Category: Projects

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U-Pick Apple Edition

More Liz U-Pick adventures. This time, for apples.

Farm to Table

Haunted by childhood memories of picking up rotten wasp-covered apples, Liz has adamantly resisted “branching” our gardening interests into orchards. So instead, we visit commercial operations for fruit. Fine, I’m game. More character-building for the kid.

When I was a kid, we had two kinds of apples: red and green. These taste a lot better than the ones I remember.

She whined appropriately.

Character-building in progress

But I’m always up for a canning operation myself. Each year Liz makes applesauce, and while tasty, it’s hard to mix with bourbon. I wanted to try my hand at juice. A quick internet search revealed reliable extension-office guidance on safe canning (apple juice is oddly omitted from the usual booklets).

I quickly discovered why small farming operations stick to cider: pulp.

Yuck

So here’s the method:

  1. Run apples through juicer.
  2. Refrigerate resultant slurry overnight.
  3. Skim off the floating pulp.
  4. Pass remainder through chinois until nothing else filters out (4-5 passes).
  5. Bring juice to boil.
  6. As the juice heats up, more pulp will coagulate and float up. Skim this as it appears with a fine skimmer spoon.
  7. Once boiling, ladle juice through cheesecloth-lined funnel into jars and process according to current standards (as of the time of this writing, the accepted method is water-bath canning for 10 minutes).

Was this a pain to do? Absolutely. But, the results were a significant step up from grocery store juice. It actually tasted like apple, not sugar water! (Why must every processed good contain so much sweetener?)

It was almost a shame to mix with bourbon – almost

I’ll be adding this to our fall canning ritual. Highly recommended.

–Simon

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Brisket

More smoked meat pics inbound. This time a brisket!

It follows, more or less, the same procedure as pork shoulder.

Smoked Pork Butt

The main difference being the intramuscular fat content. I don’t think there was much advantage to wrapping it in foil for the collagen liquefaction stage. It didn’t give me a system purge, but was definitely too rich. I also don’t think it would have dried out, and needed that extra rending. And I left out all seasoning, save the initial brine, so as not to overwhelm the smoky taste (which I wouldn’t do for pork as it needs the added moisture and flavor).

So here we are:

Wood chips courtesy of the kid’s gift to me: Jack Daniels whisky barrel wood.

–Simon

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Double Determinates

Who doesn’t love a home-grown tomato? Well, I’ve met people who don’t, but I personally think they’re not people but rather some type of The Omen devil-spawn, and no one can change my mind. I am fully prepared to debate this.

So to increase my production of delicious produce and repel demons at the same time, I planted a second row of determinate tomatoes this year, bringing the total to 18, and to compliment the 12 indeterminate tomatoes on the trellis, and the volunteers that pop up throughout the gardens, and the two extra I put in a pot on the deck. I really like tomatoes.

So standby for a selection of seductive solanums! (AKA, tomato porn):

Here’s a glorious picture!
And another!
And another!

On a more informational note, this was the first time I tried broiling the tomatoes for sauce. The standard blanching/skinning/de-seeding applies, but the flesh is then slightly browned before being added to the pot. I also included a full mirepoix this time too.

Before the stick blender
And after

I think the broiling somehow also brightened the red color, as my sauces are usually more muted, so bonus. I’ll definitely be taking this approach again.

I usually prefer rigatoni or radiotori for red sauce, but I tried bucatini this time

And I won’t have to wait long. In one week’s time, the bowl has filled again. Pizza sauce next!

–Simon

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Smoked Pork Butt

After some trial and error, I have finally nailed a pork butt.

No you freak. The devil did not appear to me in a porcine guise with an offer.

Thick and juicy

Although it was smokin’!

Smokin’

So here’s the trick, as I see it. May the internet BBQ community explode in outrage at what they think I did wrong:

  1. Brine meat for a minimum of 12 hours. Just a standard salt and sugar brine here – nothing fancy needed. The flavor will come later.
  2. Place meat unwrapped in smoker cold – both meat and smoker. No preheating.
  3. Smoke at 170-200 degrees until internal meat temperature reads 160. Temperature is based on preference – colder smoking gives more contact time with smoke and therefore has a more smoky taste. Also I like cherry wood for pork so far.
  4. Pull the meat at 160 (at this point, much of the water and most of the fat will have rendered out, and the collagen will start to liquefy, which you want to stay in the meat). Cover with rub. My rub base is ketchup, mustard, apple cider vinegar, and brown sugar. As a self-proclaimed pitmaster though, I won’t tell you my spice mix. But I will tell you that the rub shouldn’t taste very good on its own (like a marinade). If it makes you wince, you’re good to go.
  5. Wrap meat tightly in aluminum foil. I prefer to remove the thermometer probes first and then punch through the foil. It’s easier, and creates a tighter seal.
  6. Put the meat back in the smoker and cook at 275 until the internal meat temperature reads 205. This is the stage at which most of the collagen is liquefied. The next day’s leftovers will be a mass of meat and gelatin, which indicates successful collagen breakdown. This is good, even if it doesn’t look like it. Wiggle wiggle.
  7. Place the meat, still wrapped and with meat probes, in a cooler. There’s no real reason to rest it as you would a steak, since the collagen isn’t significantly redistributing as water would. But resting it at this point will allow the collagen to continue to liquefy if any hasn’t yet, and it will gradually cool to a touchable temperature for pulling. More importantly though, this gives you a buffer by which you can finish smoking prior to dinner and time the preparation of side dishes. You could technically wait as long as you want until the temperature hits 140, at which point you’ll be in THE DANGER ZONE! OOOOOOOO!
  8. Shred, stuff in face, and wait for your well-deserved adoration.

And you’re done! And it only took me 15 hours for an 8 pounder. It was, however, gone in 4 days. And now I know why you can’t get good BBQ at a restaurant. It just isn’t economical to spend that many man hours in our present day of Boomer chains (i.e. Applebees, Chili’s, Outback…)

But before I go old man ranting on you, get to the store and buy and pork butt!

–Simon

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Farm to Table

I never wrote a sequel to the great strawberry harvest of 2021:

Strawberries I Guess?

At the time, I didn’t seem to have had much hope of a good crop. As it turned out, however, the yield was very good indeed. And my portioned bags of frozen fruit saw us through many a cold winter Saturday family card night with margaritas and daiquiris.

Ultimately though, I lost the war on weeds that year and started over with new plants, and they haven’t had enough time yet to fill in, so no followup harvest.

But as it turns out, you can cheat, and visit a tourism farm or whatever they call them. That wasn’t on the menu for me as a kid out west, but apparently affluent white people from the midwestern burbs just can’t resist the opportunity to drive out into the countryside and pay a farmer to pick their crops for them. Whoever came up with that business plan is a genius.

Not only do you get the privilege of paying a farmer to do their work, you also get to then buy the product you just picked for them.

It sounds absurd, but if you want to buy some fruit in bulk, it’s ultimately cheaper. Bonus: it builds character too.

Just look at all that character being built.

30 pounds of fruit yielded about 2.5 gallons of jam and butter, plus some reserved for freezing.

Also this was not my project – I just took photos. To chronicle the homesteading and such. Liz doesn’t want to write blogs, so she can’t fight back when I talk about her here and say things like that she labeled the cans wrong. Nya nya!

As for me, I’ll save my canning for tomatoes and broth. (And the tomatoes I’ll be growing myself! I’ll even let the kid pick them for me for free.)

–Simon