Pressure Cooking

Baby lizard we found in our pressure.

Today was a slow day without wifi. Our main task was pressure cooking another jar of grains. We used a piece of paper to cover the filter, which kept the inside of the jar dry and made this process overall successful. This time we tried using wooden blocks inside the cooker to elevate the jar out of the water, since it had to be tilted in order to fit in the cooker.

The cooker’s lock never engaged; we can only assume that we pasteurized the grains for about 2 hours. It’s unclear why the cooker didn’t function - the screws in the cooker may be lose or the wood inside interfered with the process. Either way, we need to nail down a better way to sterilize the jars. After steaming the jar, we let it cool and inoculated with oyster mushroom plugs.

Oyster mushroom plugs in sorghum grain.

For the rest of the day we worked on different parts of our grant proposal and planned out some goals for the rest of our time here. We will only be in Makeni for three more days, so we want to be as productive with our time as possible.