Living Kitchens

These jars are not what you think. They are not home-canned and inert. Every one of them is alive and undergoing an ancient form of preservation. This is how Sally and I pickle, sprout, and ferment our way through winter. We call it our kitchen garden. It's what we do while the rest of our farm lies fallow in the winter.

Now that people are returning to naturally levened breads (using sourdough starter), naturally fermented wines (using native yeasts already at home on the grapes), and naturally cured meat products like prociutto, why not natural pickle? It's one of the original slow foods.

Somewhere along the way the modern idea that pickling means dousing things you want to preserve with vinegar replaced the original tried-and-true food technology. And the taste. And the texture. And the health benefits that went with it. Anyone who's tasted real brine fermented pickles, sauerkraut, and kimchee knows the difference. Vinegar (usually industrially distilled acetic acid) tastes like the astringent industrial product it is. The shelves of Whole Foods and other wholesome grocers are stocked with vinegary-but-homey-looking products with nice packaging that simply aren't the real dill. Yes, they sometimes use artisanal vinegars (malt, rice, wine). But if you want honest pickle, the kind grandma used to ferment with the help of naturally occurring, age-old, lacto-bacillus in a plain stoneware crock, if you want the softly tart lactic acids with their meaty umami elements and complexity, if you want the same probiotic microbes that make for healthy intestinal flora ... you have to make pickle yourself. Or rather, set it up and let nature do it. Or visit me!

Guided by Meta Givens' classic Encyclopedia of Cooking, I made my first batch of fermented dill pickles from cucumbers, dill and garlic I grew myself while a freshman chemist in college back in 1973. Sauerkraut soon followed. Before that I never cared for either. Since then I have lacto-fermented just about everything I could get my hands on, all self-started with a few spices and a little salt to balance things in favor of the "good" preserving microbes over the bad rotting ones. I am pleased to boast, not one batch has been a failure. A record I can't claim for my wines.

For those of you already on the road to pickle heaven, I do not add whey (from strained yogurt) as every website and blog post on the subject recommends as a failsafe. The reason is whey contains bacteria evolved to turn milk into yogurt.* And while we also ferment our own yogurt, I prefer to pickle with the helpfully evolved bacteria and yeasts already attracted to cabbage, cucumbers, jalepeno peppers, carrots, beets, lemons, onions, limes, garlic, radishes, turnips, daikon, ginger, Brussell sprouts ... you name it!

And what could be greener? They need no refrigeration and keep for months (though refrigeration does prolong the shelf life).

Along with our bubbling pickle (and though it's months before we'll sow a seed in our garden) I plant small crops of alfalfa, radish, arugula, cress, lentil, mung bean and other for tasty sprouts that are literally still growing when they land on our plates. Nothing from a store, no packaged sprout, is as fresh.

Don't get me wrong. Sometimes, I like to sprinkle a little rice wine vinegar on my bean sprouts, and make a pickled salad. I like our homemade wine vinegar -- fermented using the "mother" Giovanni's ancestors started over 500 years ago -- on fresh arugula and braised spinach from our garden. I like it, after steeping hot chilies, on Carolina pulled pork with coleslaw. I like vinegar for what it is -- a condiment and flavoring. And I happen to like a "ploughman's lunch" of cheese, beer, and English mustard pickle (uses malt vinegar). But when I want something crunchy, tart and complex I reach into my tiny briney seas teaming with lactobacillus and pull out a naturally fermented pickle.

*Lacto-pickle strains of: Leuconostoc, (also gives sourdough it's scent), Lactobacillus (other strains in wine, yogurt, most fermented food, a probiotic) and Pediococcus (probiotic also in yogurt, gives buttery character to chardonnay)

** Yogurt: Lactobacillus delbrueckii bulgaricus, Streptococcus salivariusthermophilus, Lactobacillus acidophilus and bifidobacteria.

Green Flame

I never cease to be fascinated with the way the silver-green boughs and leaves catch fire in the light and flicker in the wind. Olives trees are evergreens, and perhaps the original Christmas tree. And an ancient symbol of peace. That's why our favorite gift to friends and loved ones during the holiday season is oil from our own olives handpicked with care. Peace to all.

Labor of Love

Sometimes I don't have the time or energy to post because I am so busy pruning the olive trees, managing the grapevines, tending the garden and in general holding back chaos. So here is a short You Tube video that gives a sense of the kind of energy it takes one man to restore and run a 5-acre farm.

A Sense of Legacy

This shot is taken in the tiny piazza of our tiny village of Montisi. Sally, who took it, has pointed out the similarity in our hands.

The guy with the dangerously slung sickle blade looks a lot like our builder, Claudio Brandini (left), in the eyes. But you be the judge.

The Fruits of My Labor

Besides the regular bounty harvested mid-November ...

There were these delicious heirloom tomatoes!

Happy Thanksgiving

Joy of Pruning!

10 minutes after the posting "Joy of Wire," the muffler fell off our ancient Fiat on the way to Sunday lunch with friends. I walked 10 feet away from the car to search in a freshly plowed field for something to tie it back up with temporarily, and found, I'm not kidding, bailing wire. 10 minutes later, we were on our way to lunch.

But pruning. I've just finished all the fruit trees on the property, about 40 of them, not counting our 92 olive trees. This the last round. After this, I will not longer be restoring the suffering abandoned trees that had once been covered in blackberry vines and were being winched to the ground by the dreaded vitalba (summer clematis) vine. I will be maintaining them. No more cycles of trees exhausting themselves with pears, plums, peaches, walnuts, cherries and figs, then being fruitless for 2 or 3 years. No more broken branches overladen with too much tiny fruit. No more fear of falling as I harvest from trees that grew too tall and lanky as they struggled to break through the smothering canopy of vines. Now, I can go out with a small saw and a pair of Falco's in my belt holster and climb into the tree and reach the limbs and fruit without fear of overreaching and blowing a rotator cuff. I do not have to carry a ladder around. The trees look right, now, like grown-up bonsai. All things considered, they will be happier next year than they have been in 20 years. Mission accomplished; the farm has been restored.

Speaking of pruning. These are the last prunes Sally preserved by the age-old and greenest of methods, air drying. Real prunes, from real reclaimed prune trees. Real tasty. In fact, the exclamation point at the end of this sentence doesn't do my reaction to tasting them justice!

Joy of Wire

It's called the contadino's friend. Baling wire. Trellising wire. There are a thousand uses and re-uses for it.

As I clear the farm I still have to be careful I don't stoop to reach into brambles or weeds and get an eye poked out. In kinky strands, curlicues, and abstract cattle brand-like shapes it lurks everywhere, holding split trees together, anchoring things to the ground, waiting to spring up like a booby trap and zap. I keep finding it. And saving it. And using it. I have re-trellised the vineyard almost entirely with the old wire I have found, splicing rusty lengths together because it looks better among the gnarly trunks of our 40-year-old vines than shiny new galvanized wire would.

To my eye it looks like the raw material for art. Perhaps this is what Calder saw in it too.