I've been busy!

No posts lately due to my impending graduation! Promise to be back strong in the summer. In the meantime here's a cool word cloud graphic that reflects the word choice in the blog to this point. Fun stuff from wordle.net

Garlic Cumin Sauerkraut Recipe, at last!

I have finally committed my recipe to paper/digital ink for your DIY pleasure. This is a first attempt, and I would welcome feedback on process, ingredients, or terminology. When I made this, I took it out of the crock pretty early for a light, sweeter kraut. The garlic at the level in the recipe will pack a serious punch, so adjust for your preference.

Allan’s Garlic-Cumin Sauerkraut

awm52@georgetown.edu

smartkraut.com

Ingredients:

• 3-4 medium heads green cabbage
• Up to 1/4 cup salt
• 2-3 tablespoons cumin seeds
• 12 cloves garlic

Optional ingredients:

• beets
• carrots
• ginger
• red pepper flakes

Steps:

1. Shred cabbage thinly with a sharp kitchen knife or cabbage shredder (some have also had good results with a food processor)
2. Cut additional vegetables and garlic to desired size, adjusting for crunch
3. Place shredded cabbage and vegetables in a large bowl, salting moderately as you go
4. Sprinkle cumin seeds over cabbage and vegetables
5. Press or pound cabbage using any implement at hand, such as a potato masher or wooden spoon. Ideally you want to bruise it; this helps get more liquid out
6. Leave salted, pressed cabbage to sit 1-2 hours
7. Pack cabbage tightly into a fermentation vessel such as a jar or crock, pouring in any leftover liquid from the bowl
8. Place a weight on top of packed cabbage (Options include a plate, another jar, or even a ziplock bag full of water; something you can press down on is ideal)
9. The liquid level should eventually rise until it is above the cabbage. To prevent molding, it is important that the cabbage is submerged. If the liquid level has not risen high enough after 2 days, add some water with a small amount of salt dissolved in it.
10. Let kraut rest 4-6 days (it should be bubbling at this point), then begin tasting regularly
11. Once the kraut tastes the way you like it, refrigerate it to slow the fermentation process (otherwise it will keep getting more and more sour)
12. Enjoy!

Sauerkraut Pictures!

Apologies for the absence and intermittent posting. Here are some pictures from a recent run of sauerkraut:

Raw cabbage - juicing up

The good stuff

 Shredded cabbage, beets, and carrots in this batch, maybe a turnip as well. Trying to keep it simple, but there are so many good vegetables to use out there!

Same batch in a Mason jar being tamped down

 As you can see from the photo I got myself a tamping tool. The one I got is actually meant for tamping down the middle of a delicate little pastry tart, but I think my employment of it is better. This is good not only when you're packing a jar but also when you have your initial pile of freshly shredded cabbage. Give it a full salting in a bowl and then set to work with the tamper. It's easier than just punching your knuckles down into the cabbage and it will get more juice coming out faster.

Finished product from an earlier batch - spicy ginger-carrot kraut

This ginger-carrot was really good. Crunchy, spicy, sweet, and sour at once. It makes me want to get back to making simple, small batches.

Sauerkraut Hard Cider

As will happen in fermenting at home, I seem to have accidentally stumbled on a new way to make hard cider - with leftover sauerkraut juice.

I had just finished eating a batch of sauerkraut - laced with beets in my usual style - and there was leftover juice in the jar. Kraut juice is a precious thing, and not to be wasted. I added some cider, towards the end of making a drink out of the whole thing. The cider would hopefully mellow the somewhat harsh kraut juice. So I poured cider into the crock, then this happened:

Fermentation bubbles in the crock

It bubbled up! Alcohol was being created by the sauerkraut bacteria. I'm not sure why I didn't expect this, but it hadn't crossed my mind at all that the kraut organisms would cross over to winemaking activities. Naturally, I became curious and added more cider - topped it up to about a half gallon. Then let the bacteria do their work. It has since gone into an airlocked jug.

Initial tasters were not excited with the results! A round of trials at Thanksgiving yielded no one clamoring for more kraut cider. Too much saltiness and too much sauerkraut smell. I'm standing by my little kraut bacteria, and I have a feeling it will get better. I racked it once into a clean jug, with lots of dead yeast cells left behind. Those go into my special wine dregs container in the fridge. Meanwhile, the cider continues to mellow and hopefully improve with time. Here's to more happy accidents!

Beet Wine - now with video

I spent Monday afternoon making beet wine. It was a long time in the offing, but surprisingly easy when I actually started doing it. I boiled about 3 pounds of beets, removed the beets from the water, added sugar, honey, and orange juice concentrate.

