home made

Not a Recipe: loaded pierogi

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Ah, what a day! As I sit here, I am watching the garage cam’s live feed, as blowing snow covers my daughter’s footprints, from when she closed the gate just a little while go. At least it’s still getting warmer!

FedEx never did show up with our Starlink system.

*sigh*

Hopefully, we’ll get a call or email tomorrow to tell us what happened.

We did, however finish making the pierogi!

Gosh, it’s been so long since I’ve made these, they are the ugliest pierogi, ever! 😀

We also have a huge amount of potato filling left over, even though I made a double recipe of dough. I keep forgetting just how little stuffing fits inside a pierog. We did make extra deliberately, though, and as I write this, the girls are using some of it to make supper.

No, we’re not having pierogi for supper today. Those are cooling off in containers for the fridge. I had thought I’d have enough for the freezer, but it turns out I would have needed to quadruple the dough, and I won’t be doing that. I was in enough pain by the end of it, with just the double batch!

Anyhow, this is how we make our loaded filling.

The potatoes are basically our usual mashed potatoes, except on the dry side. They can be completely plain, too, or maybe seasoned with just salt, but we to include butter, milk and sour cream, and whatever else we have on hand and strikes our fancy. My daughter added a dash of hot sauce to it this time; just a tiny bit, because she knows I have no tolerance for spicy foods.

While she worked on the potatoes, I cut bacon into very small pieces, then cooked them over medium low heat in a frying pan until crispy and the fat was rendered out. The bacon pieces then got removed with a slotted spoon onto paper towel to drain and cool down.

I then added a bunch of mushrooms, cut into little pieces, to the bacon grease and cooked those on medium heat until almost crispy. That can take a while, as they release quite a bit of moisture as they cook. I used white button mushrooms this time, but usually use crimini. Any fresh mushroom would work, I’m sure.

Once done, the mushrooms were removed with a slotted spoon onto paper towel to drain and cool, just like the bacon.

After that, I poured off some of the bacon grease, until there was only about 1 or 2 tablespoons left in the pan. To that, I added about the same amount of butter, then added onions, chopped fine. The onions can be cooked until translucent, but I decided to caramelize them this time. Near the end of their cooking time, I added a bunch of garlic I’d put through a garlic press.

All of that got mixed in with the mashed potatoes, then the entire pot was put into the old kitchen, which is at freezing temperatures these days, to cool down.

The filling didn’t need to be completely cold before I added the cheese, but I did want it cooled enough that it wouldn’t melt the cheese. Here, I’ve got some old cheddar and goat cheese. I’ve made these using Montery Jack, which worked out very well. Any sharp cheese can be used. A mild cheese would just disappear among the other flavours.

The dough was made using a basic recipe I found online. I like a dough that uses sour cream, but we didn’t have enough for a single recipe, never mind a double, so I used one that was just flour, salt and butter melted into boiled water. The fun part is kneading it. Pierogi dough has such a wonderful texture!

When it was time to start making the pierogi, I just made a mess of things! LOL The first ones I made were massive. I was shooting for three inches square, but I was probably closer to four.

Yes, I do squares folded into triangles, instead of cutting rounds. It’s faster that way, and there’s less dough left over that has to be rolled out again.

The next batch I did went the opposite way, and were far too small. Some of the squares were more rectangles and ended up being folded into smaller rectangles instead of triangles. 😀

My daughter started boiling the first couple of batches while I finished up the last ones. At the very end, when there was just enough dough to make three pierogi, I made three balls and rolled them out individually, so we got a few half-circle ones, along with the triangles and rectangles! LOL

After they were cooked and drained, we tossed them in olive oil, salt and pepper, then I split them up into take-out containers to finish cooling down.

I suppose I should have tasted one, but I was so focused on getting them ready to put away in the fridge, I didn’t think of it!

Let me remedy that.

Oh, my goodness! They turned out great!

The main reason I chop everything that goes into the potatoes so small is so that each pierog will have a bit of everything in it, and you can really taste each ingredient in there. Of course, with the onions and mushrooms fried in the bacon grease, the bacon flavour runs through it all, but without being too dominant.

