Fall again, already?!

September 28, 2008

I swear, the color is two weeks early this year. And not just any old color, I mean shades of magenta, vermillion, alizarin crimson, violet, cadmium red, and a hundred shades in between. Long, gloomy, very wet summer, followed by a brief chill, and the maples, birches and their hardwood cousins are all morphing into the most eye-stabbing spectacle I have seen in my short five years here.

Now the sweet, faint hints of folks' woodstoves being stirred into activity again, and the sweep of cool breezes gets one in the mood to store nuts in the old burrow, if you take my meaning. We had a crappy tomato harvest, due to the soggy conditions, but for some reason got tons of cucumbers and a bumper crop of blackberries. So it's jammin' and picklin' time. After one failed batch of pickles, we realized one really does need to keep the cukes completely submerged. So the second batch is going just peachy, er, pickly.

It's almost too easy. You make a brine of maybe 10 percent apple cider vinegar-to-water, generous amount of salt, few garlic cloves, peppercorns, plenty of fresh dill, and plunge your cukes in over their heads, put something on top to keep 'em from floating up, and maintain at room temperature for a few weeks. Ecco qua --
Peeeeckles!

And along with this fun activity, I've become even more acutely aware of the importance of fermentation in my bread making. More than proper mixing, more than the type of oven or how hot it is or how much steam you put in or how long you bake . . .
if the dough is not fermented to perfection, the bread will not be exceptional. So I'm paying more attention to time, temperature, and the degree of maturity of my refreshment. Achieving the just-right degree of starter acidity, and then refreshing it for just the right amount of time at the right temperature is way harder than you think, unless you work in a laboratory. My shop temperature during this time of year fluctuates wildly. If I bring in a fresh load of flour, it might have been in my van overnight and gotten dow to 30 degrees. The water coming from the spring starts to get colder. And then as the nights get even chillier, everything in the building sort of curls up and shivers, and I have to be really vigilant about the temperature of my water when mixing refreshments and doughs.

Complain? Unh unh. I love this time of year. If for no other reason than the friggin' bugs start to die off. Man, have we had the mosquitos this year! They usually call it quits in early September. Not this year. I still have to wear long sleeved shirts. Bugs think I'm top sirloin.