Bunchberries: Useful or Useless?

The research we had done on bunchberries showed only that they have a very high amount of natural pectin and very little water and taste of their own.  We found a small handful of recipes, mostly for raspberry bunchberry syrup and not much else.

However, we didn't want to just take everyone else's word for it, so we took a small amount of berries and cooked them down.

For something so bright red and sometimes almost orange, this was not quite the color we were expecting.  Also, they really do have very little flavor of their own.  My husband added some honey to it, but all that really did was make it taste like honey.

After this confirmation, we have been trying to decide what to do with the gallons of bunchberries we still have sitting in our garage.  We know they're good to use as natural pectin in jams and jellies as they carry the flavors of other fruits well--because they don't have their own flavor to speak of.

To try to find more about using them as pectin, I found this blog, Bunchberry Farm.  Jasmine has helped give me a little guidance as to how to use them as pectin, but mostly we'll be guessing and checking.  Our biggest problem right now is the lack of all our handy dandy kitchen gadgets to assist with extracting seeds and crushing them up.  As you can see in the picture, they actually hold their form fairly well.

We're still trying to decided, since we are very short on freezer storage space, whether to keep what we harvested or not.  I really hate to throw away something that is not totally useless and that we spent 45 minutes out in the cold rain gathering, but we might since they aren't exceptionally useful and we are so low on space right now.

The most useful thing that came out of harvesting all these bunchberries?  When we first found them last weekend, we were on a hunt for crowberries to harvest.  What we realized very quickly as we started raking in the bunchberries this Saturday was that they were entirely surrounded by blueberries--lots and lots of blueberries!  Now, right now is not a good time for blueberries, so the plants were not very fruitful.  However, there were many plants that both of us saw that still had quite a few blueberries still hanging on, meaning they had not been picked clean by someone.

In short, thanks to going back for the bunchberries caused us to realize that we had found our blueberry patch for next year.  That made it all worth it.  And it is most definitely staying an undisclosed location!

Winemaking 101: Chapter 2

Last weekend when we went to start our chokecherry wine, we realized that the recipes I'd been looking at were for one gallon.  We wanted to make five gallons.  This was not a huge deal once we found a five gallon recipe, but it did mean that we had to buy a lot more sugar and use ALL of the chokecherries in our freezer plus another two pounds that my husband had to pick before we could get started.  Added to the delay was the fact that over half a gallon of the cherries in our freezer had not yet had the stems removed.

Here's a quick tip for stemming chokecherries:  If you can do it when you clean them, by all means, take the time to do so.  If not, the easiest way is to freeze them then pull small amounts out of the freezer at a time (so they don't thaw) and they are much easier to stem because the skins don't slip off and make a sticky mess all over your hands.  Keep a wet washcloth handy to wipe off any stickiness that will get on your hands anyway, though.

So we finally got to the point of crushing up the fruit to start the primary fermentation process.  Since over half the chokecherries were frozen when we started all of this, my poor husband's hands nearly froze off as he tried to crush up all the cherries.

Chokecherries actually become a very beautiful color when processed.

Once we felt they were sufficiently crushed, they went into a mesh bag inside a five gallon bucket with a mixture of water, sugar, yeast energizer, pectic enzyme, crushed campden tablets, and acid blend.

Finally, you fill the rest of the bucket with water to the 5 gallon mark and cover it with a light-weight cloth so that it can breathe.  Wait 24 hours then add a packet of wine yeast onto the top of it--no stirring.  Cover it with the cloth again and wait a week.

We actually keep our house cool enough (and I don't mean through air conditioning!), though, that we had to get a warming belt because, even in our kitchen, room temperature is about 65 degrees.  Fermentation is best between 70 and 75 degrees.  No way were we going to increase our heating bills just for the wine.  Besides, we plan to make more in the basement where it really doesn't get into the 70s!

Winemaking 101: Chapter 1

We have been talking about making our own wine for almost 3 years.  Both of our grandfathers, at varying points in their lives, made homemade wine.  For various reasons--mainly moving around--we have not been able to start that project.  Upon moving into our house here, we determined that we were finally going to make wine.  Then came the question of what to make.  We both love mead and have talked about making our own almost as long as we've talked about making wine.

