Louis-Philippe Véronneau - foodhttps://veronneau.org/2017-08-30T00:00:00-04:00Elderberry Syrup and Autumn Preserves2017-08-30T00:00:00-04:002017-08-30T00:00:00-04:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2017-08-30:/elderberry-syrup-and-autumn-preserves.html<p>It's been a while since I wrote anything here. To be honest, the last few months
have been quite hectic (I was busy organising <a href="https://debconf17.debconf.org/">DebConf17</a> with some friends)
and only now am I finding the time to do <em>real</em> stuff, like pickles and jams.</p>
<p>I'll be damned if I miss …</p><p>It's been a while since I wrote anything here. To be honest, the last few months
have been quite hectic (I was busy organising <a href="https://debconf17.debconf.org/">DebConf17</a> with some friends)
and only now am I finding the time to do <em>real</em> stuff, like pickles and jams.</p>
<p>I'll be damned if I miss the pickle season. Autumn is slowly showing its nose
here in Montreal and with that comes a season of abundance.</p>
<p>I know it sounds <em>cliché</em>, but it gets cold quite quickly here and nothing grows
for a while. To me, the end of summer is a very special time where most of the
food we eat is actually grown here too, and not in a far away USA industrial
desert.</p>
<p>Anyway, it seems that as the years pass, I find more and more wild plants I just
need to harvest and transform. Not that it makes me sad, on the contrary.</p>
<h2>Elderberry Syrup</h2>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2017-08-30/elderberry_syrup.jpg" title="A small jar of elderberry syrup I made" alt="A small jar of elderberry syrup I made" height="30%" width="30%" style="float:right"></p>
<p>This year's addition to my preserve schedule is Elderberry Syrup. Sambucus
canadiensis - the shrub that produces elderberries - is quite common in Montreal
and it looks like no one is harvesting the berries. It seemed a shame to let all
that good stuff go to waste, so I decided to make some syrup.</p>
<p>I harvested 1 kg of berries and after freezing and thawing them to break them
down, I cooked the berries 5 minutes in a pot, added 1 kg of sugar and the
juice of one large lemon and boiled the syrup for around 20 minutes.</p>
<p>The result is a little more than 1 liter of elderberry syrup. I don't think I
had tasted elderberries before and I have to say I like it very much. To be
honest I'm thinking about going back and making some more, as I think it would
make good gifts for the holiday season.</p>
<h2>Staghorn Sumac Lemonade</h2>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2017-08-30/pink_lemonade.jpg" title="A bottle of homemade pink lemonade" alt="A bottle of homemade pink lemonade" height="30%" width="30%" style="float:left"></p>
<p>During the summer of 2009 I worked in a vineyard, mostly trimming vines and
taking care of the apple orchard there. Most of the time I was working with an
agricultural engineer in training and even though it was hard work and the days
were long, I have fond memories of that summer.</p>
<p>Amongst a few things this guy taught me was that the fruit of the staghorn sumac
- another common shrub in Quebec - is edible. Most people don't know it, but you
can make tart and sour pink lemonade by letting them macerate in a large pot of
water for 24 hours.</p>
<p>Add a little sugar, and you have a deliciously refreshing tart beverage. Bonus
points for it being pink! I normally go out and harvest a large bag of it at the
end of August, but this year my freezer is already full so I don't think I will
drink it a lot.</p>
<h2>Pickles and Sauerkraut, round 4</h2>
<p>It's hard to believe, but it's now the 4th year I'm making pickles and sauerkraut.