The dough is nice and toothsome. I like a good, thick dough. Not too thick, of course, but I remember that even as a kid, eating my mother’s pierogi, my favourite part was the outer edge of dough. I would have liked a sour cream dough better, but the plain dough is still excellent. When we eat these later, they will be pan fried in butter, and that will make them even better!

Who cares if they are all weird sizes and shapes? They taste great!

The Re-Farmer

Spice Cake for St. Nicholas Day

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December 6 is St. Nicholas Day, and one of the Polish customs is to make spice cookies or cake on this day.

I didn’t feel like fussing with cookies, so I went hunting for a spice cake recipe with ingredients I already had.

More or less.

The recipe I settled on is here; Piernik – Polish Spice Cake.

The link should open in a new tab, so you won’t lose your place here. 🙂 Also, the photo at the link is completely different from what the recipe results in!

Of course, I had to do some modifications, so here, I will talk about what I changed.

In the ingredients:

It called for 1 cup of dark honey. I didn’t have dark honey. In fact, I didn’t even have a cup of liquid honey. What I had was some of my cousin’s creamed honey. I have no doubt using it will change a few things, from the colour to the moisture to the flavour, but I don’t expect them to be a big deal, and considering how my cousin makes his creamed honey, with a hint of maple syrup, I expect tasty results.

The next change was the 8oz, or 2 sticks, of unsalted butter.

I honestly don’t get the “sticks” of butter thing. I mean, yeah, I do see them in the stores, but my goodness, it costs more to buy butter in sticks than in pounds.

One stick equals a quarter pound of butter, or half a cup, so the recipe is calling for a cup of unsalted butter.

I don’t have unsalted butter. Just salted butter.

Usually, when I see a recipe that calls for unsalted butter, and I use salted butter, I would reduce the amount of salt elsewhere in the recipe.

This recipe doesn’t call for salt at all.

I’m not concerned. A touch of salt can wake up sweet things, and for the amount of salt in the batter, with no other salt in the recipe, we’re not going to have a salty cake or anything.

We were pretty much out of ground cloves, so for the 1 tsp in the recipe, about 3/4 of it was from whole cloves I ground in a coffee grinder.

The recipe also called for dark brown sugar. We have just plain brown sugar, or “golden” sugar.

The instructions mentioned beating mixtures at low speed, so it assumed an electric mixer would be used, but I didn’t want to fuss with it and did it by hand.

The instructions said to pour the batter into prepared loaf pans and bake at 350F for 45-55 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out pretty much clean. All ovens are different, so I set the timer to 50 minutes, then checked it with a steel chopstick. Because of course, I don’t have toothpicks.

It came out with batter stuck to it, so I added 10 minutes, then tested again.

Then I added another 10 minutes and tested again.

Then I added another 5 minutes and tested again!

Finally, the chopstick came out clean!

I don’t know why this took so much longer to bake than the recipe stated. Going from 45-50 minutes to 75 minutes can’t be completely put to differences in ovens. Whatever the reason, if you try this recipe, make sure to do the toothpick test (or chopstick, as the case may be) to ensure it’s done!

Doesn’t that look pretty? And the smell while baking was wonderful.

After letting it cool, I just had to taste test it for this post. 😀

As far as texture goes, it’s more “banana bread” than “cake”. It has a slightly crisp crust outside, with a lightly dense, spongey inside. The combination did make it a bit harder to cut! 😀

While sweet, is it nowhere near as sweet as I expected it to be! Not with so much sugar and honey in it. Using the salted butter was fine; there was no noticeable salty taste. I also don’t really notice a coffee taste, either, even though there was quite a bit of strong coffee in there. All the flavours blended together quite nicely, and no one flavour stands out more than the others. I found spreading a little bit of butter on my slice brought out the flavours, more.

It’s also drier than I would expect either a cake or most quick breads to be, though it is definitely moist.

From what I’ve read in other recipes, they can become moister with time.

