Island views

During my most recent trip to England, I ended up by a lucky accident staying in Canon From Court, a housing association and farming community in Herefordshire. The community aims to be as self sufficient in food as possible, and keeps goats, who are milked by members of the community in rotation. Not being a man to let such a prime opportunity to learn a practical skill pass by, I promptly volunteered to help with the milking of the goats, and over the week I stayed there, became sufficiently proficient at it to be left doing it on my own.
Back home, I found out that Ciara still didn’t share my new enthousiasm for goats (may be it has something to do with the fact that she did have some early on in her island life), and, since the 2 milking ewes we got in September are currently dry (and will not lamb before March), it looked like my newly aquired milking skills weren’t going to be of much immediate use.
Unless….
Yes, two of our Connemara mares have foals at foot, and therefore are currently in milk. Surely, if they milk mares in Central Asia, why not on Clare Island?
I separated Freya (a four year old mare born on the farm), from her foal for the day, putting both of them in separate sections of the sheep pen, so that they could still talk to one another over the fence, but the foal wouldn’t be able to suck, and in the evening, came along with a bucket to give it a try.
To my delight, Freya (who in fairness is an exceptionnaly quiet mare, and, being a first time foaler, doesn’t know what the “normal” procedure is), just threw a mildly suprised glance at me and stood there while I fumbled with her udder. I came back to the house with a cup of mare’s milk, and I have been milking her every day since.
As it turned out, I was lucky.
Milking mares can be a dangerous business. Their udder is between their powerful back legs, and most mares are not too happy with anyone other than their foal fumbling with their udder, kicking out at the offender. When I (half heartedly) tried with Daisy, our older mare, she made it clear to me that if I insisted, she would have to kick this stupid idea out of my head, and Bella (who isn’t in milk anyway) also objected (although in her case I had the feeling that, because we are such good friends, there could be room for negociation). But in any case Freya didn’t flinch. It probably helped that I had gotten her use to having her udder touched earlier in the year, before she foaled (this is common practice with first time foalers, as it helps to prevent the mare kicking at the newborn foal trying to suck).
Also, as it turned out, a mare will only allow herself to be milked if her foal is present (this is why, on all the photos of mares being milked, that you will find on the Internet, the foal is always near the mare), so I had accidentaly set things up right. Indeed, on a couple of occasions since, when her foal accidentaly got out of sight while I was milking her, Freya immediatly started to object.  She is not aggressive and won’t kick, but she twitches her tail and moves away from me. But as long as her foal is nearby, she stands perfectly quiet, munching at her hay. I don’t even have to tie her (I don’t like tying up horses, anyway).
For the first few days, I just brought the two of them to the sheep pen in the morning, put them in separate sections of it, and fed them both. Then, in the evenings, I would come up with my bucket, milk her, and then let the 2 of them together for the night. After a few days, I decided I would try and wean the foal completely, and separated the two for the night, but as it turned out, this was a bad idea.
Beside the usual whinnying with the 2 of them calling at one another, as soon as I took the foal away from her, Freya started drying out. I was getting less milk in two milking sessions, morning and evening, with no foal sucking, than I had with just the one evening milking and the foal sucking during the night. So I promptly went back to having the two of them together during the night, separating them (and feeding them separately) during the day, and milking the mare only once, in the evening. With this method, I am getting about a litre of milk every day, which is perfect for our needs. The whole operation takes about 20 minutes of my time every day (including the time it takes to separate the 2 in the morning).
What’s mare’s milk like, you may ask?
Well, it’s thinner than cows milk, having a lower fat and protein content, and it is noticeably sweeter, being much higher in lactose (that’s why it can be fermented). It has a mild taste, and apparently, it’s easier to digest than cows milk. I haven’t tried to make kumys yet, but that could well be my next fermentation experiment
I’d love to hear from anyone else who has experience milking mares.