 Boiled that mix, cooled, added a yeast-orange juice starter mix, and voila. Beet wine, in a brilliant purple-red color. Won't be ready for at least six months, so temper your expectations, please!

Here's the video of the must bubbling away in the fermenter:



Waiting for this to finish fermenting and aging is not going to be easy. I want to drink the whole thing right now! Definitely encouraging to try something that seemed so complex and find it a fairly simple proposition. I will not hold back from attempting outlandish wines or other fermentation projects in the future. As the truism goes: you can't succeed until you try. Or something like that....

Sanitizing

In preparation for the beet wine batch today, I'm sanitizing jugs. One problem - my kettle is too small (really just the biggest pasta pot we have). I've ended up pouring sanitizer into the jugs and sloshing it around a little. If it sounds amateurish, that's because it is. We'll have to make it work!

Quick post: Weekend Plans to brew for Columbus

I will be making beet wine this weekend! At last, the day has come. Montrachet yeast ordered, orange juice concentrate stocked in, beets to be bought, 5 lbs of honey in the basement. Just need to rack the maple mead out of the primary fermenting bucket, and maybe bottle it. I even bought fresh corks for the bottling process. Hurray for me!

This means I'll be sterilizing and siphoning all weekend. That's what Columbus would have wanted on his feast day! This recipe should only be for a gallon, so quantities are limited. Leave a comment if you'd like me to reserve you a bottle.

3 gallons of maple mead - what's a twentysomething to do?

This past weekend, I finally broke the big Memorial Day Maple Mead batch out of the primary fermenter (where it was still sitting on the lees after 3-4 months). Oops! Why did I wait so long? First, I'm a neglectful mead maker who's better at starting things than finishing them. It came out dry, as I should have expected. This is what happens when your must is light on sugar. The yeast eats through everything and brings out a dry white wine flavored beverage. On the whole, though, not bad at all.

It initially tastes like white wine, almost on the sour side. The flavor carries on, though, and has a complexity that is very welcome. Add a little extra maple in the bottling process, and you have yourself a tasty homemade wine. I have to admit that the first public tasting of it was as part of a blend. I mixed some of the big batch with maple syrup and the tasty dregs of a separate wild yeast maple mead in a half-gallon jug. Mixed it up and served it at a game-night/party. The verdict was good. My only tasting note was to tell everyone that it was approximately like white wine mixed with maple syrup (which in essence it was!). Reception was good overall, including the reception that I gave it. I may have had half the jug, but it was only to gin up support for the product of my labor. It was a little sweet, with the complex white wine flavor, and it went down easy. It was at least a competitor with beer for the attentions of party-goers.

I siphoned out two additional half-gallon jugs from the primary fermenter and added maple. They're topped off with airlocks and aging up a little bit before Thanksgiving, when I will serve them to my unsuspecting family. Let the adventures begin! The only problem I have: There's still at least a good 1.5 gallons left to deal with. This may turn me into a small-batch winemaker for a while. Get in touch if you want some.

Dance Yrself Clean (Wine Edition)

This weekend, when I'm not rocking out to the breakdown at 3:08 or attending the National Book Festival, I'm going to make Spiced Beet Wine. The 1 gallon recipe from the wild wines book I got from my mother calls for 3 pounds of beets, 2 pounds of white sugar, and 1 pound of honey. I'm using packaged Montrachet yeast and some yeast nutrient for this go-round to ensure a lively fermentation, but I'm not averse to doing this recipe with the wild yeast air-capture method in the future. The spices also seem pretty mild in the recipe. No reason why the amounts shouldn't be jacked up to nausea-inducing levels of fresh ginger rather than a pinch of dry. This seems like the perfect time to try and fail with exotic recipes. Beets, tomatoes, garlic wine. I may learn something, even.

May the beet wine I make now be dug out of a dusty cellar in 2088!

This project has partly come about because I'm obsessed with beets and their color. It's so....red. But not just red, it's a living, pulsating reddish-purple. I want to capture this color and turn it into wine and keep it in a bottle for several years. The color is itching to get out of the beets, too. If you scratch them they will bleed deep dark red juice into your hands that doesn't come out except under prolonged scrubbing. If you cut them, your hands and your cutting board will bear the mark long after. I wear it as a badge of honor now, the pink hand of the beet-preparer. They have a sweet, earthy, wholesome taste as well and a delightful crunch. I would eat them every day in an ideal world.

Image credit: untitled (Alexandre Moha) / CC BY 3.0

17 or more Fermentation Possibilities, who's counting, really?

