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Timelapse Videos of Mushrooms Dehydrating

This is a very, very short video showing mushrooms dehydrating.  It’s not very exciting – unless you’re geeked out about mushrooms or dehydrating – in my case this is like a double feature:

Yes, I get excited about that.

I’ve been thinking about drying mushrooms all day.  It started with a near real-time chat on our FaceBook group with one of my favorite preserving authors in the world (Gloria Nicol from The Laundry).  See, we dehydrate mushrooms and make gravy out of them.  Or noodles.  Or all sorts of other things.

If you’ve been considering buying a dehydrator (there’s lots of tips here and here) and you like mushrooms, I highly recommend you do the following:

  1. Buy some commercially dried ones (they won’t be as good as what you’ll make but they are a lot cheaper than buying a drier first).  Buy lots and don’t go fancy – quantity is a good thing here.
  2. Freeze them for a few minutes to make them brittle.
  3. Fire them through a spice or coffee grinder and into a fine powder.

Add the powder to anything (pasta sauce, stock, bread dough, gravy, stir fry - you get the idea) and enjoy.  And, for those of you with kids, this is a great trick to sneak in more veggies.

If you can resist mushroom powder you might not need a dehydrator.  But, if you’re a mere mortal (like we are), you’re likely to fall into its grasp…

Dehydrating food has changed our kitchen – and that’s why I get excited with that silly video.

 

My First Japanese Knife (MCUSTA ZANMAI PRO HOCHO)

I have been curious about Japanese knives for a long time. The opinions are generally fairly polarized – people either love them or they’re not a fan.  After years of wondering if they were worth the investment, I decided it was time to take the plunge and see for myself:

This is a HOCHO knife.  It’s a form of Santoko and is an all-purpose kitchen knife.

Most Japanese knives have a very different edge than others.  I am used to a symmetrical edge – if you looked at most of my blades, you’d see that the edge is like a peak of a mountain and but sides of the knife curl towards the blade to create the edge.  These knives are different – one side is flat while the other curves into it.  To explain as a ration, most knives have an edge that comes from 50% of the left side of the knife and 50% of the right while most Japanese Knives change that balance and go as far as 0% on one side with 100% of the curve coming from the other. I suppose this is why the first question that Eugene (from Knife, Toronto) asked me if I was left-handed or right.

The Zanmai Pro is close (but not perfectly) to being a 50-50 ratio but does have a slight bias.  Using an automated sharpener on this knife (or a person who doesn’t know that) will likely destroy it’s intent in a single sharpening.  I’ll be heading back to Knife for one of their workshops where they teach you to use a stone to properly sharpen your own blade (they will also sharpen it for you).  I am told that this blade will get even better after a few sharpening sessions.

Japanese Knives are also known for cutting as you pull the blade through an item as opposed to pushing them through.  This is very useful, especially for more delicate items like fish as it will cut the item without crushing it.  Remembering to cut like that is taking some adjusting but it’s fun to experiment.

It’s a little too early to pass any kind of real verdict on this tool other than to share that I’ve been using it for a few weeks and have been loving it. It’s well-balanced, efficient and feels like a tool (in the best of ways).  I’ve used it for vegetables as well as a variety of proteins and it has been awesome!

What’s your favorite kitchen knife?

Recipe: Braised Wild Boar Butt Steak and Ramps

I have learned more about meat in the last 3 years than I have my whole life.  My biggest learning: there’s still lots more to learn.

We’ve virtually eliminated purchasing most of our groceries from large grocery stores in the last year.  It didn’t happen intentionally and it’s not an absolute but it just seemed to be a natural progression.  Part of that transition as included purchasing far less meat and, other than the occasional restaurant meal of unknown origin, we’ve been able to stick to the results of our hunting efforts or a giant percentage of small-farm and mostly local meat. 

Read more

The Final Stop on the Tour

We’ve made it through the new index – today is the final day.  We’ll be returning to normal posts and working on some features in the background to surprise you with in short order.

Today’s section is the smallest – it’s about cooking techniques.  There will be more to come on this but for now there’s some fun content (including how to cook a whole roast over a campfire):

We hope you’ve found your way around.  We’re getting excited to launch a bunch of new recipes and articles at you in the coming days (we’ve been cooking our tails off).

Thanks for checking out our new home – As always, we love feedback so any suggestions are welcome!

The Tour Continues: Our Guide to Ingredients

We’re on the second-last day of our tour and almost back to regular posts (although we’ll still be making a lot of enhancements as we settle in).

Today’s post is all about ingredients.  These posts are about the bare essences of real food.  We discuss cheese, hot peppers and other food we cook with.  If we fall in love with a new type of vinegar, you’re sure to find it here.  You’ll also find awesome tips like how to store asparagus, a lexicon and review of a tonne of different hot peppers, how to break down a chicken, the economics of buying grassfed beef and more.  This is all about the ingredients that go into our food.

What you won’t find are recipes (click here for our index of preserving recipes and here for our index of cooking recipes).  There’s a separate index that will be coming so you can find recipes by ingredient but that’s a few weeks away still.

We hope you’ll explore some of our archive of ingredients – here it is:

Some of the categories are a little thin but our new format makes that easy to identify now so we hope you’ll stick around while we grow into our new abode!

Our New Home Tour Continues: Articles on Drinking

We continue the tour of the new hierarchy of WellPreserved today with a tour of our articles on drinking – both alcohol and non-alcohol.  Think of this as our bar – pull up a stool and pour yourself a glass of your choosing.

We have:

We hope to have the new menu system up by Wednesday or Thursday and then we’ll be back to our regular posting – we’ve got a lot of new recipes coming as well as some coverage of Terroir (an awesome hospitality conference that we’ve attended for 3 years) that will introduce you to some Chefs, a forager and the craziest community of food creatives that I’ve met in recent memory!

The Guided Tour of People, Projects and Things We Love

From the moment we launched WellPreserved we wanted this project to bring attention to people, organizations and things that made a difference.  We don’t use the word ‘love’ in mild context for this section – these are projects that we feel deserve attention and support and we hope you’ll enjoy reading about them.

The tour is nearing it’s end – and we’re approaching the reveal of our new approach to navigation which we hope you’ll love.  In the meantime, let us know what you think!

Happy Sunday!

Tour: Archive of Editorial and Articles of WellPreserved

We’re continuing our tour of our new home today – this time we’re sharing the 200+ editorial pieces we’ve run over the last 3 years. These include thoughts on slow food, sustainability, hunting, travel, event reviews and more.

This also includes our “Special Series” section of articles. These are unique in our navigation as they are the only articles that will always appear in two different categories at the same time. These articles were published as sets (for example my diary of moose hunting from 2009 is one of them) and were meant to be read in order at the time. But they also fit into out other categories (for example, the moose diaries are also part of the section on moose hunting). We recently shared a series on buying, cooking, eating and making stock with lobster. If you wanted to read the series from start to finish, you’ll find it below. But if you’re only looking for a lobster recipe, you’ll find just 2 of the 6 articles in that series in our recipe database as the others relate to buying and eating lobster.

We’ll be rolling out the navigation soon enough – for now you can browse around our past – let us know what you think!