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We’re continuing our tour of the new WellPreserved this week. So far we’ve covered our newly indexed recipe page as well as our Preserving Recipe index. Those two sections contain more than 300 recipes and represent about 15-20% of the content to be found at WellPreserved. Let’s continue to explore, shall we?
Today we’ll explore our preserving knowledgebase – there are no recipes here but you’ll find everything else here. Tips, tricks, advice, safety columns and background information on all sorts of things related to preserving. There are also articles about seasonal preserving, storage and tools we use for preserving.
Some of the sections are thinner than others but there’s a bunch of great content to be found below:
We’re taking a quick break from the tour of our new home to take care of some needed business. Specifically:
Home Ec is a non-competitive evening for a chance to meet people who share interests of food, community, conversation and enjoying each others companies. Newcomers are welcome and we do our best to make sure you’ll meet others and hopefully have a good time.
We have a different theme every month. This month it’s Finger Sandwiches. The Avro fits about 30 people so don’t worry about brining a lot but bring some tasties to share. This is the fourth monthly event and we’ve had newcomers at each one – let’s keep the streak alive!
Some of the crowd are passionate cooks who will go all out and others are far more casual – this is about participating, not about mastery or trying to show each other up. If you participate by bringing some tasties to share, you’ll get a one-of-a-kind badge (it’s actually a pin) like the Boy Scouts that shows the world you got game!
We’ll have people mark their plates so you know what you’re biting into (we’ll do our best as a community to describe each dish and help you identify which dishes contain meat, nuts or other things you may love or avoid).
We’re also teaming up with The Avro to create a designer cocktail. Emily and I are building something TEA-riffic this time after doing some consulting with Sean at Punk Domestics.
It’s 19+ because of liquor laws in Ontario. There is no cover and we’d love to see you there. you don’t have to RSVP but it helps us account for the number of buttons (you can do so by leaving a comment on this post or adding yourself to the facebook attendees).
We started the tour of our new website yesterday with a guided walk-through of our 130+ preserving recipes. We’re going to move on from that ‘room/ and into another large chamber of WellPreserved – our other recipes.
This section had weeks of debate; we were torn between including preserving recipes with regular cooking or separating them. We decided to keep them separate but you’ll see how we’ll give you the best of both worlds in coming days!
There are more than 160 recipes in this section (this kind of feels like launching two different cookbooks in two days). We hope you’ll check them out and let us know what you think. We’ll show you how you’ll find all this stuff soon but, for now, check it out here:
We’re open to feedback, any suggestions or ideas to improve. This has taken almost 2 years to hammer out and we’re positive we’re too close to it to see objectively!
The last two days have revealed about 20% of our new structure – we’ll continue the tour through this week and we hope you’ll stay around!
If you enjoy what you see, please consider supporting the project by leaving comments and sharing these posts with those you share with! We hope you like!
We’ve been dreaming of this moment for more than 2 years – that’s when we decided we needed to get our content organized and build a system to help you find your way around better.
In the coming days we’re going to give you a tour of our new home – a bit at a time. With more than 1,300 posts it can be a little overwhelming to try to digest in a single serving.
Like any new home, we haven’t quite worked out the kinks. We’d love your feedback and if you see something out-of-place, don’t be shy about letting us know (there were hundreds of hours of indexing and I’m sure we made some mistakes).
We’ll share how this will all work in a few days – for now, let’s start with one of the larger ‘rooms’ of our new home – our brand new Index of preserving recipes! There’s more than 130 recipes below – click on the category of your choice and you’ll be transported to recipes for each of the preserving types. Every link has contents though some are sparse (we don’t have quite enough furniture to fill this mansion – yet).
Stay tuned in the coming days for more features and content releases like this – in the meantime we hope you’ll have a good look around and please let us know what you think!
Last night I posted ‘The Last Post on the Old WellPreserved.’ I’ve decided not to migrate that post. A good friend of mine (David Newland) told me recently that you have to leave something behind in order to go where you want to be. He’s a wonderful story-teller and that story resonated with me. So, at some point in the next 1-48 hours, that post will be eaten my the magic Internet Monster and it’s sacrifice will bring you to our new home.
