Capel Bangor Show

I wrote half a post about this a couple of years ago and never posted it. The show is now an important fixture in our calendar and we went to this year's show last Saturday. This post covers a mixture of two years ago and last Saturday.

Agricultural and horticultural shows are a major feature of life here. It's possible to spend every weekend of the summer relaxing in a different field, watching horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, and other animals paraded around a ring for your entertainment. Any idiot who organises an event in the same week as the Royal Welsh has only themselves to blame when no-one turns up (yes, we've done that). Our local show is in Capel Bangor, a village about ten miles away, and we've attended for the last three years.

Whilst there are sheep...

... and the shearing competition is well worth watching...

... the show mainly features horses.

Unfortunately, I'm not terribly interested in horses.

Not horses, 2014

The lady to the left of the caravan talked to me at great length about peanut butter cookies (her recipe is very rich), ballet (her teacher cried when she gave it up to do A levels), drinking champagne at the Playboy club, and flummery, amongst other things.

I arranged for our friend Keith to drive a tractor for the first time. It went like this: We were chatting to Brython when his son Sion, who's in charge of the vintage and classic vehicles section, came over and spoke to him in Welsh. After Sean had gone Brython said, a little grumpily, I suppose I'm going to have to drive a tractor, then. Last time I did, I got covered in oil. (He was quite smartly dressed at the time.) Then, to me, Would you like to drive a tractor? Me: No, but Keith would. (He'd told me so earlier in the day.) I went off to find Keith, and told him there was an opportunity to drive a tractor if he wanted it, and he did.

Keith driving Brython's tractor in the parade.
Ian is driving the 2CV in the background.

Sadly, the 2CV is off the road at the moment. Well, it's not really sad because she'll be in much better shape when she comes home, but we had hoped she might be back by now. Ian still takes part in the old vehicle display, in whatever vehicle he has at the time.

Ian's Mitsubishi Colt, bought just a few days before the show. I blame Tim Minchin.

Did I mention tractors?

There was a competition to guess the weight of this one...

... and there was even a little one for children to sit on:

There were other stalls as well. Our friend Mavis had a cake stall.

Most excellent cakes at Make or Bake

While Ian gets involved with the old cars, I'm more interested in the produce tent.

In here may be found competitions for all kinds of garden produce, baking, crafts, photography (Most of which had separate classes for children) and - my favourite section - home brew (no children's class).

Garden produce

At the far end is a class for Vase of herbs, which I entered, but I think I misjudged the criteria. I went for aesthetic appeal, but the others seemed to be more about usefulness of herbs. I suppose I should have worked that out from the fact that it was in the produce section. Also, I may have been marked down for including weeds in my vase. How can you say rosebay willowherb isn't a herb? It's in the name!

I had a suspicion that the pickles and preserves were judged more on appearance than flavour, and filled a narrow jar of pickled samphire very carefully (it's the one with the luggage label, which rather hides how nicely all the samphire is lined up), but to no avail. My friend Jane explained to me that jars should show no signs of having been used before, should have white lids, and white labels should be on the lower half of the jar, but this isn't written down. My samphire came nowhere.

My two entries in the wine classes (rhubarb in the dry white; sloe in the sweet red) both won, in spite of poor presentation (I didn't even clean the old labels off the bottles). This led to me being awarded the cup for wines, which was nice. Honesty forces me to confess that the reason was that the entries for wine looked like this:

Two years ago, the first time I nervously entered a single bottle of wine (nicely presented in a clean bottle), I arrived to find an older couple unloading a crateful of homebrew: Three entries in each category. I felt a bit intimidated by this, and was over the moon when my oak leaf wine came first in its class. I haven't seen them since.

I was more pleased that my bog myrtle ale came second, as there was more competition in the beer classes:

I also entered an interesting fir cone ale, which came nowhere, but the judges drank an awful lot of it in coming to that decision.

It's a lovely day, and very relaxing because there's almost nothing to do apart from mooch around and chat to people. Relaxing, that is, apart from the excitement of the produce competitions!

Further adventures with wild yeast: Heather ale

After starting off my home brew in the kitchen, I move it downstairs to the store room, which is rather cooler. The lower temperature seems to have been a problem for the wine yeast I used last year, and I have a dozen demijohns full of half-fermented wine. I'm hoping it will get going again when the weather warms up, but I'd prefer yeast that doesn't need much warmth to ferment.

I'd been thinking of buying lager yeast, as that works at lower temperatures than most, but then I had another idea: The wild yeast that I'm using as a sourdough starter seems quite happy in cool temperatures (i.e. winter kitchen temperatures) and I've heard of people getting yeast from sourdough for cider; maybe I could do the same for beer.

I added extra water and left the starter until it separated out, then drained off the cloudy liquid, leaving as much of the floury gloop behind as possible. I don't really want starch in my beer. I added this to my usual heather ale recipe and left it to see what would happen. The quantity of yeast cells in that bit of liquid was probably pretty small, so I gave it longer than I usually would to check for signs of life. That is, I checked for bubbles frequently, but gave it three days before giving up.

Last autumn, I chucked a couple of crab apples in a jar of sugary water in the hope of cultivating wild yeast from the apple skins. The jar was still sitting on the kitchen counter, smelling... possibly alcoholic, possibly just appley - certainly not foul. I poured that in. A day later, I added some more of the sourdough starter, this time being less fussy about the starch. Eventually, I saw tiny which flecks on the surface - little bubbles? I monitored further until it became obvious that the white fleck were not bubbles, but some kind of growth. Oh, *&#%! That is not the kind of life I was hoping to see.

Two day-old pellicle

However, before throwing it all out, I did a bit of research, and learned a new word: Pellicle. This is a layer that forms on top of wort during the brewing of beer. It's the same kind of thing as the scoby that forms in kombucha brewing, but not the same micro-organisms.

While the cultivated brewing yeast doesn't form a pellicle, other strains of the same species can do, so it's entirely possible that wild yeast might do so. My pellicle smelled a little musty, but not too strong or foul. I also poked a dropper through the surface to take a sample of the wort, and that tasted fine, so I left it to see what would happen. A day later, I saw bubbles under the surface.

