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Kneading Conference West: day 1
Drove to Mount Vernon, WA yesterday: a long day, but a gorgeous drive through lush northwest Washington. Headed to the first Kneading Conference West, which is modelled on Maine’s long established and hugely popular Kneading Conference. The idea is to bring together bakers, millers, farmers and interested bystanders like myself – writers, home bakers and researchers.Arrived in time to take a stroll through the orchard and the many lovely gardens at the conference venue, the Mount Vernon Research & Education Centre – herb, vegetable, “water-wise”, Japanese and others. The land is owned by the university but orchard and gardens are managed by volunteers from the Master Gardener program. It was grey and spitty weather and the tables beneath tents in the field looked less than inviting, but we were cheered to learn these were for meals, and most of the workshops are indoors.
As was the first I attended: A Realistic Approach to Making Grain
Work – An On-Farm Example. David Mostue turned out to be a riveting speaker: after graduating from architectural studies he returned to a 230 acre family farm and set to repairing and upgrading the century-old infrastructure and rethinking its purpose. It had been started as a pear orchard, but pears are one of the many crops that have become, as he put it, a casualty of international trade and scale: labour is cheaper elsewhere, and they’re a labour-intensive crop.He spoke well enough to fix a couple of dozen of us to our seats in a very small room for about three hours. He covered the practical issues around making it as a grain farmer, whether large or small scale. He pointed out that grain is a great crop for poor soil and challenging conditions – his farm is in the Rogue Valley in southern Oregon, where temperatures average 95-100 degrees fahrenheit in the summer, and there’s a lot of heavy clay: this means that a crop like winter wheat (so named because it grows through the winter, but is harvested in summer) which can be planted in the fall is a better choice, since clay is sodden all winter and rock hard in summer, so has a small window for planting in spring.
He spoke about the qualities of different wheats – of particular interest to the bakers, and to farmers like him who need to understand the uses to which bakers put their flour. High gluten (protein) content flour, used in industrial baking, needs high soil fertility (often using artificial fertilizer). Artisanal bakers can cope with a lower protein flour (11-12%), because they use fermentation and long risings instead of the large quantities of dry yeast typical of high-speed industrial methods. Long risings, as Andrew Whitley will tell you, give the gluten time to develop and also make the bread more digestible. Lower protein still are soft white wheats (6-10%) that make pastry flour; or rye or alternative wheats (emmer, spelt et al) that are popular in artisanal baking. The highest gluten levels are in durum wheat (his clocked in at nearly 15% last year), used for semolina flour: Mostue had wanted to make his own whole grain pasta, which he found to have an unbeatable flavour and dense texture that made it more fliling than its commercial counterpart.
But of course nothing is simple, and Mostue explained the many other aspects of grain production – preparing the soil (he uses a five year rotation so that he can build soil fertility naturally, rather than using artificial fertilizer), seeding (we learned a lot about seed drills), weeding and harvesting (who knew combines could be so interesting?). He had progressive ideas about marketing the farm and its products, using social media but also building a market by getting people to understand and be interested in the farm; using innovative variations on standard CSA programs (including use of Survey Monkey for ordering), farm dinners… and plenty of wine (which they happen to produce on farm!)
Reluctantly we left for the fruit garden and 
a cider and goat cheese tasting, followed by abundant pizzas fresh from the mobile wood-fired ovens, and salads of wheatberries and donated vegetables – carrots and beets – that were roasted in the ovens, followed in turn by seriously good cookies from the 
Breadfarm. -
Eat Here Now… and we did
A glorious hot Sunday in the middle of Victoria, with food, music and more food. What could be better? The Downtown Public Market Society put on a great day in the interests of furthering interest in a permanent year-round downtown food market. While I don’t know how far that goal is from being realized, the group certainly soldiered on through a bleak winter with regular markets offered in Market Square.