I don’t expect these to last long enough for us to find out. 😀

The Re-Farmer

Recreating Mom’s soda cheese: the taste test

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Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Well, here it is! The final product in trying to make my mother’s baking soda cheese.

Did it work?

Well… sort of.

First of all, this is not at all like what I remember my mother’s cheese looked like. That was a semi-hard cheese that could be sliced. This… is not. It’s more like a cream cheese in texture, but it wants to crumble more than spread. It can, however, be spread.

As for the taste… I have a really hard time describing it. It’s a young cheese so, of course, the flavour is very mild. Which means it would lend itself very well to the addition of herbs and spices and other flavours. As it is now, with just salt, there is a sort of tanginess to it that I can’t put my finger on. It somehow manages to be both mild and bold tasting, at the same time!

Oh!! I just realized what it reminds me of. It’s very similar to a Boursin.

All four of us have had a taste, and we do have a consensus.

It’s very good. Delicious, even.

In fact, as I write this, I’m enjoying it on a slice of oatmeal bread, with a cup of Irish Breakfast tea.

What I should probably do is take some to my mother, so she can try it and tell me how it compares to what she made. After all, I only ever saw the finished product once, and that was many years ago. Based on my memory of it, I did not succeed in recreating it. However, the finished product is very good.

With the cost of milk these days, compared to a container of Boursin cheese at the grocery store, we’re not really saving any money by making it ourselves. If I were to compare to the cost of a block of plain cream cheese, we’d be losing money by making it ourselves.

Is it worth making again?

Absolutely. And we will, probably in larger quantities.

It may not be as I remember my mother’s soda cheese looked like (I can’t compare the taste too much, since hers had been flavoured with caraway seeds), but that’s just more reason to keep trying!

The Overview

Okay, so let’s look at why it might not have turned out like my mothers. What differences were there?

First up, quantity of milk. I’m now convinced that my original notes, which said “about 5 gallons” of milk was accurate. My parents still had a few cows at the time I visited and saw this cheese, and it was just the two of them, so they would have had a LOT of excess milk.

Second, she used raw, skim milk. My parents always ran the milk through the separator. While I’m sure they must have done it once in a while, I don’t remember my parents ever setting aside whole milk. Until it finally closed, my parents sold their cream to a local creamery for a bit of extra cash (though they sometimes took payment in butter!). Skim milk was for home use. Cream was for selling. I used the type of milk we usually buy; homo milk (3%). We never, ever buy skim, because we all find it incredibly disgusting. So what I made has a higher fat content than hers would have, plus our milk was pasteurized and homogenized. Hers would not have been.

Other differences include my hanging the cheese to drain, when my mother had just set it aside; my curds may have been drier than hers. She melted her curds in a frying pan before pouring it into a mold. Chances are, the frying pan she used was cast iron. If so, that too would have made a difference. She would have made hers in the summer, when the milk would have soured much more quickly. Even the natural yeasts in the air might have made a difference, and while my mother would have ensured everything was clean, she could not have sanitized things to the extent that home cheese makers can, now. The salt I used also would have been different. She would have used ordinary table salt, which would be iodized. I used non-iodized coarse salt that had been run through a coffee grinder to powder it.

There’s also the fact that she may not even remember some details, or had not thought to mention some because, to her, they were just so obvious she couldn’t imagine them not being done.

There are so many little things that could have made a difference, but until I actually take some to my mother to try, I don’t even know just how different ours is from hers! For all I know, I could be remembering her cheese completely wrong, or the cheese I remember is not the one she remembered and gave me her instructions for. We could have been talking about two different cheeses completely, and not known it.

I guess that’s just how it can be. I’ve had an interest in recreating ancient recipes for many, many years, and this sort of reminds me of that. When the ancient recipes were written down, they weren’t at all like modern recipes. Often, they were little more than a list of ingredients, with no or few quantities. The writer assumed the reader would already know the details. My mother just used what she had, in the quantities she had, done in the ways she knew.