I guess I still haven't learned my lesson though, as my latest sauerkraut batch
is too salty to my liking.</p>
<p>I think the main error I'm making is that I'm calculating the amount of salt to
add based on the cabbages' weight, instead of using the total weight of the
cabbage and liquid I'm adding. My fermentation crock is quite large and I always
have to add a good 5 or 6 liters of brine to top it up.</p>
<p>The pickles are not ready yet, but I'm curious to see what that method will
yield for them. I've used a 4% salt to pickle-and-brine ratio, as recommended
by the neat fermentation book I bought a few months ago.</p>
<p>I have to say this was not an easy task, since you need to salt the brine before
adding it to the crock, but you can't know the amount of brine you'll end up
using until you've actually poured it on the pickles... I ended up making a
guess and removing a liter of brine, adding more salt to reach the 4% mark
and adding it back. I just hope it won't stay at the top and will mix with the
rest of the brine.</p>
<p>For convenience, here's the salting table my book recommends. The percentage is
based on the total weight of the fermentables and of the brine combined:</p>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Brine<br>(salt/kg)<br></th>
<th>2%<br>(20g/kg)<br></th>
<th colspan="2">4%<br>(40g/kg)<br></th>
<th>10%<br>(100g/kg)<br></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td rowspan="3"></td>
<td rowspan="2">All vegetables not mentioned in this table<br></td>
<td>Pickles<br></td>
<td>Beets<br></td>
<td>Olives<br></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Hot peppers and hot sauces<br></td>
<td>Jerusalem artichokes</td>
<td rowspan="2">Umeboshi plums<br></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Citrus</td>
<td>Citrus</td>
<td>Squashes</td>
</tr>
</table>Chestnut Cream & Poppy Seeds Cake2017-04-20T00:00:00-04:002017-04-20T00:00:00-04:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2017-04-20:/chestnut-cream-poppy-seeds-cake.html<p>Hmmm, chestnuts. Who doesn't like them? Eating a cone of hot roasted chestnuts
has to be one of my best memories of Europe. Buttery, savory, filling chestnuts.</p>
<p>Out of the multiple recipes my father does, he's always been very proud of his
rolled chestnut cream cake. Even though I like …</p><p>Hmmm, chestnuts. Who doesn't like them? Eating a cone of hot roasted chestnuts
has to be one of my best memories of Europe. Buttery, savory, filling chestnuts.</p>
<p>Out of the multiple recipes my father does, he's always been very proud of his
rolled chestnut cream cake. Even though I like it very much, this post is not
about that recipe.</p>
<p>I've never been fond of super sweet stuff and sadly, my father's roulé falls in
that category. Instead, let me blog about my take on a old recipe my great-aunt
gave me a while ago. It originally comes from a recipe sheet they gave her way
back when the general store she went to at Halles Saint-Jean in
Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu was still open. Anyway, you get the point, an old
grocery's recipe.</p>
<p>I think what I really like from this recipe is actually the poppy seeds. It
gives this cake a very pleasant mouthfeel.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, I'm putting this here because I'm afraid to loose the sheet
my great-aunt gave me and since she gave me the original, it's not getting any
younger. That and friends asked me for it.</p>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2017-04-20/chestnut.jpg" height="100%" width="100%" title="Chestnuts" alt="Chestnuts"></p>
<h2>Ingredients</h2>
<p>It's quite hard to describe accurately how much cake this recipe makes, so let
me try a few things:</p>
<ul>
<li>Last time I made it, the 9 people around the table all had a reasonable but
not ostentatious piece</li>
<li>In my 14" x 7½" cast iron mold, it makes an 1½" thick cake</li>
<li>Total cake volume is 2.5 L</li>
</ul>
<p>Sorry for the derp units, Canada still isn't using the SI system for cooking
recipes -_-'. Anyway, here's the ingredients list:</p>
<h3>Cake</h3>
<ul>
<li>1 cup of milk (the fatter the better)</li>
<li>½ a cup of poppy seeds</li>
<li>¾ cup of salted butter</li>
<li>1½ cup of white granulated sugar</li>
<li>4 eggs</li>
<li>2⅓ cup of flour</li>
<li>3 teaspoons of baking powder</li>
</ul>
<h3>Glazing</h3>
<ul>
<li>1 can (500ml) of chestnuts cream</li>
<li>½ cup of salted butter</li>
<li>3 tablespoon of maple syrup</li>
<li>1 egg yolk</li>
<li>2 tablespoon of some fragrant hard liquor</li>
</ul>
<h2>Baking steps</h2>
<h3>Cake</h3>
