Tag: kitchen tips (Page 7 of 8)

How to Make Sauerkraut

June 27, 2010 / Lindsey / 13 Comments

Today I’m going to show you how to make your own old-fashioned, raw, lacto-fermented sauerkraut. The first time I made sauerkraut, I was sure I was doing something wrong because it was so easy!

Ingredients:

Cabbage – red or green (or a combo), organic

Sea salt – See my salting chart below, plus you may need more to mix up extra brine. (Any non-iodized salt will do, but unrefined sea salt is better for your body.)

*****

Here’s my salting chart. These are just guidelines — if you want, you can add a little more salt in the summer and a little less in the winter.

10 tsp salt per 5 lbs vegetables

5 tsp salt per 2 ½ lbs vegetables

2 tsp salt per 1 lb vegetables

1 tsp salt per ½ lb vegetables

½ tsp salt per ¼ lb vegetables

Cabbage becoming sauerkraut. (Little bits of cabbage clinging to the side of the jar --like in the picture-- should be scraped down into the brine, otherwise they'll get moldy.)

Chop, shred, or grate your cabbage — coarse or fine, however you like it. Sprinkle the salt onto the cabbage and mix it up. I let mine sit on the counter for several hours or overnight (this step is in place of pounding) so that the salt can begin to draw water out of the cabbage. The water contains nutrients, and these nutrients then become the substrate for the growth of the lactic acid bacteria which is what turns your cabbage into kraut. (Steinkraus, Handbook of Indigenous Fermented Foods, p.120.)

After the cabbage is wilted and some water has been drawn out, pack the cabbage WITH its water into a glass jar. You really want to pack it in there (use your fist or any kitchen tool), because this will help squeeze more water out. You can also use a specially-made ceramic sauerkraut crock, or a glass or ceramic bowl (anything except metal, since salt and acid can react with metal).

Keep your cabbage submerged under the brine by placing a smaller plate on top and weighing it down with something heavy (a jug of water, a boiled rock, etc.). Or, nest a smaller jar of water inside your larger glass jar. Or, wedge a whole cabbage leaf into the jar to keep everything submerged.

Sauerkraut fermenting in a ceramic bowl, weighed down with a plate & a water-filled bowl.

This is kale, not sauerkraut, but same idea. I particularly like this nesting-jars method for keeping everthing submerged in brine.

Whatever method you devise, just be sure that all traces of cabbage are completely submerged in the brine. Little bits sticking up above the water line will quickly lead to a moldy situation like the photo below (and if you do end up with mold like this, scrape off the entire top layer of cabbage, but the rest underneath should be fine! The kraut below the mold in this picture turned out great.) So if you need to mix up some more brine (which is just a fancy name for salt water), use the ratio of 1 tsp salt to 1 cup of water.

This is what happens if your cabbage doesn't stay submerged in brine.

Cover the jar with either a lid (leave it loose to prevent pressure buildup) or a towel to keep bugs out.* Leave it to ferment at room temperature until you like the taste of your kraut. Let your tongue be your guide to done-ness. Taste it every few days, and transfer into the fridge when it tastes the way you like it. I like mine pretty sour, so I usually leave it out for 1-2 weeks or more, depending on how warm it is in the kitchen.

Once in the fridge, your sauerkraut will keep for many months. Don’t throw out the sauerkraut juice; it’s full of beneficial Lactobacillus (lactic acid bacteria) and is said to be a very good digestive tonic. And if you like, add a little of the juice to your next batch of sauerkraut as a starter.

*If you see a white film (“kahm yeast”) develop on the surface of the brine, scrape off what you can each day until the kraut is done. Sometimes I don’t get any film. Sometimes I get a fair amount. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason. The kahm yeast won’t harm anything, but if you keep getting a lot of it day after day, it can sometimes (not always) impart an off taste to the brine. If that happens, I will actually dump out the brine and replace with new brine. How salty to make the replacement brine? Good question. I’m still experimenting with this. When I did this I used 1 tsp salt to 1 cup water, but then my kraut was almost done fermenting and ready to go into the fridge. In the summer — or if your kraut still has a ways to go — I might increase the ratio to 1 Tbsp salt per 1 cup water. Use your judgment and go for it; fermentation is an imprecise art!

Here you can see the white film (kahm yeast) that sometimes develops on the brine's surface (between the blue bowl and glass bowl).

Why Buying Locally is Not Always Better

May 5, 2010 / Lindsey / 13 Comments

(First of all, sorry — this is going to be a long post. But stick with me here… 🙂 )

We’ve all heard the call to “go local” with what we buy, and I generally agree with this. However, sometimes there are exceptions, and I think it’s important to keep this in mind when we purchase things. Because when we purchase things, we vote with our money. Through our money, we actually decide which businesses will flourish, and which ones will not. We, as consumers, have power!

