Archive for the ‘Root Cellar’ Category

Once upon a time, I built a wine cellar. In order to make decent wine from the grape vines in my back yard, I was advised to practice on other fruit. I practiced on apples. Now my wine cellar’s really a cider cellar. Perhaps cider/charcuterie cellar would be most appropriate. If I call it a wine cellar, it’s only because I’m lying or getting old and am forgetting what is in fact stashed down there. It’s cider. Apple ciders of various blends/batches. Pear ciders of various blends/batches. A couple types of Pommeau [an apple and apple brandy desert wine]. And if you look hard through the bins, you will find some actual grape-based wine. If you were to turn around from this view of the west wall of bins, you’d see kegs. Full of bubbly cider. Awaiting an epic party. Above them hangs odds and sods of dry cured meats. Refreshing that meat stash is on my to-do list.

Edmonton is an apple [and pear] city, and we just haven’t figured it out yet. Maybe I’m reading too much into things or it’s just the circles I spin in, but cider seems to be slowly creeping into our psyche. Maybe it’s just me. I’m starting to think ‘coq au cidre’ instead of ‘coq au vin’. Starting to pair every pork dish with some kind of apple booze. Give me cheese, I now think ‘pear cider’ instead of ‘pinot gris’ [which I still love, btw]. Is part of it frugality? Partly, especially indirectly in that it’s so abundant that dumping a litre into a braise doesn’t phase me, whereas dumping a $20 bottle into the dish does. As a result it creeps into your daily life. But there is also a dominant thread of simple beauty around the harnessing of what ‘where we live’ offers. I don’t think that bit will ever get old.

Strange. It’s mid-December, the soil’s frozen, plants toast – but counterintuitively, this time of year is one of the best times of year food-wise. The freezers are full of a variety of meats, fruits, stocks, lard, and more. The wine cellar’s full of apple wines, ciders, and dry cured pork and game, while the root cellar is an exciting world of veg – from squashes to parsnips, potatoes, beets, carrots, rutabagas, leeks, shallots, and more. It is a time of year rich in food in our home, and will continue to be for some time in fact – nearly all the way into spring when the veg starts to go sideways, the cider stash drops, and the freezers are once again navigable. All the way into the ‘spring gap’ that I’ve largely found ways to close.

Since my cellar seems to be desired stop number one for folks that visit my home, I thought it’d make a decent location to shoot video at a time of year when the food scene has moved from outdoors to underground. It’s a cold place to shoot video – about 2C at this time of year. So I grabbed some things from the cellar, put together a snack for my wife and I, and rolled some…SD card. Rolling tape sounds way cooler.

Harvesting root veg demarcates the border between fall and winter for me. Since September I’ve been watching the weather, waiting for the cold to come that would force my hand and make me get the produce into the cellar. It was an especially fun game this year with a remarkably temperate fall. I feel like I got away with something harvesting in early November, when many pulled their root crops back in September.

I have to focus on that for a minute, as it’s important. If you pulled root veg to cellar in September, you’ve already got 1-2 months more of storage on your crops than I do. That matters. Vegetables will only store so long. And if a vegetable will survive storage for 4 months, say, I’d rather start that 4 month clock ticking in November than September.

Which brings me to point #2. At the moment, my cellar is 6-8C. With the coming cold, it will soon be close to 3-5C. The veg I did harvest and put up in the cellar [a farm glean] in September got to enjoy some balmy 10-12C temps for a month or more. Not ideal. So the longer I can wait, the colder the cellar is when they go to their winter home, the better it is for the quality and longevity. A rare moment where procrastination pays dividends.

Although I haven’t weighed it, my potato harvest has to be about 3-4 times what it was last year. We have lots for the winter for the first time. Mostly a function of developing more annual veg beds where lawn once stood, partly due to better soil health as time goes on. My fall carrot, rutabaga, and parsnips [photo below] probably add up to 2-3 times what I had last year. Beets are about the same, maybe a bit more. My back’s done with forking. Time for a brandy.

Last night I tackled the next round of bean harvest and shelling. I’m realizing one of the perks of being small-scale on this I can harvest as they ripen – which they are not doing all at once – and it’s actually quite pleasurable to sit and shell them. Yes I will likely thresh them as my production increases.

