Recipe makes about 3 pints.

GPS Farm Stand
This Summer, I added a new stop to my weekly Farmer’s Market rounds.  In a good week I am able to visit the Pike Place Market at least once, the University Market on Saturday and either Columbia City (Wednesdays) or Madrona (Fridays) or Broadway (Sundays) once. This year, however, stopping at Madrona means one can often  check out the farm stand set up by Green Plate Special across ML King way from the main market.  The kids running the stand are always a pleasure (although sometimes a little sketchy on pricing, and in need of a nudge from GPS director Laura Dewell to avoid undercharging) and the stand features beautiful and sometimes unusual produce (Portuguese cabbage anyone?  Yes, and it was delicious, more like collards than cabbage).

Time to Pickle Peppers
A late August stop at the GPS stand yielded a tempting mix of hot and sweet peppers and the inspiration for a summer pickling project.  In pickling vegetables, the most difficult part is often deciding how to go about it.  As noted in my post on pickled asparagus, you can cook the vegetable in question, then pack it wit a hot vinegar mix and leave the jars to cool upside down as with jam making.  Alternately, you can pack the vegetable raw, then add hot vinegar mix and boil the closed jars in a canner for 15 minutes.  The choice depends on what you hope the final result will be like and how the veg in question takes to certain kinds of cooking.  For asparagus, my aim is that the stems will just be cooked through;  therefore, I blanch,  then pack hot without further boiling.  The idea of blanching peppers doesn’t seem quite right to me, so I figured why not just let them cook as the jars seal?  That means raw pack and 15 minutes in the canner.

With the method decided, the only question left is the composition of my pickling liquid or brine.  Based on advice in Putting Food By by Greene, Hertzberg and Vaughan, I decided to use a 50/50 mix of water and white wine vinegar with the addition of 1 teaspoon of salt to each cup of vinegar.  As for flavorings, the choice is purely personal.  I used garlic, thyme, lemon peel, anise seeds and black pepper.   Note that as vinegar is unstable at high heat, one should avoid boiling your bring  hard for any length of time.  I find simmering at about 150 degrees for 5 minutes to be sufficient to make sure that the salt is all dissolved into the brine.

Once the brine is ready, the jars are tightly packed (vegetables tend to shrink during cooking and we want the finished jars to look full) with peppers and the garlic, thyme and spices added.  The hot brine is ladled in, leaving a 1/2″ head space and the jars tightly closed with 2 piece lids.

Then the jars go into the canner to cook at between 180 and 185 degrees F for 15 minutes.

The jars are then left to cool overnight.  The next day, I check the seal by lifting the jars by their lids with the ring removed (100% successful this time…if that is not the case, you are either faced with trying to re-seal, with the result likely being finished peppers that are overcooked and to soft, or just leaving the unsealed jar in the fridge for a few weeks and then eating the peppers.)

In order the let the salt and vinegar do their magic on the peppers, it is usually recommended to wait about a month before eating.  So here I am this morning, October 2nd and ready to try my peppers.  The verdict?  Spicy!  But good.  The peppers still have a nice crunch, and the level of saltiness and acidity seems about right.  We will be enjoying the fruits of Green Plate Special’s labors all winter long.

Full recipe to follow soon.

Summer’s Gift
I recently happened into 8 pounds of deliciously ripe, honey sweet Green King figs.  By “happened into” I mean that my neighbor across the hall got a whole bunch of these rare local treats from a tree at his mom’s house somewhere on the east side of Lake Washington.  Green  King figs, when ripe, are never firm under the best of condition;  some of these were firm enough for cutting and eating but many were so soft that they squished under my knife.  They were, is short, some of the most lusciously sweet and sun drenched fruit is is possible to imagine coming from the Puget Sound area.

A few points on making jam
When faced with more pounds of very ripe fruit than two people can possibly eat before it goes off, the obvious course of action is to make jam.  Jam making is very easy, especially on a small scale, and can be broken up into stages so as to avoid the day long jam canning marathons of the kind my mom favored when I was young.

Lets talk about making jam.  It is helpful to remember that  adding sugar to fruit is a way to stop its decomposition.  Once the fruit is boiled with sugar and sealed in a canning jar, it has a shelf life of almost a year.  But since the sugar acts as a preservative just as salt and vinegar do in pickles, it is important to add enough sugar to make sure the fruit will be preserved.

