Grow it, Cook it, Eat it.The freshest, healthiest, tastiest food is what you grow and eat yourself!

This program features Slow Food Ireland’s Raw Milk Cheese event in the Hilton Hotel earlier this year.

We then go to Irish Seedsavers Annual Apple Day in Scarriff, County Clare

Lydia carving up tastings for people before they decide which apple trees they want to buy. What a great way to sell apple trees!!! Perhaps the only place in Ireland where you get to taste the fruit before you buy the tree!!??

Then Madeline McKeever and her partner Mike from Brown Envelope Seeds in Skibbereen, County Cork tell us about whats happening to seed supply in Ireland and internationally and what its like to be one of three organic seed producers in Ireland.

You can now download Program 10 of the 10 part series here:

“Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” Program 10 Raw Milk Cheese, Apples, Seeds

Please leave a comment once you have listened to it, let us know what you think of the show or share any food related thoughts with us.

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Steven has been visiting old orchards in Ireland and rescuing old apple varieties. Ten minutes talking to him was like entering a whole new world of apples!!

“Look! Check this one out!!”

Well looking at my webstats it seems that this program is suddenly very popular in China! Its been downloaded about 7000 times! Amazing!!

Perhaps you could get in touch and let me know what you think of it please?

This program features a mushroom hunt day out in Avondale House, Co Wicklow which was Charles Stewart Parnell’s home. The grounds have a huge variety of trees and therefore loads of mushrooms.

Out of all the photos and mushrooms I saw on the hunt this one is my favorite. I found and picked one of these and even Bill got quite excited by the find! I just love the colour of them and when you cut into the flesh it reacts to the oxygen in the air which turns the yellow flesh to blue reminding me of mackerel skin for some reason. This colour scheme darkens further when cooked on the pan.
A magical mushroom with personality, not the psycho-active stuff!!

The program begins with Bill O’Dea (www.mushroomstuff.com) giving a slide show and telling the group of about 40 adults and children all about mushrooms.

We then go out for two and a half hours with baskets to hunt for any mushrooms we can find, edible or poisonous, and bring them back to base for identification after lunch.

Various edible mushrooms which were purchased are then fried up on pans as well as a few wild mushrooms which the experts are positive are safe and tasty.

Everyone gets to try some of the different varieties while speculating about some of the mushrooms that are in the baskets.

After lunch in Avondale House its back down to the hall where mushroom experts Howard Fox and Maria Cullen reveal all….

If you would like to go on a mushroom hunt or find out where to start building your knowledge about mushrooms then please check out Bill’s website www.mushroomstuff.com

You can now download Program 9 of the 10 part series here:

“Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” Program 9 The mushroom hunt

Please leave a comment once you have listened to it, let us know what you think of the show or share any food related thoughts with us.
Let us know if you fancy becoming a berserker or getting pissed?
You will know what this means when you have listened to the show which explains where the terms “berserker” and “getting pissed” originate from!

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Mushroomstuff.com’s Mushroom Hunt, Avondale House, County Wicklow, Ireland.

Mushroom hunting can be considered one of the most dangerous sports around. Crocodile wrestling and bungee jumping just pale into insignificance beside it …. and there is always the potential reward of ending up with a really tasty meal!

After Bill’s slide show and crash course in the world of mushrooms we all grabbed our baskets and went out around the grounds and woods of Avondale House to see what we could find….

I spent the first 30 minutes looking for mushrooms but I don’t think they wanted me to find them!
“Dont come around here no more, whatever your looking for” sang Tom Petty sitting on a mushroom… but I think that song was about a woman not mushrooms.

If you go down in the woods today you’re sure of a lot of suprising mushrooms!
There are in there somewhere…

After 30 minutes of fruitless walking around I came across some fellow mushroom hunters who had managed to slow to the required speed and level of patience to find some of the thousands of mushrooms that grow in Ireland.

And a few minutes later down the road they found more, totally different, mushrooms

A fine specimen of bracket fungus – I think it’s a beefsteak or else it’s the one that artists use to carve designs on?

Same angle without the camera’s flash

The flipside

Stairway to heaven?