Some results are becoming apparent. The pinto bean is a winner in my garden, by far. I’d guess that it has out-yielded in number at least 4 to 1. That’s big. So if somebody asked: ‘hey, what single bean should I plant in Edmonton for good yield‘, I’d have to go with pinto at this stage. Not only do I have lots already relative to the other varietals, there are still lots coming. They’re also a climbing bean, which means they’re particularly useful for space maximization in an urban setting. Many of the others are bush beans.

Next up is the first one shown below. I have to contact my source of seed [bought 3-4 yrs ago, as I seed save], Salt Spring Seeds, to have them ID it for me. If you know what it is, weigh in. Nice uniform large size – larger than the pinto. Then it’s Jacob’s Cattle – the reddish mottled one below. It’s a very attractive bean, and size was really good this year. Favorite after that was the red kidneys, then the orcas – neither producing much, but they’re lovely to have coming from the garden. I’d say the pintos out-yielded them by 10:1 or so. I have about 4 other varieties that grew, but yielded so little that I won’t bother next year. There will likely be more to say once the harvest is done, but I’m pretty sure the outcome won’t change much.

Dry bean harvest has begun. This is my 3rd year at it, and it’s now one of the crops that gets me most excited. There are some seriously compelling reasons to grow this stuff.

First, there is no other substantial protein from the garden that can store as well and as easily. No solar dehydrator here – leave them out on a sheet pan, done. No special root cellar storage required – leave them in a jar in a pantry, done. I had a moment this April, when the root cellar produce was eaten or spoiled, the coldframe greens were just producing, and the last of my dried beans from the prior year stared me in the face. I realized at that moment how key a player dried beans could and should be in our diet. Produce from the garden, year-round, with ease. That’s rare.

Second biggy: crop rotation. Any time you can get a nitrogen fixing crop preceding a heavy feeding crop, it’s a win. So when I plant a big crop of dry beans, not only is it easily storable, it’s fantastic for whatever plant will follow it in that space. I needed legumes in my rotation, problem solved. Then there’s its dietary contribution – carb and protein that isn’t a potato. It’s a welcome addition to the diet, especially when there’s an abundance of it’s friend, pork. And the icing on the cake is that seed saving is a no brainer – no extra task required. Simply grab a few of last year’s from the bean jar, and plant them. All exceedingly genius. Hence my new love for dried beans. Once the full crop is in, I’ll post an update with which varieties performed best for me, as I have quite a few kinds going at the moment.

This is a first for me, despite it likely becoming an annual ritual for decades to come: airing out the root cellar. I’d noticed starting sometime in May that my 1 year old cellar was starting to smell like that of some old grandparent. Musty, kinda stinky, but familiar enough to not be altogether unpleasant.

Then I remembered reading somewhere in a root cellaring book to air out the bins, sacks, pails, etc between storage seasons. That would be now. So outside they went today, to get bleached by the sun, dried of any excess humidity, and to allow me to take inventory of the room itself. Turns out a bucket of moldy root veg took up residence in one corner. A pail of salt water for humidifying could get emptied, rinsed, and re-purposed. Buckets and bins of sand and soil needed moving. Surprising how many little tasks lie down there. Thankfully, it’s a pleasant place to be when it’s hot outside.

So my first root cellaring season is over. A triumphant success. I’m already far more focused on producing more veg to put up than modifying my cellar in any way. It simply worked. Got down good and cold around freezing for months, and kept us in garden root veg until April. Dragging the bins out to air out felt like closure to that adventure, but moreso got me excited about the coming harvest season in a few short months. My potato plants are growing like mad. My cellar will remain door-ajar for the time being, fresh, and waiting.

I’m out. April 16th will mark the 2011 date that I ran out of 2010 garden veg in the root cellar. Turns out in one meal, I ran out of potatoes, carrots, and beets – all at the same time.

Things may have been able to hold out longer, but quality was definitely starting to suffer. In best shape were the carrots – still crisp and earthy. The beets had held on incredibly, but recently hit a wall and cratered in quality quickly. Perhaps the recent milder 6C did them in. One rotted. That’s it though. The potatoes were still in okay shape, the biggest problem being size – only the smallest were left, and small doesn’t store well.

