Archive for the ‘Recipes’ Category

I managed to obtain one Imperial gallon of maple syrup at a cost of $45.00. That’s a pretty fair price these days. What I have is dark syrup, which should have more nutrients – and flavour – over light syrup.

I am trying to decide what to do with it as far as some homemade wine. I’ve come across a few different recipes – all using American measurements. The one that seems the most popular – and easiest is John Gorman’s maple wine which calls for 8 to 9 pints of maple syrup, then water added to bring it to 5 gallons. An Imperial Gallon contains about 4.8 US quarts. So going by Gorman’s recipe, that should do 2 1/2 US gallons, or about 9.5 litres. But then, what yeast should I use? I suppose the best thing to do would be to make about 9 litres of maple wine and water solution and test the SG, and make some decisions about what potential alcohol I want while considering whether I’ll want dry or sweeter.

Or maybe I should just try Gorman’s recipe and see what I end up with. Not sure if I will start this homemade maple wine this evening – taking a break from some other things, or wait until tomorrow. Probably a good time to take stock of my yeast strains in the freezer.

Although some consider a maple wine to be a mead, or “mead-like,” some refer to it as an “acerglyn,” but I think this would be more correct if honey is also used in the recipe in addition to the maple syrup.

Decisions, decisions!

Well, I hope she’s right! When I posted the Potato Wine recipe, I quoted Judith Irwin: “The maturation period is important, as this wine improves greatly with keeping.” And yes, this wine is only about six weeks. When I racked it off sediment today, I had a very small taste – and it was mostly a flavor of demerara sugar. The specific gravity today was 1.002 – I was expecting that as when I started it was high at 1.128 based on Irwin’s recipe.

It has cleared quite nicely on it’s own but there remains much trapped gas. I’ll spend some time tomorrow degassing it and then I’ll probably rack in another month, have a taste, probably add potassium sorbate because of the remaining sugar and then let it bulk age for awhile before bottling.

And that’s about all there is to report on the potato wine for now.

I did manage to get out fly fishing today. The afternoon looked as if it was going to turn out fairly decent – partly cloudy. When my “wee man” and I arrived at the small lake we were going to fish, we sat down and had a bite to eat first and then got into fishing. About half an hour, it began to rain. A few minutes later, I had a nice rainbow trout on the end of my line. As soon as that rainbow hit, the rain started to come down in a torrent. Bravely, the wee man stood by with the net while we got soaked. After the fish was netted, David decided he was heading to the car to get out of the rain. I was not long after him but left my gear in the hopes the rain would break and we’d return. It did stop after about half an hour – and I was able to give Colleen a call to let her know I’d caught a fish, knowing she’d be pleased!

We walked back to the water, had a few more casts when the rain started up again. And this time, thunder and lightning not far off. I decided to call it a day, but at least after a long winter, I did hook and land a fish the first time out. The fish will be breakfast.

There will be lots of potatoes in my diet over the next little while. But being from Northern Ireland, I shouldn’t have any problems with that!

I was in an experimental mood today and thought I’d try a recipe for Potato Wine that I found in a book. But first, I needed to find some ingredients I did not have in hand: Citric acid and Amylozyme. Wasn’t sure exactly where I’d find them but on a hunch which turned out to be a good hunch, I called Bob over at Orangeville Winemakers. Sure enough Bob had the Citric Acid. “Amylozyme?” he asked. “What’s that for?” I told him it was an enzyme used to break down starches. “I have Amylase which does that.”

Yes, the same thing, I think. The book that the recipe is in was published in the UK so some terminology might be different. Now that I knew I could get the ingredients today, I planned on making the wine in the evening. Here’s the recipe for potato wine.

This is a winemaking blog, and I’m not about to turn it into a cooking or baking recipe blog. However, good wine, whether purchased at the retail store or made at home goes well with food, of course!

Many will spend much time and energy pairing wines with the food they will eat. And there’s nothing wrong with this at all. Wine can compliment a dinner, or it can leave a bad taste if not correctly paired with the food one is eating.

Another addition to dinner that we usually enjoy is some type of bread. (Perhaps I have too many hobbies – from fly fishing to winemaking to bread baking but I enjoy them all and sometimes, together! Although I’ve been known to take a certain flask with me when fly fishing, and sip some Bushmill’s Black Bush from it.)

A few years ago, maybe four, I came across a recipe in the New York Times, I think it was. It was interesting to me, relative to my winemaking hobby. We commonly make bread with yeast, just as we do our wines. Although I also enjoy making non-yeast breads such as Irish Wheaton and Soda as I grew up on it. But I digress – this recipe I found called for a small amount of yeast, no kneading of the bread, and instead, just time – lots of time – to allow the yeast to work, the dough to rise and the flavours to yield themselves.

I make it quite often and enjoy a slice with butter (it has to be real butter – not margarine) and a glass of red wine. Here’s how I make it:

Ingredients:

3 cups white flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon “Quick Rise” yeast
1 1/2* cups water

Notes:
Quick Rise yeast is the same as that used in bread machines
* it’s approximate. I usually need to add a few tablespoons of water to this amount.

Method:

Measure out flour into a mixing bowl.
Add the yeast and the salt to the water. Stir well.
Pour the water into the mixing bowl. Stir the water and flour so that you end up with a “shaggy” dough. I’ve found that the amount of water, 1 1/2 cups is only a guideline – some flours seem drier than others, and I need to add more. You are not looking for a soaking wet dough here, keep in mind. You’ll sort of shape it into a ball like form.

