Left Coast Cowboys

Yesterday, I posted about our newest resident of Two Terrier Vineyards, the coyote who is surely Coyote with a Capital C, the Cosmic Trickster of Native American legend. If you’d seen his almost levitating, loose-limbed lope and the way he slips under a gap in the vineyard fence that is almost too tight for Oscar, you’d know what I mean. Well, today we met another new denizen of our patch of Sonoma — one that works the other side of the spectrum. Seems we’ve become a hang-out for the Pileated Woodpecker. That’s the goofy hole-drilling bird that inspired Woody Woodpecker. Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!

Believe me, in the flesh (or the feather) these guys are just as goofy as their cartoon counterpart. They’ve got big bodies and stubby wings that don’t look as if they could lift them. When they fly, they look as if they are just barely going to achieve lift-off. But ours have mostly installed themselves in the vineyard where they are busy cleaning out the few grapes that were left on the vines after harvest. They are welcome to them. But hopefully they won’t let that taste carry over to the times BEFORE harvest. Meanwhile they better restrain their drilling instincts. Our vineyard poles are made of metal!

This is as close as I could get without a telephoto lens. See Woody in there with his red head?

Here he is again! Ha-ha-ha-ha!

Meanwhile on the wine front, if you haven’t been following the great Fermentation Face-Off between our college educated yeasts and Cousin John’s local yeasts, read about it here. It’s the college boys versus the juvenile delinquents and time will tell who produces the better wine.

Here’s the latest: our wines, thanks the College Boy yeasts, have been maintaining a 78 degree temperature, even as the outdoor temps have been low 60s and the 40s at night. Cousin John’s juvenile delinquents have struggled to stay a few degrees above 60. The University Crew Team yeasts are almost at the specific gravity where we can press them, Cousin John’s liquor store robbing thug yeast is only halfway through. Other than proving that college boys are hotter than the dropouts, what does this prove from a winemaking perspective? Well, Andy says John’s slow colder fermentation will produce a very fruit forward wine that will be drinkable earlier, but not such a long keeper. Ours will be more balanced between tannins and fruit and will age better. But taste? Cousin John’s could still win on that. Stay tuned.

Our grapes are hotter thanks to College Boy yeasts.

But Cousin John's biker yeasts are cooler. Producing what looks to be more depth of color.

I’ve got a lot of small subjects that aren’t, in themselves, worthy of a whole post, so perhaps, since I’m experimenting with Slow Cooking, I should just throw them all in the pot.

Actually, while we’re on the subject, let’s get right to that Slow Cooker. Long days on the crushpad or in the vineyards, then Sonoma’s cool nights creates a perfect environment for the kind of cooking you start early in the cool morning, then let simmer all day unattended to eat at night when it’s cool again. But I’d been having unsatisfactory results until I started to experiment. Maybe it’s because I’m armed with the chemistry of winemaking that I started looking at Slow Cooker cookbooks with a more critical eye. And my conclusion is that most are clueless about the dynamics and physical properties of what happens in a slow cooker — hence so many tasteless watery results. Firmly pulling my Alton Brown Food Science Nerd cap on, I set out to experiment.

The key thing to remember about Slow Cooking: condensation. The liquid recycles and never evaporates. So you need to take other steps to concentrate flavors.

First off, don’t accuse me of not doing my research. I think I own every current Slow Cooker cookbook out there. Sadly, the vast majority are of the “chop stuff up, throw it in the pot and let it stew” variety. Nothing with that little effort is ever going to yield anything good. And as I added ingredients and experiments, I’ve found some Slow Cooker secrets that most cookbooks will never tell you:

1) The Slow Cooker, by the nature of the way it cooks, can’t concentrate flavors (nothing evaporates), so don’t fergawdsake ever add water to any recipe. Substitute the appropriate stock for anything that calls for water. I had wild success with beans cooked in stock and a very special beer as documented here. You’ve got to try these beans. FABULOUS!