Since we still have two mortgages (that and we're just cheap), we decided to attempt this as frugally as possible.  As much as we'd like to make mead, honey is really very expensive.  So to start, we thought we could use a fruit that we know is used to make wine and is free, abundant, and readily accessible in our own yard.  I'm sure you can guess where this is going.  That's right: chokecherry wine!

So we bought the bare minimum of what we needed just to start.  When we were up in Fox, AK, for the Permafrost Tunnel tour, we brought our 5-gallon water jug to fill with water at the natural spring to use that water for our wine.  Silver Gulch Brewing & Bottling Company, located in Fox, uses the spring water to brew all their beer.  As I said in a previous post, we hauled drinking water from this spring for an entire month when we lived halfway between Fairbanks and Fox.  Countless people in the area use this spring water for drinking and cooking, including people from all the way down in North Pole, AK.

Our daughter loves to help get "Fox water."

Fillin' her up.  Yes, we had completely sterilized the bottle.

So last Saturday night we finally got to the business of starting our first five gallons of wine, with plenty of delays and false starts!

Bunches and Bunches of Berries

Last weekend when we were out scouting good berry locations in the area, we found these very plentiful berries but we had no idea if they were edible or not.

After asking a few people whether they knew what they were and whether they were edible, I went searching online and quickly found that they are--surprise, surprise--bunchberries!  The plant is commonly known as a dwarf dogwood.  The berries are edible but there is not a lot of information out there about how to use them.

Once we knew this and where to gather gallons of them quickly, we planned to revisit this location and pick a whole bunch.  What better time to go pick them than a cold, rainy day like today?  With two berry rakes and lots of containers, we managed to harvest several gallons in around an hour.

Due to the rain and all the leaves we raked up with them, I decided it would be easier to lay them all out to dry before trying to get the chaff out, which is best done with most berries by rolling them down a dry towel-covered board.

The next question is: what do we do with all these berries now?

While we wait for the berries to dry, enjoy one of our lovely views from today:

Undisclosed berry-picking location

The Pancake Part IV

I am almost caught up with the sourdough pancake saga.  This is the story of iteration five, week 4 of the pancake saga, which was last Saturday.  That day I scrapped the recipe which came with our starter and took up Steve Floyd's method.  This time I started the starter at about noon on Friday but never put it in a very warm place.  I will now digress.

We tend to keep the room temperature at 60-65 degrees inside.  This is due to the annual number of heating degree days (HDD) which Fairbanks is subject to.  The annual HDD for Fairbanks is around 14,000.  Now compare that to a place which still gets winter but is more mild like Central Illinois, which is around 6,400.  Basically, we never get to shut off the furnace as even in the summertime it only rarely gets up to a temperature where it stays at or above "room temperature" during the day much less overnight.  With heating oil being around $3.80 a gallon, that comes out to an average of $400-600 a month to keep the house hospitable.  Some of our neighbors changed over to natural gas or use electric and their bills can be as high as $1-2K per month in the winter.

Now back to the pancake.  The starter stayed out at our room temperature for almost 18 hours.  But yeast is most active from 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit.  Thus, my pancake batter grew but it would probably have taken 48 hours to get really going to where the flapjacks would taste sourdoughy.

I can't go back or postpone breakfast so no matter what happens, I make the pancakes.  This time they stuck together correctly, were somewhat glutinous and I cooked them in a cast iron skillet so they got brown (until my daughter started bugging me to start her plate as she was sooo hungry and then I lost track of the skillet and a couple got slightly crispy).  I think I'm on the right track but I haven't gotten it yet.