Down at the base in a hollow

View from below reveals the white underneath

Close up patterns like tidal marks on a sandy beach

Yet another specimen

Same one I think as the one above

View from below

Bill’s basket. Note the little red one bottom right which we tasted to experience the fungal version of hot chilli and that explains the spitting sound in the program…

Wow depth of field on a little digital camera! I like!!
The steady hand of Bill

Key to identification is looking underneath the cap. Here we can see gills which contrary to an ill-informed popular belief is not a good sign. Gills bad! Except in supermaket!!

This was the bracket fungus I spotted. Bill stood on my shoulders and that combined reach potential of about 15 foot wasted no time harvesting this specimen

Closer

Bill at full stretch for a potential chicken of the forest
Alas it wasn’t to be

The power of zoom…..

Usually seen in big clusters could this be a lone Honey Fungus?

More of them in situ

“Amanita muscaria” more often called “Fly Agaric”, the mushroom Santa Claus has to thank for his colours. This one is a bit dried and withered, well past its sell-by date but still showing the classic red skin with white spots

This is the mushroom I saw in the hedge and climbed in after it. Here Bill has broken a piece off to show me the yellow flesh turning blue on contact with the oxygen in the air. I thought it was magic!!

Without the flash

One of the collection baskets – great variety

Huge white thing, like a cloud became a mushroom

With camera flash

A mushroom in the basket is worth a lot more than one up a tree out of reach, right?

Some of the mushrooms purchased for cooking up at lunchtime – chanterelles?

King Oyster was the tastiest by most people’s taste buds

A wild basket of colours, shapes, smells and textures

Identification is key and its always good to have an expert on hand as opposed to a hopefull, hungry opinion

When we cut it open it was full of black spores which wasn’t a good sign but an impressive sight all the same

Lunch or death? What other food offers that range of potential?

Basketfull of yet to be identified potential

Great colours

Mostly Honey Fungus I think?

A funny pair. Looks like the slugs had some fun with these …. shamanic slugs?

Bill O’Dea starts cooking as the hungry hunters hover

Keep it simple – heat, pan, butter, King Oyster

Slicing them up, before their 10 to 15 minutes boiling in the pan in water then to be finished by frying. Wonderful colour!

I like the texture of the finger, the knife and the mushroom

The pile grows below

Inky

Hunters awaiting reward

All mushrooms have to be cooked properly

Keep ‘em movin’

2 pans on the go

Dying for some fried mushrooms

Hot but tasty

Washing them down…

We like mushrooms

intrepid and very talented Mycoexplorer Wojciech Chmura

Shades of brown…

Cant get enough of those mushrooms…

Wine and mushrooms a nice combination but there is one variety of wild mushroom where one has to be careful combining alcohol with

Shrooms from above

Happy with anticipation

Once identified and cooked the last safety check is to taste a bit of those inky looking mushrooms

Wojciech looks on as Bill tries

They turned out to be bitter so Wojciech knew something was wrong and that a dodgy mushroom must have gotten into the mix.
The whole contents of the pan were thrown away! Can’t really take any chances!!

Bill’s wife Frieda on the left who is a Slow Foodie too

The spongy underside of the mushroom’s cap.
Reminds me of a sponge or a piece of coral

Maria Cullen is very happy to see this mushroom. Donal Carroll looks on

Same mushroom different angle

Donal listening to feedback from Maria about what he found

Another basket

Howard Fox, botanist/mycologist takes a closer look

Howard shares his thoughts

Howard moves onto the next unidentified fungal object

But what’s this? A morel?

Another basket

I think this is Honey Fungus, edible for humans and bad for trees so Avondale were happy that we were picking it

Just when you thought you’d seen all the colours a mushroom can be the little purple ones appear!

Pretty but they might kill you!

Wojciech’s other half cooking for the hungry hunters!

Cooking em up

Red is dead!

Baby puffballs?

Red

Back down at the hall identifying what was found that morning

Maria tells us more about them

I was impressed by the variety of mushrooms and their shape and colour

Closer

Some chanterelles Maria brought along

Gills

More honey fungus?

Beefsteak???

Honey fungus just starting off???

2 whole tables like this were covered in fungi

They look nice but would you eat them?

Would they eat you?

Could be tasty?

This is the phallic Stink Horn?

Probably not edible

Maria must be grinning at the sheer size of it. I think it’s a parasol mushroom but Im no expert!

Honey fungus I think?

Checking to see if chanterelles smell of apricots!

Double checking!

Triple checking!

Our mushroom experts Howard, Maria, Wojciech

Maria working her way through the table.

