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As you may recall, there were a number of cracks forming in my beloved pizza oven. Well, last weekend I decided to do something about it. I started to open up the cracks a bit more with a hammer and chisel. I soon realized that the hammer was unnecessary, and completed opening the wounds with just a chisel. After I thought they were sufficiently open I washed them out with a hose. I did this to get any loose material out and also to help the patch bind (hopefully anyway).
Now these cracks, once widened, were only about an inch or so wide. They did not go all the way through. I think that most of this cracking was within the insulation layer because we had a higher clay to sand ratio in that layer.
I had some extra insulation layer mud, so with my wet hands I packed everything in. Now my oven looks like it’s got a big scar…
Once it dried the scar tissue was not as apparent, but you can still see it from up close. Tonight I’m going to try it out again, and we will see if the cracks return. I’m sure they will, I just hope they are smaller.
Tomorrow a bunch of us are going to Kloster Andechs to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Hill, and tour their brewery. Then Thursday we will take a train into Munich for the Oktoberfest. We have reservations in two different tents this year, so I hope things don’t get out of control.
I’m sure everything will be fine Mom…
No, really…
I’ve got it all under control…
Just in case though, I’ve emailed you the Western Union number of the Munich Criminal Courthouse…
And I hear that bail here is pretty high, so I’ll understand if you can’t get me out by Chrsitmas.
We finally cooked a pizza in my new backyard pizza oven, and I must say it turned out very well. Here's an action shot of a pie cooking...
And here's a picture of the first finished pie...
I had bought some dough from a local pizzeria, but made the sauce myself. We didn't get too adventurous with the toppings, other than adding some New Mexican green chillis.
We had the thing blisteringly hot, which expanded the existing cracks and brought out some more.
I think many of these will close up when it cools, and I will try to repair the larger ones by adding some more clay mix into the seam.
I must say that I am quite pleased with the way they came out, and everyone there said that it was delicious.
At the end we did get a little more adventurous and added some kimchi to one of the pies. By then it was just Eric and I left, and we were both pretty full. But we went inside and watched some college football and still managed to eat half of the kimchi pie.
On it we had: sauce, kimchi, spicy Italian salami, basil, and cheese...
and it was wonderful!
We will be attempting Pizza tomorrow...
...today however, is a training day.
It all started with a simple enough idea…
“Hey!” I said to a couple of friends. “Let’s put a really big and heavy pipe in my backyard”
We all thought about it for a couple of seconds before they replied, “O.K.”
So I proceeded to a local construction supplier, and managed through my broken German (and his slightly less broken English) to order two 1 meter diameter pre-cast concrete manhole sections, each one half meter high.
I had these beauties delivered on July 3rd.
As usual, not everything went according to plan. The two sections you see in the above photo were different. I ordered one of them with both the top and bottom open and the other had a closed bottom. We wanted to flip the sections over, so that the bottom would be on top. That would leave us with a one meter tall concrete table-top, which can come in very handy.
I reckon that I could also stash bodies underneath it, but that is a whole ‘nuther post.
The guy comes to deliver the sections, and doesn’t speak a lick of English. No problem, all we need to do is point to the location we want it. We are also trying to explain to him that we would like it inverted, and we think he understands. He sets the first section down, but still needs to invert it. Well the rig he’s got on this truck is basically a crane with three chains, each with a clamp on the end. So he takes two of the clamps off, and proceeds to lift the section onto its side, then it’s just a matter of pushing it over.
He then replaces all three clamps, and we’ve got one section in place. “This is great”, I think, “one concrete tabletop comin’ right up!”
Whoa… Let’s not start patting each other on the back quite yet.
Turns out that there is not and easy way to invert the piece with the solid bottom since the clamps can only attach to an end of the section. So we naturally try to set it up on its side, and reason that we can drop it down and muscle it into place. We calculated that it should weigh about 400-500 lbs, and although it would be a bear, there were four of us … surely we could do this.
So the guy starts lowering it, and we’re holding it up … a bit … then when he releases the clamp, Lawrence starts to turn blue.
“Guys…” he says, “this is really heavy.”
We are all starting to realize this same exact thing.
