Preparing blank slants for yeast storage

Chronologically this is out of order, since I posted about the opposite side of this process, propagating yeast from a slant, some time ago...  But here is my procedure for producing blank slants, ready for inoculation with yeast (will post about that later).

 First step- boil 15 g Dry Malt Extract in 250 ml of water.

 Have the test tubes ready- I put them in 1 pt mason jars for easy movement to the canner (later), but a test tube rack would work of course.  After boiling the DME for 5 minutes, I whisk in 1 tsp of Agar Agar powder for gelling, and while the heat is still on (gets pretty goopy pretty fast otherwise):

 Suck a little up in a syringe, and

 squirt it into the test tubes.  I try to fill them a little less than 1/2 full.

 Here they are all filled.  You can also see the roughly 2" of water I put in there as well, to keep the mason jars stable when we put them in the canner.

 Also in the canner (hard to see here) is about 3 qt of water for the boiling/steam thing.  If we didn't have the water in the mason jars, they'd tend to want to float away.

 Bring the canner up to 15 PSI and hold it there for about 10 minutes, then cool until we can work with it...

 Then carefully cap the tubes with fresh foil and lay them on their sides to cool and gel.

 Once they have solidified as a slant, I tape the foil on, bag them, and put them in the fridge.  They are now ready for inoculation, next time I have a starter!