Crooked

After all my brewing escapades and other things that have been going on here, I came back to the tools again. Wood-selection was a bit tricky, because all the good hawthorn is gone. I have some crooked bits left, and I was saving the one fine chunk I have for kuksas. I now have some gnarly pieces with twisted grain to work with, and not in every piece there is a spoon. Sometimes you see it right away, and sometimes you find that out when a piece unexpectedly splits or just turns out to be a right pain to carve. Today I had a go at a small crooked spoon.

The edges of this bit of wood splintered rather easy, and this hawthorn is getting harder as well. I have seen some people felling poplar earlier this week, and I might just drop by the site to see if I can get my hands on some.

The Plum-Project. Part 3 - Wine

This will be a write-up covering my first experience in the fascinating craft of brewing. It is by no means intended as a tutorial. It will simply cover what I have done, why I did it, and eventually how it turned out.

First I weighed out 3 kilograms of plums, and washed them under hot water. Then I transferred them to a food-grade bucket. I got my buckets from a snackbar franchise in the Netherlands. They get their sauces delivered in them and afterwards have no need for them. The good thing about these buckets, besides the lid, is that they are made of polypropyl, as opposed to the PVC that household buckets are made from. The PVC has a tendency to release chloride into your product. The bucket should be well sterilized before use. I do this by soaking them in a bleach-solution for a bit, and then rinse them very well. 

After I had a sterile bucket I put four liters of water on the stove to let it boil. While that was going on I began the noble task of crushing the plums with a potato-masher. This turned out to be no easy task, and I found out it is better to wait with this untill you poured some boiling water on them.

While crushing the fruit you have to be careful to not crush the stones as this will affect the flavour later. Once this mix is cooled down I added about 8 grams of pectinase, a pectin degrading enzyme, and let is stand around at room temperature for 24 hours. The pectinase degrades the cell-walls in the plums and this increases the amount of juice and therefore flavour you can get from them. 

After 24 hours (well, it might have been about 32) it was time to strain the liquid. I had my sister here to help, and that was very nice because holding stuff in place while pouring liquids through isn`t so easy while alone. We strained the fruit out of the liquid (that would at be called 'most') and pressed as much out as we could. A nice dirty job. 

 The most we boiled up, and once it was boiling we dissolved 1700 grams of sugar in it. This whole mix went back into a sterile bucket to cool down.

Once the most has cooled down, which takes quite some time, it is time to start the yeast. I mixed a good teaspoon full of yeast in about 2 dL of organge juice. If it goes frothy this proves that the yeast-cells are active. Leave this for 10 minutes or so. 

 The cooled down most still had quite some particles and stuff in it, so before I put it in the demijohn I strained it through a clean tea towel, yet again into a sterie bucket. After that I poured it into the sterilized demijohn using a funnel, and then added the yeast. In hindsight I could better have done this in the opposite order, as that would have mixed the yeast through the most better.

 In this picture, taken just after I put the airlock on the bottle, you can see that the yeast floats through the most in little clumps. Now, after a few days of bubbling the colour of the wine changed a lot, and all the clumps have disappeared. One day after the plum-wine was in its flask bubbling away I also started a batch of elderberry-port. I followed this recipe for that: http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60997&highlight=. It is a very clear tutorial made by a man who knows his buisness very well. Here are my projects side by side. I left some head-space in the port-bottle, because the man who made the tutorial says it will have a violent first fermentation. When things calm down a bit I`ll add the last bit of most that I am now keeping in the fridge in a clean coke-bottle.

I have really enjoyed my first ventures into the brewing-world. It is very satisfying to just look at the bottles bubbling away every now and then. It is so alive in there! For now the bottles are standing isolated from the ground and in a bucket. If things decide to become violent in there this will avoid a great mess.

The Plum-Project. Part 2 - Jam

Yesterday evening my sister and I got on with the plum project, and we made a large batch of jam. Here is how we did it.

First of all you need to find some jars, and clean them very well. First wash them with hot water and soap, and then fill them with hot water with a solution sodiumbicarbonate. Baking powder is good. Washing soda also works. The jars need to be this clean because you do not want your jam to become the food of some nasty yeast or other micro-organism.

When your jars are clean, put them upside down so that nothing falls in them (there are many fungal spores in the air, and they can and will fall into the jars if you don`t cover them or put them upside down). Then it is time to get on with the fruit. A good way to go about this is gather the family and make them all help you de-stone and slice the washed plums.

For the 3000 grams of plums we had we used this recipe:

Equal mass of gelatine-containing sugar for the mass of fruit.

 Then heat this up. If it is necessary, add some water in the beginning to keep the fruit and sugar from burning. This water will evaporate out later. Per 1.5 kg add the juice of 1 lemon, and the zest of half one. Also boil about 10 cm of cinnamon stick into the mix.

 Once the fruit begins to get softer and broken down, fish out the cinnamon-sticks and take a stick-blender and blend all the fruit untill it is a homogenous mass. Now you can put the cinnamon back in and boil it for a few minutes more. You`ll notice it`ll start thickening. The jam will thicken further after it has cooled down and the gelatine sets. When it is done, use a sterilized spoon to pour it in the jars. Be careful that the rim of the jar stays clean.

The jars should be put upside down while cooling. When it cools the volume of the jam decreases. This creates a small underpressure in the jar. Putting the jars upside down helps to preserve an airtight seal.

