What I Did on Summer Vacation 2020

On Friday I got home from my place near Rib Lake, Wisconsin. Since the autumnal equinox happened during the last few days of the trip, technically we can call it a late-summer visit to the woods. Temperatures were warm for September. A few nights were cool enough that I was comfortable inside my shack with a fire in the stove, but most nights were fine to sleep outside in the hammock.

Despite the warm temperatures, the sun was no longer high in the sky, as in July. Daylight hours are shorter, and the leaves turned color while I was there. Early on there were patchy bits of color here and there:

. . . but by the time I left we had sights like

this everywhere:

As always, I walked in the woods and found things I hadn't noticed before, like this yellow birch perched on top of a rotting stump. I wonder if it will keep its balance once the stump is completely gone.

A pretty good year for apples, and I found a crabapple tree I hadn't noticed before because it was laden with bright-red fruit. I made a tiny batch of excellent jelly from these:

But the winner this year is the hawthorns, many trees absolutely covered in fruit. No pictures to share of these, but I did infuse a bottle of vodka with them. The flavor is like sour apples. An experiment worth repeating!

Continuing with the hawthorns a moment. I make a point of harvesting at least a token amount of wood whenever I visit, so that back in Georgia I can work with my own wood. This time I brought back wood for two projects.

Hawthorn for spoons:

And elm for a pair of low sawhorses like the ones in Drew Langsner's Country Woodcraft:

The other food news from this trip is about cooking, rather than harvesting. Most readers will find what follows so detailed as to be tedious. Feel free to just skim and look at the pictures. But I'm enthused about this, and I can't help bubbling over.

On my trip in May 2019, I built an improvised tandoor (clay oven), based on ideas from Paula Marcoux's excellent book Cooking with Fire. An L-shaped arrangement of two clay flue liners is placed in a steel garbage can, so it can be insulated in vermiculite and sealed up with refractory cement (heat proof). At the time I built it, I found that tandoori chicken was easy, and delicious, but my attempt at naan was a flop. Literally a flop - - - when I slapped it onto the inside wall of the tandoor, it flopped down onto the coals.

When I arrived this time, I was pleased to find that the tandoor had survived 16 months unattended, 98% intact. One seam where the lower flue liner enters the can had opened a bit, and about half a cup of vermiculite had fallen out. I addressed that issue, and several small cracks in the refractory cement cap, with heat-proof caulk from the hardware store. So an important, encouraging lesson is that leaving the garbage can lid covering the top, and fastened with a bungee cord, is enough for this thing to survive a Wisconsin winter.

One of my goals for this trip was to get better acquainted with the tandoor, to see how many of my cooking needs it could meet. After working with it on this trip, I was able to conclude: a LOT. The tandoor will sautée, simmer, boil, roast, and bake. It won't cut potatoes into julienne fries, but I'm sure it could deep-fry them. My wok balances on top, inside the rim of the flue liner, at about waist level. With a hot fire down below, the wok heats up in a few seconds. Paula Marcoux uses the analogy of a rocket, and I found that quite apt. If you keep a hot fire under the wok, you can cook fast. I can't overemphasize how much faster this is than working on a home kitchen stovetop. So for high-heat techniques, like stir frying, the tandoor is far superior to what I have at home.

But can it simmer? Yes it can, but the way to do that is not as simple as turning the knob on the stove at home. For simmering, you want only glowing coals in the fire. You also need to damp down the air flow. This can be done both top and bottom: where the air goes in, stacking firebricks in front of the opening gives very fine control. 

On top of the tandoor, a steel plate slightly bigger than the flue liner gives similar very fine control over the air flow. I was able to keep this dish of brown rice and lentils at a steady, low simmer for just over an hour by keeping the air flow very low, but did need to add fuel twice in that time. Each time, what I added was a scrap of hardwood about 1 x 2 x 4 inches. Compared to pieces of firewood for heating, quite small.

The success with a long, slow simmer told me that the insulation does, indeed, allow the clay liner to absorb, retain, and then radiate the heat for some time. This made me optimistic about trying naan again. For the naan attempt, I kept a small fire going for an hour. I meant to thoroughly soak the clay liner with heat. Close to cooking time, I added about a dozen charcoal briquets. I figured they would last longer than wood. That turned out to be the case, and it's also easy to keep the tandoor stoked to naan-cooking temperature by adding a single briquet every 10 minutes or so. For the dough, I used Marcoux's simple recipe.

Her recipe yields 8 pieces. The first one fell into the coals immediately. I hauled it out, brushed off the ash, and inverted my wok over the hole. I have found that to be an excellent way to make other flatbread over fire, and it worked here too.

So I knew I could make flatbread, but I really wanted to make naan the way it's supposed to be. I thought about all the videos I've watched of professional bakers in India, and remembered that when they roll it out, they don't use flour to keep the dough and pin from clinging together. I had had to do that. Perhaps my dough was too dry? So I rolled out another one, put it on my oven mitt so it was ready to slap onto the oven wall, and then sprinkled some water on it. I slapped it onto the wall, and . . . it stuck!

Moistening the dough just before baking was the trick. The rest of the batch baked smoothly. You slap the dough onto the oven wall, and wait, as the dough inflates, browns, and slowly pulls away from the oven wall. When it falls, it's done. You wait with your naan hook poised to catch it. As soon as it comes out, you quickly give it a light brushing of clarified butter. Then you stack it with its littermates.

Here are two photos of the finished product, that help explain why it's worth baking the naan on the wall of the oven. Notice the charred edge on the left. That's the edge that is closest to the bed of coals, and like a well-cooked pizza, it tastes like burnt marshmallow. The rest of that surface was facing into the oven, and is lightly browned, like good pita bread.

The next photo shows the opposite face of the same piece of naan. It's the face that cooked on the wall of the oven. You can even see the impression left by a crack in the flue liner. Notice this face is shiny. It is crispy, delightfully so. 

The inside of the whole piece is fluffy and light, tender from being cooked by steam. Other flatbreads are nice and uniform, but naan has these four distinct textures and flavors going on.

I would have been happy to get edible naan. But what I found is that, like with home-grown tomatoes, the stuff you make yourself is worlds better than the stuff you can buy. I am inspired to make a tandoor to use at home in Georgia. I will make a few improvements to the design based on what I've learned so far. But I'll also keep making naan in this oven whenever I'm in Rib Lake!