While we should buy local when we can, I feel that it’s actually more important to support businesses with integrity, even if they aren’t local to us.

Let me share a personal example with you:

There is a local company, based in Colorado, called The Savory Spice Shop. There is another company, based in Wisconsin, called Penzeys Spices. I live in Colorado, and I visited The Savory Spice Shop back when it first opened about 5 or 6 years ago. Having a local store dedicated to spices was a novel thing, and I went there a couple times that year.

However, since that time, I have completely avoided The Savory Spice Shop because of a negative experience I had there. I had called them up to place an order that I wanted to pick up later in the day, and spoke with the owner, Mike Johnston, who asked me to email him my order. He spelled out his email address to me, and I remember thinking it was an odd address because his name was misspelled…but when I read the address back to him, he said it was correct. Later in the day when I went to get my order, he was quite annoyed with me. Evidently he had given me the wrong email address over the phone, but blamed it on me, telling me I must have copied it down wrong, and told me how long it had taken him to search around his computer and find my email order. After receiving such poor customer “service”, I never gave my business to that company again.

Meanwhile, my mom introduced me to Penzeys Spices, based in Wisconsin. She gave me a Penzeys catalog, and I’ve been happily doing business with them ever since, even though they’re not a local company. The difference to me is that Penzeys has integrity; every single interaction I’ve had with them over the years has been easy and friendly. I love this company! And I would much rather spend my money at a company I like and that values their customers, regardless of whether they’re local or not. (And as a side note, the Penzeys catalog is fantastic; in addition to all their yummy spices, it’s filled with personal stories, pictures, and recipes from their customers. They’re not paying me to say this, by the way; I just really love their catalog, and their company in general.)

Interestingly…the story doesn’t end there. Penzeys is opening up stores in Colorado, and they’ve gotten some negative feedback accusing them of invading the territory of The Savory Spice Shop. But it turns out that The Savory Spice Shop has quite a dark history, and in reality, they’re the impostor — not Penzeys.

Bill Penzey, the owner of Penzeys, recently sent out the following email to people in Colorado. It’s very interesting, and definitely worth reading:

I just want to let you know how excited I am that Penzeys will be opening a store in both Boulder and Colorado Springs in the next couple of months. I have a great respect for your part of the country. Time passes everywhere and we are all moving towards the future, but to me this area is one of the few spots where the future is actively and successfully being created. Where people take joy in looking beyond the day-to-day. Thinking not only about the impact of their actions, but also figuring out what actions might in the future create a better world for all of us. And not only are you thinking these thoughts, you then actually get up off the couch and do them. Very cool. I so look forward to being a part of that.

I also understand that there is another company that sells spices in the Denver area, and with our opening in Boulder and Colorado Springs there have been negative statements made about Penzeys, about me, and about my motivations for coming to the area. That I am doing this because I want to be the “Wal-mart of Spices.” I have tried to simply ignore these comments and let what we do in our stores speak for who we are. But these days this really does not work. Not commenting is seen as the same thing as saying, “Yes, it is totally true.”

So, some comments.

The other spice business in the Denver area has a history with my family. The person who started it worked for a period of time at my sister Patty and brother-in-law Tom’s spice store in Chicago. Patty and Tom’s Chicago store is an offshoot of the spice store that my parents, myself, my sister Pam, and many others built on the near northwest side of Milwaukee. The fact is this “Denver” business was started in Chicago in the middle of the night when its founder used his key, took Patty and Tom’s blend book to Kinko’s, and photocopied the entire thing.

I understand that we’ve all done stupid things that we later regret. But what will always stick with me is that when confronted about what they did after opening their store, and selling exactly those blends, they refused to stop. Ultimately it cost Patty and Tom a tremendous sum of money, most of their savings, for court costs to try to get these people to do the right thing. When their blend book showed up in court it was still in Tom’s sister’s handwriting. They never even bothered to recopy it.

Newspaper stories from their startup still live on the web. The Colorado Springs Gazette:

“So when I heard about a place called the Savory Spice Shop opening in Denver, I couldn’t wait to see if it would be like the shop in Chicago. And, though it’s not related, it is almost identical in almost every detail, from the candied ginger and dehydrated corn samples on the checkout counter to the water cooler with tiny blue cups.”

Their story has changed over time, but is consistent in always telling the story they believe works best. The Denver Business Journal:

“Johnson grew up in his family’s spice business”

Today their story is that they moved from their home in Chicago to Denver because of the weather, but the original story was very different. Once again from the Colorado Springs Gazette:

“Johnston and Chambers got their inspiration from a contest sponsored by Penzeys Spices, a Wisconsin company that has long sold spices through catalogs and retail stores…’The Penzey company did a survey asking customers to write in about why they would like to have a spice store in their town,’ said Johnston, who worked at the Chicago store for about a year and a half. ‘Colorado Springs and Denver were in the top 10 towns.'”