Bubbles trapped under the pellicle

Bubbles indicate fermentation, so there's definitely something going on, though of course, I don't know what kind of fermentation. It still smells OK, so I'm going to wait and see what develops. At worst, I'll get something that smells and tastes horrible, and I'll have to throw the whole lot away. Alternatively, it might taste of nothing, which is also not worth keeping. Another possibility is that mainly acids are forming, in which case I might have two gallons of vinegar, which is not ideal, but worth something. There's also a chance that I might end up with a delicious and unique beer. I'll just have to wait and see.

Homemade Absinthe

The first time I tasted Absinthe, a friend was passing round a bottle of it at a party. We all hated it. Since then, however, I've learned that the traditional way of serving it includes sugar and water, which would probably make quite a big difference (note that stuffing jelly beans into the bottle does not improve the flavour).

When I discovered that the plant I'd previously identified as mugwort is in fact wormwood (I really should get better at identifying plants before eating them!) I wondered whether it might be worth having another go at Absinthe. This idle thought was reinforced when I looked up other herbs included in the drink, which include fennel and anise. I don't have any anise, but I did have a bottle of a light, sweet, fizzy drink flavoured with Alexanders (very nice on its own, incidentally), which has an aniseed-like flavour. I also had fennel in the garden, as well as lemon balm (melissa), another of the herbs mentioned, and vodka in the fridge.

By way of experiment, I put some wormwood, fennel and lemon balm in a jar, covered with vodka, and left it to steep. After a few days, it turned a fabulous bright green, but then oxidised to more of an amber colour. Not unappetising, but it was a shame to lose the green.

Still green at the bottom of the jar, already amber at top.

I mixed a little of the infused vodka with the Alexanders drink, and it was really nice. The balance of sweet to bitter was just right. Consequently, that experimental sample has long since gone.

If I make it again, and I probably will, I might try putting all of the herbs into the vodka together, then adding the sugar and water on serving, in the traditional way. Of course, infused vodka isn't really Absinthe, as the herbs were originally introduced before the final distillation. Since I'm not going to get into distillation, I'll stick with infusion. I end up with a strong alcoholic drink flavoured with (some of) the right herbs. If I take more care to exclude air, I might even end up with something the right colour, too.

How much CO2 does fermenting wine give off?

We have a couple of demijohns of elderberry wine bubbling away noisily in the sitting room. They were in the kitchen, but that's next to the bedroom and the bubbling was keeping us awake, so I moved them. As we sat down for the evening the other day, Ian asked me what gas it is that's bubbling out so vigorously. Carbon dioxide. Hmm. That does seem to be rather a lot of carbon dioxide. I wonder whether it's enough to be a health risk?

My attempts to find the answer to this question via Google led to one Daily Mail article about a couple of Frenchmen dying of suffocation while treading grapes, but not much else. I decided to measure it for myself, so here is what I did:

1. Find a piece of plastic tubing and bend it into an S shape using hot water to soften. This was not easy because it kept buckling.
2. Take a graduated jam jar (I marked lines at 100ml intervals) and completely fill with water, then invert in a bowl of water. This was not easy because the jar was taller than the bowl, so the whole lot had to be submerged in a bigger bowl to get all the bubbles out.
3. Faff about for ages trying to raise the jar off the bottom of the bowl so that it wouldn't squash the plastic tube, before realizing that it wouldn't squash it anyway.
4. Recognize that the jar wouldn't need to be horizontal all the time, just when the measurement was taken, and I could hold it for that bit. Considered a spirit level, then decided that would be going a bit far (!)
5. Bring a small table (for the bowl/jar), blu tac (for sealing), and mobile phone (for timing) through to the sitting room.
6. Assemble the apparatus, connecting the plastic tube to the air lock with blu tac, and start timing.
7. Notice that the tube has filled with water again, reseal the blu tac, and hope not too much gas was lost.

The tube takes the CO₂ into the water-filled jar, hopefully catching it all

Here's a closer view of the jar-in-a-bowl assembly. If you look closely, you can see a bubble rising between the two marks on the jar. Please do look closely; it took me several attempts to get this picture.

Look, a bubble! More to the point, lots of gas collecting at the top of the jar.

The idea was to see how long it would take to produce 100ml of CO₂ and then work out volume (or weight) produced per day, and compare that with what a human breathes out, or maybe a cat. I did wonder whether the extra pressure of the water might slow down the bubbles, but they were still coming out at much the same rate as the other demijohn, so that was OK. Holding the jar horizontal was a bit of a challenge, as everything else in the room, and particularly the cupboard behind, is on the skew.

And the result was... about 20 min for 100 ml CO₂. It took 22 min for the first 100 ml, then the second 100 ml, which I expected to be slower due to the extra weight of water, was actually quicker and I missed it. At 43 min, there was already more than 200 ml gas in the jar. This may be due to a bit escaping when the seal broke at the beginning, so approx. 20 min will have to do. That's 300 ml per hour, or 7.2 litres per day.

I found a few different figures for the amount of CO₂ breathed out by a human, of which this page includes the lowest estimate: An inactive person (as they would be, in a sitting room) breathes out 350 litres of CO₂ per day. That's 48.6... almost 50 times as much as my gallon of fermenting wine.

I couldn't find any information on other mammals, still less on cats, specifically.* If amount of CO₂ exhaled is proportional to body weight (which it probably isn't) and cats are about one twentieth the weight of an adult human, one cat would be breathing out about two and a half times as much CO₂ as a gallon of wine. Even with two demijohns, George is probably still breathing out more CO₂ than the wine is. Daily Mail notwithstanding, I'll stop worrying about suffocation from fermenting wine.

---

* Though apparently there is a myth that cats breathe in carbon dioxide, and this is linked to the myth that they smother babies. Surely if they're breathing in the CO₂ that would be a good thing for the baby? Not only does that myth take no account of biology, it's not even internally coherent.

A few updates

I'm not doing very well with regular blog posts this year, so here's a bit of a catch up on some things I've left hanging.

Solar panels
The big project. When I last wrote about these, I was waiting for sunshine to see how they'd do.

Well, they work, but they don't put a huge amount of heat into the tank. I found this very demoralising at first, but Ian pointed out that it takes quite a few hours to put a significant amount of heat into that tank with fire, so I should feel too bad about modest performance from a couple of old radiators. There are one or two more things I could do that might improve performance. In the meantime, we've had warm-ish water out of the taps this summer, instead of cold, in spite of weather that barely qualifies for the name, summer.

