Chive Blossom Vinegar, Pretty in Pink

Chive Blossom vinegar is easy to make, and the taste in a vinaigrette on salads is wonderful. I just take a handful of chive blossoms and put them in a jar with champagne vinegar. (I like that better than most store-bought vinegars as it's fairly mild. I have to buy a case of 4 gallons to get a good price, but it lasts a long time and I use it as a base for other flavored vinegars.)

The more chive blossoms I use, the darker the pink color will be, along with the chive taste. I let mine sit in a dark cool place for about 2 weeks, then strain into sterilized bottles/jars.

ps, I'm planning to make some blackberry vinegar soon... stay tuned!

Pork, and Health

I love.love, love bacon, ham, pork chops...  and for many years I have wondered why some cultures and religions do not allow pork in their diets. I suppose I assumed (maybe like many others?) that in the early days of civilization it was probably due to trichinosis, and the absence of any kind of refrigeration. However, I've never seen any reasons given for the dietary restrictions, just to avoid them, and I always want to know why restrictions exist for anything.

The late Dr. Carey Reams (RBTI) even forbade pork in his protocol for good health, merely saying it was bad to consume. (Reams was a dedicated Christian, and nothing I have read in the Christian New Testament forbids pork. Most of the major restrictions about pork are found more in Jewish and Muslim dietary laws, and the Christian Seventh-Day Adventists.) There are a number of sites about RBTI, and Dr. Carey's book, Choose Life or Death, The Reams Theory of Ionization is considered "the ultimate text", quite popular (and scarce) even now. 

I have been interested in Reams' work for several years because he developed a test for determining the quality of the soil, which in turn determines our health... and you know I'm big on soil health and thus our own health. I really don't know a lot about RBTI, but I did become curious about why he forbade pork.

I do muscle testing, sometimes known as AK, or Applied Kinesiology, to test whether any food or supplement is good for my body. Up until just a few weeks ago, pork has tested okay for my body... then it changed to being a no-no, and I have no clue why. My opinion is that as my body gets healthier, the nutritional requirements change (meaning I tolerate crappy food less and less, although my pork is pastured pork and I do not consider it crappy), but I have no basis in fact for that idea.

Then several weeks ago I read a paper about how various preparation methods for pork affect red blood cell clumping, and some things started to make sense. (You'll have to read it... too lengthy to explain here). The paper showed that some pre-treatments like marinades and curing make a difference, and showed some slides of red blood cells before and after for documentation. Since my background includes a long stint in cardiovascular research at Johns Hopkins, it made sense to me!

I had a bag of meaty pork bones in the freezer to make stock, so I did my muscle-testing with them raw. They tested NOT GOOD for me. Having nothing to lose but a bag of bones,  I soaked the bones in about a cup or two of Bragg's Raw Apple Cider Vinegar for 24 hours in the refrigerator, turning every few hours. A second muscle test after 24 hours said they were GOOD FOR ME, so I rinsed them and roasted at 425ºF until they were crisp. There was a goodly amount of meat on some of the ribs, which I immediately ate.

To my surprise, there was absolutely NO taste of vinegar in the roasted pork despite a 24 hour vinegar soak, and the meat was delicious! The bones were then cooked in my usual stock recipe, and I think the cooked pork stock from those bones (with aromatics) will be equally good. 

I always add some ACV or lemon juice to any bones in a pot of water for stock since it helps extract the good minerals like calcium from the bones, but I've never soaked the meat alone before in a larger amount of ACV. I'll always do that from now on with pork.

I make a lot of sausage patties, generally without any curing salts since I just freeze them and use them up quickly. Even my venison sausage has fatty pork added because venison is so lean. I haven't tested my body yet on the sausages I made several weeks ago, but if they test not good for me, I may try an overnight marinade or ACV soak to see if that changes it. I'd hate to throw away a few pounds of otherwise good sausage!

ps, found this post, Feb. 13 about pork consumption may cause cirrhosis.

"Quicker" Real Apple Cider Vinegar

Last year, I wrote a couple of posts about making apple cider vinegar. The technique I favored and said to have the best taste was to first make hard cider, and I did start some last fall when fresh unpasteurized apple cider was available. It's still in the root cellar aging, and I have decided if it's any good at all, I prefer to bottle the cider for drinking rather than turn it into vinegar.