Without their business investors, franchise sales, and food media connections we can’t open stores as quickly as they can, so it is taking us some time to get to all the contest finalist cities. We are proud that our growth has been slow and steady and not about shortcuts. But really, if you intentionally copy the Penzey family business, and intentionally choose an area to launch your plans where our customers like us and want us to open stores, can you really be genuinely shocked when we open stores right where we promised we would?

Worst for me in all of this is the notion that my actions caused them to come to Denver. I just thought the contest would be fun and raise awareness, but I did not think about how others could then use the results to promote food not as a way to bring people together, but as a way to divide them. Looking back I now see the contest as a shortcut and something that was not who we are. It was a mistake. I am sorry. I will try to do better in the future.

At Penzeys we see cooking differently. To us cooking is something wonderful. We believe the simple act of making food and sharing it with others has the power to transform lives, to build communities, to make the world a better place. To us cooking is at its most powerful when each of us follows our own path without judgment from others. Good things happen when our own cooking is our own tale, the story of where we’ve come from, where we’ve been, and who we have met along the way.

For years the research has shown time and again how cooking and sharing food together leads to more positive and less negative outcomes in life. Science can tell us that time spent around the dinner table can turn off DNA sequences that otherwise would lead to violent behavior, but so far it has not told us why. I’ve been hanging out talking with cooks who were willing to go out of their way to get good spices since I was 10 years old. In these 37 years I have come to believe that the positive results of a life spent around the dinner table come from two things: validation and kindness.

When faced with good and bad choices in life so often our choice comes down to how we feel about ourselves. Without respect from others it is so hard to have respect for ourselves. There may be no better form of validation than getting food made just the way you like it. For birthdays my grandmother used to always let us choose not only our favorite cake, but our favorite frosting as well. Not much can make you feel more special than being seven years old and blowing out the candles on a banana cake with the special chocolate frosting made by your Gram.

Last Friday was my birthday and I had the same cake, this time made by my wife and six-year-old daughter. There really is a sanity that comes to life when we eat foods that recognize us for who we are, but cooking is about more than that, it is also about kindness. Cooking at its heart is an act of kindness. It is something we do without charge for the people around us. Make a salad for yourself and it all too often will be lettuce, tomato and dressing. Make a salad for you and someone else and suddenly it makes sense to grate some cheese or dig for a few more vegetables or maybe slice a hard-boiled egg. Why do we make more of an effort when we make something for others? Kindness.

Cooking is kindness and kindness works. It transforms people into families and families into communities. Where we have opened stores we have played a part in turning streets into communities. We have done this by respecting our customers and the cooking that makes them who they are. “Love to Cook-Cook to Love” is more than a motto for Penzeys, it is our reason to get better at what we do, to grow, and to improve. Our goal to do everything we can to help spread the kindness of cooking has pushed us to create a line of spices and seasonings beyond what anyone else is doing.

Now to see what we have spent so much time creating copied and stripped of its values to be sold as a commodity is heartbreaking for a lot of us here at Penzeys. I believe in the power of forgiving and forgetting, yet I just can’t bring myself to watch what I have worked for all my life being used to promote food not as a way to bring people together, but as a way to promote an elitism that is so destructive. I can’t put the genie back in the bottle. But for as long as we can keep up, wherever their stores spread their self-described “food snob” point of view, we will do our best to be there as well to spread our view of cooking as kindness.

These are our ideas. This is what we are looking forward to bringing to Boulder and Colorado Springs, a sincere appreciation for the richness that comes to our lives when we cook and how cooking ultimately is an act of kindness. That in reality, kindness is all around us.

Have a great weekend,

Bill Penzey

How To Decaffeinate Your Tea

March 9, 2010 / Lindsey / 7 Comments

I just love tea! Something about having a hot cup of tea in my hands is very comforting. When I lived for a short while in New Zealand, one of my favorite things to do was make myself a cup of tea, and take it outside into the chilly grayness of the late-winter afternoon and with one hand pull up little weeds from the flower beds while sipping steaming tea from the other hand. That’s a fond memory I’ll never forget.

Anyway, over the past few years I’ve become less and less tolerant of caffeinated tea. Caffeine used to do absolutely nothing to me, so I could drink it and not notice anything one way or the other. But gradually it began to affect me in a negative way. I stay away from any caffeinated drinks now because they make me feel jittery and nauseated (too much strong dark chocolate also has the same effect).