I’m just fortunate I can still actually ask her for details, even if she can’t always remember them.

The Re-Farmer

Recreating Mom’s soda cheese; final steps

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Part One
Part Two

After sitting overnight, tucked away in the oven, it was time to take out the cheese and do the final steps.

This is what it looks like this morning, after stirring.

It… looks like dry cottage cheese.

The next instructions were:

Add salt to taste, if desired. Add colour if desired. Add herbs/spices, if desired.

For this first attempt, I am only adding salt.

If you look closely, you can see the salt on the curds in front of the spoon. My mother would have just plain table salt, since that’s what she would have had. I stole some of the powdered salt my daughters use in the popcorn pot. It’s just coarse salt that has been run through a coffee grinder, so it can be added to the oil that popcorn is popped in, and actually stick to the popcorn as it pops. That got very thoroughly mixed in while I started the next step.

Put to frying pan on low heat, in batches, and heat. Mix while heating.

The more the curd got mixed, the more dough-like it got in consistency.

Then, it actually started to melt!

I know that’s what my mother said, but I still felt surprised by it!

I even had to change spoons. By this stage, the texture was a bit like cake batter.

When melted completely, pour into form.

I didn’t know how long it needed to be stirred, but my mom said to pour it, so I just kept going.

Just look at this! It really did get to a pour-able consistency, unlike any other cheese I’ve ever worked with! At this stage, it was like well stirred sour cream in consistency.

I then poured it into a loaf pan I’d scalded and had ready. This level if what 1 gallon of milk was reduced to.

Leave to rest until cool.
When cool, ready to slice.

This is the stage we are at now. I covered the loaf pan with a narrow wooden cutting board I have. I considered covering it with plastic wrap, but I wasn’t sure I wanted the condensation build up, and the board would keep the dust off while also allowing a bit of air.

I’m hoping that, as it cools, it shrinks a bit, so it’ll be easier to remove from the loaf pan.

I did taste it after pouring it into the mold (I admit it. I licked the spoon!). The salt definitely improves the otherwise bland flavour. There is another flavour in there that I just can’t identify or describe. I’m hoping after we do a taste test, later, someone in the household will be able to describe it!

I am really looking forward to trying this!

The Re-Farmer

Recreating Mom’s soda cheese; the next steps

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Okay, so the curds have been hanging for about 5 1/2 hours, and I’ve moved on to the next steps in trying to recreate my mom’s cheese.

Now, my Mom had said to just set it aside for a few hours, or overnight, so hanging it may have changed things a bit. I don’t know. But this is what it looks like after hanging for most of the day.

Also, it’s a good thing I covered the whole set up with another cheesecloth, because the cats REALLY wanted to get at this!

The next instructions are:

Put solids into large pot.
Add about 1 tsp baking soda and mix thoroughly.
Leave overnight.
Will rise like bread.

Hmmm.

Looking at how little there is in here, I’m starting to think that my original notes, saying about 5 gallons of milk, was accurate. There is not a lot in here, and when I saw my mother’s cheese, it filled an ice cream bucket, so there’s no way it was only 1 gallon.

Which means I’ve been using the quantities for vinegar and baking soda for 5 gallons, not 1 gallon. Yet, 1 tsp of vinegar to sour 5 gallons seems like way too little. Mind you, she would have been making this in the summer, and the milk probably would have soured quickly, with no vinegar at all. Knowing she was pretty loosey-goosey on the quantities to begin with, it’s really hard to know. Considering how long it took to sour using 1 tsp of vinegar to 1 gallon of milk, I suspect it’s actually the correct amount, and that I would have needed more, if I were using more milk.

This is after very thoroughly mixing in the baking soda. Yes, I used 1 tsp for this amount.

The curds feel like a cross between cream cheese and cottage cheese. I spent quite a bit of time mixing it, because I wanted that baking soda to be worked in as much as possible.

My mom said to leave it overnight, which means she would have just left it on a counter, but I have put the covered pot into a warm oven, because of how chilly that part of the house gets.

