The Harvest Moon by George Mason via
As the autumn equinox draws closer I’ve been busy making the most of my very small harvest this summer. I learned a lot in my second year’s planting but still have found myself with a smaller yield than I imagined. Some of the discrepancy is just my idealism slowly coming into alignment with reality. There’s only so much that can grow in the planters and pots that I’ve been using, and now that I’ve tried out a few different layouts I have a better sense of the limits of the space I’ve built. The herbs and leafy plants did really well, but my cucumber and pepper plants have struggled. The fruits are still full-size, fresh and very tasty, and I almost worship them for their singularity! Wanting to make the most of them has led me to return to another perennial obsession: preserving.
My first single-cucumber pickles used used the common quick pickle method of vinegar brining. The mixture is about 1:1 apple cider vinegar to water with a mixture of 1:1 of sugar and salt, as well as some dill and mustard seed. After bringing to a brief boil the mixture is added to the contents of the jar. I used dill flowers and a pepper from the garden with the cucumber, which is a very firm-fleshed pickling variety. The benefit of this method is that the effects are almost immediate, they’re ready to eat the next day and will keep for at least a month. If theyre canned properly and pasteurized, they’ll last 18 months on the shelf before their taste starts to change. I made mine a little too garlicky and ultimately I don’t prefer the vinegar sharpness of these acidified preserves on their own but they’re good in certain places, like with smoked fish or pork or on a sandwich.
My tomato plant has actually come out quite prolific! It was labeled as a “sandwich” variety and definitely hasn’t disappointed in that category. I’ve made quite a few caprese sandwiches on open crumb bread, usually with a few giant basil leaves from the garden as well. They stand out even in less tomato-centric meals too, like roast beef sandwiches and burgers. When I pick a less-than-perfect fruit sometimes I’ll pulp it on a cheese grater and make pa amb tomàquet, a Catalan spread with olive oil on garlic rubbed toast. Among my relatives who also garden, fresh tomatoes have always been a proud topic— and I can now say that I understand!
My garden is situated on our patio, surrounded on all sides by flowers, which I’m sure has helped the fruiting plants to be as productive as they’ve managed to be. For most of the day the buzzing coming off the flower beds is actually pretty loud. Sometimes when I’m passing by I’ll stop and bend down to look closer at the work that the bumbles and honeys are doing so enthusiastically. They seem blissfully unaware of the happy spectacle they make. When its quiet at night sometimes I imagine them back in their hives. Besides my garden they’re responsible for pollinating the pear trees scattered through the nearby forest, resulting in their many fruit-crowded boughs. These are also a favorite gathering place of a different wildlife cohort— squirrels who either enjoy the fruit as food or more likely the fermented drops at their base. Whether this is for their slight alcohol content or else just an appreciation of the fine changes in taste and texture that fermentation confers is unclear. One wonders about the palette of a pear appreciating squirrel…
For my part, my taste has recently found its destiny in fermented vegetables. I’ve always really enjoyed pickles, since a bizarrely early age, but to my knowledge those weren’t fermented pickles. This is sometimes expressed in the naming nuance of pickled-x versus y-pickles. Typically a pickled-something is canned raw in an acidified brine, usually involving vinegar. Fermentation most commonly uses a culture of Lactobacillus bacteria to create lactic acid over the course of feeding on the vegetables themselves, which then preserves them in an altered state. The added delight in fermentation is the flux the vegetables undergo as the culture digests them, usually imbuing an interesting depth to their flavor. Vinegar itself can even be made by fermentation, and live culture vinegars can be used as a kind of middle ground between the two ways of making a ‘pickle’.
I tried to ferment some full-sour pickles at the end of last summer but all of my jars except one got mold before I could eat them. When the vegetables float or otherwise break the surface of the brine, or if you open the jar to release gas from the bacteria, the risk of actual rot rises. I was careful then and even boiled each jar before filling it, but it didn’t seem to matter ultimately. I took a little time to find some reference books on fermenting this time and discovered two simple solutions that possess an alchemical kind of flair. Using a glass or ceramic weight to keep the vegetables submerged, and installing airlocks in the lids of the jars limits the mold risk considerably. An airlock releases you from needing to open the jars to “burp” them. Expanding pressure can simply vent through the water trap in the airlock, and practically nothing can travel back into the container.
For my first time using the new gear I wanted to try out a bunch of vegetables to see how the lacto culture took to them. These are all “wild” ferments, so the bacteria comes from the vegetables themselves. Some vegetables like cucumbers have stronger natural cultures than others. I started with the recipe for full sour pickles from last year, using cucumbers and jalapenos from the garden, which clouded up after only a couple hours. Because I cut my cukes into spears the ferment went really quickly, maybe even too quickly! They started going soft before the brine was very sour, but they still have a pretty interesting semi-sour taste. The next batch will be using whole cucumbers so that they’ll stay firm for two or more weeks while a properly acidic lacto builds up in the brine. I’ve also come across a tip to use certain leaves and even teabags to introduce tannins to the brine, which also apparently help keep things crisp.
The next jar was filled with cherry tomatoes and basil from the garden as well as some garlic, and only fermented for a few days before being capped and refrigerated. The tomatoes taste almost like they’ve been sautéed with the other ingredients, they’re a little more soft, sweet and salty. The pulp is a little vinegary but then has a buttery aftertaste, almost like a confit!
Next I made a simple giardiniera, with cauliflower florets, jalapenos, chillies, celery, carrots and garlic, which will be ready after a week and is already making a nice smell through the airlock. When I tasted a little piece of califlower to check it’s progress I was surprised at how blended all the flavors had already become after only a few days. I filled the biggest jar with firm green tomatoes, chillies and garlic. Sour green tomatoes are probably my favorite fermented food of all! They clouded up after only a day but they’ll probably need to ferment for more than two weeks for the culture to get to the center of the slices.
I really want to have a garden that I can grow all of these ingredients in someday. I’ve always dreamt of being able to grow my own food entirely but I think I would be happy to settle for being self sufficient in just pickled things.
2018 harvest moon ecliptic via
The autumnal equinox happens to fall on the last day of the full moon this month, the harvest moon. The name is among an otherwise kind of problematic set of names for the full moons of the year erroneously attributed to Indigenous People by early American settlers. These have taken up their own place in pseudo history as a part of American folklore, but the harvest moon dates back several hundred years earlier, to Europe. Its origins trace to the way the full moon coincided with dusk and illuminated an extra hour of work in the fields at the time of harvest, for several days near the equinox each fall. The reason it rises at the same time for a few nights in a row in the northern hemisphere is because the moon’s orbital motion at the start of autumn forms a very shallow angle to the eastern horizon.