The Pancake Saga Part IX

This has been a busy pancake week.  My sister came to visit and we had pancakes at least three times while she's been here.  The first time was the most sourdoughy I've made and my wife was a fan.  What I tried that made the difference.  This time instead of using 1 teaspoon of soda I used 1/4 and I made enough for another adult so the batch size was bigger.

The problem.  Less soda=less fluffy.  So I'm getting more sour but the fluff is going down.  I've also started getting up, adding all of the ingredients, egg and sugar and then placing in a warm spot while I take a shower.  This is similar to the concept when making sourdough bread when you add the flour and let it sit for an hour before making the dough and letting it leaven.  My thought is that the 30-45 min from adding sugar (high energy) until I cook the cakes should energize the yeast.  I'm not sure if it's worked as I haven't repeated the process.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to take my sister to Sam's Sourdough Cafe and I tried to eek their secret out of the waitress with the resulting comment of "it's complicated".  Perhaps if I eat enough pancakes there, they will have sympathy.  Then again I think I may have stumbled on the solution but I won't mention it until I've tried it.

Until next time.

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.

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.

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.