There are 3 major steps in making and preserving jam:
1)  Cooking 2) Setting and 3)  Preserving.    This sounds pretty simple but there are choices to be made along the way that can have a large impact on the final product.  Cooking is the process by which the fruit and any flavoring elements are combined with the sugar and brought to a stable point.  Setting is the method used to give the jam the preferred consistency.   Finally, Sealing is the means used to remove the jam from contact with air, which extends the shelf life of the finished jam so that it can be enjoyed all year long.

My mom always followed the jam making advice distributed by the US Department of Agriculture, which involved cooking the fruit  with an equal weigh of white sugar,  guaranteeing the set of the jam when necessary by using pectin and sealing the jam in jars with 2 piece lids by  boiling them in water for 15 minutes (she also like to make freezer jam, which is exactly what it sound like, which, for my money, gives a better result than traditional canning).

There are a couple of obvious drawbacks to this method.  1) In the Summer, when many fruits are at their peak and are most reasonably priced, the idea of keeping a cauldron of water boiling for hours on end is not very attractive, especially if you live in a small apartment with imperfect circulation and no air conditioning  2)  Using pectin can not only give an overly gelatinous consistency to the jam, there is something that rankles about making wonderful fresh jam from organic fruit and sugar only to add artificial thickener  3)  Boiling the finished jam for another 15 minutes after it has finished cooking just to seal the jar tends to compromise the fresh flavor of the fruit (The extra cooking time can make the jam seem caramelized or oxidized, when you really just want the flavor of fresh fruit).

Christine Ferber is one of the best known master jam makers in France’s Alsace region, which is known for its wonderful fruit preserves and jams.  In her book Mes Confitures,  she lays out a method for making jam that puts maximum emphasis on preserving the true, fresh flavor of the fruit.  Her method involves using only beautifully ripe,  fresh-picked fruit, only organic ingredients and cooking the fruit as little as possible.  When thickening is required (for fruits with little natural pectin, like cherries), she adds her own home made green apple jelly (outside of quince and lemon rind, green apple has just about the highest levels of pectin of any fruit).  To eliminate further cooking  during the  sealing process, she uses a method that I like to call “inversion”.  Note that my Grandma also favored this method until the 70’s when dire government warnings about improper sterilization forced her to switch.

How Much Sugar?
Like I said, the old way of making jam was to weigh the fruit you want to use, then add to it an equal weigh of refined white sugar.  This assures that your jam will have enough sugar to be properly preserved for long storage.  The problem is that this amount of sugar can make for a very sweet jam.  I find that with most fruits, using 85% of the weight of the fruit in sugar is plenty sweet and also makes for jam with a long shelf life.  The sweeter the fruit, the less sugar is required.  For super sweet figs, as little as 70% works fine.

I also prefer less-refined organic sugar.  I find that organic sugar has less of the “hot” flavor of refined white sugar, which can overpower the flavor of the fruit.  Plus it is less likely to have pesticides and it also less likely to to be GM (that’s a whole story unto itself).  The only downside with less refined sugar is that it is  necessary to skim the jam during boiling a lot more carefully.  This makes sense, because the foam that comes to the top of boiling jam is in fact the impurities from the sugar.  Skimming these impurities out gives a sparkling clear finished jam.  It should be no surprise that less refined sugar has more impurities to be skimmed off.

Macerating v Cooking
The simplest way to minimize the cooking time for jams is to macerate first.  When fruit is tossed with sugar and left to rest, the sugar begins breaking down the fruit in a way that resembles cooking but without the loss of fresh taste.  Depending of the firmness of the fruit, Ferber recommends macerating the fruit raw with the sugar, or bringing the sugar and fruit to a boil together very briefly then leaving it to macerate overnight.

To Thicken or not to Thicken
Time was people liked a thick jam (heck that still might be today).  If that’s the case, when making jam, one needs to either pick a fruit with enough pectin to yield a nice thick jam or to add some sort of thickener, normally pectin.  One can also add sources of natural pectin, like lemon pith.  Or one can just get good with a looser jam.  In any case, simply boiling the fruit and sugar together will give a certain amount of body to jam.  Further boiling will increase the thickness.  However, you hit a limit where further boiling compromises the flavor of the jam, leaving it tasting “cooked”, “caramelized” or “oxidized”.  So the trick for fresh tasting jam is to test the thickness of the jam after minimum boiling to see if the “set” or thickness, is enough for your taste or if you need to resort to other methods of thickening.  I find that for most fruits, 5-10 minutes of hard boiling gives enough set without compromising the flavor.