That left me with either having no apple cider vinegar at all, or buying Braggs, which is getting more expensive all the time... and I use a lot of it! Then I read a post on someone's blog several months ago about making apple cider vinegar from either whole apples, or from apple peelings and cores, leaving it to ferment in a wide-mouth container quickly through alcohol production to vinegar. Unfortunately I have no idea where I read it. However, I decided to try what I remembered of the method.

In early May, I was cleaning up the few remaining apples in the root cellar from last fall, and found a few that had bad spots but enough good apple to salvage. I cut the good parts up into chunks (seeds, peels and all) that I put on a cookie sheet. The idea is to let them air dry long enough to turn brown, but I don't know (or don't remember) why.

My old apples didn't turn brown very well, nor as quickly as a fresh apple does. I think that's because they lose so much moisture in the root cellar over the several months' storage. After about 3 days, I packed a wide-mouth half gallon canning jar with the apple chunks (photo at top), filled the jar with bottled water (to avoid the chlorine in our county water), fixed a piece of cheesecloth on top with a rubber band, and set the jar in a closed cardboard box out on the porch where it was warmer (and dark inside the box).

I checked them every week or so, and only had to top up the water twice during the 2 or so months or so they were fermenting.

When it started smelling only like vinegar, I left it another 2 weeks to be sure the alcohol was all converted to acetic acid, and then strained the apple chunks out with a colander. It did have a thin layer of "mother" on the top. It's very cloudy right now, but I didn't want to use cheesecloth to strain out any fine pulp so it can still develop a thicker "mother". I'm sure that it will clear as the solids sink to the bottom.

Here, after sitting 24 hours, you can see the settling has started.

It smells and tastes terrific! Certainly a lot quicker process than making hard cider and then turning it to vinegar. I'll do this again in the fall when I have apples again, but in larger batches.

Update: My neighbor just gave me some Transparent apples, which mature much earlier than fall... so I cubed some to start another batch of ACV. The ones on the first tray were already starting to brown by the time I finished the 3rd tray.

Making Weed "Vitamins"

To continue from the "Gotta be a pony in here somewhere"...  I'm starting to make some vitamin tinctures from the weeds in my garden.

Above are the things I picked early this morning (June 16th, which is just 1 day past the full moon) to make some vitamin tinctures. Around the full moon is said to be the best time to harvest herbs for medicinal use.  I don't know if that also applies to culinary use, but it might. That doesn't stop me from cutting fresh culinary herbs from the garden when I need them for a dish I'm preparing, but it might affect those same herbs when I want to dry some for winter.

The large stainless steel strainer basket is full of red raspberry leaves that I will dry for raspberry leaf tea. Raspberry leaf tea is not a tasty tea like mint tea; it's uses are more medicinal and you can do an internet search about them. Raspberry leaf tea was recommended by Dr. Abravanel as the morning beverage for the Thyroid Food Protocol which I followed many years ago. (Dr. Abravanel's Body Type Diet and Lifetime Nutrition Plan)

Finished, Dried Raspberry Leaf

The small strainer basket in the top photo above has red clover, and the plastic bucket behind it has dandelion leaves. Many of the recipes for red clover used medicinally call for just the blossoms, but as I'm steeping mine for a vitamin tincture, I'll use some of the top (softer) stems and leaves as well as the blossoms. Red Clover contains calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc as well as vitamins B3, C and E. 

Medicinally, red clover has been called the "woman's herb" as it contains phytoestrogens, similar to estrogen, and is widely used during menopause. "Although the phytoestrogen effects of soy and flaxseed have been more widely studied, red clover may actually be a more effective treatment for relief of menopausal symptoms. It is an active ingredient in Promensil, an over-the-counter supplement used to help treat hot flashes." (Source) Red Clover has many herbal uses, but as I am not an Herbalist, I shan't go into that here.

Dandelion is rich in calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, copper and zinc.  It also contains vitamins K, B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin), B3 (niacin) and C along with beta-carotene, which our bodies turn into vitamin A. I haven't been able to find a breakdown of nutritional content of roots, and I'm not up to digging roots right now. Instead I'll make a vitamin tincture from the leaves now, store it, and later mix it with a vitamin tincture made from the roots to get the whole vitamin/mineral chorus in dandelions. Below are the vitamin and mineral contents in 1 cup of chopped raw dandelion greens.

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2441/2

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2441/2

To make a tincture requires only a base liquid, and the herbs or whatever you want to incorporate. Generally a food-grade alcohol like vodka, brandy, rum or Everclear is the liquid of choice, but I'm going to use raw apple cider vinegar for some added nutritional properties.  

