Bottle washing and tempeh smoking

Friday, April 6, 2007

Today I went out to the Ambers’ farm a bit early and smoked the tempeh we had made yesterday (cooked I mean, not inhaled). It had been in the drying rack for almost 24 hours and the mould had grown in it cementing the soybeans together in cakes that looked kind of like Brie cheese. Cliff prepared the grill/smoker device/thing by fuelling it up with wood on the bottom and starting the fire using the biggest blowtorch I’ve ever seen (it’s one of the ones used for killing weeds). He then placed a pot of water over the fire to provide the steam to keep the cakes from drying out. Then he tore off the plastic bags and placed the tempeh patties on the rack over the fire six at a time. After that, he put a lid on top of them and let them sit and smoke for a while. The first batch we smoked on top of hickory wood that he had chopped up. It was a bit windy, so thick white smoke kept blowing everywhere, but it was very nice-smelling and worked quite well turning them a pretty tan colour. For the next batch, Cliff added sawdust-like shavings of fruit trees to the fire, which gave the cakes a more faint smoky smell with less of the strong, spicy hickory smell. He then decided to use up the rest of the fire to smoke some tofu (yumm). All the cakes were put in the freezer except for one, which we sliced and fried up with oil and salt on the stove (like bacon) so I could try it. YUM! I think I’ve been converted! (Seriously, you guys should go out and try this stuff.)
After our nice snack we went down to the basement where I sat on a rocking chair watching Cliff rack a few wines using a racking hose to draw the wine off the solids that had precipitated out and accumulated at the bottom of the big bottles. One he topped up with wine left over from last year and put back in with the others to continue in its aging process. Another wine he racked did not taste very good, so he mixed it with another batch that tasted a bit better. Then he added lots of sugar to it, which made it very syrupy and sweet, but he said some people like their wines that way, so he let me keep a bit to bring back for my roommates (who are among a few of those that do). He also tested a few of the completed batches for their pH and acidity recording everything down in his book. Then I washed bottles, while he filled them and corked them with the completed wine (using his special CZ vineyard corks). I used a brush attached to a screwdriver and OxiClean to wash the empty bottles he had stored in the cellar. Then I rinsed them three times and put them on a bottle tree. It got a bit repetitive but was actually kind of therapeutic, excluding the incident where I almost lost a finger to the mechanical brush when it took a bite of my plastic glove, ripping it off my hand and turning the wire into a mangled mess. Luckily I kept my digits and Cliff had an extra brush. I went through four cases of empty bottles and about seven? pounds of wine before it was time to stop. Cliff gave me the dregs of the Oaked Seyval to take home with me along with the wonderful smell of wood smoke on my clothes. Yay for wine internships!