We’re moving in, in stages. We want to make sure we don’t break the fine China or lose some items during the move. I suppose that means there will be less of a ‘wow’ factor but it means that you’ll get to see some new stuff as it comes. The real hard work is now behind us and we’ll start adding some new features that we think you’ll like.
Here’s some of the new items that are here:
A new template. It’s cleaner and gives us many more options to tweak it. We plan on doing so. Hopefully you see a bit of that now.
Larger writing space (less scrolling for text and bigger pictures). We’ve also increased more than 25% of the ‘old’ pictures to be larger.
A more flexible format for publishing content.
The generic ads are gone. They were from WordPress. We’re not outlawing the idea of ads but the ones that were out of our control are gone.
A faster host.
Here’s some things that are coming:
All 1,200+ articles have now been indexed. I had announced that we’d be launching our new navigation system today but, as of time of writing (11:11PM), I’m not quite satisfied with it yet and the domain needs to update before I can finalize the testing. So you get a new look today but this feature is still a day or two away – it allows you to browse the contents far easier to find what you are looking for (i.e. pickling recipes vs dehydration recipes vs pasta recipes). That part has been 1.5 years of off-and-on-again work and we’re thrilled that every last one is now indexed.
Detailed indicies to look up ingredients, seasons and more. That’s a few weeks away but it will come – it’s much faster now that we’re moved in and organized.
More features – by switching to our own host we can now install more powerful tools (like embedding our store right within the site).
And we’re hoping for a few surprises on the way. For now we hope you like the new digs – and we are fully open to all feedback (although we may not be able to take action on all of it). So let us know what you think!
Update (6:40AM) There may be issues with the photos today; we’ll take a look when we get back from Terroir (a full-day conference on food in this great city). WhWhile the photos migrated in every test run, something’s fishy this morning!
Today is day 2 of converting the blog (you’ll see no changes here, yet) so it’s busy times here. The conversion kept me up until 2:00AM (because I was having so much fun, in truth) and I was out of bed at 7:00. The dog and I went for a walk and then I took a quick spin to the farmers market to get some leeks and to help inspire/ remind me why we work on this project. I’m getting excited to geek out!
The Brickworks is a reclaimed industrial area that time forgot and has been converted into this amazing community space that hosts, amongst other things, a year-round market.
The market has a new website that’s just launched today. It includes information on different food regions in Ontario, their vendors, principles and more. It’s awfully neat, check it out here.
I’ve been working on a surprise for you for a long time.
I work on it often. But it never seems to end.
I thought it would take a few weeks.
It’s well past a year.
So, I thought I’d raise the stakes and put some pressure on myself.
Dana’s away for the weekend on an awesome foodtrip and that means me and Schaeffer are having a boys weekend.
And, by Monday morning, I will complete the table of contents and indexing of this website. There’s a gonna be an entire weekend of geeking out – I figure by letting you in on the secret that I’ll be raising the stakes and increasing the pressure.
Here’s how Schaeff is feeling about it:
And here’s how I am (this is the before picture):
There better be a lot of coffee.
In all seriousness, I am a little intimidated by the goal – it’s a big one. But I’m so excited at the results and making our archive of more than 1,300 articles actually usable… It’s not going to be a complete relaunch of WellPreserved but it will be a significant step towards what we’ve been meaning to do for about 3 years.
My Father gifted us a few venison chops from his fall hunt (after we got skunked together during Moose season). He had told me that they were awesome – and he was so right!
This recipe takes a bit of a departure from my normal treatment of game. I usually go for very simple seasoning as I’m a big believer in appreciating the flavors for what they are. But it was a Saturday night so I decided to dress it up a bit. Despite the obvious heavy use of pepper and the small amount of jus, the flavor of the meat did shine through.
There are three main reasons we hear from people on why they don’t preserve:
They don’t have time.
It’s scary/ they don’t know how.
It could be expensive.
I hope we’re doing our part to debunk all 3 items above. Today’s recipe makes the absolute best hot sauce using fermentation. You do require a bit of special equipment (a jar and an airlock) but the total cost is around $5 and everything can be reused. The total active time is less than 5 minutes (elapsed time is about 3-5 days) and the cost of ingredients is less than $2. And it’s virtually impossible to mess up.