<p><strong>1 -</strong> Mix the milk and the poppy seeds together in a bowl. Reserve.</p>
<p><strong>2 -</strong> Cream the butter and add in the sugar until fluffy. Realise how great
plain white sugar and butter tastes.</p>
<p><strong>3 -</strong> Add 4 egg yolks.</p>
<p><strong>4 -</strong> Slowly add in the flour and baking powder. Make sure everything is well
mixed.</p>
<p><strong>5 -</strong> Add in the milk and poppy seeds mix.</p>
<p><strong>6 -</strong> Whip the 4 egg whites until you can make solid peaks. Fold in the cake
batter carefully. Eat some batter directly and appreciate it.</p>
<p><strong>7 -</strong> Bake at 350°F for around 30 minutes. Time depends a lot on the size of
your mold, so watch your cake. I like it slightly moist, but you can
check that by putting a knife in the middle. I like baking in a cast
iron mold since it creates a nice golden crust and does not stick.</p>
<h3>Glazing</h3>
<p>The original recipe calls for splitting the batter in two, baking in round
molds, adding the glazing in-between and glazing the whole thing afterwards.</p>
<p>This is both painful to make and adds little value in my opinion. I prefer to
bake the cake in one single mold and let people add the glazing themselves as
they like. This also has the advantage of giving people the liberty to deciding
how sweet they want their cake. Your call.</p>
<p><strong>1 -</strong> Cream the butter.</p>
<p><strong>2 -</strong> Add everything else and whip the glazing until smooth and consistent.</p>
<p>Voilà! I forgot to take a nice picture of the cake, but here's a beautiful
picture of a poppy field taken from Wikimedia.</p>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2017-04-20/poppy_field.jpg" height="100%" width="100%" title="Poppy Field" alt="Poppy Field"></p>Holiday cookies2017-01-01T00:00:00-05:002017-01-01T00:00:00-05:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2017-01-01:/holiday-cookies.html<p>Holiday season once again! Each and every year, I struggle with the gift ritual
in my family. Everyone (especially my closest relatives) feel obligated to find
some special gifts to give and spend a lot of money on that. I loathe it.</p>
<p>Either it ends up being some useless crap …</p><p>Holiday season once again! Each and every year, I struggle with the gift ritual
in my family. Everyone (especially my closest relatives) feel obligated to find
some special gifts to give and spend a lot of money on that. I loathe it.</p>
<p>Either it ends up being some useless crap I'll never use or it's stuff so
expensive it makes me feel bad about it. Anyway, I used to simply not give
anything in return and mumble, but I'm now at an age where I'm supposed to start
taking part in this ritual.</p>
<p>So this year, instead of joining the general capitalist frenzy that everyone
partakes in, I decided to bake cookies for my loved ones. Cookies are nice,
everyone likes them, they are relatively cheap and rely less on exploiting
people in the global South than your typical gifts.</p>
<h1>Honey Oatmeal Cookies</h1>
<p>I received a lot of honey at the end of the summer from a friend who has beehives
and I don't really like honey by itself. I prefer the taste of maple syrup.
But honey being thicker and having a stronger flavour, it makes a great way to
replace processed sugar in a lot of recipes.</p>
<p>I also wanted the cookies to last (we eat enough baked goods during the Holidays
as it is), so I wanted them to be hard cookies. He's the recipe I used:</p>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2017-01-01/cookies.jpg" height="100%" width="100%" title="Homemade cookies in a cookie tin" alt="Homemade cookies in a cookie tin"></p>
<h2>Ingredients</h2>
<p>This recipe makes around 50 big cookies. Sorry for the derp units, it's quite
standard for recipes here...</p>
<ul>
<li>3 cups salted Butter</li>
<li>2 2/3 cups Honey</li>
<li>8 cups Oats</li>
<li>3 1/2 cups whole Flour</li>
<li>3 teaspoons Baking Powder</li>
</ul>
<h2>Baking steps</h2>
<p><strong>1 -</strong> Melt the butter until fluid. Remove from the heat and add the honey.</p>
<p><strong>2 -</strong> Stir in the oats and baking powder.</p>
<p><strong>3 -</strong> Stir the flour in.</p>
<p><strong>4 -</strong> Grease a cookie sheet and flatten balls of dough into 2 inches cookies
(the cookies won't expand or change shape a lot during the baking
process, so make them the size you want them to be).</p>
<p><strong>5 -</strong> Bake at 375°F for around 35 minutes. This time depends a lot on the size
of cookies you made, so watch your first batch and iterate from there.