Howard, Maria, Wojciech

The other table!

Ornamental mushrooms on sale.

Honey fungus and a parasol behind!

A parasol?

The view from above it.

At the restaurant in Avondale House.

This program features a beer making session with Sean Billings who set up the online home brew forum www.beoir.org

I first met Sean at a presentation which Irish Craft Brewer.com gave in the Phoenix Park, Dublin for SeptemberFest which was a festival of Irish craft brewers organised by Bord Bia.

I’ve tasted wine that people have made at home so I wasn’t expecting much but when I tasted the beers that were been passed around at the talk I was amazed at the quality of them. Several members of the forum had brought along some of their own home brewed beer and everyone got to try some.

Brewing at home might be considered an amateur activity but the quality of the beers I tasted were as good if not better than some of the micro-brewery beers and obviously head and shoulders above Guinness, Heineken and all those mass produced, pasturised “usual suspects” that pubs inflict upon us!

I should point out that home brewing is for your own consumption and if you are brewing to sell then you would need to seek legal advice and register for duty etc…

Our program starts in the morning with Sean talking about which barley, malts and hops he is going to use and follows each stage through the day as he makes up a brown ale, using software and hardware, in his back yard in Phibsboro.

Check out the photos below.
(Is this what that silly word multimedia means?)

You can now download Program 8 of the 10 part series here:

“Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” Program 8

Please leave a comment once you have listened to it, let us know what you think of the show or share any food related thoughts with us.
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Below are photos taken as we went through the process so you can listen to the radio show and go down through the photos at the same time to give you an idea of what each step, ingredient and piece of equipment looks like…..

25 kilos of malted barley works out at about 45euro.
Just 3.5 kilos will be used in this brew to produce 23 litres of beer

You can buy software for homemade beer! It can predict some aspects of the beer in theory but it can never tell you how its going to taste or what good or bad accidents might happen along the way!

“Munich” – a great song by the band Editors, a place to go in Germany and a nice malt!

Weighing out a malt – Crystal or Munich?

Mixing up all the grains and malts

Mixing up all the grains and malts

The muslin cloth, attached via bungee cords, will help contain the grains and act as a filtre whilst all the time letting through the malty goodness, sugars and enzymes which will go into the boiler for the next stage

Muslin cloth can be purchased from Hickeys – notorious hangout of beer, curtain and dress makers…

Testing the temperature before adding ingredients

Still not hot enough! Given the style of beer being made, a brown ale, 70 degrees is what we are waiting for which will produce a less fermentable wort for a fuller bodied flavour than if the water was at 60 degrees.
The 60 to 70 degree range is when the enzymes in the barley are active so as to convert the starches into sugar. The yeast will be digesting some of those sugars and turning them into alcohol at a later stage.

Mashing is the process of combining a mix of milled grain, typically malted barley with supplementary grains and water, known as “liquor”, to allow the enzymes in the malt to break down the starch in the grain into sugars to create a malty liquid called wort.
Mashing takes place in a “mash tun” – an insulated brewing vessel with a false bottom.

The whole mix of grain and malt go into the hot water in the mash tun.

Before mixing with a spoon

The expert hand of Sean deploys the orange mixing spoon

All the goodness comes out into the water

All the time making sure to keep it at the right temperature for the enzymes

It was a little hot so we recirculated some out of the tap and back in the top

Pulling up the muslin cloth

Leaving the insulated top on the insulated mash tun for a bit while the enzymes work their magic

Decanting a finished beer from the fermentation tank to make room for the new one

This is some of the yeast that was left in the bottom which can be used again

Sean took some yeast out as there was too much for next brew

Quite a bit of yeast taken out!

Stainless fermentation tank

More recirculating

And back in it goes

Despite what’s written on the outside this container is the boiler

The kettle element to take it to the boil and the copper filter pipe for straining an hour later

At this stage you don’t want the mix waterfalling down into the boiler below as it would get oxygenated which would be a bad thing. So a plastic pipe is used.

“Stirring is important”, Michael Lemass, Stirring Media Ltd, stirringmedia.com

Just after adding another saucepan of boiling water

Some of the wort taken out of the mash tun via the little tap, now in the boiler

Homemade top to insulate the boiler with built in aperture feature to regulate boiling level, eh thats the curve in this object which is carefully covered in plastic bin bags. Hmmm, did Sean make this or buy it in the home brewing section of Woodies? Answers on a postcard ….