Cover the mixing bowl with your favorite brand of cling wrap. I have found the so called extra cling stuff made by Glad to be useless. It seems to stick to itself alright, but not to anything else. Saran wrap is better.

And that’s it for now! The above steps take all of five minutes. All you’re going to do now is treat that dough as if it was wine. You’re going to let the yeast go to work, all on their own, for at least 14 hours. So this bread won’t be ready until tomorrow.

14 or more hours later, place a piece of parchment paper on your work surface and sprinkle it with flour. You’ll also want to sprinkle flour over your hands too. This dough will now have become quite sticky. You should see lots of bubbles in the dough, and it will have risen considerably. It will also be sticking to the sides of the mixing bowl.

Roll out the dough onto the parchment paper, and quickly shape it into a ball, after turning the dough into thirds, over onto itself.

Cover the dough with a tea towel for another four hours.

After three hours of the secondary rise, turn your oven on to 450 and put a 4 to 5 quart crock pot that has a lid in the oven, but don’t put the lid on the pot. Let the oven warm up completely.

After the fourth hour (and you don’t have to be exact here – if you want to wait five hours, you can), roll the dough from the parchment paper into the crock pot. Jiggle the crock pot around a bit to have the dough be as centered as possible. Put the lid on the pot, close your oven door, set the timer for 30 minutes, and go have a glass of wine.

When the timer goes off, take the lid off the pot, and let it bake for another 15 minutes.

As it’s baking, your kitchen will fill with an aroma that just smells so good! And you’ll be tempted to cut off a slice of that bread immediately after you take it out of the oven. Hey, I’m not going to tell you not to do that – I enjoy a glass of new wine too – but if you just take the bread out, place it on a cooling rack, you’ll be able to hear it crackle as it cools down.

Use a serrated knife to cut this – you’ll have a crusty, delicious bread, good for almost any meal. And people will think you spent hours on it!

Enjoy!

If you read my blog back in July, you may recall that I started a blueberry wine from this recipe. About a week after starting, I racked into a one gallon carboy and since then, it’s been patiently (or perhaps I’m the one who has had the patience) aging and fermenting.

Since it’s been about two months, I decided to rack it yesterday, which gave me the opportunity to have a wee taste as well. Wow! It is already quite lovely – although I only had the tiniest of a sip, I can hardly wait to try it when it will supposedly be even better in about six months from now.

I let Wendy have a sip too. Her eyes opened wide and declared that it was the most different thing she has ever tasted, yet something she wanted to have more of in her mouth to savour. She’ll have to wait for that.

I also racked the raspberry wine as well. The wine itself is quite clear except for some continued bubbling going on with CO2 gasses escaping. The raspberry was not as impressive in taste – in fact, it quite tasted like raspberry juice still. I have faith it will improve with more aging however.

If you are interested, the specific gravity came for the blueberry was 0.990 and the raspberry 0.994.

I also added a crushed campden tablet to each gallon.

Wendy says I must make try making five gallons of the blueberry! Five bottles just won’t last very long, she threatens.

As I wrote just over a week ago, I started some ginger wine using this recipe. Tonight, I racked the two gallons into separate one gallon carboys. I was quite curious about how this would taste, so I snuck a wee sip after measuring the specific gravity, which was 1.010. Perfect for racking into the secondary fermenting vessels.

Well, it certainly isn’t like any fruit wine! It has a very unique taste as far as wines go that I’ve tried, and not disimilar to ginger beer. I suppose that shouldn’t be unsurprising as real ginger beer likely has the same base. We’ll just have a drink that doesn’t feel carbonated.

I used a little extra ginger, so the taste was quite lively. I could see this being a wonderful beverage for a cold winter night. As mentioned previously, I’m going to make a gallon of dry ginger wine, and another gallon sweet. In one of the secondaries, I will add a half cup of sugar every so often until no further fermentation takes place.

I can see myself making more of this, trying some other ingredients as well as I think it will be popular among my ginger loving friends. I don’t think a gallon will last very long.

And it’s going to be at least a year before this is ready.

This evening, I started some ginger wine. I found a recipe which I adapted for my own ingredients on hand, and doubled up as I want to make two gallons – one that is sweet and one gallon of dry.

It took me about an hour all together to chop up fresh ginger root, simmer it with raisins, sanitize my equipment, and get all the ingredients all mixed up. I likely could have spent less time but my brother called and chatted with me for a bit while I was in the middle of it all.

I’m very interested in how this will turn out. Ginger by itself has health benefits apparently – will the wine retain those? As well, I used demerara sugar instead of white sugar. This is something new for me.

If you are interested in the recipe, it’s right here!

For those following my wine making adventures, with all the recent nonsense going on I neglected to mention that I started a new batch – from Raspberries. The recipe for this is basically the same as the Blueberry wine recipe that I started the other day. I’ve noticed that I have visitors that have found their way to this blog using search terms on Google that include “wine making recipes.”

So for the benefit of those, here is the recipe that I used:

3 pounds of raspberries
4 1/2 cups of sugar, mixed into water to produce a gallon
1 Teaspoon of yeast nutrient
1 Teaspoon of pectin enzyme
1 Campden tablet
Yeast

The above ingredients, (except of course for the raspberries, sugar and water) may be obtained at your own local wine making supply store.

Again, this won’t be ready for 6 months or so before I can bottle it. I apologise for the long delay that will occur before I taste this!

Oh, I should mention that indeed I used nylon stocking in which I put the crushed raspberries. The proprietor at my local convenience store did look at me funny when I purchased pantyhose from him, and made some joking remarks at my expense. I think he believed me when I told him what the pantyhose was for.