Among our product line are: fresh baked bread, ready to eat soup, several canned foods, and more recently some dried products.

Bread.  Each Friday evening I bake bread for Saturday's Farmers' Market.  I bake several kinds of bread, but only one on any given Friday.  All of my breads are based on a French Bread recipe and use a high quality commercial flour.  However, I remove 20% of the flour and replace it with a fresh-cracked, whole-grain such as: wheat, rye, sorghum etc., which has often been grown by me.

CANNED PRODUCTS

Sauerkraut.  The first product of ours to recieve FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approval was sauerkraut.  This is a old fashioned, naturally fermented, product.  There are certainly others available, but the industry standard is no longer a "fermented" product but an "acidified" one.  In that processess, cabbage is chopped or shredded and mixed with acetic acid (i.e., vinegar) to the appropriate pH (acid level) to render it a safe product, and immediately canned.  In a fermented product, the cabbage is chopped or shredded, mixed with salt and water, and packed away in a container (stone crocks in the old days, I use plastic tubs and set up about 100 pounds at a time) with an air tight seal to ferment.  During the next month bacteria associated with the cabbage leaves use the sugar present in the cabbage leaves as food, breaking it down to smaller molecules and energy.  One of the smaller metabolic molecules is lactic acid.  It is the accumulation of this lactic acid which "pickles" the cabbage.  Because the acid in fermented cabbage is lactic and not acetic it has a notably different taste.  While still sour, I describe it as more mellow, not such a sharp after taste as vinegar.  The product is then heated to kill the bacteria and canned.

Chili Verde.  This product is an authentic Mexican salsa, which, because of the way it is used in Mexican cuisine, is rather different from the American "chip & dip" version.  In a Mexican household salsa goes on the table at every meal to be applied as a condiment to all manner of food -- beans, rice, enchilada, tamal, etc.

When the American Food Industry decided to make a snack food out of it they were faced with the problem that it was generally too thin, and would not "hang" on a chip well.  In an effort to correct that problem they thickened it.  One of the ways they thickened it was by adding more vegetables -- namely sweet pepper and onion, neither of which are found in our chili verde.  However, once they did that, they understood that they had just created a potential health hazard.  You see there might not always be enough acid in the tomatoes to acidify all that additional "neutral" vegetable.  To correct that problem, they added acid -- in the form of vinegar -- to their recipe.  But the taste of vinegar is not one you would want associated with all those foods on your plate, so products like our chili verde, which do not contain vinegar, are still the salsas of choice in Mexican households. 

It might be used just as it comes from the jar, or cooked with.  A classic preparation is to sliver a piece of meat into bite size pieces (or example, a boston butt roast) and fry is in a hot skillet.  Once it has seared well, the grease is poured off and the salsa added.  Cooking continues until the meat is well done.  This is what the term "chili con carne" really refers to, not that hamburger and bean dish we see featured in "chile" cook offs.  This chili con carne likewise goes on the table to be spooned over food, with some of the meat put on the side of the plate. By the way, mama will always leave some of the meat out of the salsa for the children.  Contrary to American myth, Mexican's do not lust after "hot" food -- spicy, flaverful, yes; but hot, not necessarily.

A final word about chili verde,  it is red, not green in color, but that is correct.  You see the adjuctive verde (green) is modifying the noun "chili" which is the Mexican word for "pepper" not "sauce."  In other words the name literally means "green peppers," which in actual usage is translated to mean "fresh" peppers.  That was to distinguish it from chili rojo, which literally translates into red peppers, but in actual usage means "dried" peppers.  Those would be the two basic types of salsa, chili, pecante, etc. you would find in a Mexican household -- one made from fresh (usually but not necessarily green) and another from dried (always red) peppers.  The latter was generally used during the winter and was what those strings of peppers hanging from the ceiling were for -- not decoration.

Salsa.  For many years I refused to make an American style "chip & dip" salsa product.  I was only interested in authentic foods.  However, one can't ignore such mega trends forever.  I now make the thickened, acidified (vinegar added) product in mild, medium, and hot pungencies. 

Pickled Beets.  A classic recipe, the beets are peeled, cut up into large chunks and cooked in a mixture of water, vinegar, sugar, and cloves. 

Hot Sauce.  This is an interesting product in that it is "fermented," much as is sauerkraut.  Peppers are harvested shortly after turning red, chopped, mixed with salt, and packed away to ferment.  Later the fermented peppers are ground, filtered, and processed into jars.

Apple/Persimmon Jam.  This is my first venture into jelly/jam making, and is based on persimmons from a tree in my front yard.  This is a line I plan to expand in upcoming years as we put in an orchard.

DRIED FOODS

Granola.  A few years back, when I had a bumper wheat crop I asked for suggestions to how i might process it into a value-added product besides bread -- Granola, a friend suggested.  Well, this product does not contain any of my wheat -- it would require a soft wheat which I have not yet grown; but it does contain some of my peanuts and pecans.  I'm very excited about this product because besides the peanuts and pecans there are several other ingredients in it -- grains and fruits -- which I can and will grow in future years. 

too be continued.