Large espresso for me please!
Note the kettle lead with blue “rain protection device” plugged into kettle element in the boiler

The great cycle of recirculation

Ye olde orange spoon

What’s it wort?
Yes it is.

Getting the last bits of malty goodness out of the mash tun into the boiler, tilt and pour ….

Wortless?

Taking the muslin bag which contains all the barley and malts out of the mash tun, now that its cool enough to handle. This muslin has seen better days and several brews so its all going in the bin …. unless ….

…. the Beer-Cat finds it and discovers its love for yet another 4 letter word beginning with “M”
Big malt lollipop for cats?

Hang on I only ordered a double espresso not 25 litres?
The boil begins…
Kettle element on…
Homemade insulated top with aperture curve device goes on…

And now for a little magic – the hops!!

These are the bittering ones added at the “Hot Break” stage of the boil which is after the foam on the surface has died down. These hops are added so the beer isn’t too sweet

These hops are added at 45 minutes into the 1 hour boil phase, that’s 15 minutes before the end so they add flavour and aroma to the beer. Like Ronseal they do exactly what it says on the tin – half the bitterness (at 6.2% Alpha Acid) compared to that of the bittering hops above that are 13.7%

This is what hops look like when they aren’t vacuum packed in foil

Pay attention Dougal, these are big, close up hops!

Making sure the wort is boiling vigourously with the help of the homemade insulated cover device thingy.

Could it be time to add bittering hops and set the timer for 60 minutes now that its boiling in the boiler at about 100 degrees?

Yes!

Ah yes its time to put the bittering hops in

The wort, bittering hops and everything are going swimmingly

Masterbrewer, masterstirrer

Now is the time to install the smell plug-in for your browser!

What do you mean noone’s invented one yet?

Well you are just going to have to watch the smell till someone does!

Hosing down the homemade copper pipe otherwise known as a wort cooler
It will be properly sanitised by leaving it in the boil bucket which contains the 100 degree wort

And in it goes

For about 10 minutes

You can see how the pipe can connect to a cold water tap and send cold water through highly conductive copper pipe to take heat out of the wort and send out hot water at the other end of the copper coil

Lids really do help keep in the heat. Everyone who has cooked pasta and watched it bubble up and over flow due to a lid on the saucepan knows this. It doesn’t need a scientific equation to be proven.

Common or garden hose from cold water tap connects to the copper wort cooler to cool down the wort mix as fast as possible.

Regardless of what software or how bleeched white your computer is its always wise to take notes of what really happened, not what the software implied should happen. This is because pen on paper in notebooks don’t crash or become corrupt!

And just when you think you have taken enough notes, stop and take some more.
Remember the software and computer are not master just a guide.
Anything can happen in the real world and improvisation and “mistakes” can turn out to be wonderful things.
Pen and ink is cheaper than 25 litres of brew as they say. And what if you made the most amazing beer ever and couldn’t remember how you made it!!!
Beer nightmares forever!!

We are now on “The Cold Side” of the process with the wort being cooled down from its 100 degree boil temperature towards its 22 degree destination temperature, so keeping everything that touches the wort sanitised is key. Spray everything that’s going to come in contact with the wort and equipment. And you’ll just have to listen to the program to find out what that no-rinse sanitiser is!

The wort as patient.
Take its temperature to see if its dropped enough to strain off into the fermentation container where the temperature sensitive yeast is awaiting lunch…

It takes a while for the temperature to drop and its probably better to transfer it to the fermentation tank before it drops too low bearing in mind that its going to ferment for a few weeks at 22 degrees

Some yeasts.
None were needed in the new brew that day as there was enough yeast, more than enough, left at the bottom of the fermentor when the finished beer was transferred out into the glass storage vessel.

Out comes the wort chiller as the required temperature is reached

Almost 26 litres but some of that is the hops and other gunk that wont be transferred into the fermentation tank, which is what happens now

Keep sanitising all the way …

The boiler, now cooled down, sits above the fermentation tank as we are going to use the power of gravity to transfer the wort. No pipe is needed as oxygenation at this stage will be beneficial to the yeast which is going to digest the wort now into something called BEER!!!

Yeah, I know it says FERMENTATION on the side but we used it as our boiler – call the cops!!