Cooling takes quite a while. I left them out overnight. The next day you are all set to enjoy all the jam you made. Here is our productions, minus some jars we have already given away.

We have now used about half of our plum-reserves. Today I will look into making plum-wine that should get us through another 3 kilos. My sister is looking into fruit-drying. That is something I know nothing about, and it will be interesting to see what she comes up with. Maybe I can interest her in a guest-article on here.

The Plum-Project. Part 1 - The strong stuff.

Brace yourselves for a sequence of non-spoon related posts! Last weekend my sister and I got a chance to pick around 10 kg of plums from our uncles plum-tree. We were a little bit too enthousiastic in picking plums, and therefore we now have to make a lot of things with all the fruit.

Today we made a start with one project. Plum-vodka. This will be our approach of a slivovice-type drink. We decided to experiment with two different approaches to make something good out of this. Approach one is the simple one. We took 200 grams of washed, cleaned and quartered plums, 50 grams of sugar and 400 mL of Vodka. We also added 5 of the plum stones to the mix. This will give the drink a little bit of a bite, so I am told.

We will shake this bottle daily for about two weeks, while we keep it on the counter. After this we will put it in some dark cool place for about 3 months. Then it is a matter of filtering, adding extra sugar if necessary, and bottling it.

Approach two: For this approach we boiled the plums with 100 grams of sugar and a dash of brown sugar. Boiling the fruit will break down the long sugarchains from the cell-walls, and this will result in a richer and sweeter drink. No stones in this mix either.

 We put the boiled mixture in a jar to let it cool. Before you add the vodka it needs to be under 78 degrees C at least, otherwise the ethanol will evaporate. I let it cool untill it was lukewarm, just to be safe. After that the alcohol was added:

We will treat this mix the same as the other one when it comes to shaking and storing. In three months from now we`ll see what both taste like and what they`ll need. We also made sure to document what we were doing now. Keeping a small journal with long-term projects is essential for me, because in three months from now I will not know what my exact plans were for these mixes.

Now there are so many plums left! Tonight we will make a few kilograms of jam, and later this week we will start a batch of wine. It`ll be my first brewing-project, so I am anxious to try this out.

Scooptydo.

This morning I had my first exam of the year, and I didn`t do to well. I guess I did good enough to pass but not with a result that I`ll be very proud of. Quite annoyed with myself about this I figured that I should sit down and carve it of. Carving for me is quite meditative and always slows me down. I suppose that those who carve recognize this feeling, and those who don`t should try it sometime and be convinced. I sat down with a bit of hawthorn that was too short for a spoon, and too small for a kuksa. That left me with not many other options than to make another scoop. I quite enjoy scoops. They are small and fun to make, and ideal for when the woodsupply is not ample. I settled for an eggshaped bowl with a raised rim where the handle meets the bowl. I like the light spalting in this one.

Here both scoops are side by side. they are comparable in size, but the latest one has a larger capacity. Different to the older one I shall be keeping this one unsanded.

Tea.

Today when I sat down to study, and wanted to take the teabag out of the pot, I was once again confronted with me not having a designated place to put teabags after I take them from the pot. Naturally, this called for an immediate solution, and that solution was that I`d carve something. Happily postphoning my studies (and regretting that decision later) I carved the following tea-bag/tea-egg holder.

A useful thing, really. It`ll get more use than many of my spoons.

Hawthorn Kuksa - Finished

Today I decided to go ahead and sand the hawthorn kuksa. Halfway through the job I remembered why I disliked sanding so much. It is a messy buisness. But in this case, the result is worth it. Ladies and gentleman, I present: A sanded, oiled kuksa, ready to be used.

Tomorrow it has been a week since I got my hands on the hawthorn, and I have used one third of it. Carving is really effective at keeping me away from what I should do. Like study. Here is what I have made over last week:

Three spoons, a scoop and a kuksa.

Thanks for reading :-)

A scoop and a kuksa in progress

Today I finished off a little scoop. It is in hawthorn, as that is the wood I have currently. The scoop was inspired by the work of a member in a spoon-related facebook group I`m a member of. It is a fantastic group to be in because your always inspired with new ideas, styles and techniques. Like this scoop. I have quite a bit to post today, but I`ll let the pictures do the talking for now.

 It is a small scoop, with a bowl-diameter of 6cm and 10 cm overall length.

I went ahead and sanded it. It is the first spoon I have sanded in months and months. I have been working on my tooled finish, and it is coming along well. In this case I wanted a really smooth surface because I wanted to see how the grain would pop out. There were hints of a psychedelic pattern in the grain, and I wasn`t disappointed.

Here are some more pictures. I am trying to work on the quality of those. There is lots of room for improvement there. I had good intentions to take pictures outside today, but the rain was so enthousiastic that I didn`t really dare venture outside.

Now for part two of my post. A kuksa. Two days ago I began working on a kuksa. The largest one I have started this far. I also did a picture sequence on how it progressed, but considering the lenght of this post I`ll save that for when it is finished. Here is a picture from the kuksa in its current state.

 I am considering sanding it, now that I have seen how the scoop turned out. I haven`t quite decided yet. Currently I am letting it dry slowly in a bag filled with wood shavings, hoping it won`t crack. I have removed a fair bit of the inner growth rings to be on the safe side. I think it`ll be fine.