Frugal Friday

[ecosophia]

Welcome back to Frugal Friday!  This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which have changed as we've proceeded. (As things have settled down to a nice steady conversational pace, for example, I've deleted the rules about only one tip per person per week and about limiting the length of comments; I was worried early on about people flooding the forum with too much too fast, but I think we're past that risk.)

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc.  I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

With that said, have at it!

Comments

Re: Homemade fruit wines

[milkyway1]

Hi Claire,

A great topic! :-) Do you cook the elderberries for wine, or can they be used raw?

And to everybody:

If anybody is interested in experimenting, I‘ve also tried home-made wines with natural yeasts. I.e. no store-bought yeast is added, instead whatever is on the fruit or herbs, or in the air, does the fermenting. This can go really well, but the results are, obviously, not as reliable. However, in a pinch or in a situation where wine yeast supplies are hard to come by, it can and does work. (There is always the option of adding some earlier home-made wine whose taste you like, or the yeast which is accumulating at the bottom of the jugs, and hope to thus kickstart the process with a working kind of yeast.)

I can also recommend herbal-based wines. You‘ll need more sugar, and overall the wines tend to be less strong, but the tastes can be amazing (or overwhelming ;-) ), and of course herbs can have other properties as well.

A very inspiring book for the herbal wines/beers is Stephen Harrod Buhner‘s „Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers“, although he uses store-bought yeast and not wild fermenting processes.

Milkyway

Re: Homemade fruit wines

[slclaire]

The elderberry wine recipe on page 100 of Garey's book says to boil a mixture of water and sugar, then pour the hot mixture over crushed raw elderberries to extract their juice. (We use a steam juicer instead, because we make wine often enough to justify that piece of equipment.) You want to sterilize the sweetened water and the elderberries before you add the commercial yeast, so that the yeast grow and reproduce fast enough to overwhelm anything else that could spoil the wine. All of Garey's wine and melomel recipes include a step to heat the liquid to boiling or nearly so in order to sterilize the liquid. After sterilization, you let the liquid cool enough that the yeast can live in it before you add the yeast.

We haven't tried using natural yeasts or the yeast at the bottom of the jug for wine-making. I spend a lot of time pulling 3 pounds of elderberries off their stems, so I don't want to take a chance on some random organism showing up and spoiling the wine. ;-) But if we couldn't easily get commercial yeast, I'd be inclined to try using the sediment ("lees" in wine-speak) at the bottom of the bottle as a source of yeast. It would probably be best to re-activate it in a similar way to re-activating sourdough starter that has been sitting in the refrigerator for awhile.

Re: Homemade fruit wines

[milkyway1]

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I dudn't mean to suggest you should try natural fermentation, just mentioning that as an option if sonebody feels adventurous... :D

The question about cooking was pure academic interest - I've been wondering if fermentation would make elderberries and similar thngs easily digestible raw.

Milkyway

Re: Homemade fruit wines

[(Anonymous)]

Hi SLClaire.

I process pounds and pounds of elderberries by deep freezing them first before I pluck them off of their stems. They pretty much roll right off with very little work. It’s much quicker and less staining occurs on my fingers.

Annette

Re: Homemade fruit wines

[(Anonymous)]

Do you mean the berries come off without those tiny 3mm stems? Those are so tedious, but my understanding is that it is important to use no stems.

Re: Homemade fruit wines

[(Anonymous)]

I get no stems with the way I do it. I put the clusters of berries in shallow boxes and put them in my chest freezer, usually overnight, maybe longer if I’m busy and forget. When I pull them out of the freezer, they roll right off their stems.

I think the point is to get them frozen enough to be little elderberry rocks.

Re: Homemade fruit wines

[slclaire]

I tried deep-freezing the elderberry clusters one year, but it didn't work for me at all. When I tried pulling them off the frozen clusters, they thawed out and fell apart as I pulled them, making a real mess. I had more trouble getting them cleanly off the stems than when I pull them off when fresh. That said, I might have done it wrong.