Note: Everclear generally needs water added because some nutritional properties of herbs are only water soluble, and Everclear has very little water; it is almost all food-grade alcohol, 190 proof, or 95% alcohol.

Dandelion leaves in vinegar

To make the tincture: clean and rinse the leaves and stalks thoroughly as soon as possible after harvesting. (Vitamin loss starts immediately from any harvested fruit, vegetable or herb.)

Chopped red clover

Drain and chop the plant material, enough to nearly fill a glass jar with a tight lid. Fully cover the leaves and stems with either the alcoholic beverage, or my choice: apple cider vinegar. (You could also use vegetable glycerin. Glycerin might be a good choice if making a tincture to give children since it has a sweet taste.) Tighten the lid securely (I'm using the plastic Ball storage lids because the acid content of the vinegar will eat through regular canning lids in a short time.) Store the jar(s) in a cool, dark place for at least 2 weeks although 6 weeks is better, shaking often. Then strain the infusion into clean jars, re-label and store... again in a cool, dark place.

If you think about it, flavored vinegars such as tarragon vinegar, or Provençal vinegar are nothing more than tinctures with a vinegar base, and so easy to make at home with fresh herbs! Since I take a spoonful or two of raw apple cider vinegar (ACV) every day anyway, it is easy instead to use ACV infused with extra vitamins and minerals as a healthy tonic.

The Road to Real Fruit Vinegars

I've been fascinated by the few reports I have read about Real [Fruit] Vinegars ... those are NOT the fruit or herb flavored vinegars [other than Bragg's Raw Apple Cider Vinegar] we usually find in our stores in the US. Apparently there are a few stores who import these luscious vinegars from France, Italy and Spain where they are more commonly made, but the purchase cost is higher than a bottle of fine wine.

The process to make real vinegars from fruit is to first make fruit wine. Then you expose the wine to oxygen where the acetobacter convert the alcohol to acetic acid. Actually, the process to make any real vinegar is to first make the substance into a wine, then convert the alcohol in it to acetic acid. Quickly distilling GMO corn or corn by-products into vinegar may give you a good product to use as a household cleaning product, but there are far better options of vinegars for foods.

One important distinction besides the taste is the health benefits of the nutrients in the vinegars. When wines are bottled, sulphites are added to kill the bacteria and stop any residual fermentation, and act as a preservative. If you have bought Bragg's Raw Apple Cider Vinegar (or made your own vinegar) you will notice a "mother" in the vinegar. That's a product of the action of the acetic acid bacteria on the alcohol where no sulphites have been added to kill the good bacteria. It is harmless (but alive). Real apple cider vinegar retains all the nutritional goodness of the apples from which it was made,  plus it is fortified with the enzymes produced during the two fermentation steps. The same is true of any fruit fermented into real vinegar.

The photo above is blueberry wine on the left, and plum on the right. I made both of these from what winemakers call 'seconds'... that is, the second brewing of the same fruit pulp after the first batch has been drawn off. Not being a winemaker myself, it will be interesting to see if I have successfully made wine at all! Those bottles will be left to 'age' for several months, and then I will siphon the liquid into jars with a large mouth, and cover the mouth with cheesecloth to keep out dust and bugs but allow contact with oxygen to convert the alcohol.

In my freezer I have enough red raspberries to start fermenting a 3 gallon (or more) batch of wine from scratch, and I have higher hopes of success in making wine than with the jugs above. If I actually succeed in making a drinkable wine, most of it will be bottled for friends since I don't drink. The rest will get converted to vinegar.

I'm also hoping to find enough elderberries left this year to start a gallon of elderberry wine. I used all the elderberries I had picked to make an elderberry syrup for colds and flu before I thought to save some for wine.

I have an invitation to visit a cidery when apples ripen, and I'm hoping to buy some just-pressed juice to make some hard apple cider, which will ultimately become raw apple cider vinegar. I use a lot of Bragg's and it would be nice to make my own, but buying a cider press is out of the question financially.

One of the apples I hope to find for cider is an heirloom crab apple "Virginia Hewe's Crab" Thomas Jefferson grew in his North Orchard at Monticello for cider. Someone discovered one growing somewhere in Virginia several years ago and has been grafting lots of new crab apple trees from it. The old cider made in England and Colonial America was a mix of sweet and bitter apples; most of those heirloom apple varieties are long gone since cider fell out of favor as a beverage, and they did not make a good eating apple.

Pitting Plums and Plum Vinegar

I don't have posts lined up in advance like I usually do; in fact, this is the only post in the pipeline for now. I'm very sorry, but I will pick back up in a few days. I have been very busy helping a friend in the next town pit plums for wine, and we think we'll have about a thousand pounds by Sunday when we finish. 