Shower
It turned out that we really do want a different temperature in the kitchen than the shower, so we were forever turning the valve up or down, and trying to remember where we'd left it. Also, the temperature at the shower head wasn't entirely determined by the valve in the cupboard across the hallway; whether or not the underfloor heating was on made quite a big difference to how much heat was lost between the two. Added to that, the valve started to get sticky. I think maybe these valves shouldn't be treated this way. We needed an upgrade. One new thermostatic mixer valve was purchased, plus a connector or two, and plumbed in.

We now have one temperature for the shower and a slightly higher temperature for the hot taps. Perfect.

Wine yeast
At about three months old, the blackberry wine made with bread yeast was still pretty sweet, but pleasant and quite drinkable. That made with wine yeast, in contrast, was horrible. It was really rough, exactly like every home-brewed gutrot you've ever tipped into a potted plant when your enthusiastic home-brewing friend isn't looking.

Well, they look pretty similar

Now, at one year old, the bread yeast wine is no longer sweet at all, though still quite fizzy (correctable with a vacuum pump), and has quite a decent flavour. The wine yeast wine is surprisingly a little sweeter. It has mellowed and completely lost the rough edge, and has a more complex flavour than the bread yeast wine. In conclusion, then, both are fine for older wines, though wine yeast is better, but bread yeast is far superior for a very young wine, if you're happy to drink it fairly sweet. Before you decide that bread yeast is all you need, though, I also used it for my other wines. The dandelion wine was very good, but the oak leaf, beech leaf, and blackcurrant wines are still fermenting now, and still very sweet. It seems that bread yeast doesn't stand up well to tannin.

Vinegar
My too-sweet beech leaf wine remains resolutely sweet. I chuck in a bit of yeast or some more vinegar from time to time, but nothing doing. I think I may have discovered the solution to the antibiotic time-bomb, as this stuff kills everything I throw at it. It's a new multi-purpose sterilising solution.

Pickled mushrooms
These are very nice.

Perhaps a little stronger on the vinegar than I'd ideally like, but that has to be good for storage. It feels odd to be eating preserved mushrooms right in the middle of mushroom season, but I had to try a few, and yep, they're good.

Willow bench
Is mostly still alive. Many of the thinnest pieces died, but most of the thicker, more structural pieces have survived, and are putting out thin shoots of their own to replace the ones that died.

It's still not strong enough to sit on, but I'm sure it will be in time.

Crocosmia
In our first February here, when I was carrying out a serious assault on the garden to get it ready for my first year of planting, I moved some crocosmia from a flower bed to a steep bit of hillside. It was hard work. While not yet the dazzling display of colour that I have seen from these plants, they're getting established nicely and give a good show of orange flowers scattered across the hillside.

A smattering of crocosmia

In the background you just about be able to see the willow fence alongside the terrace. That's doing quite well, with almost no losses, and may yet provide valuable support if the terrace does start to break down.

Signs of spring

All over the blogosphere, there are signs of spring. From snowdrops and crocuses, little white dots and fluffy cuteness, to wetter snow and daylight saving time. I guess you take what you can get if you live in Denver! Here, I have beer:

Clear signs of fermentation going on there

To be precise, I don't even have beer yet, I have fermenting wort, but it will be beer before too long. You may be wondering why this counts as a sign of spring. It's not even my first beer of the year. That may be true, but it's the first batch of heather ale of the year, made with the early flowers and new growth of the heather in my garden.

Flowering heather

I'm experimenting with a different yeast this time, so I'm not sure whether it will end up the same as last year's or not. Of course, I hope it'll be better but it might be worse - I'll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the increased daylight, flowers, and occasional sunshine.

Wine yeast experiment

On the 'ish forum, we were discussing different kinds of yeast that can be used in brewing. Last year I used lager yeast (from a beer kit) throughout the year, keeping a bit from the bottom of the bucket after each brew and using it to start the next one. This year, not having a beer kit to hand, I looked at sachets of brewing yeast, decided that a pound for a little sachet of yeast was a bit excessive, and bought bread yeast instead, which is much cheaper. I think at least one person in that forum conversation was a bit horrified by my inappropriate yeast!

So far, I've had excellent heather ale and elderflower champagne from that yeast, but I none of the wine is ready yet, so I don't know how that will turn out. Since wine yeast is bred to tolerate higher alcohol concentrations, the bread yeast is likely to give up the ghost at about 12% abv, possibly before all the sugar's fermented. This is fine, as I'm not aiming for strong wine, but there is some concern that as it struggles in the toxic, alcoholic environment, it might produce off flavours.

In the interests of science, and taking advantage of the abundance of blackberries, I decided to make a second batch of blackberry wine, this time investing in a sachet of wine yeast. For my record, here are the details:-

• Two 2 gallon batches, each made with 8 lb blackberries and 2 kg sugar.
• The first batch uses bread yeast, previously used for mugwort ale and washed in sugar and water in between. The second batch uses half a 5g sachet of Young's red wine yeast.
• For the first batch, berries were picked on Sun 17th and Mon 18th Aug (4 lb each day); fermentation of 1 gallon started on Sun.
• For the second batch, berries were all picked on Tue 19th Aug and fermentation started that day.
• The first batch went into demijohns on Sat 23rd Aug and the second batch on Mon 25th Aug (late in both cases)

I now have four demijohns of blackberry wine bubbling away.

Blackberry wine, or at least potential blackberry wine

By chance, I used two different types of airlock for the two batches, so I can use that to identify them. The ones on the left, with the old, one piece airlocks, are the first batch, with bread yeast. The ones on the right, with the new, two piece airlocks, have wine yeast. I'd only just filled the second batch, so you wouldn't expect it to be frothy yet, but in the buckets, it did seem that the bread yeast was a lot more lively. I suppose it's bred to produce bubbles, so maybe that's not terribly surprising.

These will stay in the (relatively) warm kitchen for a few days before I take them down to the cooler store room. I might even take the first batch down first, to keep everything as similar as possible. Then we'll just have to wait and see what happens. I will conduct blind taste tests, and I'll let you know the results in a few months.

Blackcurrant harvest; wine and cordial

The blackcurrant bushes have done me proud yet again.

This is not all of the blackcurrants, oh no.