Christophe

Those of you who have read this blog regularly know that I am very concerned about a probable food crisis and about food security (see my previous posts about population and agriculture, and about GM food and the upcoming food crisis).
Being a practical man, I look for practical solutions and in this case, this means working toward self sufficiency in food. This is one of the reasons why we produce most of our vegetables and are looking into grain production (see the post about Growing grain).
One key area of food self sufficiency is the ability to store food for longer periods of time, so summer surpluses are available in the winter, when the gardens and orchards do not produce much.
Over the past year, we have tried various methods of preserving food. Freezing is the easiest option, but it is not entirely satisfactory because to store any serious amount of food this way requires an initial investment and a lot of energy, but mostly because power cuts (which are likely to become more frequent) make it unreliable. Canning and bottling (which we will look at in further posts) are better options and we have successfully bottled some of our tomatoes and courgette surpluses this year, and have made vast amount of apple chutney and pasteurised apple juice last year, but the process requires large amount of energy, as the food has to be pasteurised, and in most cases, cooked, before storage.
You will also know from our previous post that we have also tried successfully lactic fermentation of vegetable, a traditional method of preserving food (think of sauerkraut, but also of Kim chi, the Korean national dish). Lactic fermentation gives excellent results and we will certainly keep using it, but today’s post is about our latest experiment in food preservation, the solar dehydrator.
We have been drying herbs from the garden for a few years, but hadn’t really found a satisfactory way to do this, in the sense that we had to use a dehumidifier for days in the attic before the herbs were dry enough for long term storage. So this year I decided to try something different. For 106 euros, I got an electric dehydrator, which works fine but still uses at least 250 w of electricity.
The idea of a solar dehydrator came up almost by accident. I had seen a very large solar dehydrator used for commercial dried herb production in a farm in the South of France, but hadn’t really thought of doing a scaled down version until I looked on the Internet and found out that it had already been done.
As we had a woofer with good carpentry skills here at the time, it ended up being one of his project. It took him a day to build the box, and another day to build the solar heater. This is what the result looks like:

On top is a drying box with drawers make of Insect screen (stretched on a wooden frame). The drying box has a large rectangular hole at the bottom in which the top of the solar heater fits neatly, held in place with 6 bolts. On top of the box is another hole for the solar powered fan (you can see the little solar panel on top of the roof of the box).

The solar heater is a wooden box containing a sheet of corrugated iron, painted black, with a sheet of clear plastic to cover it.

The air circulates through the solar heater, which has a series of large round holes at the bottom (not clearly visible on the photograph), and comes out at the top into the drying box (through another series of large round holes), pretty hot. The small solar powered fan on top of the box sucks the hot air from the solar heater through the drying box.

We used:

2 sheets of 1/2 exterior ply (for the box, and also for the bottom of the solar heater)
2 lengths of 7×1 larch (for the solar heater) you could also use red deal / pine or even just treated timber)
1 sheet of clear plastic (recycled from an old roof)
1 sheet of corrugated (roofing) iron, 3 m long. Cut what you need for the roof of the box and use the rest for the solar heater
1/2 tube of silicone mastic (to make the solar heater airtight)
1 length 2×2 (framing for the box)
1 length of 2×1 (for the drawers inside the box)
3 meter of Insect screen, 600 mm wide (for the inside drawers)
1 small solar powered fan (a Google search will get you one for less that 50 euros, although if I was to do it again, I’d probably spend a bit more and get a slightly more powerful one)
1 roll of draught proofing strip (to make the door airtight)

Total cost around 100 euros, same as the electric dryier, but surely more eco-friendly!

Ciara didn’t believe that the thing would work, but after we dried a kilo of fresh mint in less than two (sunny) days in September, she had to admit that this is a lot more efficient than a dehumidifier in the attic. Later on, we also used it to dry chilli peppers, as, thanks to Frank and Christina diligence, we have a bumper crop of those this year.
The monster is now put away in a shed for the winter, but Theo is looking forward to selling loads of dried herbs in his farm shop next summer

Christophe

“This book is my song of praise and devotion to fermentation. For me fermentation is a health regimen, a gourmet art, a multicultural adventure, a form of activism, and a spiritual path, all rolled into one.” (Sandor Katz, Wild Fermentation, p.1)

In Wild Fermentation Sandor Katz, or Sandorkraut as he is nicknamed, brings fermentation out from the mouldering cupboards of pungent Northern Eastern European cuisine to present it as the edgiest of today’s food thinking.

As to whether the “wild” in the title designates the binding’s wacky fluorescents, assimilates the thinking to that of wild food, acknowledges the unconventional, even anti-conventional mindset from which the book is written or searches to highlight the experimental methods and DIY aspect of fermentation… I don’t know. We could assume it is a sort of all-encompassing wildness, or perhaps merely wild as opposed to straight.

