporary place to live here, and it is without question the backbone of our kitchen and garden.

We harvested over 1,400 heads of garlic this year. We grew 13 heirloom varieties with a range of subtle taste differences and growth habits, planted in the fall for a mid-June to early July harvest.

We started out with seed garlic from Filaree Farm and have been saving garlic for seed from varieties that we like and that do well here, gradually selecting to create strains more and more well-suited to growing in this particular spot as we continue to save seed over the years.

Much of this year's garlic bounty will be saved for next year's seed; some will be sold to local restaurants; some will be sold, traded, or given to friends and family; and a large amount will be eaten right here in our home.

Christopher cured all of the garlic that we grew by hanging it to dry under a porch roof for 2-4 weeks (the time varies based on variety of garlic and weather conditions). He's recently been spending evenings processing cured garlic, cutting off tops and roots and sorting for storage, seed, and sale.

Curing garlic by drying it immediately after harvesting yields the dry heads of garlic that are the way most of us buy garlic at the grocery store. The majority of our garlic will be stored that way. Stored in a cool place with low humidity and good air flow, dried heads of garlic can keep for up to six months, depending on the variety of garlic. But we found this year that there comes a point in when the dry garlic from summer's harvest, even stored under the best conditions, has reached its maximum shelf life.

Plus, some of the garlic that we harvested is not pretty or perfect enough for selling, saving for seed, or storing whole. Particularly if the heads are not tight or the cloves are starting to separate or there is any sort of damage to the skin, garlic will be less likely to hold up in storage.

So we are finding ways to preserve garlic for use in our kitchen throughout the year. Pickling is an easy and tasty way to eat homegrown garlic year-round. And besides: pickled garlic just plain tastes good.

So here are two super-delicious ways to enjoy pickled garlic.

These two preparations have a different enough taste from one another that they are both worth trying, especially if you have an enormous amount of garlic to preserve, as we do.

Pickled garlic is great as a substitute for fresh garlic in prepared dishes (though it adds a totally different flavor) but my favorite way to eat it to pop a whole crunchy, sour clove in my mouth...mmm!

Pickled Garlic

The old fashioned brine-pickled way

(modified from Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation)

Ingredients:

• 2-4 cup garlic cloves
• 1/4 cup salt dissolved in 1 quart of water
• 1 Tbs. black peppercorns

Equipment:

• 1 gallon ceramic crock
• Small plate that just fits inside the crock

Instructions:

1. Peel the garlic and rinse.
2. Sprinkle the bottom of the crock with the peppercorns, and fill with garlic cloves.
3. Make the brine by combining 3/8 cup salt with 1 quart of water, and pour the brine into the crock over the cloves, making sure the garlic is submerged.
4. Place the plate on top of the top layer of garlic and weigh down with something heavy (I use a clean mason jar full of water). Make sure you don't have any floaters.
5. Cover with a cloth and allow to ferment for as long as you like. I recommend at least a month.

When the garlic reaches your desired taste, you can pack the cloves into jars, refrigerate and use as you like. Brine-pickled garlic should keep almost indefinitely.

Pickled Garlic

The newfangled vinegar/heat-processed way

(modified from a recipe found in the Rodale Food Center's book Preserving Summer's Bounty)

Ingredients

• 2 cup garlic cloves
• 3 cups apple cider vinegar
• 4 Tbs pickling spices (make your own blend or buy it pre-mixed)

Equipment:

• 4 pint jars with self-sealing lids
• Saucepan
• Canning pot big enough to fully submerge filled jars

Instructions:

1. Peel the garlic and blanch for 30 seconds. Drain.
2. In an enamel or stainless steal saucepan, bring the vinegar and pickling spices to a boil.
3. Pack the cloves into sterilized jars.
4. Pour the hot liquid over the cloves, leaving 1/2 inch of headroom.
5. Seal and process for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.

Jars stored in a cool place out of direct light should keep for months or even years, and can be cracked open for garlicky goodness at any time. After opening a jar, you should refrigerate it-- that is, if there are any cloves left after you chow down on the crunchy sour taste explosion of pickled garlic!

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For more info on growing garlic:

Ron Engeland's Growing Great Garlic is an excellent resource for the finer points of not only growing but curing, handling, and storing garlic. This book has been our most useful garlic growing reference, and is well worth keeping around if you are going to grow any quantity of garlic.