I can take no credit for this. The bushes were here before we arrived and I've done nothing to them apart from harvest the ever increasing crop of big, dark, luscious fruit. So far this year I have used almost 6 lb for wine and over 11 lb for cordial, and there are still more currants on the bushes.

For the record (my record, that is - last year's blackcurrant wine is a bit rough, but I didn't take good notes, so I'm not sure why. I suspect I left it in the bucket too long), I made wine as follows: 3 lb 4 oz of currants picked on Wednesday 2nd July. I ran out of time to pick more, so started the wine then. Currants into bucket, followed by boiling water and 1 lb sugar. Currants mashed with potato masher. Cold water added up to somewhat less than a gallon, then yeast leftover from elderflower champagne, which went everywhere because I inverted the bottle a few times, to stir up the yeast from the bottom. That got going nicely, then on Friday I picked another 2 lb 11 oz of currants, making 5 lb 15 oz in total. I added these to the bucket and mashed. They didn't get the sterilizing effect of the boiling water because the yeast was already in the bucket, so I just had to hope that the yeast was strong enough by that time to smother anything else. More sugar added up to 4 lb in total. Actually, I can't remember how much I added the first time, just the total, but I can remember that I didn't have enough white granulated, so this included some icing sugar and some light brown sugar too. Mash again and add water up to about 2 gallons. On Monday, i.e. after an average of four days, I transferred the liquid to sterilized demijohns using the two jug method.

The two jug method. Yes, it's messy.

This method consists of scooping liquid out of the bucket with one jug then straining through a sieve into the other jug, from which it is poured into the demijohns. Here they are full, after some tidying up:

I do love the sight of demijohns full of wine-in-the-making

These stayed in the kitchen bubbling for a few days before I took them down to the cooler, darker store room.

As for the cordial, I picked the currants for that today. I spent a couple of hours picking 8 lb currants this afternoon, then it was time to come in and get dinner. I put those in the jamming kettle with a very little water, and brought to a low simmer. I left these on a very low heat during dinner, to evaporate some of the water. After dinner, I went out to pick some more (still plenty of daylight!) and discovered how much faster I can pick when the air is thick with tiny creatures that all want to suck my blood. It did take a lot longer when I got them indoors, though, picking out all the stalks, leaves and snail poo, before I added those to the pan as well. The whole lot's still simmering gently as I write this. The next step is to separate juice from pulp, and I'm wondering whether the bowl I usually use will be big enough for all that juice. Tomorrow I'll add sugar, and edit this post to record how much.

Too many parsnips

I wouldn't have thought that such a thing was possible, but here we are in mid March, I have lots of parsnips still in the ground and they're all growing like crazy. At least, that was the situation a few days ago. Growing parsnips are not going to store for long, even if I lift them all and try various tricks I've read about, such as removing all the little roots, cutting the tops off and dipping the cut ends in wood ash (gives you a couple of weeks' storage, apparently). I needed to do something with these.

Just over 3 lb of parsnips

Of course, I could make a big batch of parsnip soup and freeze it, but it's getting to the time of year when I don't fancy thick, warming soups, and I suspect there might be quite a lot of it still there by the time I'm harvesting next year's parsnips. Besides, I had an idea...

I enjoy my home-brewing, but it bothers me a little that the main ingredient - sugar - is not something I've produced myself. What I'm doing is essentially buying sugar (either refined white or malt extract) to ferment, then adding foraged flavourings. However, parsnips are quite sweet and I've heard that parsnip wine can be pretty good. I wondered whether I might be able to brew a drink purely from the sugars in parsnips.

Estimates for the sugar concentration in parsnips range from 5% to 10% and I could reasonably hope they'd be at the upper end of that at this time of year. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't be able to extract it all, so that would bring it down a bit. A rule of thumb for potential alcohol content is that 1 lb of sugar gives 1% of alcohol in a 5 (UK) gallon batch. For my 3 lb parsnips, an upper estimate would be almost a third of a pound of sugar, so in one gallon that would be 5/3... about 1 ½%. You're not going to get drunk on that, but maybe enough to be worth a go. I subsequently found more parsnips - several monsters that I'd allowed to run to see last summer - which doubled the quantity, so I could be looking at up to about 3%. That would be good, but is probably very optimistic, given the likely inefficiency of extraction.

I looked up various sources of information on how to process the parsnips. Wine recipes recommended cooking fairly briefly, so the veg doesn't start to disintegrate and distribute tiny particles of parsnip throughout the liquid. Descriptions of how sugar beet is processed include finely chopped beet being passed through hot water... hm, hot doesn't sound like boiling, I wonder whether heating at a lower temperature might be the answer?

I sliced my parsnips fairly thinly, covered with water and brought to the boil, then reduced the heat to barely simmering, which I kept it at for about an hour. Sure enough, the parsnips were in no state to mash at the end of it, and the liquid tasted distinctly sweet. I strained the liquid off, hung the veg up in a jelly bag, then decided that was a waste of time and put it in the press instead. The strained liquid was about half a gallon, and I got another 2 ½ pints from the pressing, which I then brought back to the boil to sterilize (easier than sterilizing the press), which probably evaporated some off, so about ¾ gallon in total.

There were a few things I did for flavouring. First, I put a few of the parsnip slices in the oven and dry roasted them to caramelize some of the sugars, then added these to the pan. Secondly, I took another ingredient that makes a popular foragers' ale - nettles - and boiled up some of those separately. This allowed me to check whether the flavours work together (they do) before adding the nettle tea to the parsnip liquor. Nettles are only just appearing here, so I didn't get very many - about half a colander full. A few more would probably be better. Ginger is often added to nettle ale, and parsnip seeds, of which I have many, have a somewhat similar flavour, so I threw in a teaspoonful of those. I didn't think of that until near the end of processing, so they might have no impact on the flavour at all.

When the liquid cooled, I attempted to take a hydrometer reading, which was quite tricky as I don't have a proper flask and it kept sticking to the side of the bottle I was using. I think it read around 2% potential alcohol, which is about what I'd expect from the calculations.

The yeast is now doing its thing and the liquid is bubbling convincingly. My next decision is what to do about bottling. Usually, I'd wait for the primary fermentation to finish, then add a little sugar to each bottle to condition the beer - i.e. provide fuel for secondary fermentation so the beer's fizzy. However, the point of this experiment is to make a drink without using bought sugar, so I'd rather not do that. In the meantime, I have found another monster parsnip root, which might be the answer...