She commented that it will “rise like bread.” That makes sense, since we should be seeing a chemical reaction between the acidic milk soured with vinegar, and the alkaline baking soda. It’s something I’m used to when working with sourdough, but with cheese? I did get the sense that the curds were starting to feel “fluffier” by the time I finished stirring in the soda, but that could be just my imagination because I am expecting something like that.

I did taste the curds before and after adding the soda. As I mentioned before, it has very little flavour right now, but I did feel that the baking soda … softened… the flavour, if that makes sense.

After it has sat for the night, salt, colours and herbs and spices can be added. For this first attempt, I will be adding some salt, but that’s it. If we make it again, we’ll experiment with adding herbs and spices or whatever.

I am incredibly curious to see what it looks like by morning!

The Re-Farmer

Recreating Mom’s soda cheese

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I am currently in the middle of an experiment.

Growing up here, as a subsistence farm, we had cows for milking and for beef. Even with 7 of us, we were milking enough cows to have excess milk. I remember my mother making cottage cheese (which I did NOT like), but that was the only type of cheese I saw her make until some years after I’d moved off the farm. I’d come out to visit, and saw some semi-hard cheese in an old ice cream bucket for a form. It was slightly harder than a cheddar, sort of tannish yellow in colour, with caraway seeds in it. It was quite tasty. I asked my mother about it, and she said she had made it.

A few years ago, I asked my mother about how she made this cheese I remembered. Unfortunately, she thought I was talking about cottage cheese, and the more I described it, the more perplexed she was.

After moving here, I was having a conversation with my mother about making and preserving food, when she mentioned a cheese she’d made. It was the one I remembered! I quickly took advantage of the moment, and got her to describe to me how she made it. I knew it had to be different, because my mother did not have access to rennet or any of the bacterial starters. She didn’t have a food thermometer, either.

Getting any sort of information like this from my mother has always been difficult. I remember the first time I tried to get a recipe for a soup she made. I remembered some of the ingredients, and asked her if she remembered how she made it. Instead of answering me, she started mocking me for not knowing how to cook and not knowing how to make soup. Never mind that I was already married and a child, by then, and had been feeding the family just fine.

I never did find out how she made that soup.

This time, I did manage to get the information down then, after I got off the phone with her, re-wrote it into more cohesive instructions, since the conversation bounced all over the place. When I was finally ready to try it, I was perplexed by some of the quantities, so I called her to clarify. Did she really start with 5 gallons of milk, or did I make a mistake writing it down?

Finding out was like pulling teeth! She kept avoiding answering the question, and kept saying, “you mean you’ve never made cheese before?” in total shock. Then giving me instructions on how to do different parts. I kept going back to the quantity, and asked her if she had used 5 gallons, only to be told how I should just use one gallon, because 5 gallons is such a lot… *facepalm* Then she talked about how she’d never made it using milk from a store, and how I could use lemon juice instead of vinegar, and on and on. It took a while, but I managed to explain that I have made cheese before, I did only want to use 1 gallon, and if the instructions I had was for 5 gallons, I’d have to know that, so I could adjust the other quantities.

What it came down to is, my mother never measured. She used whatever amount of milk she had, and went from there. I did know that. What I needed was some sort of approximation, because there is a heck of a big difference in quantities involved.

Finally, she told me she used about 1 gallon.

*sigh*

Once I had that clarified, I finally got a batch started. Here are the instructions I got from her, highlighted in blue, with my own commentary.

Milk – about a gallon
Add 1 tsp vinegar to make sour. May take all night.

This part actually ended up taking almost two days. The milk was supposed to rest at room temperature, but with how cold our house is – especially the kitchen – I put it in a warm oven.

When sour, put in pot/roaster into oven to warm (lowest heat) until forms curds and whey.

We finally reached that stage this morning.

This is how it looked.

I have no idea if this is how it’s supposed to look.

Drain through cheesecloth.

There is nothing about cutting the curds or anything like that, first. Just to drain it.

I did give it a taste at this point. It doesn’t have much flavour to speak of. The texture was a lot denser than I expected it to be, considering how it broke apart.