The Pancake Part III

My 4th try was on the 11th of August in the year of our Lord 2012.  My wife bought the ingredients so I could make the pancakes exactly as the recipe on the back of the info card says.  It recommends mixing the starter with Krutzeaz pancake mix and letting it grow overnight.  Then add all the rest of the ingredients in the morning.  According to one of my wife's friends, Steve Floyd (a radio host on 660 KFAR and host of The Better Breakfast Show which I listen to every morning) when you add the baking soda or "soda," the mix is supposed to almost double in size before your eyes.  Obviously, I did something wrong as mine stayed flat.

That morning I tried using our great new George Foreman G5 griddle.  So I mixed it all up and poured some on the griddle.  The first two pancakes came out great, but for some reason not very sourdoughy.  The second round just wouldn't cook and get brown.  It was taking about 5 min for each set of pancakes.  This happens when the griddle cools from the new batter and there isn't enough latent heat in the plates to keep it cooking.  I still made all of the pancakes on the griddle but they were mostly white and, yet again, not very sourdoughy.

In fact, that morning the cool griddle was the least of my problems.  They also kept falling apart and just didn't taste right. I believe I used some expletives about that method and the frustration I had with the poorly written recipe from the Kiwanis who gave us the starter.  At this time I vowed not to use that recipe again and have focused on Steve's recipe instead, which he graciously shared with us.

Now, since I'm frustrated just writing about that morning, I will post a serene Alaska video for all to enjoy.

Alaskan Medevac coming in for a landing in the Tanana Flats south of North Pole, AK.

Chokecherry Jam Update

So as what was supposed to be chokecherry jam cooled last night, we realized that it wasn't really solidifying that well.  As such, we now have four pints of chokecherry syrup, one of which is opened and was used on my husband's latest attempt of sourdough pancakes this morning.  It is excellent syrup.  I will let him keep you updated on the pancakes.

Journey to the Center of...30,000-Year-Old Ice

Permafrost--perennially frozen ground--is a fact of life up here.  It affects everyone in some way from building foundations to roads heaving to having ice cold water straight out of the tap (that last one I really like!).  Engineers in this part of the world have been battling the effects of permafrost (especially when it melts due to, say, a road bed laid over top of it) and trying to understand permafrost for as long as people have been building here.

This sign is located on the Steese Highway just south of the small town of Fox, AK, almost 10 miles north of Fairbanks.  For a month earlier this year we hauled drinking water from a natural spring in Fox, so we saw this sign quite a few times.  Every time we passed it, I thought to myself and often said aloud to my husband that I would love to see that. This Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility is a joint facility between the US Army Corps of Engineers and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

This past Saturday and Sunday, they held their first open house ever in their almost 50 years of existence.  Of course, we jumped at the chance to tour this tunnel.  They apparently were not sure how many people would show up for it.  They were overwhelmed by the outpouring of interest from the community and tourists.  I don't know the stats for Sunday, but they had to turn away at least 250 people on Saturday because they could only take about 475 people through the tunnel on their scheduled tours.  Apparently, if we had arrived much later than we did (about half an hour after they opened), we would have been turned away as well.  Fortunately, however, we both got to tour the tunnel and it was well worth the wait we had.

They actually cool the tunnel down to 24 degrees to prevent any of it from thawing.  Normally permafrost is just a few degrees below freezing.

Ice wedge

Junction of that ice wedge with other wedges

An ice wedge is a narrow piece of ice extending from ground level down into the ground several yards, usually growing every winter.  The wedges usually form in a polygonal pattern, causing the junction pictured above.  If you want to learn more about this (I'm a geology nerd, so it totally fascinates me), the tunnel's page about ice wedges has a lot of information, diagrams, and more (better than ours) photos from inside the tunnel.

Striation in the ice wedge.  These wedges are predicted to be 30,000 years old, but have stopped growing. 

Close-up of the ice surface. 

In addition to the tunnel itself, they had displays and scientists on hand to teach more about permafrost, what they've found there (mammoth bones, bison bones, etc.), and techniques for dealing with building on and in permafrost.  One of the most interesting displays was actual chunks of ice from ice wedges in the tunnel.  You could even touch it and pick it up.  Seeing it up close and backlit (see the light there?) was really something else because you could see all the sediment from all the years of growth.