Your cooked cookies should be golden and hard.</p>
<h1>Preserved eggs</h1>
<p>In October 2016, I <a href="/for-the-love-of-goddamn-pickles.html">made pickled beets</a> and had a lot of
liquid left from the process.</p>
<p>I has previously used pickle juice to make preserved eggs, so I decided to use
some of the pickled beets juice this way!</p>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2017-01-01/eggs.jpg" height="100%" width="100%" title="Homemade cookies in a cookie tin" alt="Homemade cookies in a cookie tin"></p>
<p>A dozen eggs fit nicely in a 1L mason jar and the eggs were ready after
approximately 1 week. Don't throw your pickle juices!</p>For the love of goddamn pickles2016-10-17T00:00:00-04:002016-10-17T00:00:00-04:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2016-10-17:/for-the-love-of-goddamn-pickles.html<p>I've always loved pickled food. I think if I had to rank my most favorite
pickle, I would have a hard time choosing between pickled cucumbers and pickled
eggs. Hmmm, eggs.</p>
<p>Anyway, I started pickling food <em>for real</em> around two years ago. I did some
pickled cucumbers in vinegar once …</p><p>I've always loved pickled food. I think if I had to rank my most favorite
pickle, I would have a hard time choosing between pickled cucumbers and pickled
eggs. Hmmm, eggs.</p>
<p>Anyway, I started pickling food <em>for real</em> around two years ago. I did some
pickled cucumbers in vinegar once before that but nothing serious. My first true
pickling experience was making homemade sauerkraut from nothing but cabbages and
salt.</p>
<p>I said <strong>true</strong> pickling because I've grown to consider putting things in
vinegar as cheater's pickles. Don't get me wrong here: some of them taste great
(beets in sugary vinegar for example), but it's nothing compared to the fun
and the incredible feeling of accomplishment you get from fermenting raw
vegetables with only salt (and sometimes water).</p>
<p>If you never heard of lacto-fermentation before, you could basically describe it
as such: the yeasts & bacteria naturally present on the skin of your vegetables
develop in an environment where there is no air and no other competing bacteria.
When it does, it breaks down you food (making it taste great) and acidifies the
solution it's in, killing all other bacteria.</p>
<p>To make sure your yummy veggies do not rot before they ferment, we put them in
salted water. This inhibits the development of other bacteria, but not of the
ones responsible for lacto-fermentation.</p>
<p>But enough science.</p>
<h2>Materials I've used to ferment</h2>
<p>Fermentation is an anaerobic process, meaning you want to keep your fermenting
vegetables <em>away</em> from air. If you don't, they'll rot instead of fermenting.</p>
<p>The challenge of fermenting thus lays in the techniques used to do that. Most of
the time, you'll want to use a big pot and weight your pickles with something
for them to stay under the brine.</p>
<h3>The traditional Canadian pickle pot</h3>
<p>I first stated fermenting using a big lidless clay pot my great-grandmother used
to use to pickle cucumbers. Apart from making me feel I was connecting with my
family history, it did not work so well. To be honest, it worked fine, but was a
hassle to use.</p>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2016-10-17/clay-pot.jpg" title="A pickle clay pot very much like my own" alt="A pickle clay pot very much like my own" height="30%" width="30%" style="float:left"></p>
<p>First of all, the pot was not really round but somewhat oval as it was handmade,
making the use of a regular plate as a weight impossible. I ended up using glass
marbles tied in a cheesecloth. Marbles kept exploding when I sterilized them and
cheesecloths are somewhat expensive, making this an overall pain in the butt.</p>
<p>On top of this, since this was a lidless pot (by design), I had to skim the
brine each 2 or 3 days to make sure nothing was growing on top of the brine. I
feel you great-grandma.</p>
<p>I still made sauerkraut and my first cucumber pickle batch in this pot. It now
lives under my sink, awaiting to be used again. Who knows, maybe my
great-grandkids will use it someday.</p>
<h3>Enters German engineering</h3>
<p>Who never joked about German engineers being so great? Well, turns out it's
not something new.</p>
<p>Germans seem to love pickles at least as much as I do and have been pickling for
a while now. I guess one day someone grew tired of using a lidless pot like the
one I have and designed this wonderful piece of craftsmanship.</p>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2016-10-17/german-pot.jpg" title="A German fermenting crock" alt="A German fermenting crock" height="40%" width="40%" style="float:right"></p>
<p>It might not obvious if you never used such a pot, but the lid of the pot has
a deep groove in it. You fill this groove with water, thus creating an airlock.