We are thinking that the section is centered enough to balance on top of the other one, but as we gradually let it down we discover otherwise. It just keeps dropping. Lawrence tells us he can’t hold it anymore and we all drop it onto its side.
However, this beast of a thing is weighted much heavier on one end because of the solid bottom. Now when I say “solid bottom”, I mean it has a 6 to 8 inches worth of concrete type of “solid bottom”. So this thing wants to roll back to where its bottom is on … well … the bottom.
So it keeps falling, we are trying to hold it up but realize that it is futile and just try to get out of the way. Lawrence dives back in one direction, Eric and I go off in others and it falls to the ground with a … crunch?
The man who delivered this thing is lying on the ground holding his head, then his knee. I go over to help him, but he waves me off. I see no blood, no scrapes, and he’s clear of the concrete section, so what gives? Then we realize that the concrete section is not lying flat like it should be. Unless of course something, or someone, was trapped underneath.
It turns out that it was the remote control box for the crane that was lying underneath this concrete monstrosity. So everyone was OK, and he worked the crane manually and got the remote out. Funny thing, the remote still worked. So we ended up just putting the sections on top of each other, with the bottom part in the middle.
I was thinking that this damn thing is heavier than we thought. The guy who brought it said it weighed about 600 kilograms, which is only about 1300 pounds. It turns out we were only off by a factor of three. Damn engineers!
So anyway, it sat in my yard just like it is in the photo above until a couple of weeks ago. I had taken a couple of days off work, and went and purchased some bricks, and some sand, and some clay. We filled the half meter deep concrete tube with sand and laid some brick down on top.
The next thing we did was mound up some wet sand…
Then we covered the sand with wet newspaper…
We then proceeded to ignore all child labor laws, and had Lawrence’s kids stomp the clay and sand together…
Of course I added too much water and the mix was too wet. It kept slumping, so this is as far as we got the first day…
Over the next week, after coming home from work, I would work on it a little every night. I mixed about 4 batches of the sand myself, and that is not fun. It’s just like kneading dough, but there’s a lot more of it, and the sand is actual kind of sharp. I was beginning to wish I had gotten married and had kids, just for the free labor.
Anyway this is how it progressed…
If you haven’t already guessed, we are building a cob (or earthen) oven in my backyard.
After leaving it for about a week, I cut the doorway out, and dug the sand mound out from inside …
The second layer (the insulating layer) is going on…
The first fire inside…
Then a big fire a couple of days later…
Perhaps too big…
The crack is not a big deal. I will patch it up with some more clay, and I’m sure there will be more forming as it dries out fully. It still as a way to go, and I still need to make a door and a roof for it.
But I’m hoping to be cooking some pizzas in it this weekend. That is if Lawrence’s kids can come over. I promised them the first pies out.
Of course they will probably be a little gritty too. Maybe I blew it by not having kids; I could have an army of food tasters too.
But if they were anything like me, they probably wouldn’t eat any real food until they were well into their thirties…
There's lots more pictures on my flickr page, just click on any photo.
I just put some pictures from Ljubljana up on my flickr page...
HERE
Rumtopf?
What is a Rumtopf?
Well in this case a Rumtopf is the name of the ceramic jar that contains the stuff. Sometimes this stuff is referred to as “Officer’s Jam” or “Bachelor’s Liqueur”. Actually I had been, rather ignorantly, calling the stuff Rumtopf. It was not until I received a proper Rumtopf from a woman at work that I truly understood.
Confused yet?
Well just set back fer a spell, and lemme do some ‘splainin’…
A friend of mine had told me about Rumtopf, and I made an attempt to create one without knowing what I was doing or even what it was supposed to be called. Something I actually do quite often, believe it or not. He had told me that (some) German people kept a jar under their sink (or in a nearby cupboard or something). Into this jar would go whatever fruit that was in the kitchen at the time and was past its prime. The fruit would be covered in rum, and was left until needed. Once in a while the person would spoon out some fruit and put it onto a desert of some sort. Once in a while the person would pour him or herself a little glass of the liquid (booze).