We really feel so blessed to have had the opportunity to see something so rarely seen by the public and, as part of their purpose in this open house was to gauge public interest, I really hope they do it again sometime and even work toward having regular public tours.

Chokecherries, Chokecherries, and More Chokecherries

Chokecherry trees are everywhere in Fairbanks. You can't walk a block without seeing at least one tree.  Many of them are volunteers, but most of them are intentional plantings as ornamental trees, which is actually how they were introduced to this area as they are not native.  We have four chokecherry trees in our yard.  Once we discovered what these trees were, we decided to learn how to tell when they're ripe and what to do with them once they are.  That wasn't too difficult as we've seen chokecherry products throughout our travels in the lower 48.  We'd even bought some chokecherry wine at one point.

The two resources most helpful to us was this article on Wildfoods.info and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks Cooperative Extension.  I have found the UAF Cooperative Extension's publications on native foods to be invaluable resources when learning how to pick, clean, store, and utilize the abundant foods found throughout Alaska.

What's left on some of the upper branches of our big chokecherry tree.

Chokecherries are ready to pick at least 2 weeks after they turn jet black.  The longer you wait to pick them, the sweeter they will be (though I've learned they also start being eaten by birds and falling off the trees the longer you wait).  They will always have a tartness and make you pucker.  I, personally, am not a fan of them straight off the tree.  However, I have liked all chokecherry products I've tried.

Armed with this information and a ready supply in our own yard, I started picking these small black cherries. Between my husband and me we picked all the chokecherries we could reach in our yard, which was about 13 pounds, or two and a half gallons.  Most of them went into gallon bags in our freezer for later use.  I took a small portion of them, though, and extracted the juice.  We tried adding the juice to some homemade pancake syrup my husband had made when we ran out of store bought syrup.  It was nowhere near the same result as true chokecherry syrup.

The rest of the juice has sat in the refrigerator until today because we have been without storage space to make any jam, jelly, or syrup with it.  I finally broke down and bought a flat of jelly jars the other day.  This afternoon, my husband decided to make chokecherry jam.

Chokecherry jam

We currently have four pints cooling in the kitchen, and I have been picking more chokecherries, so I have a couple more gallons to go clean and freeze!

The Pancake Part II

In May of this year, I decided that I needed to learn to make pancakes.  So I did and I put the recipe to memory:

1.5 cups flour
3.5 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1.25 cups milk
1 egg
3 tbsp butter (melted)

This is pretty easy, right?  I made excellent pancakes all over using this recipe and even on a spur of the moment made some while at my sister-in-law's house.  So when I got the sourdough starter I thought, well I can mix up everything but the egg, milk, and butter when I pull it out and let it grow overnight. It also happened that I left the mix on the stovetop thinking that the kitchen was warm enough.  I was wrong about that, too.  By morning the mix smelled a little of sourdough but it wasn't pungent.   And when I made the flapjacks, I found out my mistake as my pancakes tasted just like regular pancakes not sourdough pancakes.   That was 28 July of this year.

This is our starter in its jar.  You can see the little pockets, which are clear.  That's yeast poop, or some like to call it ethyl alcohol and others call it booze.  If too much of it fills the top of the jar it'll literally drown the starter in its own feces.  I know it's kind of a disgusting thought but that's what it is.

Given long late mornings with a late work call I could make pancakes for my family more often and not even bother to refrigerate the starter, but that's not my life so the next batch of pancakes was the next Friday.  This time I decided not to add the salt (as I think that's what slowed the yeast).  So I just fed the starter and let it grow overnight (this time in the oven with the light on).  In the morning, the starter had a nice clear liquid on top so I knew it had done its job but I decided to make waffles instead of pancakes.  My wife still says those were great and I need to do it for pancakes.

Saturday morning, instead of letting the sourdough starter grow overnight I just used the starter from the fridge and added some flour.  I should have known that wouldn't work, and it didn't.

To be continued...

The picture above is from deep in the Tanana Flats south of Fairbanks.  It's a beautiful area and I was there studying the mosquitoes (there were plenty).