For Katz, a self-proclaimed “fermentation fetishist”, fermentation is an integral part of a movement, a lifestyle, a sort of ecosystem even. He lives in a queer community, a “rural homestead” built from wood salvaged from a coca-cola bottling factory, rearing goats and chickens, powered on solar energy. Bound within this thinking Katz does not let his vision remain in specific potted form but always draws it out to explore larger issues such as community, harmonious living, sustainability, mortality…

Drawing widely from scientific sources, in the first chapter Sandor Katz outlines the health benefits of fermented foods. Although he flirts with complex formulae and equations he lets the facts surface to show that: fermentation preserves food, breaks down nutrients into more digestible forms and removes toxins from foods… on a primary level, the living cultures contained in fermented foods ease digestion and facilitate the assimilation of nutrients. And this is it: the consumption of live foods offers a spiritual and practical interaction, interdependence with what we eat. We can move then from the near passive consuming of long dead food, to a creative, transformative action.

An invitation to commune, to communicate with our living entourage – his is a (brave) positive reading of contagion (contact, Latin : con-tagere, touch with) as a form of life-giving communion as opposed to the foreboding it evokes in this double-glazed anti-bacterial fear era.

Katz calls for co-existence with bacteria and creating what he calls microbiodiversity. His thinking encourages a shift in the mindset, on one level dispelling the contemporary hygiene frenzy myths, pointing out that certain bacteria are very important for the functioning of the immune system and also provide competition for heavier more potent bacteria, and on another proclaiming a possible and positive interconnection with the surrounding life forces. From decomposition and decay to life, reproduction and transformation…

In the following chapter Katz sketches out an anthropology of fermented foods, recalling the meads that wizened the oracles’ tongues, remarking on the sacred qualities pertaining to these foods and dating fermentation to pre-arable farming times, even questioning as to whether it were not the discovery of fermented grains itself that caused nomadic peoples to settle, in order to enjoy the elixirs of the harvested crops…

He then looks at fermentation as a means of revolt amidst a mainstream culture of mass produced, plastic packaged foods. With sections entitled : Cultural homogenization; Fermented stimulants and the rise of globalization; Resisting the commodification of culture, he outlines how “we can merge appetite with activism and choose to involve ourselves in food as cocreators”.

And yet this a highly practical guide to home fermentation. The following chapters and the bulk of the book is made up of recipes. Recipes, yes steeped in anecdote and dilemma – the raw cheese question for example, but very clear, accessible, easy to follow recipes. Some of the foods we know well: yogurts and cheeses, sauerkraut, sourdoughs, miso, beers, wines and meads, and then many others exotic, unheard of and to experiment with. The concoctions are wicked. And, for Katz, fermentation is not a science confined to a laboratory, the methods are simple, the apparatus readily available. Water, sea-salt, a vessel and off you go! He will suggest alternatives for any hard to find equipment, such as a balloon in place of an airlock stopper, and let you know where you can pick up crocks and other items. He has tried all the recipes himself, so abounds in tips for taste, ideas for what to do with the foods when they are ready,. He even gives his email address for fermentation troubleshooting!

We have already tried many recipes from this book. We have made batches of ginger beer, and bubbling pots of lacto-fermenting cucumbers and green beans are sitting on a shelf in our kitchen. We have even attempted a sort of carrot kimchi (a spicy Korean pickle) and we look forward to soon starting on sauerkraut, borscht and perhaps some miso pickles. Unlike freezing, dehydrating, jam making and sterilising, fermentation conserves food at no energy cost, it is therefore a highly efficient manner of preserving food. Out in the wild west of Ireland we hope that fermented food will help to sustain ourselves through the winter, when the garden production becomes too sparse…

In Wild Fermentation we enter into a lucid food process, a recipe book which is less about quantities and ingredients, and more about concepts, methods and practice. Encouraging a slight deviation in one’s mindset one can begin to observe, to learn by trial and error, to test according to our singular tastes, to experiment with what is growing around us, our climate and living conditions.

In a system so keen to dis-able, to render ignorant and dependent, Katz opens the other door: enabling, empowering, giving knowledge. Is this not the first true step of revolution?

Sandor Ellix Katz’s also has a wild fermentation website.

This book was reviewed by Olivia Heal, who is currently wwoofing at Macalla farm for the summer