The easiest way to check the set is to put a spoonful of cooked jam onto a cold plate (I keep 2-3 plates in the freezer while making jam for this purpose).  This will allow you to get a clear idea of how thick the jam will be when it cools.  If you are ok with the set, you are ready to seal.  If not, you will need to think about cooking further or adding thickener.

SO whats “Inversion”?
In the typical canning process, the clean jar are filled with hot jam to within about 1/3 of an inch from the top, leaving what is called “head space”.  The jar is then closed with a 2 piece canning lid and boiled in water in  a canner, basically a big pot designed for this purpose, for 15 minutes.  The two piece lid is designed so that during this boiling,  some of the expanding air in the head space escapes.  Then, as the jar cools after boiling, the remaining air in the head space contracts, creating a vacuum that seals the jar.

In the inversion method, the clean jars are filled with hot jam almost to the very top.  The jars are closed with a two piece canning lid, then turned upside down on a towel and left to cool.  The contraction during cooling of both the jam and the small amount of air left in the jar cause the lid to seal.  Easy.

I didn’t tell you to do this!
Let me be clear that the FDA recommends for home canning that one  use the traditional method of sealing jars in boiling water for 15 minutes.  At my restaurants, we don’t can our jam but instead make it fresh each week, so this issue never comes up.  However, at home, when I am making jam just for  myself and my wife, I feel at liberty to use whatever method I like.  After all, the FDA would prefer that I didn’t drink raw milk or eat raw milk cheeses, but I routinely ignore that advice.   However, be aware that sealing by boiling minimizes the risk of food borne illness in canned food.  Full disclosure.

In a nutshell
So there you have it.  The basics of jam making:  Cooking, Setting and Setting, its that easy.  The process varies a little for each fruit, which is where the skill of the jam maker comes in.   You can check out my recipe for Green Fig Jam here.

Slow Foods Seattle held their 2nd Annual Tuna Canning Workshop, directed by local fisherman Jeremy Brown on Sunday January 8, 2012.  This event caught my eye for a couple of reasons.

First,  I am a big fan of preserved fish in all of its many forms.  Sardines, anchovies, octopus, tuna, herring, the whole world of those lesser known, stronger flavored fishes really shine when canned.  Some are preserved using nothing but olive oil and a bit of salt, others are smoked or flavored with everything from tomatoes to chiles to herbs to, well just about everything.   Canned fish is no substitute for fresh fish.  It is not intended to be.  Just as duck confit is a a wholly different food item than fresh duck but a fantastic one in its own right, preserving gives fish a whole new and delicious life.

Secondly, our house in Orthez is only about 50 minutes from Saint Jean de Luz, one of the most productive fishing ports in France, where the catch coming off the fishing boats every morning leans heavily toward tuna, sardines and anchovies among other species.  As a result, the fishmongers in Orthez always offer an inspiring array of fishes that lend themselves to preserving.  During the season, these fish are offered at prices that make putting down some preserves for the rest of the year a very attractive project.   So the process for canning my own tuna seemed like valuable info that might well come in handy;  I can envision a time when I will be canning tuna for myself every season, and maybe even teaching the technique to others as well.

Up to now, it seems preserved fish has been more appreciated in the rest of the world than here at home in the United States.  Think of the pickled  herring of Scandinavia, preserved sardines from Spain, tuna and anchovies from Italy, smoked fishes of every sort from Eastern Europe, tuna belly from France and you begin to get the idea.   Preserved fish in these countries play a role in the archetypical dishes of the traditional cuisine.   In all these places, canning  has been seen for generations as not only a method of preserving the abundance of the sea beyond what can be eaten fresh, but as a process that yields a product to be admired for its for its own merits.

On the other hand, Americans (at least in my family) have tended to regard canned and preserved fish as a necessary evil when fresh is not available.  My grandmother, whenever she ate salmon in Seattle, never failed to tell the story of how  much she hated salmon  growing up in Nebraska where the only salmon she ever say was from a can.

However, it is my observation that Americans are beginning to discover the pleasures of preserved fishes.  When Le Pichet first opened, we had a hard time convincing people to try Spanish sardines and had to defend Italian tuna from charges that only fresh tuna is worthy of a good restaurant.  Those days are gone, thank goodness and people are much more open to trying preserved fish.  I love fresh sardines, tuna and anchovies in season, but I love a well made, artisan preserved fish  just as much.   Judging by the turnout at the Slow Food Tuna Canning Class, I am not the only one.