2) Poultry skin, raw bacon and any other fat is nasty unfried and uncrisped. Why on earth would a recipe to ask you to put such a thing in the Slow Cooker where it will just stew and get slimier? But most of them do. Bollocks, as my English husband would say. Add bacon, by all means, but fry it up crisp first. I did this with my fabulous beans and with a recent Cassoulet and it was just the ticket. All the bacon flavor and, after hours of slow cooking, it was still crunchy.

3) And while you are crisping up all that bacon, use the rendered fat to brown any meat or root or hard veggies you are planning to put in the pot. That goes for onions, carrots, parsnips, etc. Believe me on this one point. When you brown things first, you get a depth of flavor that the Slow Cooker can never achieve on its own. And stop freaking out about that fat. Most of it stays behind in the skillet. Just enough makes it to the Slow Cooker to make a world of difference in the result. I used these techniques in my Slow Cooker Cassoulet and Cousin John had three helpings and declared it “restaurant quality”.

Did I mention that one of Cousin John's careers was a deejay at fancy European ski resorts? Cousin John knows his food!

Okay, there is a reason that I am not a food blogger, nor do I play one on the Interwebs. Because, I’m not a trained enough cook to come up with anything original. Yet, 99.9% of Slow Cooker cookbook authors don’t tell you what I’ve just learned, but one does.

If you buy only one Slow Cooker cookbook, make it this one. Andrew Schloss has cracked the secret code of the Slow Cooker.

Andrew Schloss is no “throw it in the pot and hope for the best” slow cooker and he’s way ahead of me on all the things I thought I discovered. He explains the science of the Slow Cooker, what it can do and what it can’t do. He will only steer you to cooking with the ingredients that are truly enhanced by the cooker. And he’s got some great ideas, such that one about removing all skin from poultry, rendering it and using the fat to brown the veggies and the meat. The result: the same depth of flavor you get from cooking something long and slow in the oven — without the oven’s requirement that you hover over the pot and make sure it isn’t scorching.

Another great suggestion/technique he advocates: thicken liquids and sauces BEFORE you put them in the Slow Cooker. Or, strain the ingredients afterwards and thicken the strained sauce by boiling it. Hey, it’s a bit more work. But if you want to do zero work in cooking, go to McDonalds!

New subject: Cousin John and the great Fermentation Face-Off. Twitter and Facebook have been lit up since I told of this culture clash now happening on our crushpad. (People, talk to the blog!) I hear the odds are changing in Vegas hourly as our college educated UC Davis yeasts compete with Cousin John’s juvenile delinquent local yeasts. Which will produce the best wines? It’s going to take at least a week for us to see how fermentation goes, and months after that to assess the final results. Meanwhile Cousin John, on behalf of his yeasts, has thrown down the revolutionary rhetoric:

“My wild yeast shall prosper after the revolution while your decadent intellectual yeast shall be sent to reeducation camps in the countryside to learn how to be productive members of the ecosystem without sucking at the tit of the corporate funded dogs of Davis!”

Signed The FSRF
(Free Saccharomyces Revolutionary Front)

Just call Cousin John’s yeasts Che, Ho, Cinque and Patty Hearst.

Hey, Did Someone Mention Salma Hayek?

I once mentioned the Mexican Bombshell in connection with a Spanish class I’m taking. I was unprepared for the groundswell of worldwide interest. My web hits quadrupled. From around the world. So I had to follow with this completely gratuitous Salma Hayek post. And since that date back in June, the most frequent Google search that drives hundreds of readers to my blog, from Internet cafes as far-flung as Indonesia and Mali, is “Salma Hayek Cleavage”.  Then just the other day, a sometime reader sent me an email telling me that he’d be a more frequent visitor if I’d include more pictures of Salma Hayek.

Okay okay. Can we count this as the post that seamlessly melds wine, terriers, slow cooking, eccentric English friends and husbands into one post, and still open the door for dozens of completely gratuitous shots of  Salma Hayek’s…er…assets.

UC Davis yeast revving up before being added to our grapes.

If you don’t make bread, beer or wine, you probably think of yeast as something slightly icky. But for those of us who depend on it for the outcome of our products, yeast is a beautiful thing. And we’re always looking to use the best. UC Davis, one of the world’s foremost centers of winemaking expertise, has formulated yeasts that are perfectly tuned to the grape varietal and that work consistently and effectively.