That’s one lesson from my first year of root cellaring: size matters. The biggest of the veg fared the best in storage. Anything small was first to go soft. Another important lesson was that the cellar can handle a mild freeze. The first couple nights my cellar temp was near 0C, I was freaking out, putting hot stock pots of water in there to bring the temp up. I learned from experience that -2C was nothing to worry about. My dad says he’s had his dip to -7 without major damage. A last biggy would be my experience with washed carrots trumping unwashed. I’ll be washing my carrots this fall, no question.

Our celebratory last root veg supper included carrot sprouts/shoots – surprisingly pleasant atop a carrot slaw – to mark the season, along with a couple different cuts of pronghorn. The shot below is briefly marinated skewer or pronghorn heart grilled over a wood fire. I had no idea root cellaring would yield such successes in a first attempt. This growing season, the objective will simply be to grow and stow more.

I’ve had cats. One of the carrots looks like a carrot, and the other like something scooped from a litter box. In the weird little world I live in, this is important research. All of the root cellaring books – including the most widely respected ones – advise not washing root veg before storage. A major no-no. So I intended on not washing my root veg. Cause I’m a good listener. But knowing that root cellaring books are written in climates warmer than ours, with humidity generally higher than ours, and knowing that local experience was likely valuable, I looked to my dad’s techniques when putting up veg this fall. He washes his root veg. At first, I thought ‘oh, if you only knew what all those books said’, but then considered his successful results – often storing carrots well into spring.

So this past fall, I put up many bins of washed, and a test bin of unwashed carrots. The one that looks like cat poop is the unwashed carrot. The other – washed. Crazy. Unbelievable difference in result. The washed carrots did not desiccate and/or rot like the unwashed ones did. The washed ones are far better quality too – crisper, fresher, tastier. In fairness, I chose one of the worst unwashed specimens from the unwashed bin for the photo – some of them were in usable form. But quality wise, no contest.

This is long over due. Long, long, long overdue. I have come to feel very strongly about winter slaws. Despite all my root cellar bliss, I thought that the one thing I’d long for is salad in the dead of winter, but honestly, I am still diggin’ the slaws.

This one is carrot from the cellar with a touch of cabbage, and a flax-oil/duck-egg aioli – finished with flax for some texture variation. It was tweaked with a little cider vinegar and seasoned, but otherwise is super-simple, local, healthy, cheap, tasty, and a tad exciting. That’s right: exciting. Winter salads can be exciting. It’s a new-to-me discovery, and I love it.

When I first started making slaws heavily this year – the garden greens ended mid-November, and no, I have not purchased any since – I thought I would tire quickly. They were good, but how much could one take of them, really? Apparently, lots. Granted, I don’t want to eat a lettuce-salad-bowlful, it’s better as a side kind of deal, but it’s also a lot more dense.

If you have a box grater and some local veg, you’re most of the way there. Try it.

Although not a big TV watcher, I have to admit I really love ‘Jamie at Home’. I was  recently watching his winter squash episode, and he  very quickly whipped together butternut squash cupcakes with a very low-sugar icing. ‘Hm’, thought I, ‘I have a bunch of jack-o-lantern pumpkin in the freezer that needs to get eaten’. Then, thought I, “I also have lots of chevre from Smoky Valley Goat Cheese in my freezer”. Hm.

See, back when we did a cheese tasting for Holly the cheesemaker, one of the ideas for use of her chevre was cream cheese icing on carrot cake. Every time that idea crossed my mind, I thought it  was genius. It was time to give it a go.

We directly substituted pumpkin for butternut, and chevre for sour cream, and as unlikely as it is for me to get excited about cupcakes, these are really awesome. They will be a new staple in our home. The girls like them, mom and dad like them, and they’re heavy on winter squash and goat cheese, and relatively light on sugar. The chevre doesn’t need a lot of sugar to whip up into an icing – a few tablespoons of icing sugar per cup of chevre, and it’s really, really good as icing – only a slight tang of tartness reminding me it’s goat dairy and not cream cheese. Because of the light tang, go easy on the citrus, I think, if using Jamie’s recipe. We used no citrus.

So there you have it. Me, endorsing a cupcake. Never thought I’d see the day.