Set aside for a few hours or, preferable, overnight.

This is the stage we’re at now, though I’m cheating a bit. I dug out the stand I made to hang jelly bags or drain yogurt cheese, tied off the cheesecloth and hung it.

After taking this photo, I covered the whole stand and bowl with another cheesecloth, to keep out the dust and cat fur – and cats!

Since I got to this point so early in the day, I will likely continue after a few hours, rather than leaving it overnight, because…

Put solids into large pot.
Add about 1 tsp baking soda and mix thoroughly.
Leave overnight.
Will rise like bread.

… it will sit overnight again, after this stage.

As for the whey, I think it’s time to do some more bread baking! I love using whey as the liquid. It adds so much flavour!

The next instructions have me wondering.

Add salt to taste, if desired. Add colour if desired. Add herbs/spices, if desired.

This is all stuff that’s supposed to be added after the baking soda gets added, and after it rests overnight. Which seems odd to me, but that’s how she did it, so that’s how I’ll try it!

Put to frying pan on low heat, in batches, and heat. Mix while heating.
When melted completely, pour into form.

… melted?

It can melt at this stage?

I am really perplexed by this.

I’m not sure what I’ll use as a form just yet. It will depend on what I see when the time comes

Leave to rest until cool.
When cool, ready to slice.

If I hadn’t see my mother’s cheese, I would never guess that these instructions would get that result. As it is, I am still unsure of what I’ll actually get!

So this should be an interesting experiment. I hope it works, because it’s really easy to make, even if it does get spread out over several days.

The Re-Farmer

Ginger Bug Progress

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Well, we are into our third day of starting our ginger bug. It got its third feeding last night, and third morning stir today.

Look at those bubbles!

While researching how to make this, I saw sites that said it could be used after three days. Others said to wait four to ten days. All seemed to agree that it could be used once it starts bubbling.

Which means we should be able to start fermenting some pop, any time now!

I picked up some cranberry-raspberry juice to try first. There should be enough for at least two or three 8 cup batches. The recipes I’ve been reading said to use 7 1/2 cups juice to 1/2 cup ginger bug. Eight cups is not a lot, though.

Time to go back over the various instructions I’ve found and confirm the next steps we need to take. Then I have to decide on what container to use. Depending on what we go with, we might do a double recipe. We shall see!

The Re-Farmer

Babcia’s Bread Experiment: awake!

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Thanks to my wonderful daughter taking over for me, yesterday, we had a couple of fresh loaves of bread to try this morning.

I’d started by having the dough baby soak overnight, then added flour to make a sponge. After several hours, this is what the sponge looked like.

My daughter set aside half of this, then used the remaining sponge to make our basic bread. Instead of using loaf pans, she made two big, flat loaves on a baking tray. Here is what I used for breakfast, this morning! 🙂

The bread had a very mild sourdough flavour. For all the months the dough baby sat in the flour, it did not get any stronger in flavour. It was mild enough that I could put them with slices of brie under the broiler, and the flavour of the bread did not overpower the flavour of the cheese. The bread had a very nice texture to it, too.

As for the sponge that had been set aside; my daughter had used the flour from the dough baby’s canister in the bread, but there was still some left. I kneaded some into the sponge to make a stiffer dough, then refilled the canister half way with fresh flour, added the bough baby, then topped it with more flour. The canister is semi-transparent, so when I checked on it an hour or so later, I could see the dough baby had risen enough to work its way through the flour, so I gave the canister enough of a shake to cover it up again. With our temperatures slowly cooling (though I saw a 30C day in the forecast!!), we’ll be using this more often, which should further develop the flavour.

As someone who has never managed to keep a sourdough going for more than a couple of years, I really appreciate how low maintenance the old dough method is. If we can’t going to bake as often, it’ll just stay in its flour bed and dry up. It doesn’t need to be constantly used, fed, stirred, or kept warm. I think this will work out really well for us!