Foraged Food Friday: Beech leaves... and the rest

There's a traditional drink, similar in process but less well known (at least in this country) than sloe gin, called beech leaf noyau. I had the opportunity to try some at a festival last summer and... well, it tasted of gin. All the same, it got me thinking: Having had such success with my sloe wine, perhaps I could try the same trick with beech leaves, i.e. skip the gin and just make wine with them?

Beech leaves (Fagus sylvatica)

As I have a beech hedge, I have no shortage of leaves, and the task of picking them can be combined with tidying up the hedge. This meant I ended up with quite a lot of twigs in with my leaves, making the volume difficult to estimate. They filled my jamming kettle, which has a capacity of 15 pints/ 8½ litres. I thought it was probably about twice as much volume as the oak leaves I picked (but much quicker to pick!) I stuck to my usual simple recipe of boiling the leaves for about 45 min and then putting leaves and water together into the bucket with just shy of two kilos of sugar (I'd used a little from the bag already) and topped up to about two gallons of water, then added yeast (kept from the bay herb ale). After four or five days, it was strained into demijohns and left alone. This was in early June, so it's had about seven months to ferment and mature.

I wasn't sure it would be ready as there are still some bubbles on the surface, which is why I left it to last, but with a bit of de-fizzing it was fine. What looked in the demijohn like a light brown colour appeared in the glass more as a pinkish tinge - very pretty. And the taste - wow, this stuff is good! It's rich and smooth, slightly nutty, maybe a hint of vanilla... am I getting pretentious? I'm not very good at describing wine, you'll just have to make some and try it for yourself.

When I wrote about dandelions in the last post, I thought it was nice, at the end of the foraging challenge, to return to the beginning of my foraging journey. In a way, this one represents the challenge even better. I drew on information and brewing skills that I've learnt, tried an experiment, and the result is surprisingly good. Cheers!

Also harvesting this week
Parsnips
Leeks
Evening primrose roots

Also eating
Potatoes
Crab apple jelly
Rosehip vinegar
Ceps (from dried)

Also drinking
Oak leaf wine
Hopped ale

As for the rest? Well, this is my fifty-third post in a fifty-two week challenge, and I have lots of foraged foods still to tell you about. I did wonder about continuing the series, as many of these foods are preserved, but I'd like to finish the challenge and move onto something new. As a compromise, here are some brief notes on a selection (i.e. the ones I've remembered) of foraged foods, mostly seaweeds and mushrooms.

Green laver
Thanks to a field guide that told me laver is green when young, I picked a load of this thinking it was black laver. It was only when I got home and did further research that I realised I'd picked a differnet seaweed entirely. However, this is also used in oriental cuisine, as a condiment, and that's how I've been using it. Dried and toasted (it only takes a few seconds) it can be crumbled over food and has a strong, savoury flavour. I find it goes particularly well with slightly sweet dishes, such as pumpkin soup.

Gutweed
Another green seaweed, this is the kind you get deep fried in Chinese restaurants (if it's not cabbage standing in). It's tricky to clean all the sand out of the fine fronds, though. I have some dried, but it's gritty so I think I'll probably throw it away.

Dulse
This seaweed is distinctively pink. I dried quite a lot of this and intended to include it in the foraging series, but kept eating it, so I had none left to write about. It tastes a bit like shellfish and simply dried, it makes a very nice, crisp snack.

Kelp
The last of my seaweeds, kelp isn't something I'd want to eat on its own. It's reputed to add a savoury depth to soups and stews if you put a piece in while cooking, rather like a bay leaf. I've been using it in this way, but John Wright has tested the theory in leek soup and found it makes no difference. I'd like to do my own test before I'm entirely convinced, because I think meat or beans would be a more appropriate flavour. In the meantime, I still have a tin full in the cupboard.

Fairy ring champignon
Being late summer mushrooms, these were amongst the first I learned to identify, and they're delicious.

They generally grow in grassland, but two patches came up in my terrace. Actually, I have no idea how to classify that environment for the sake of mushroom identification, so I just have to be extra careful on the other features.

Blusher mushrooms
It's important to be able to distinguish these from panther caps. As well as subtle differences in colouring, there's a key distinguishing feature in the ring: The blusher mushroom has grooves on its ring and the panther cap doesn't.

I'm pretty sure the one on the left is a blusher mushroom and the one on the right is a panther cap, but I'd want a good look at the ring before eating one.

Grooved ring of blusher mushroom.

Although I've now seen enough of both of these to recognise them by sight, if I can't find those distinguishing grooves, I won't eat it. Even then, blushers need cooking before eating, and once cooked, they're a pleasant, if unremarkable mushroom. They're common, so I picked quite a few and dried them, making a useful contribution to the winter store cupboard.

Brown birch boletes
Rated by some mushroom hunters as worthless - sludgy and 'orrible, according to Hunter Gatherer Cook, I think these are quite useful for adding a mushroomy depth to stews. It's true that they do dissolve into a dark, sludgy mush when cooked, so I wouldn't fry them to eat on their own, but in my opinion the flavour is not very different from an elderly cep, and they're so common it's a shame to let them go to waste. Like the blushers, I have a jar full dried.

Scarletina boletes
I'm really sorry I don't have photos of this one, or even better a video, because the colours are great fun. It has a dark brown cap, but the underside and stem are bright red and when you cut the flesh it's bright yellow, then quickly turns dark blue. Once cooked, it all turns a boring brown, but the flavour's good. I didn't find enough of them to preserve, so I'll just have to look out for these again next year.

Oyster mushrooms
It says something about how well this challenge went that oyster mushrooms didn't warrant an entry of their own. Not only did I find the semi-cultivated ones at my sister's, I applied my new-found knowledge of their habits to find them in the wild. I learnt that they grow on beech trees and often emerge shortly after a sharp cold spell. We had a few days of freezing weather... it warmed up... I waited a couple of days then went to a patch of beech woodland nearby... I searched, and found them! I picked about three quarters of a pound of young mushrooms, and they were delicious. I loved the feeling of competence I got from applying knowledge like this.

Garlic mustard seeds
Having read about Atomic Shrimp's experiment making a condiment out of these, I collected and dried some with a view to trying the same. In the end, I used them in pickled samphire instead, and the result was very good.