Last weekend it gathered together some fine local food food talent for a sunny celebration that featured food stands from local farms and small producers, including Hilary’s Cheese – promoting his new shop in Victoria – and the usual mob scene around Salt Spring Cheese’s ample samples, and Cottlestone Apiary with their wildflower, raw creamed and orange-infused tastes of heaven.
Baked, canned and hand-filled goods too…
Lots of farmers around, including my Haliburton friends
and City Harvest, Madrona Farm, Sun Trio (with their gorgeous lemon cucumbers) and many more.
There were food tickets on sale – a very reasonable $1 per ticket gave you a sample from most booths, stocked with everything from “kaleslaw” to cream puffs, and I proved to my own satisfaction that it was possible to eat extremely well for under $10. The barbecued salmon and boiled corn stands were mobbed for most of the time we were there; there were tasty treats from the likes of Canoe Brewpub, Bliss, Relish, Choux-Choux Charcuterie, AJ Organics and others…so after taking in all that with a taste of music and lots of sunshine we finally left, sated and laden with produce.
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Preserving the harvest: apples
I came upstairs from a round of apple-wrapping to find some questions on apple preserving from Ruth, who is the lucky recipient of a quantity of hangingoverthefence apples.Like me, she had heard that wrapping apples individually in newspaper is the way to go. She’d read that coloured inks are toxic so to avoid those, but I’ve been told that Canadian newspapers use soy-based colour inks so they are ok (but glossy inserts are not). (I don’t know if this is really the case or not, so if in doubt, avoid them.) I’d heard it from the Compost Education Centre which suggests that you can add newspaper to your compost (for a “brown” layer), which means the apple wrapping can do double duty if you end up with some spoilage later in the season: you can just chuck the whole thing into the pile. The point of wrapping is to keep the apples from spoiling one another if they’re bruised or damaged. Lacking a root cellar, I am fortunate to have a little bar fridge that I use just for apples and it works reasonably well.
My first year of bounty, Adrienne gave me a wonderfully liberating tip: you can pee
l, core and slice apples and put them in ziplocks in the freezer – works brilliantly for cooking apples. Don’t worry if they brown a little en route to the freezer as they go brown when you cook them anyway. But I suppose if you can’t bear the thought of any brown, you can always dip them in syrup while you work, as the PickYourOwn folks recommend. But I don’t find they brown too badly if you work quickly on fresh and fully ripe apples. The ones in the picture were frozen a year ago with no syrup or preservative: I’d still use them in baking.If the apples are of a fairly firm texture you can slice and dehydrate them (my tree is a yellow transparent, which produces very soft apples great for applesauce but impossible for drying). Here are some instructions on drying apples in a dehydrator, an oven or a hot car!
I have an apple peeling machine which makes a lot of the labour-intensive aspects slightly less so. As long as you’re dealing with firm, regularly-shaped and very fresh apples. It doesn’t work well on my transparents which tend to be soft and misshapen. It’s also less frugal than I when it comes to peeling and coring: such is the trade-off with labour saving devices of all kinds.
Or you can make applesauce and can that – it’s a high acid food so you don’t need a pressure canner, just a pot large enough to cover the jars with water and process (boil) for 20-25 minutes depending on the jar size and altitude (again from the PickYourOwn website, good instructions on applesauce, with photos) I’ve made it with plums or quince and those are nice combinations; perhaps saskatoon-applesauce or raspberry-applesauce would be good if you have an alternative source of berries.
I own a centrifugal juicing machine so that’s what I use. Because my apples are very tart I always add carrots for sweetener (sugar as a last resort); or blend them with sweeter varieties or other fruit. This year I decided to use up some surplus jam from my larder, so I
heated that and added it to blackberries I’d picked, and strained the juice and used that for sweetener. I also used raspberries and carrots. I don’t have a recipe, just go by taste. I put the juice into jars or plastic tubs, cover them and freeze them. Because the liquid expands while freezing, if you’re using screw-top jars, be sure to leave the lids loose until the liquid freezes, to avoid any messy explosions.I have made apple butter in years past, but find I don’t use it.
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In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”
Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.