And that little black tap is how the wort gets out after being filtred by the slotted copper pipe inside the bucket.

Even if you didn’t ferment beer in it it would still be a nice piece of furniture/kitchen gadget

C’est bien l’acier inox!!

Lining up….

Houston, we have a fermentor!

Its pretty simple, the wort comes out of the boiler’s tap into the fermentation vessel which already contains enough yeast, but not too much, from the last beer.
Nice bit of recycling here.
Supposedly yeast needs some magnesium for it to be still potent enough to work from brew to brew. When brewers switched from copper containers to stainless steel ones they found their yeast not performing due to the lack of magnesium.
Not sure how Sean got around it here using all non copper vessels?
No!! It couldn’t have been the wort chiller, could it?
Coincidently in the last few weeks I have found that humans need magnesium too and that our food has been dropping in magnesium content in the last few decades due to modern chemical methods of farming.
Some would say that buying organic veggies would help solve this deficiency as the roots have to mine deeper into the soil to find nutrients and minerals ….

This is a hydrometer which is calibrated to work at 20 degrees so you must adjust your calculation to take into account temperatures that are above or below the required 20 degrees.

According to John Palmer on howtobrew.com ….
A hydrometer measures the difference in gravity (density) between pure water and water with sugar dissolved in it by flotation. The hydrometer is used to gauge the fermentation progress by measuring one aspect of it, attenuation. Attenuation is the conversion of sugar to ethanol by the yeast. Water has a specific gravity of 1.000. Beers typically have a final gravity between 1.015 and 1.005.

This is what remains in the boiler after the wort is cooled and drained into the fermentation tank.
Its for the compost heap now….

Emptied boiler with spent hops and the fermentation vessel below.

The wort sitting in the fermentor

There is a hole for a temperature probe which goes into the fermentor to relay the temperature to the thermostat so that it can turn on the fridge to cool down the mix if the fermenting yeast produces heat that brings it over 22 degrees

And there it is, finto!
The fermentor just has to be squeezed into the fridge where it will six for about 6 weeks?

Now in the fridge the only thing to do is put the temperature probe into the fermentor

Plugging the fridge into the thermostat

Setting the temperature above which the fridge will kick in to cool the wort

22 degrees is whats needed, so not much work for the fridge to do…

The program is about what could be done with some of the food that is thrown away as well as strangers coming together to cooperate without any money in the equation to serve up food for free to the public.

This program features a Dublin chapter of the international movement Food Not Bombs. We follow two NCAD students Andreas Von Knobloch and Jonah King who have been involved in Food Not Bombs for the last year, collecting and giving away free food everyweek to their fellow students on Thomas Street and anyone else who’s passing by.

We start by cleaning the containers we are going to use to collect the food in and then go down to the first restaurant which has been a regular contributor for the last year. They are very generous with their left over food and are happy that someone is going to make use of it and that its not going to end up in the bin.

Then we do a cold call to a new restaurant. Andreas and Jonah explain the concept of Food Not Bombs to Deirdre McCafferty who runs the vegetarian restaurant Cornucopia.

Next day we are back up at the college preparing the food and getting all the kitchen equipment out onto the pavement on Thomas Street.

Check out Andreas and Jonah’s website http://officeofpublicworks.wordpress.com/
and follow the link to thier Food Not Bombs chapter in Dublin.

The international site for the Food Not Bombs ‘mothership’ is at www.foodnotbombs.net

You can now download Program 7 of the 10 part series here:

“Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” Program 7

Please leave a comment once you have listened to it, let us know what you think of the show or share any food related thoughts with us.
(Your email won’t be displayed on the site)

This program features chef Doreen Palmer telling us how to make a indian dahl in The Happy Pear kitchen in Greystones.

Then Deirdre McCafferty takes us through the Cornucopia At Home Cookbook.

Then we visit Natasha Czopor in the kitchen of Natasha’s Living Food in Stoneybatter. We head out on some deliveries and meet Dermot Kelly from Nolan’s supermarket in Clontarf, North Dublin. Natasha tells a customer who picks up a box of her raw cacao chocolates all about where they come from and why you can enjoy them guilt free!
Check out her website natashaslivingfood.ie

You can now download Program 6 of the 10 part series here:

“Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” Program 6

Please leave a comment once you have listened to it, let us know what you think of the show or share any food related thoughts with us.