Oak moss
I was very excited to learn that this lichen is edible, as there's not much else going at this time of year, and it's also high carbohydrate, which is rare in wild food. Someone mentioned it on a forum, then when I did some research I found one other article online about eating it, which was presumably the source for the first one I saw as the cooking instructions were identical but the second one I found explained how she arrived at this technique. OK, so I've found two people on the internet who've eaten it and survived. It's not the most ringing endorsement, but it probably means it's safe to eat. (Looking again, I've just found it in a River Cottage recipe and several other place. It's amazing how much difference it can make to use slightly different wording in a google search.)

There's loads of this on the trees around here and recent storms have blown a lot down, so it's easy to gather a handful just from what's fallen. For my first attempt, I followed the cautious cooking instructions that involved boiling in two changes of water before deep frying. By the time I'd boiled it twice it was a soggy mess. I squeezed the water out and fluffed it up before frying but even so, I'd cooked the life out of it. The final crisps could have been anything. For a second attempt I tried the traditional method of steaming before frying. It certainly held its shape better but when I ate it there was an edge to the flavour - the word acrid came to mind - which put me off eating very much of it. There may be a happy medium, but I'm not sure I can be bothered to find it at the moment. On the plus side, this lichen that's mostly used for perfume left the cooking oil scented pleasantly. That's been quite nice on rice salads and suchlike.

Fir cones
This one was an impulsive forage. On the way to pick bilberries, I spotted what looked like chopped apple, scattered over the forest floor. On closer inspection, these turned out to be large, fleshy fir cones of a kind I'm not familiar with that had been taken apart by animals (presumably squirrels) to extract the kernels from the middle. Hmm, thought I, I like pine kernels... I picked one out and tasted it - wow, that resin's strong! OK, so I wouldn't eat these nuts as they are, but that fir cone resin is an interesting flavour...

I picked up a couple of cones (they're big) to take home. The first thing I did was try to identify the tree (tip: It's easier if you have more than just the fruit to go on) - I'm pretty sure it's Abies alba, the European silver fir - then tried to find out whether it's safe to eat. The only relevant information I could find was about its use in cough medicines, so I concluded that it's reasonably safe.

That done, I had to decide what to do with it. I reckoned I'd need an organic solvent to extract the flavour and chose two; vodka and vinegar. I thought that once the resin was soaked out, the kernels might be good to eat, so I separated out the cones into kernels and fleshy parts and soaked the kernels in vinegar, then divided the flesh between more vinegar and some vodka. I also added hogweed seeds to the vodka.

Bits of fir cone in solvents

Some months later, I tried a couple of the kernels. They're far too tough to be worth the effort of preparing like this. What about the liquids? They were both an encouraging shade of brown/red and smelled of the fir cone resin.

Fir cone vodka

Disappointingly, although it smells good, the vodka tastes mainly of, well, vodka. Oh well, I suppose I haven't lost anything. The vinegar - which turned dramatically black shortly after decanting - is another story. That is packed with flavour. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to use it for yet, but I have successfully extracted the fir cone flavour into a condiment.

Bilberries, and foraged Christmas pudding
Bilberries are similar to blueberries, but smaller, and very fiddly to harvest even when they grow in huge quantities, as they do around here. I quite like them, but can't get that excited about them as a fresh fruit. On the other hand, they're small enough to dry quite easily, and make a good substitute for currants. With this starting point, I decided to have a go at making a foraged Christmas pudding this year. In addition to the bilberries, I had a few dried blackcurrants and some old, dried rosehips. I felt the latter would benefit from soaking in brandy, so I did. Adapting a Delia Smith recipe, I came up with:

• Bilberries (mostly), blackcurrants and (rosehips soaked in brandy) - together 4 oz
• Sloe puree, from sloe wine - 3/4 jam jar
• Tallow - 2 oz
• Hogweed seeds - 1 tsp
• Nutmeg - ½ tsp
• Cinnamon - ½ tsp
• Flour - 1 oz
• Baking powder (this seemed an unlikely ingredient to me, but I put a bit in anyway)
• Dark brown sugar - 2 oz
• Bread soaked in damson jam - most of kilner jar full (I wanted dried damsons, ideally, but the closest I had was jam)
• Breadcrumbs - sprinkle
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 tblsp dandelion and honeysuckle ale

It's not entirely foraged, but number of actual bought ingredients is quite small.

I also quite liked the idea of cooking this in a cloth, the old fashioned way, mainly because this was August and I didn't fancy having one of my pudding basins tied up until December. I found and followed instructions for doing this, but I note two things: If you boil a sugary thing wrapped in cloth, much of the sugar will end up in the water. If you hang a sugary thing up, even in a cool place with good airflow, it will go mouldy. I tried to mitigate the latter by soaking the cloth in brandy, but it was already soaked in sugar solution, so didn't absorb the spirit. After a few weeks I saw the first signs of mould, and decided another strategy would be necessary. I scraped the mould off the outside then microwaved the whole thing to kill it. I then unwrapped the by-now soft pudding, which promptly disintegrated. I packed the squishy mess into a Kilner jar as tightly as possible, added a thin layer of brandy for good measure, and sealed it up.

My intention was to eat this at the conventional time, i.e. Christmas day, but we had an unexpected invitation to join friends for Christmas dinner, so I ate their pudding instead (and very good it was too) while mine stayed in the cupboard. This week, in celebration of completing the foraging challenge (OK, it's January, I feel the need for sweet and stodgy food), it is pudding time! It was actually firm enough to hold its shape, but the jar didn't allow for turning out of the pudding, so I scooped it out, added an egg white (I'd used the yolk for mayonnaise), mixed with a little flour and sugar, which should stick it all together pretty well, packed it into a well greased pudding basin, and microwaved. In spite of all due preparations, I was quite surprised when it actually turned out of the basin.

It's nice, too. Not exactly like a traditional pudding, of course, and there's some room for improvement, but not at all bad. That, I think, rounds off the foraging year nicely. Happy New Year!

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

Foraged Food Friday: Dandelion Flowers

Having covered dandelion leaves (too bitter to eat as salad, but good in beer) and dandelion roots (a surprisingly good substitute for coffee), I now come the most valuable part of the plant, dandelion flowers.

Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale), complete with flowers

These flowers were my first step into foraging, not counting blackberry picking as a child, and feature in my very first blog post. They're still one of my favourites, if only because dandelions are such a ubiquitous weed, it's nice to have a use for the flowers. In fact, there are several uses - I dip them in pancake batter and fry them to make fritters, I dry them to make a herbal tea, and, of course, I make wine out of them.

The traditional date for picking dandelions for wine is St George's day, 23rd April. This year spring was late and I picked the flowers over the course of two weeks, Apr 30, May 1, May 2 and May 6, somewhere around four or five pints of flowers in total. I added one orange and one lemon (both elderly, say my notes) at the beginning, and 4 lb of sugar in two stages (Apr 30 and May 6). I assume I must have added some yeast as well, though my notes don't mention this. As usual, I made two gallons. Even when I wrote the notes, I couldn't remember what date I'd strained the liquid off the flowers and fruit and into the demijohns - I guess around May 12.

Dandelion wine. I need a photo is
a good enough reason for pouring another glass, isn't it?

As you can see, the wine is a very pale yellow colour and reasonably clear (actually, with a plain wall behind it, you can't tell how clear it is. You'll have to take my word for it.) Drinking this, I can see why I judged oak leaf wine to be quite similar to grape wine, because this isn't at all. On the other hand, it is delicious. Light and floral (unsurprisingly), the nectar gives it a sweetish hint of honey. Of course I'll be making it again. Don't tell any proper gardeners, but I have reached the stage of actively cultivating dandelions in my garden.

Also harvesting this week
Broccoli (one of my broccoli plants has got confused about what season it is and put out flower shoots. I'm not complaining!)
Hairy bittercress
Mustard leaves
Leeks
Parsnips
Evening primrose roots
Celery
Oak moss

Also eating
Knotweed chutney
Crab apple and rosehip toffees
Rowan jelly
Pumpkin, including seeds (not mine)
Blusher mushrooms
Birch bolete mushrooms (both from dried)
Green laver
Black laver

Also drinking
Hopped beer
Blackberry wine
Beech leaf wine. I was saving this until next week, the final week of the challenge, but I got impatient. You'll still have to wait, though.

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

Foraged Food Friday: Hops

I found some! We were staying in the Cotswolds at the beginning of September and whilst Ian was talking to people about cars, I went for a foraging walk and found lots of lovely things, including magnificent hop bines growing in the hedgerow. Sadly, I don't have any photos. I took some, I'm sure, but can't find them now. This is the danger of borrowing someone else's camera - that person may not check whether you've saved all your photos before clearing the memory card. So, a photo-free post, disappointingly.

It's the flower of the hop plant that's used in brewing (I've gone for the obvious use this time), also known as a cone. It's similar to a pine cone, but very light and papery. Since I also had quite a lot of fruit to process, I didn't want to start the beer straight away, so I spread the hops out to dry. This had the added advantage of converting them into a standard ingredient; dried hops can be bought from home-brew stores and appear in recipes. Yes, I thought I'd actually look at a recipe!

I thought that using hops, it would be easy enough to look up how to use them, and how much. It turned out to be not quite that simple. People who brew beer and share information online about their recipes do not simply use hops. Oh no, it's all about the varieties, and each recipe called for several. Neither do they simply use malt extract - similar complications are included for that ingredient. There's a lot of heating to specific temperatures, for specific durations, with the various ingredients being added at different times during the process. What these recipes do not tend to specify is the total quantity of beer they're making. The simple information I sought - weight of dried hops per gallon of beer - was not easy to find.

Eventually I concluded that the usual amount of hops is between half and two ounces per gallon (British gallon I hope, but I'm not sure I checked). Have you any idea how much a dried hop cone weighs? No, I don't have clinical-grade scales, either. Half an ounce is a lot of hops. I thought I'd picked plenty for multiple brewing experiments, but in fact the one ounce I needed for my two-gallon batch was most of what I'd picked. Of course I ignored pretty much all other aspects of the standard recipes as well, such as boiling the malt with the hops in it, and stuck to my own method, i.e. I treated the sugars and flavourings separately.

As in my heather ale recipe I used two 370g jars of malt extract and 350g sugar for two gallons of beer. Since the hops are serving two purposes, bitter and aromatics, I divided my ounce in half and steeped one half in hot water for half an hour to extract the aromatics, meanwhile boiling the other half for bitters, then after straining the water from both into the bucket, boiled the whole lot together for another hour. Water topped up to two gallons, yeast added (from blackberry wine, I think), then the bucket was left alone for a few days. At this point I tasted it... eugh! That was way too bitter!

Since the quantity of hops I used was right at the bottom of the range I found in online recipes, the reason for the bitterness can't have been too many hops. It could be that I don't like such bitter ales as other people, but I think that's fairly unlikely - I drink a lot of beer. It's possible that the wild hops I found happened to be very bitter but again, that seems fairly unlikely to me. More plausible, I think, is the possibility that something about my unusual method made the difference. I think it's very likely that boiling the hops in plain water, rather than malty water, would extract more flavour. The point is to transfer flavour compounds from the hops to the water - to dissolve them. If the water already has a lot of sugar (malt extract) dissolved in it, then it will have less capacity to dissolve anything else.

The excess bitterness was easily solved with dilution. I made up another two gallons of sugar and malt extract solution, and steeped the rest of my hops - probably about a quarter of an ounce - in hot water to top up the aromatics. I then mixed the whole lot together in a bigger bucket and left for a few more days. This meant that the total time from start to bottling was probably about ten days. After bottling, it was only a week or two (sorry, my notes aren't so good on the leaving it alone parts of the process) before it looked clear and ready to drink.

I'm so glad I made a double batch of this beer - it was excellent! It's a fairly light, crisp, beer but there's plenty of body to it. I know I could make a darker beer by boiling the malt (or adding a little treacle) but I'm not sure I'll bother. This is really good! Now all I have to do is find a more local source of hops.

Also harvesting this week
Navelwort
Celandine leaves
Ground elder (the first tiny leaves are poking through. It's spring!)
Mustard leaves
Parsnips
Oak moss (lichen - who'd have thought that'd be edible?!)

Also eating
Sloes pretending to be olives
Sloes and elderberries puree (in sloe tart - one of my more successful baking experiments)
Rosehip vinegar (I'll tell you about this shortly)
Lactofermented French beans
Pickled samphire (have I already said that chestnut biscuits topped with mascarpone cheese and pickled samphire is just about the most divine food on earth? If so, sorry, but it bears saying again.)