Here’s a few primers that people new to fermentation may want to start with:
We store the whey in a jar in the fridge for a few weeks at a time and use it for fermenting small batches.
Hot peppers aren’t available locally this time of year but I’m a big fan of practicing my technique and recipes in the off-season so that I don’t ruin a bushel of local product during the actual season. I happened to have a half-cup of Thai Chiles (they are small, long and red) and was on the verge of losing them, so I decided to test a new version of last years hot sauce by experimenting with whey.
The final product is extremely hot and has tremendous flavor that only fermenting can provide. There’s a sour kick to it that most can relate to when they think of eating kosher pickles. It’s earthy, sour, acidic and very potent. This is a similar style to Tabasco (which is fermented in woods barrels) or Franks Red Hot but its way hotter. If you’re scared of heat, here’s a handy article explaining why you might actually prefer a HOTTER hot sauce than others you’ve tried. I’ve had a lot of different fermented hot sauces in the last few years and I’m more excited about this one than any other I’ve made in that time.
Ingredients/ Equipment
1 mason jar (not wide mouth) large enough to fit your peppers comfortably
1 airlock (link above; you can find them at wine or beer home-brew places)
0.25-1 cup hot peppers, washed and stemmed (include the seeds)
1.5 teaspoons of salt
1 tablespoon of whey (the link to the Greek yogurt article above shows how to get this)
Water (if you’re using chlorinated tap water, pour it into a bowl and let it rest for an hour or more to evaporate the chlorine)
White wine vinegar (needed at end; day 3-5)
A spice grinder, blender or other fast immersion blender is handy (I suppose you could pulverize manually if you had to)
Instructions
Place hot pepper, whey, salt and enough water to cover in a jar.
Place airlock on mason jar. Place in a warm-place in your house (around 70 degrees is optimal).
Over the next 3-5 days, gently agitate the jar 1-2 times a day. The airlock will keep the air out. You’ll notice the brine will become cloudy.
When the brine is good and cloudy, strain (and reserve) the brine into a bowl.
Blitz the peppers and seeds in the spice grinder. Adding a little brine may help in this process.
Pour the brine and pepper puree into a jar (I’m a fan of using all of the brine but that’s up to you).
Add white wine vinegar until you are happy. I would guess we split it almost 1-to-1 with the brine and pepper. Taste as you add it.
Place a lid on the jar, store in fridge.
The taste will slowly evolve in the fridge – although it’s ready to serve right then and there. It’s AWESOME!
Note: watch for mold. If there’s a lot of head space (i.e. ‘air’ between the surface and the airlock), there will still be oxygen in the jar. If you watch out for it, you can pulverize the sauce before mold occurs. If mold does happen, you can remove it the day it appears (in theory you can do it several days after but the texture will change) but you’ll be adding oxygen back into the mix. It’s not the end of the world, you’ll just need to watch it closer.
The final sauce has a thicker consistency than the two commercial brands which strain the solids out. You can strain the solids if you’d like too but be sure to reserve them and use them as paste. I just happen to love the texture.
This is a very easy recipe that yields results that are better than store-bought at a cheaper price. I hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think!
If you’re a big fan of the hot stuff, you may be interested in our entire series of Hot Pepper Posts where we tasted a whole bunch of different dried hot peppers and shared their heat and profiles (I am still in love with the Morita Pepper).
When I saw Tigress post about Kimchi soup I became very curious. I’ve been meaning to cook up her recipe but didn’t really get around to it (which is foolish because my feline friend can cook). It was one of those things that just slipped back into the depths of my mind until about 5:00AM this morning.
I’ve been in an odd habit of surfing Instagram at 5:00AM. I search for food tags and I’m fascinated. Since most people upload content to the app as they take it, Instagram kind of lets you travel the world at any given moment. Searching “#FOOD” at 5:00AM Eastern reveals very few North American pictures and a slew of posts from the other side of the world, mostly in different languages. I LOVE IT!
