Weekend before xmas

Chain-sawmill

I finally got to do some milling with my chainsaw!  I really want to get a bandsaw-sawmill, but for now this will do.  I sawed 5 boards out of a piece of the maple I cut down last year.  I adjusted the mill to give me 1.25" boards - approx.   I used the rip-chain on the Stihl saw.  Worked well, although it can be a bit tedious and frankly holding the chainsaw throttle open would surely limit how much of this a guy could take! 

This shows where the log I sawed up used to be - LOL!  You can see the ended slabs from the log.

5 1.25" boards. Well, actually, just 4 1.25" boards and one just under an inch.

It's a bit rough - I am not sure if this is a normal finish on a chain-sawmilled board. These will have to be planed.  They should turn out nice

The rip-chain makes quite a bit finer sawdust then the regular chain.

More fermented soda

I left my champagne yeast and the filler tube stuff down in the city, but I none-the-less was able to bottle 2 bottles of root-beer and 2 of orange.  I used the Montrachet yeast - I hope it doesn't cause problems!

 

Pyracantha Jelly

I got the pyracantha (and all of the other berries) out of the freezer so that I could make jellies this weekend.  I started with the pyracantha since this is something I have no experience with.  I looked at a bunch of recipes I found for it on the web and finally settled on this one.  One thing I noticed was that many of the recipes added a lot of water to the berries to extract their juices.    Many of the recipes use only a very small amount for the berries and stressed not pressing the berries.  I also noted that many recipes added grapefruit juice and one even noted that the firethorn berries taste is very subtle in the jelly and that the grapefruit can easily overwhelm it.  With that in mind, I opted for a recipe that used LOTS of berries!  Even so, I used 5lbs of berries with 5 C of water, boiled them for 20 minutes and then crushed them with a potato masher (off of the heat).  Then I put them in a jelly bag and squeezed out as much juice as I could without getting too annoyed.  I ended up with 5 C of juice.  Yep, 5 C - the same amount of water that I added!  But the juice was definitely not water, I could tell it actually had a good amount of pectin in it.  I added the lemon juice (3 tbsp) and pectin and 5 C of sugar (following the jelly prep directions, of course).  I was barely able to get all the jelly in the jars as it was setting fast!  I got 8 half-pint jars of jelly.  The taste is very mild - kind of floral, maybe a bit like a wildflower based honey.  It is pretty.  I honestly don't think I will make this again.

 

Pyracantha update:

OK - totally unexpected, this stuff did NOT set!  Still like a syrup in the jars!  I swear I was afraid it was going to set before I finished putting it in the jars!   What happened?  I will reprocess, but I am going to wait until this evening.  I should also note that I thought about reprocessing the apple jam I made early this year, but... I went to get it from storage and lo-and-behold, the stuff is now jelled!  So now I am wondering if this pyracantha stuff will jell after a week or so?  I read that some jellies, like pepper jellies, can take up to a week to jell.  Hmmm.  I am concerned that I may have a bad batch of pectin.  The last sure-jell pectin I bought was in a pack of 3 (I think).  The first I used from that pack was the apple jam.  The 2nd was this pyracantha.  Should I risk using the last pack?   

Pyracantha update 2:

I reprocessed the Pyracantha jelly.  I added a full package of the sure-jell pectin for sugar free use.  This time it set nicely.  I lost about 3/4 of a cup of jelly to processing.  Ended up with 7 half-pints.   Still tastes "blah".  There is no reason to make this again!