There was a third quart that I wasn't sure if it was sealed or not, so we've started drinking one quart and I'm going to see if I can reprocess the other two this evening as I don't think we can drink 3 quarts in a few days. Sometimes reprocessing works, sometimes it doesn't. For at least one jar, I don't think the ring was on quite tight enough.
Maggie says they're leaf gulls, not a major problem, but there sure are a lot of them on that one tree!
Some kind of bug damage on this maple? (We have someone trimming the trees, he didn't recognize it, but we have an arborist coming out later today, she should know what it is, probably some kind of gull from bugs.)
I agree, nice loaves. I decided to wait until tomorrow afternoon to bake, it would have been well after midnight before I could have baked that recipe, because it takes close to 5 hours.
It may be inaccurate to call it gelling, but Ginsberg says the starches and the proteins bond over time as the cooled bread sets, reducing gumminess. In some cases he recommends waiting up to 4 days before cutting into a loaf. This bonding slows the rate at which the starches go stale, which is why many rye breads remain soft for a week or longer.
I may go ahead and start the semolina bread tonight, so we've got it for meals tomorrow.
Some of Ginsberg's recipes have you wrap the loaf (after it cools, I think) in plastic and let it sit 24-48 hours before cutting it. I haven't made one of those yet, I probably won't get back on the rye project until October, starting by building a new rye starter.
Rye bread has a much longer time for the starches to gel, wheat starch gels much faster.
I wound up with 7 quarts of tomato juice that are in the boiling water now, plus another 2 cups that we'll have tonight. I also wound up with 2 large bags of seeds, tomato peel and a few par-boiled tomatoes that are already in the freezer and will be used for batches of beef stock later this year or next.
The first sample of the juice was excellent. I'd forgotten how good home made tomato juice tastes.
2 of 7 quarts don't appear to have sealed, I must be out of practice with canning procedures.
We are out of semolina bread, but I'm not sure I've got the energy or time to make it today and do 30 pounds of tomatoes. And tomorrow's calendar is pretty full already.
It's cooler today, high is supposed to be 80, so I'm getting ready to process tomatoes.
You can make tangzhong bread with anywhere from about 5% to up to 40% of the total flour weight being pre-gelatinized, they all seem to come out reasonably well.
We had tuna melts.
Mice will crawl right up the stem of plants, no matter where they are relative to the house.
A few years after we moved to Lincoln we had sunflowers planted near the back fence at our duplex. They were about 5 feet tall with heads a good 8 inches in diameter. We watched over the better part of an hour as a squirrel would jump from the fence to the sunflower, which would bend down with the extra weight, knocking the squirrel off because he didn't have a strong grip, so he'd climb back up the fence and try it again.
Eventually he figured out that if he jumped on the back of the sunflower head, rather than on the face where the seeds he wanted were, he could get a much better grip, and then he just chewed through the back of the sunflower to get to the seeds. Persistent and smart!
I picked 3 large bowls of tomatoes today, in part because I hadn't picked much in over a week, but also because this looks like it will be the peak harvest. Some of the vines appear to be dying off, others just aren't setting fruit in this heat. It is supposed to be cooler soon, but that might be too late to get a final wave of fruit setting.
I'll probably make tomato juice and can it, I'm guessing after culling ones that are too far gone I'll still have at least 25 pounds to work with.