The Re-Farmer

Making hard crab apple cider: bottling day one

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For those who have been following this blog for a while, that’s right. We still haven’t bottled our hard cider yet! And yes, it’s been almost a year!

For those who are new to the blog, you can catch up on the progress with these links; all will open in new tabs, so you won’t lose your place.

Crab apple picking
Making hard crab apple cider; will it work?
Hard crab apple cider: getting clear
Making hard crab apple cider: racking day – what happened? (Updated: I found out)

We meant to bottle these months ago, but time and space and other priorities kept delaying things.

Today, I finally broke down and did it.

Well. Half of it.

We didn’t want to use corked wine bottles for this, so we’ve been saving up our screw top bottles for a while now. Only recently did we get enough to bottle the hard cider, anyhow. We just don’t buy wine-bottle sized things very often. I suppose that’s a downside of our buying habits. Not a lot of materials left over to reuse.

I only did one of the two carboys we had fermenting. They are 3L each, so I needed at least four 750ml sized bottles. After sterilizing them, I didn’t siphon the cider into them. I have problems with using the siphon. We don’t have an auto siphon, and have not been able to find one that will fit in anything smaller than the large carboy that came with our wine making kit, so it’s gotta be done old school. I always end up disturbing the sediment, and splashing all over when moving from bottle to bottle, so today I just gently poured it from the carboy through a sterilized funnel.

For the last bottle, I added a coffee filter to the funnel, just in case.

It actually worked out MUCH better than fighting with a siphon. Not only did I barely disturb the sediment at all, but there was no mess. I’m sure I committed some major faux pax by not using a siphon to fill from the bottom up, and getting all that air in there, but… it is what it is. I still wiped the bottles with vinegar water, but there really wasn’t anything to clean up.

Of course, I then had to do a taste test!

This was poured from the partially filled bottle, so if there was any sediment that got through, this would be the bottle that has it.

As you can see, it is very clear.

There is a very strong smell of alcohol from this, but you can also really smell “crab apple” as well.

I just love that colour! Sadly, it doesn’t look like we’ll have many crab apples at all this year, never mind from this particular tree with it’s very red little apples, so we won’t be making more hard cider, nor cider vinegar, with our crab apples this year.

We still have the second carboy to bottle, though, and that will leave us with hard cider to last us a while.

Ah, but how does it taste?

The first thing that hits is SOUR! This is a remarkably sour cider! Not a bitter kind of sour, though. It really wakes up the taste buds. I think this would be good with game. Or with a really strong flavored dessert.

For all that it smells of strong alcohol, there isn’t a strong alcohol flavour. I don’t actually enjoy the taste of alcohol, but I can drink this. And yes, there is a light, fruity apple taste, too.

I find myself thinking this would be nice with a spot of sugar or honey added to it. Perhaps I’ll try some with a bit of our vanilla sugar added. Or to include it in a fruit punch.

I did not take a hydrometer reading. I wasn’t up to digging it out this time. Based on previous readings, it was just under 11% alcohol. After tasting it, I would not be surprised for that to have remained unchanged. This is strong stuff, even if it does take a while to feel it!

This is definitely a “sip it slowly” kind of drink.

It should be interesting to see if the flavour changes after they’ve had a few days to rest after being bottled without a siphon.

The Re-Farmer

Chive Blossom Vinegar is done

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Well, we had at least one good thing happen today.

I was able to finish the chive blossom vinegar.

The bottle has had two weeks in the cupboard to infuse. Any time we went into the cupboard for something, we’d turn the bottle upside down a few times, to get the blossoms out of the bottle neck and mix with the vinegar.

I was curious how the colour would turn out. The site I’d found instructions on had a final product that was bright pink. I used white wine vinegar, though, which is pale yellow.

The final colour is quite dramatic, isn’t it?

After straining the vinegar, the bottle got cleaned and scaled, the vinegar added back, and we replaced the little plastic thing in the top, that controls the flow of vinegar when pouring.

We haven’t tried it in anything yet, but the smell of it is absolutely fabulous!! I can’t wait to try it!

The Re-Farmer