But Cousin John, who helped us with the Cabernet crush, is all about the natural yeasts. To the uninitiated, that means the stuff that floats in the air, develops on fruit and lives on your skin. Doesn’t matter to him. He took the crushed grapes we gave him, plunged his hands into it, let it sit in the air for a bit and now he’s letting the natural critters do their thing.

Actually all this is happening side-by-side on our crushpad. So it’s a bit of an experiment. Experiment? No, think culture clash. Think gang warfare.

See while our yeasts were earning letter jackets, taking Advanced Calculus and getting college degrees, his yeasts were smoking in the boy’s room, riding motorcycles and robbing liquor stores. There’s a fermentation face-off happening right at Two Terrier Vineyards. Who will win? The Chi Omega House or the Greasers?

Our yeasts row crew and posed for this Bruce Weber Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.

Cousin John's yeasts are juvenile delinquents!

Okay even I will admit, you can't always count on a college education to mean anything.

You might be tempted to bet on the guys with the credentials. A college education from a top university means something, right? Well, not always as we learned for eight years. And there’s something to be said for the tenacity developed at the School of Hard Knocks. In this instance, the latter case appears to be true. Cousin John’s Cabernet is bubbling furiously, while ours is just tentatively starting fermentation. But we’ve got big vats compared to Cousin John’s little bin. So our boys are producing more heat and condensation. (Wait, the College Boys are producing more hot air? Guess, that’s not a bragging point.)

If Cousin John's "native yeasts" are native like Chief Solano, all bets are off!

I’m still betting the College Boys will surge ahead tomorrow when fermentation is established enough for me to start taking readings of Specific Gravity, pH and other measurements.

Meanwhile, I’ve been kidding Cousin John about his delinquent yeasts. And he’s been taking umbrage. In my last post, he commented that I should be “kinder to our local yeasts” and even name them, as every other critter at Two Terrier Vineyards gets named. Of course, I ran through the list of hood, delinquent and greaser names from movies and TV: Vinnie, Spike, Riff, Tony…

Then I suddenly had a thought. These “local yeasts” that Cousin John is relying on, they could also be called “native” yeasts. Native as in Native American? As in Chief Solano, the fearsome 7 foot tall Suisune war chief from early 1800s Sonoma? If Cousin John has that kind of yeast, my College Boy yeasts don’t stand a chance. And what if my College Boys aren’t lettermen, but bespectacled science geeks? Cousin John’s warrior yeasts are going to be kicking their nerdy butts all over the crushpad!

After two previous harvests, crushes and fermentations, I thought I was getting sick of it all. Now winemaking has just gotten interesting again.

I'm just hoping my yeasts aren't these kind of College Boys.

 Ran up to Sonoma to do a quick check on our Cabernet which we transferred to secondary fermentation carboys on Saturday.

Since we had so little, we’ve decided to do some experimentation. Half the Cabernet we put through primary fermentation using the specially formulated UC Davis yeast that most winemakers use. The second, smaller batch we decided to process using only the naturally occurring yeasts on the skins. Now we see why UC Davis makes so much on its yeast strains. They really work.

Our nature boy wine got stuck about ten points above the optimum specific gravity of 1000. So we had to resort to adding some yeast to get that batch restarted. Mission accomplished. Two days later, it’s bubbling away. That’s the fire.

The misfire? The second goal of the trip: to pick the remaining ripe tomatoes, cukes and peppers and get a glamour shot of the produce using a make-shift light tent. This is the latest assignment of my photography class.

Hmmm. Not really good enough, even if my make-shift lightbox is big enough to include a terrier.

Even worse, every photo I took under this contraption included reflections of me, my camera and the whole jury-rigged mess reflected in the wineglass and the bottle.

Yup, there's that big reflector and me right in the reflection.

Finally, I packed up and headed back to San Francisco, leaving all my fresh picked produce sitting out there on the gravel.

Well, the foxes will be grateful. Ever had one of those days where you can’t win for losing?