In Search of Wild Blueberries

We've heard that the blueberries up here are extremely plentiful.  We had also heard that the blueberries were behind their normal schedule this year.  As such, we were waiting to go looking for them.  Last Sunday, we were talking with some friends at church about how we were going raspberry picking that afternoon because someone told us that they were on in full force and where to go find some.  One of these friends, who has been here just a year or two longer than we have, mentioned that the blueberries were early this year.  We looked at her funny and said we'd heard the opposite.  Apparently, they had gone out and picked a bunch at the end of July.

With this news, my husband started asking around at work for recommendations on where to go find blueberries.  That is no easy task around here.  I did a little searching online and found this article (published on August 1st!) that made me chuckle because it is 100% true--around here you never tell people where your berry batch is or where you go moose hunting, unless you're telling them the "known" spots.  My husband actually was told a spot where there are tons of blueberries, but it was the first place mentioned in that article: Murphy Dome.

So Friday, we loaded up the family and headed out to try to find this spot on Murphy Dome.  We were told that you could drive right up to it, which was good because we have two very young children and we don't yet have our bear gun up here and bears love berries even more than humans.  Even so, we were armed with a bear bell (to announce your presence so you don't startle a bear), bear spray, and mosquito repellent.

The drive up to the top of the dome was fine, but we had to continue on the north side for a bit and it rained quite a bit in the previous 24 hours.

When we saw this, we decided to stop while we knew we could still turn around and get back.  We weren't entirely sure what blueberry plants looked like, so we wandered off near the truck to see what we could find.  What we found was a lot of blueberry plants...and very few blueberries.  We thought if we wandered farther down the trail, as we were told to do, we'd find a lot more blueberries.  

We found blueberries all right.  However, most of what we found was completely stripped clean blueberry plants.  There were blueberries all over the place, but next to no actual berries anymore.

That's all completely empty blueberries.  

So are those.  We walked all the way out to the rocky outcropping in the distance.  Obviously, we were a few weeks too late.

My husband and our daughter wandered all over out there thinking there HAD to be some out there still.  Yeah, they were wrong.  We saw many lingonberries (also called low-bush cranberries) and other berries that we didn't know whether they were edible or not.  We picked what few blueberries we found as we headed back toward our truck.  As we were on our way back up the trail, we met a family who was out for crowberries and bearberries, two varieties of black berries that we'd seen plenty of but didn't know were edible.  Once we learned that, we tried some and started picking those as well.

Picking blueberries

Picking bearberries

We didn't come home with a huge haul, but, after doing research on crowberries and bearberries, we determined we would go back out and get more crowberries another day.  But that is a story for another day.

Mostly crowberries on the left and blueberries on the right.

Even though that's all we came home with from an afternoon of picking, we had a great time hiking and the scenery was amazing.

Heading back into town

Eternal? Saga of the Perpetual Sourdough or The Pancake

Sourdough starter is like a pet.  You have to love it, nurture it, and take care of it.  If you don't it gets mad at you and spews nasty colors and stinks and might even die.  Thus, given the requirement of feeding it at least weekly when not in constant use, the question must be asked as your jar overfloweth:  What do I do with the extra starter since I have extra every week?

The simple answer is: use it!  But you may not want to spend the time to make a big batch of bread so, instead, the next best thing which takes a lot less work is:





Sourdough Pancakes! 




Stop!  Wait!  If you're like my wife and me, we had never even heard of sourdough pancakes until moving to Alaska.  I'm not sure why that is as they were likely the most common way to use sourdough starter in pioneer days, but the truth is that sourdough was made internationally famous in San Francisco, CA, in the form of bread not pancakes.  So the world hasn't been introduced in entirety to the amazing sourdough pancake.

Now, the first thing you must know is that if you plan to imitate something it is best to know what it is supposed to taste like.  Thus, my family had a job.  We had to eat lots and lots of pancakes at different breakfast and mom and pop type of places so that we would know what the best sourdough pancakes taste like.  The answer, so far, is Sam's Sourdough Cafe in Fairbanks.  It was rough and my belly ached a few times but we survived this very difficult task.