This would just go on throughout the year. One would add some fruit when they had it, or add some more rum when it was needed. Sounds like a good idea, and it is simple enough. Hell, lots of time I have fruit laying around that is on verge of going bad, so I tried it. And it worked out pretty well. I added apples, peaches, dates, kumquats, grapes, even some walnuts (shelled of course). Every once in a while, I would grab the jar from the liquor cabinet and spoon some of the goods onto some vanilla ice cream. And damn was it good!
I decided that I was going to start a new one this year, and instead of rum I would use … well … Bourbon, of course. Wild Turkey to be specific. I used an old pasta jar that I had, and started adding fruit to it. It wasn’t until later that another friend told me that you are not supposed use apples. It turns out that apples are specified as something to NOT use.
Oh well, it was fine with apples last year and I’ve already added them. Oh, to hell with it! I’m not going to throw out this grand experiment just because of some apples.
So I was looking in one of my books about preserving food, and I saw the Rumtopf listed under preservation with alcohol. According to this book, you were supposed to add and equal weight of sugar each time you added the fruit. So add a pound of strawberries AND a pound of sugar and put enough rum to cover it, then when you add a pound of cherries you are supposed to add ANOTHER pound of sugar and rum to cover it.
Holy crap that’s a lot of sugar! I hadn’t added any sugar last year and it was good. So this year I added a bit of sugar each time I added fruit, but nothing near what they were calling for.
One day when a few of us were traveling back to the office from a review meeting, and I mentioned something about my Rumtopf. Although I knew by now that it was just the name of the jar, I was still referring to the stuff as Rumtopf. A German woman colleague was in the car, and she said that she had a couple of Rumtopfs and would bring one into work and give it to me. “Great” I said, ‘Thanks!”
Well she was out of the office for a couple of weeks, and I had forgotten about her offer. Then one day this shows up on my desk…
“Holy shit! Are you sure you want to give this away? Thank you so much!”
And there are even directions on the back…
If you can’t read German, it basically tells you to put the fruit into it as they come into season, add an equal amount of sugar, and cover with rum. It also tells you not to add certain fruits, and yes apple is one of them. Well, your not supposed to stir the fruit mixture, so there is not going to be any transfer of fruit from my old pasta jar into this new beauty. It’s also too late in the season to start a proper one, since a bunch of the fruits are already out of season.
So next year will be the inaugural season of my proper ceramic Rumtopf (without apples).
This year my second attempt will have to do…
And my buddy Tim is seriously covetous of my new Rumtopf!
Tallinn, Estonia is a nice little town. Actually it’s not so little by Estonia standards, but still…
There may be a lot more to the town than I was able to see in the day that I was there, but I mostly wandered around the Old Town area. I didn’t get a chance to go to the Baltic Sea and dunk a toe, or watch the ferries coming from and going to Finland. I think it’s only about an hour or so by ferry, so it’s really pretty close.
The people were very nice, and for the most part spoke English. I was with two other guys the first night, and wandered around solo a little bit the next morning before my flight back to Germany. It was a fun trip, and I wish I had stayed in Tallinn for at least one more day…
… but I had to get home and make some Kimchi (since my supply was running dangerously low)…
Last weekend I was a pickling fool (and not just pickling my liver either!). I put up a double batch of Kimchi. Well, it was only my third attempt, and each time prior I had just made one head of cabbage. So doubling the batch is not really as extreme as it sounds.
So I salted two quartered heads of Napa cabbage. Here’s a little hint… if you have a lot of vegetables to cut up, don’t soak your cabbage in the sink. I had to keep running to the bathroom to wash my knife and cutting board in the tub.
Then I cut up a bunch of vegetables, mixed them with some rice flour, water, little bitty shrimps, fish sauce, and a bunch of red pepper.
I then smeared a bit of this hell broth between each leaf of cabbage, rolled them up and placed them into a bucket.
I decided to put what I had remaining of the previous batch on top of this one. I thought it would help to kick off the fermentation. Now it's kind of a sour mash Kimchi.
I had to go to the farmers market to get the cabbage and other Kimchi makings. While there I saw a lot of other little vegetable that were just crying out for some pickling. So I picked up some small cucumbers, some small zucchinis, a couple of little yellow squashes, some radishes, some onions, and some fresh garlic. I mixed a couple of gallons of a 5% brine solution, with some other spices, and put everything up in these purty lil’ pickle crocks…
I also added in some grape leaves that I absconded with from the vineyard across the road. The tannins in the grape leaves are supposed to help the pickles stay crunchy.
