Ac Baker

I just read this from Wikipedia via the Hodmedod: bread before agriculture!

"In 2018, researchers discovered charred breadcrumbs at a Natufian site called Shubayqa 1 in Jordan's Harrat ash Shaam, the “Black Desert”, dating back to 12,400 BC - around 4,000 years before agriculture began in the region.

"Analysis revealed that the breadcrumbs were likely from flatbreads made with wild barley, einkorn wheat (Triticum boeoticum), oats, and tubers from Bolboschoenus glaucus, a type of rush plant."

Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan
Arranz-Otaegui et al. 2018
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6077754/

Nancy Reading wrote:

Ac Baker wrote:Now I want to try making a yeast-raised bread with skirrit pulp, like porridge bread!!

Do you want me to send some pulp down to you? I have quite a bit left still

I'm almost tempted to say yes now, although it seems a bit impractical, given the less enthusiastic response of your taste tester: I suspect I'll be much keener than him! What do you think (knowing I love roast parsnips!)?

Now I want to try making a yeast-raised bread with skirrit pulp, like porridge bread!!

Wonderful!  How is the cake?!?!

Nancy Reading wrote:Showing how little needs to be spent ..
Demonstrating easy techniques ..
Recording little time spent on the plots ..
Showing that starting with dirt can still produce a yield in the first year ..
Growing a range of calorie rich crops

.. So let's come up with some possible alternate names for the project!

Hmm ..

You CAN Grow Food In Your Yard This Year?

shortened to:

YouCANGrow

My lemon balm dies right back in the winter, as it is now.  I guess a tisane of the lightly dried leaves, or freezing the fresh leaves in ice cubes, are practical ways to have it available in winter.

Kim Wills wrote:Lemon balm gets a hearty vote here! Studies have proven it to kill many viruses, including various flu strains and oral herpes (cold sores). I made a lip balm from it and my husband's annual 2-week cold sore was only 1 week, and half the size and half the pain.

"the study showed that lemon balm essential oil could inhibit influenza virus replication through different replication cycle steps especially throughout the direct interaction with the virus particles."

Antiviral activity of the oseltamivir and Melissa officinalis L. essential oil against avian influenza A virus (H9N2).
Pourghanbari et al.
Virusdisease. 2016 Jun;27(2):170-8. doi: 10.1007/s13337-016-0321-0. Epub 2016 May 21. PMID: 27366768; PMCID: PMC4908999.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4908999/

Nancy Reading wrote:Hi AC! Cooking in water is one way of extracting the sugar. It is interesting that the available sucrose seems to stabilise in the water after three hours. That seems like a long time! did they macerate the carrots to maximise the surface area?

I've finally managed to find the full paper for free (not behind a paywall):

https://ucanr.edu/datastoreFiles/608-463.pdf

which says: "Each carrot was cut lengthwise into four parts to ensure homogeneous material was being compared. These four parts were cut lengthwise into disk sectors of a 5.5 mm thickness (to minimize edge effects)."

Nancy Reading wrote:I'm inclined to start with trying to juice the roots first. I have a little hand juicer and that will avoid having more water to remove.

Since I don't have the figures for skirret (!), I thought carrot might give us a rough idea of the efficiency.  Bao & Chang 1994 estimate the sugar content of juiced carrots as c. 8-9% reducing sugars (https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2621.1994.tb14666.x) which suggests you've extract the non-reducing sucrose more efficiently than the reducing glucose & fructose.   Other sources say, carrots are 90 +/- 5% water, and have c. 4 +/- 0.5 g of sugars per 100g and carrot juice has 4 g sugars per 100 g, and has a density of around 1.01442 g/cm3.

So it sounds like juicing works pretty efficiently for extracting sucrose from carrots.

Given the high proportion of sucrose in skirret, as long as the flavour isn't a problem, skirret juice sounds promising for reducing the need to add 'shop bought' sucrose to wet dishes!

Nancy Reading wrote:A syrup certainly has culinary uses. I think that one that is strong enough to keep well will be fairly viscous so I may go by eye/taste to start with. I was thinking that a refractometer might be useful for assessing root crop nutritional value and it would be invaluable for this too. I do have a hygrometer, but it needs quite a volume of liquid - any ideas of more simple ways of measuring density of liquids?

It's much easier to compare densities, than to exactly measure them, of course!  You could I guess calibrate a kitchen balance between water at the light end of the calibration line, and a stable syrup (e.g. golden syrup, which consists of fructose, glucose & sucrose with a density of around 1.430 g/cm3) at heavy end?

I'm guessing much of the time, the skirrit would be used like carrot, rather than to make crystalline sucrose.

I found this paper about extracting sucrose, glucose & fructose from carrots with an interesting abstract:

Sucrose, glucose, and fructose extraction in aqueous carrot root extracts prepared at different temperatures by means of direct NMR measurements
Cazor et al. 2006

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf060144i

"[In] Solutions obtained by heating carrot roots in water (stocks) ..

"The concentrations of these three sugars reached a maximum after 9 h when the temperature of treatment was 50 or 75 °C. At 100 °C, the sucrose concentration reached a maximum after 3 h, whereas the concentration of glucose and fructose was still increasing at that time."

This makes me wonder if you could simmer the mascersted skirrit root overnight in the woodstove, and then measure the specific gravity to estimate the concentration of sugars?  This 'stock' could be used as a partial replacement for some of the sugar & water in a strongly flavoured chutney, at the very least.

What a shame!

For what it's worth, this stockist claims the following are all suitable to use on a range cooker:

https://www.blakeandbull.co.uk/collections/kettles?filter.p.product_type=Kettle&filter.v.price.gte=&filter.v.price.lte=