Fisherman Jeremy Brown says that, although many people are not aware of it, the Washington coast is a rich fishing grounds for albacore tuna (this should not come as a surprise to anyone who remembers the Bumblebee Tuna processing plant in Astoria, Oregon).  Jeremy arrived at the Canning Workshop with 1000# of albacore tuna steaks that he had caught himself while cruising about 40 miles out in the Pacific Ocean off the mouth of the Columbia river in late October, 2011.  The fish had been frozen whole on his boat to safeguard its pristine freshness, although the same canning method can be used for freshly caught fish during the actual fishing season with even better results.  Jeremy brought the albacore to Sunday’s class in several coolers, as  2 inch thick steaks cut from the still frozen fish.

The event took place at a catering facility in South Park (you know, between Boeing Field and Burien) that was more like a warehouse than a kitchen, which is to say, it was cold outside and it was cold inside.  Inside, a series of workstations were set up for cleaning and trimming the tuna, preparing the jars and other ingredients and for actually packing and closing the jars.  Outside a row of gas burners had been set up to accommodate the pressure cookers that would be used for cooking the tuna and sealing the jars.

The first step in the canning process is turning the albacore steaks into skinless, boneless filet pieces.  This was complicated a bit by the fact that the tuna was still very cold, and this, combined with air temperature on this bright winter morning  that hovered around 40 degrees, made for cold, numb hands that refused to answer to my commands.  Still, I consider myself fairly handy with a knife;  I found the process of cleaning and trimming the steaks pretty manageable.  If using fresh fish, it would be even easier  as one could simply remove the entire filets whole instead of cutting a little bit out of a large number of steaks.

The next step is to trim the tuna filets to size for packing in jars and preparing  the other ingredients for the preserves.  Jeremy recommends keeping the recipe simple to better feature the flavor of the tuna;  in addition to the albacore filets, his recipe for canning tuna only calls for good quality olive oil, salt and a bit of carrot.  Jeremy calls the carrot his “secret ingredient” and claims that it adds just a touch of sweetness to the tuna.

The amount of olive oil that Jeremy uses is much less than I would has guessed.  I kinda thought that you would almost fill the jar with olive oil ,but his recipe calls for just a few tablespoons.  After filling the jars, the rims must be wiped carefully to assure a good seal and long shelf life for the preserved tuna.

The lids are put on only hand tight, although hand tight is pretty tight judging on Jeremy’s demonstration…strong hands.  Now that the jars are filled and closed, all that remains is to cook the tuna while at the same killing any bacteria inside and giving the jars an airtight vacuum seal.  This is where a bit of old fashion technology comes in:  the pressure cooker.  I personally had never used one of these, but my grandmother had used one to can everything from beef tongue to creamed corn to white beans.  According to the USDA, a standard home canner (you know, the big pot with lid in which you boil Mason jars to seal them) can only safely be used for canning high acid or high sugar content foods…tomatoes, for example, or jams, or pickles.  Everything else should be canned in a pressure cooker.

Once you get over the fear of using a piece of equipment that looks as if it comes from a Fritz Lang movie, a pressure cooker is not that hard to use.  You stack your jars or cans in the cooker, add a few inches of water, seal the cooker tightly with its hand screws, and put it on a source of heat.  When the pressure gauge reaches the required pressure, you start the timer and continue cooking for the required time, adjusting the heat as necessary to maintain the pressure level.  In canning the tuna in jars, Jeremy brings the pressure cooker to 15 psi and keeps it their for 90 minutes.  Then he removes the heat and waits until the pressure descends to about 5 psi before opening the pressure cooker and removing the sealed (hot!) jars.

I returned home Sunday afternoon with 12 half pint jars of freshly canned, Washington Coast albacore tuna.  I am looking forward to trying it for the first time this evening;  I am thinking of a marinating the tuna with a bit of Bermuda onion, red vinegar, some of the olive oil from the jar, sea salt and black pepper, and serving it on a simple salad of endive, avocado, and oranges.

Although there is not much more to the process that I have described here, I will post soon a more formal recipe.

Note that the amount of brine below is enough to make about 4 pint jars of pickled asparagus.  Plan on 1.5 – 2# of whole asparagus for each pint of pickles to be made.  The spices, garlic thyme and bay measurements are given for each pint jar of pickles.