Also drinking
Sloe wine
Honeysuckle ale
Blackberry wine

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

Foraged Food Friday: Honeysuckle

This was my third home-brew beer experiment, and I was getting a bit cocky by this time. Although I didn't explicitly recall it at the time, I think I must have read Atomic Shrimp's sweet gale beer recipe, as I had the idea of using treacle to make a dark beer. It probably would have been better if I had remembered where I got the idea from, and checked just how little treacle he used. Not only did I use treacle, I also added molasses. I saw some for sale and bought it out of curiosity, just to see whether it is the same as treacle (no, it's not. It tastes like muscavado sugar, whereas treacle has a more caramelly, burnt sugar sort of flavour. Similar, but not quite the same.) Since I then had a jar full, I decided to use in beer.

Having found dandelion leaves too bitter to eat as a vegetable, I wondered if they might serve well as a bittering agent in ale. They're not very aromatic, so I then wondered what I might use to complement them. This lead me (via flowers in general) to honeysuckle. The flowers smell so wonderful, and I've heard that children pick them to suck the nectar out, so they seemed like a good bet for a flowery, aromatic flavour that might stand up to both treacle and dandelion leaves.

Honeysuckle flowers (Lonicera periclymenum)
These are my neighbour's flowers. I did not pick these ones.

Here are the notes I wrote on this recipe at the time:-

• Two large handfuls of dandelion leaves
• about 20 honeysuckle flower heads, picked on a warm evening
  (NB see Jade's notes on honeysuckle: Wild Pickings: Honeysuckle Not seen before using flowers. Probably best to use them in beer!)
• 370g malt extract
• 370g molasses
• 454g treacle

Bearing in mind that the berry is poisonous, I pulled the flowers off the green centre. I wondered about removing the green base of each flower - I didn't, but seeing Jade's notes, wonder whether I should have done. For a bitter ale, perhaps it'll be OK.

Flowers filled the larger basin, covered in hot water and steeped for... half an hour? An hour?
Leaves put in saucepan and boiled for 20min-half hour; strain off liquid and repeat.
Pour hot liquids onto sugars in bucket, fill, wait to cool (got down to 38deg. It was a hot evening) then add yeast - last used for blackcurrant wine, so a hint of blackcurrant in this, too.
Bottled after one week in bucket (probably a bit too long). Smells very treacly!

Dandelion and honeysuckle ale

Frankly, this ale is a bit peculiar. Firstly, it's not smooth at all. I'm not sure what the opposite is - rough means something else - but the bubbles, such as they are, are fairly large, which is not the effect you want in this kind of beer. It didn't taste good at all to start with, but after a few months it's mellowed to something quite drinkable. It's still rather odd, though. The flavour is dominated by the molasses and treacle, so I can't really tell what contribution the honeysuckle's making, if any. There's a certain bitter depth to it, which balances the treacliness, so the dandelion is doing its job, but I can't pick out the floral notes. This probably has more to do with the unfamiliar taste from the sugars than anything else.

I can't really call this beer a success, though I'm happy enough to drink it. It leaves me with no verdict at all on honeysuckle flowers - they might be a good flavouring for beer, I just can't tell from this. I might try again next year, or I might have a go with other flavourings. Either way, I'll skip the molasses next time!

Also harvesting this week
Parsnips
Evening primrose roots
Leeks

Also eating
Birch bolete mushroom (from dried)
Green laver (from dried)
Courgette puree (from frozen)
Potatoes
Sloe and elderberry puree (from making wine)
Hogweed seed

Also drinking
Bay herb ale (the last bottle, that I told you about a few weeks ago but didn't actually drink)
Blackcurrant cordial
Blackberry wine
Sloe wine

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

Foraged Food Friday: Elderberries

The elder tree is most wonderful generous to the home-brewer. Not only do the flowers make the delightful, summery, elderflower champagne, but the berries are excellent in wine, both on their own and with other fruit.

Elderberries (Sambucus nigra) spied from afar

Somewhat closer view of elderberries

I read on the 'ish forum (currently slightly creaky due to recent relocation) that elderberries are almost identical to grapes, apart from the sugar content. I've heard that it's possible to make an excellent wine from them, though I've yet to achieve this myself, partly due to lack of elderberries, partly due to impatience. I have some on the go at the moment, but as it needs at least a year, it won't be ready in time to include in this series of foraging posts. However, grape juice concentrate appears in various wine recipes, and elderberries are the perfect wild substitute. The extra sugar required is less wild, but never mind. I have some elderberry and blackberry wine on the go, but what I'm going to tell you about today is my favourite home-brew: sloe and elderberry wine.

This is possibly my most successful experiment to date, first tried a couple of years ago. From my notes, the recipe I used this year was:

• 1 lb 9 oz sloes
• same of sugar, initially
• kettle full of water, then cold to ?3.5-4l
• mash lots
• remove floating dead grubs
• 2 tsp yeast from beer
• 4? days later (15 Oct), add 1 lb elderberries and the same of sugar, and about a pint of water.

Note that the sloes were picked before the frost softened the flavour. Since then, I've added a tablespoonful of sugar whenever I've thought of it, which could be every day for quite long periods, and stirred frequently to see whether bubbles are still forming. The first time I made this, it stopped fermenting in about six weeks, but this one was still going at Christmas, which is well over two months. I can think of two possible explanations for this; either it's much colder this year than two years ago, and it's going more slowly, or the yeast I have this time is tolerating higher alcohol concentrations, and surviving longer. Considering how much sugar I've added, it would be ridiculously sweet if the yeast wasn't doing its thing, and it's not, so I think the latter explanation is more likely. This could be quite a strong drink.

I managed to keep one small bottle of last year's, to see how it matures.

Sloe and elderberry wine, 2013 and 2012 vintages.

A year's maturing makes no discernible difference to the flavour but as you can see, the sediment does settle out, leaving a beautiful clear wine. This is a sweet, strong, after-dinner sort of a drink. I shall continue making it so long as I can find the ingredients, which should be quite a long time.

Also harvesting this week
Parsnips
Leeks (strictly speaking, these two were harvested the week before, to take on holiday with us
Sorrel

Also eating
Pickled samphire

Also drinking
Blackcurrant cordial

Foraged food challenge summary page here.