I sampled the Kimchi Thursday evening, and some of the pickles today. While neither is a sour as I would like them to be, they are both pretty damn good. I’m gnawing on a pickled cuc’ and drinking a dunkel hefeweizen as a write this. In other words both were a success.
Tomorrow I’m flying to Kosovo for a week, and will spend next weekend in Ljubljana, Slovenia on the way back. Why Slovenia you ask? Well that’s where we were scheduled to change planes, and I’ve never been there. So I get to add two more countries to my list next week.
Where in the hell have I been?
Y’know, I sometimes ask myself that very same question. There are several blogs that I frequent, and most of them seem to be able to scrap together posts on an almost daily basis. So what’s up with the Haven? Why isn’t this one updating on an at least a semi-regular basis?
I guess it all comes down to not really being entranced by this whole writing thing. It’s fun sometimes, but at other times it seems too much like work. When I haven’t updated in a while it’s doubly tough to get myself to sit down and write about: 1 – a lot more stuff, and 2 - stuff that is not really fresh in my mind. I inevitably end up forgetting about stuff that I should have written down.
And I’m a bit lazy…
Anyhoo… I’ll try to get you all up to speed with as few words as I can possibly muster.
Late last month I got a hankerin’ to do some confit. I purchased the pork fat and went about rendering the fat that would be needed…
I had decided to make some tongue confit, and had purchased 4 pork tongues. They came four to a package, or I probably would have only cooked one or two. Here are the tongues after they had been seasoned and cured a bit overnight...
Here they are in the pork fat with a little garlic getting ready for the long simmer…
Once cooked I peeled the skin from the tongues and placed them back into the fat.
The whole container was then placed in the refrigerator where the fat solidified. They have been there ever since. Just ripening up a bit. I plan to pull one out soon to try it.
July 4th I had a party at my place. A bunch of people were out of town for the holiday weekend, but we still had a decent turnout. Only one of my beer glasses was broken (…thanks Andy!), and I actually had some leftover meat to freeze.
I smoked two briskets, a pork shoulder, and two chickens.
Every time I’d check the meat, or add a log I sprayed the meat with an apple juice and water mixture.
It turned out OK, but I could not taste any apple. The fresh spray each time may have et the meat capture a little bit more smokiness, but I’m not sure of that either. I’ll have to run a test while smoking two pieces of meat. I’ll just spray one each time and see if there is any difference.
It certainly did not make it any easier to pull, but two forks, a little muscle, and several beers later yielded a 5 quart Dutch oven overflowing with porky goodness…
The day after the party, I had to go to Stuttgart for a week. The following week I was in Bernkastel-Kues for a training class. The class was very good, and the surroundings were a bit better.
Bernkastel-Kues straddles the Mosel River, which is a big wine area. Both towns are pretty small, but are very picturesque. They are both very tourist oriented, so there are a fair share of restaurants around. There are also plenty of neat old half-timbered houses…
I returned to Wiesbaden on Friday, only to fly out again on Sunday. This time the destination was Estonia.
Where?
Estonia. It’s north of Latvia, which is north of Lithuania, which is north of Belarus and northeast of Poland. Just west of Russia, about 150 clicks from St. Petersburg. We touched down in Tallinn, and immediately drove across the county to the city of Narva. Now the country is only about three hours wide, but Narva is the easternmost city in the European Union, and is directly across the river from Russia.
There are castles on either side of the river. The bigger one is, of course, in Russia.
After a meeting and site visit, we drove south to Värska. Värska is damn near the southeastern most point in the country. Not a lot going on there. We had to drive about 25km to get find a restaurant besides the cafeteria style one at the hotel. After another meeting and site visit we drove back to Tallinn. In three days we managed to drive to 3 corners of the country. It is a pretty country. Very rural, lots of trees, but very flat.
Tallinn is a pretty big city, it’s right on the Baltic Sea, just across the Gulf from Finland. Nice place, but I’ll have to tell you about that next time. I’ve got a couple of things going right now that need my attention…
As always, more pics on my flickr page HERE