Now that we knew what they were supposed to taste like, it became imperative to learn how to imitate perfection.

The task seems easy, but that would be a lie.  I'm on week 4 of trying and have yet to get close.  I could do it faster by making pancakes every day but I have this terrible problem called work which interferes with the expeditious nature of my "Becoming Sourdough."

Thus begins the sourdough pancake saga which will not end until I can repeat the process multiple weeks in a row.

For Starters

About a month ago, the "Golden Heart" city Fairbanks, AK, celebrated the 60th anniversary of "Golden Days." It was a great taste of sourdough life and gave us many opportunities to be out in the community and learn more about why this town truly has a golden heart. However, that's just the intro to the saga which I am about to start. On Saturday of the Golden Days festival, the family went to a Kiwanis sourdough pancake breakfast in the parking lot of Sadlers Home Furnishings. We were joined at our table by a lovely local family whose father had been involved in cooking the pancakes for a number of years but this year was just running the cash register. During the conversation, the topic of sourdough was brought up. In this case it was the yeast not the eventual title. My wife mentioned that she was interested in learning more about sourdough by having and maintaining a starter. The family then told us the history of the starter that the Kiwanis use which includes one person maintaining it for the past 30 years, but he is not the first in the lineage of this sourdough. The yeast has been perpetuated for over 100 years! Wow. Of course when we had the lovely pancakes and the company we told them we would like some sourdough starter (they had it for sale). As we were finishing up eating and getting ready to go, the father (and grandfather) brought over a Styrofoam coffee cup with a lid and a set of directions. It was the yeast and we asked how much they wanted for it but they refused payment. I think they decided that we were sourdoughs in the making.

When we got home and read the instructions they were sorely lacking in my opinion. The whole thing was a mixture of parts and actual measures and statements like "then fill the bowl up to the line with starter." My 6 quart bowl doesn't seem to have a line and actually I'm not sure it's even 6 quarts or that I need to make 6 quarts of pancakes for my family of four.

That night we spent about two hours researching sourdough starter and feeding your sourdough only to discover about a hundred different methods and lots of conflicting information.  After much confusion, deliberation and research I just did it.

We found a mason jar (which originally held a very nice spaghetti sauce) and I tried the feeding directions that came with the hundred year old starter. We mixed it up and put it in the refrigerator.  Thus begins the saga of our sourdough starter.

Jumping Right In

Over the past few weeks in particular, since arriving in Fairbanks and getting settled--a term I use loosely as we have been here for a month and a half and are still living off everything out of our travel trailer since we have not yet received our household goods shipment--we have been diving right in to life in Interior Alaska: sourdough starter, berry picking, fresh rhubarb from the garden, and many fun new experiences and events.  These new experiences for us, especially the failures and triumphs in the kitchen, have inspired me to start this journal of our journey to become sourdough.

Many of you may be asking yourselves, "what in the world does it mean to be 'sourdough'?"  During our first month here, we lived in the Alaska Heritage House Bed & Breakfast, the former home of Mary Lee Davis, who authored several books about life in Alaska.  It was there, talking with the proprietor one day, that we ourselves were first introduced to the term as she explained the difference between a Sourdough and a Cheechako.  A few days later, thumbing through Davis' book, "Sourdough Gold," my husband found her definition of what it means to be a Sourdough.

54°40'  North is the southernmost border between Alaska and British Columbia, a fact I, admittedly, had to look up as I wrote this.  Fairbanks sits at 64°50', Anchorage is at 61°13', Juneau is at 58°26', and Ketchikan, the southernmost city in Alaska, is at 55°21'.  As newcomers to this last frontier, we are, in the words of the locals, Cheechakos.  Merriam-Webster online actually has an entry for the word and defines "cheechako" as "tenderfoot--used chiefly in Alaska."  

I hope you enjoy watching our journey from Cheechakos to Sourdoughs as much as we have been enjoying being on it.  We've only just begun.