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.