But I love black tea with cream…especially Earl Grey. And the kitchen at work is always stocked with tea bags, hot water, and half & half. But the tea bags are fully-caffeinated English Breakfast black tea, Earl Grey, and green tea. What to do? DIY decaffeination! Here’s my method:

1. Put a teabag into your mug. Fill the mug with very hot (or boiling) water. (Fill the mug a quarter full, half full, or totally full…it doesn’t matter.)

2. Let the teabag sit in the water for 30 seconds.

3. Pour out the water (but keep the teabag!)

4. Now you’re ready to brew your actual cup of tea; fill your mug with very hot (or boiling) water, steep your teabag for as long as you prefer, add milk, cream, or sugar if you want, and enjoy!

I’ve been decaffeinating my own tea for a few years now, and this method really works for me. Caffeine is very water soluble and most of it leaches into the water within the first 30-45 seconds of brewing your tea. I’ve read that this method removes about 80% of the caffeine…about the same as the pre-decaffeinated tea that you can buy at the store. (In fact I like how the little “pre-brew” process softens the bitter bite of the tea.)

Now, I’ve read some silly debates about using hot water versus boiling water…and how you “must never” use this method with tea bags — only with loose tea, and so on. In my opinion, it’s baloney. If the water is hot enough to make tea, it’ll work. If you use tea bags, it’ll work. If you use loose tea, it’ll work.

I use this method daily, though I do get some strange looks in the office kitchen from people who wonder why I’m standing idly at the counter, staring into space with a half-full mug of tea in my hands!

In any case, it’s a trick that definitely comes in handy!

*****

The Sheer JOY of an Empty Countertop

January 17, 2010 / Lindsey / 10 Comments

Ridiculous amount of junk on my counter...

Note the ridiculous amount of junk on our counter.

If your countertop is anything like mine, it doubles as a storage surface for things like cutting boards, ripening fruit, fermenting kombucha, kefir, herbal tinctures, an overflow of yesterday’s dirty dishes, oatmeal being soaked for tomorrow’s breakfast, notes to myself, and other miscellaneous junk that I put there to remind me to deal with it. Our counter space is already severely limited due to the size of our kitchen, but thanks to both the dish drainer and my many ongoing kitchen “science projects” (see photo above), we often find ourselves squeezing all of our cooking and baking preparations into only about 1 or 2 feet of usable counter space. Ridiculous!

So yesterday Hubby cleaned off the counter completely. The cutting boards found a new home in a cabinet next to the stove…the fermenting kefir jar, kombucha bottles, tinctures, and soaking oatmeal now live on top of the refrigerator. I will need to find some other system for posting notes to myself…perhaps taping them to a cabinet until I can throw them away. Ripening fruit will just have to go elsewhere.

The new rule is…Nothing on the counter! No more “counter-as-pantry-annex.” And I’m totally loving it. It feels open and luxurious. It’s clean and uncluttered…restful to look at, and so much more conducive to efficient cooking. Heck, now that the counter is so clean, the entire house feels like it’s more under control. Sweet!

Wonderfully stark! (And yes, that is all the counter space we have!)

Wonderfully stark. (Yes, that's all the counter space we have -- can't waste it!)

Kitchen Tip: Best Tool for Removing Baked-On Food

January 9, 2010 / Lindsey / 2 Comments

Best Tool for Removing Baked-On Food, (c) The Herbangardener

Oh my goodness, I have discovered something! I made some Challah bread over the holidays and did an egg wash over the top of each braided loaf, and then baked them on cookie sheets. Do you have any idea how hard it is to scrub burnt egg off a cookie sheet?? I scrubbed and scrubbed with my scouring pads, which I swear took a layer of metal right off the cookie sheet, but didn’t touch the egg. I rummaged around, trying to find something else to use. There was my little nylon pan scraper that had come free with the Pampered Chef Stoneware loaf pan I’d bought. It’s so small and simple that I figured it wouldn’t work. WELL. That pan scraper plowed through the burnt egg like it was butter. So you know when you bake cookies and can’t get the baked-on crud to come off? PAN SCRAPER. You will not believe how well it works; in fact it seems like magic. Pampered Chef isn’t paying me to say this, so I guess it’s free advertising for them! (Though I have to say, I’ve been more impressed with the little pan scraper than the actual stoneware pan!)

And we discovered tonight that the Pan Scraper makes very quick work of any charred food baked onto the floor of the oven. No harsh oven-cleaning chemicals needed. And no scouring, either!

Anyway, you can buy them by clicking here: Pampered Chef Nylon Pan Scrapers. Definitely my new favorite cleaning tool!

Best Tool for Removing Baked-On Food, (c) The Herbangardener