Pitting plums is just plain messy and tedious, but at least with 2 of us, we pass the time with conversation and it goes faster. I haven't done my fair share of pitting because after about 4 hours, my back begins to spasm. That, in turn, prohibits anything else I might do during the day, including writing posts for this blog.

In this post, I mentioned I'm playing around with making real fruit vinegar. The jug of fermenting plum pits above is merely a trial of the process; I don't expect it to be a viable comestible but I have to start somewhere. The best way to make real fruit vinegars is to first make fruit wine, and the folks who make plum wines do not all agree on fermenting the pits or not. Most don't ferment them, because 'everyone' says the pits make the wine bitter, although some who do include the pits have won awards for the wine. Go figure.

So I decided to do some of each. Here's why:

I'm sure you've heard the story about a young wife who cut off the end of a whole ham before baking it? Her husband asked why, and she replied because her mother always did. Questioning her mother about why brought the response "because your grandmother always did". Well, the grandmother was still alive, and when questioned about the 'why' she replied "because the pan was too small". So it had nothing to do with the actual ham at all.

Now, it may turn out that the pits fermenting for more than a week or so actually make the juice bitter, but at least I will know firsthand... and not from hearsay!

Homemade Apple Cider Vinegar

Homemade apple cider vinegar is easy to make. There are 2 basic methods, and if you happen to be a home-brewer, you may elect to start by making your own 'hard' cider. For the rest of us, the easy way is similar, but much shorter and less complicated.

Either way, the fruit sugars must be converted, first into a fizzy alcohol, then the alcohol breaks down in the presence of oxygen into acetic acid, which is vinegar. (Many home wine makers have inadvertently made wine vinegar instead of wine, myself included.)

To begin, you  will need a container, some apples and a bit of some raw apple cider vinegar to use as a culture. Choice of apple varieties greatly affects the resulting taste, and I'll post later on apples for making cider. For now, just juice your own apples, or if you are lucky enough to be at a country fair where someone is pressing apples, get some fresh juice. Using bottled apple juice will not give you the health benefits of raw, unfiltered apple cider vinegar.

(I apologize... I lost who took this photo)

Fresh apple juice will start to ferment into alcohol on its own within a day or two (due to the yeast that naturally occur on the apples and in the air), so don't delay in starting this process unless you want to make hard cider. When you have your fresh juice, measure it, and add 5-6% by volume of the raw apple cider vinegar you obtained, or had on your pantry shelf. A half-gallon canning jar works well for fermentation, but if you have a crock, by all means use it but don't fill either one up all the way. Stir the mix well, pour into the jar, cover with several layers of butter muslin (fine muslin), and stick it in a dark closet. I fasten the cloth with a rubber band. The object is to keep dust out yet allow oxygen in, necessary for the bacteria to convert the alcohol into acetic acid.

The bacteria do their conversion work on the surface, so surface area affects total time to usable product. That's what makes a crock work better: less liquid depth to surface area. In a canning jar, it might take 3-6 months. During the fermentation, a "mother' should form on the surface, perhaps with spots or strands, formed by the bacterial digestion, and it will have a clean but sour smell. There should be no mold forming on the surface.

After several months, it should no longer have any fizz. When the fizz is gone, you know all the sugars have been converted! It should have a sour taste on your tongue, not a fizzy residual taste... and you have vinegar! Now, siphon off half the vinegar into a bottle, cap it, and you have raw, unfiltered apple cider vinegar ready to use. Take it internally, use it topically, use it on salads with extra virgin olive oil, cook with it... you'll love it!

With the remaining half still in the bottle, top it off with more FRESH apple juice, starting the fermenting procedure all over again. This process can go on for years, giving you a continual supple of good, healthy apple cider vinegar.

Now, if you want to make hard cider first, I suggest you begin by checking with your state laws as they all vary in the legality of making hard cider. If it's legal, go for it. I have never made hard cider, so here's a link that sounds like an excellent starting point. Once you have your aged hard cider, here's their link for making some of it into cider vinegar.

Here's another easy method I have read about but not tried: Put apple cores in a jar and cover with non-chlorinated water. Add 2 tablespoons raw apple cider vinegar. Put a breathable top to the jar, such as a fine-woven cloth fastened with a rubber band or string. When the bubbling calms down, you should have vinegar. Not much to lose. Hey, were you planning to save those apple cores for something else?