As your food ferments, the gasses created replace the air inside of the pot,
creating the perfect anaerobic environment. Excess gasses bubble through the
water.</p>
<p>This means you can leave your pot closed for a whole month and never have to
worry about spoilage. The only thing you have to check from time to time is the
water level in the groove. On top of this, my pot came with two beautiful clay
weights. No more marbles!</p>
<p>The only downside of such a pot is that it's a little expansive. Then again,
if you treat it correctly, your pot should last you a lifetime.</p>
<p>My pot is a whooping 10 liters one. This is great for fermenting a lot of stuff
at once, but as I learned from my last batch of sauerkraut, you have to make
sure it's completely filled. If not, there is too much empty space inside and
the food starts to rot.</p>
<h2>Recipes I've tried</h2>
<p>I'll try to keep this blog post updated with the recipes I've tried and give
some general feedback on them. This is mostly intended for future me, but if you
happen to read this and try one of them, tell me about it!</p>
<h3>Sauerkraut</h3>
<p>This is the first recipe I did and it has been by far the most successful one.
If you ever want to start fermenting food, I'd recommend you start with
sauerkraut.</p>
<p>To make sauerkraut, you only have to shred cabbage in very thin slices (some
people use mandolines to do this, I prefer a nice sharp chef knife) and add salt
to it.</p>
<p>The salt will draw the water out of the cabbage, making the brine in
which it will ferment. This process takes some time (20 minutes?) and you have
to work the cabbage with your hand, pressing it and squeezing it as much as you
can. The final goal is to have enough brine to cover your weights with at least
3 cm of brine. You might need to add some salted water to you pot if you don't
have enough brine.</p>
<p>How much salt should you use? The golden number is 3 tablespoons for 5 pounds
or cabbage, or in non-retard units, 19 mL of salt for 1 kg of cabbage. You can
use slightly less salt than that if you prefer, but beware: using less salt
increases the chances of your cabbage rotting instead of fermenting.</p>
<p>Wait a month and you now have delicious sauerkraut.</p>
<h3>Carrots & Ginger</h3>
<p>I had around 10 kg of carrots lying around after an event and nobody wanted
them. I turned them in delicious fermented carrots!</p>
<p>My mom suggested I put some ginger into it, so I did. I think I added between
200 and 400 grams of ginger to the mix. Some (like my special other) though it
was too much, but others loved it. Personally I think the flavour was nicer
after being canned for a while.</p>
<p>Using again 19 mL of salt per kilogram of shredded carrots, I did not have
to add any water to get a good brine level. Looks like carrots contain more
water than cabbages!</p>
<p>Making so much fermented food is not much more job and makes great Christmas
gifts :D</p>
<h3>Pickled cucumbers</h3>
<p>A classic. Fermented pickles taste nothing like their vinegary friends.</p>
<p>The first batch I made was glorious, but sadly I lost the recipe. The second
batch I made was way to salty and I had to desalinate them in water overnight
and dilute the brine before canning them, thus making them less good.</p>
<p>5 tablespoons of salt per liter is too much. Next time I'll try with 2,5 tbsp
per liter and see what the result is.</p>
<h3>Beets</h3>
<p>Fermented beets are hard to describe if you never tasted them. Maybe you ate
some of those Lebanese fermented turnips before? Well they taste somewhat like
that and have the same soft but yet crunchy texture.</p>
<p>Using 3 tablespoons of salt per liter was again too much. Like a previous batch
of pickles, I had to desalinate them and cut the brine by a third. Next time I
think I can manage with 2 tbsp of salt per liter, but still I worry about
spoilage.</p>
<p>Note: beets are high in sugar and some of that sugar is turned in alcohol during
the fermentation process. This changes the taste a little. Some people don't
like it (I do) and mix beets and turnips to bring down the overall sugar level.</p>
<p>A little alcohol also means you can use less salt safely!</p>