Potential future fermentation projects:

-Beer
-Kvass (Russian bread soda, basically)
-Beet kvass
-All-beet kraut (or pickled beets, you might call it)
-Beet wine
-Beet hot sauce (sweet and hot)
-Fermented beet and corn salad (very close to becoming a real thing)
-Beet yogurt (getting the theme yet?)
-Tomato wine
-Sourdough pizza
-Fermented tomato sauce (we'll need this on our sourdough pizza)
-Fermented peach preserves
-Sour pickles
-Hard cider

-Beet hard cider (why not?!)
-Fermented ginger preserves
-Pickled potatoes
-kombucha
-Kefir!

Any more suggestions? I'm open for business.

Let's not hold back here. The possibilities are limitless, constrained only by imagination and equipment. People have laughed when I told them my plans. I understand fermentation is easy to dismiss as a mad scientist-type hobby without productive consequences. This is real, though. I'm going ahead with it anyway, but I want people to know that it's not a joke. There are vast opportunities for fun, financial savings, and health improvement. I plan to laugh all the way to a tasty bank of jars containing the products of my labor combined with friendly bacteria.

It's mostly for fun right now, but it feels good to have a modicum of skill that creates something you can eat and drink and give to people. It feels good to make your own. And when people laugh at you, you can go home to your pickled beets and feast until your lips turn red.

Also, let's not lie, it's fun to be able to make alcohol. It's not just fun, it's easy too. I'm a little short on jugs, but once I get my operation running, there's going to be a large quantity of wine in production. If you're nice to me, you'll be on the distribution list.

Fermenting for Life

Fermentation is the gift that keeps on giving. This sounds fatuous, but I promise you it's not. Making fermented food is about creating the conditions for new life to exist. It's about nurturing microbes. You make friends with the microbes, and they provide you with food and drink that is teeming with life and delicious to boot. It's a symbiotic relationship. The microbes also live in your intestines and protect you from harmful bacteria. You scratch their back, they scratch yours.

Making fermented foods is so cheap it's almost free! There are limited startup costs for equipment, which you can scale according to how fancy you want to get. There's no reason you can't start making sauerkraut right now with a head of cabbage, salt, and a jar. No need to get any more sophisticated than that. It's very forgiving of beginners and perfect for those who like to experiment.

Why aren't you doing it already?!

Progress Reports:

-Wild Yeast All-Maple Mead (went in on 6/16) is still bubbling up nicely. It has been tasted several times by Matt and I, with impressions all favorable so far. The fermentation is probably less vigorous than it would have been with refined yeast, but there is undeniably something going on in there. Also forming is a big clump of dead yeast on the bottom, which is why the meadmaker is advised to rack the mead to a new container (to get the mead off the spent yeast, which may be imparting yeasty flavors). I'm thinking about leaving it for a while. The big problem is going to be keeping myself from drinking the whole thing before it's ready. Age can only improve the product.

-Fresh batch of kraut is in the jar right now, with radishes, beets, red and white cabbage, and a moderate quantity of garlic. It smells great after 5 days, and may be ready for tasting soon. I favor frequent tasting, especially in the early stages when the flavor is still relatively mild. You get a sense of the evolution over time. This one is being kept in the basement because the air conditioning is off upstairs and the basement is the only consistently cool place in the house.

Progress Report

In the primary fermenter: 3 gallon batch of Memorial Day Honey-Maple Mead.

In the 1 gallon small-batch testing jug: Wild Yeast All-Maple Mead (went in on 6/16)

In a recycled salsa jar in the fridge: Beet-Hot pepper spicy fermented chutney.

I had to throw out a batch of sauerkraut that went bad, sadly. I came back from Ghana to find it molded on top and smelling of serious rot. You can't win em' all. This is really my first setback in the sauerkraut arena- everything else has been coming up roses. I have fresh cabbage and beets stored in and am ready to dive into the next batch. Try, try again!

Some background

Here's my philosophy: you should try anything. Why not? Why shouldn't I throw some vegetables in a jar and let them sit out under brine for a few weeks, just to see what happens? Why shouldn't I be responsible for making my own food, rather than spending dollars to support a corporate food industry that is by all accounts unconcerned with the health of its customers? Why shouldn't I experiment?

If you make your own, in many ways you can taste the effort and the hand craft that went into it. You can go further towards being self-sufficient and running your own home economy. You can create flavors and smells which have never existed before in the world and are delicious to boot. You can keep traditional methods of food preparation alive for generations to come. You can do it all! Go forth and ferment.

All credit for any success I have in these endeavors goes to my parents for raising me the right way and teaching me to ask questions and be mindful of what I eat and where it comes from, to my brother the farmer for being ahead of the curve on everything sustainability-related and for inviting me to dinners at the Hive, and to Sandor Katz, whose recipe I used for my first batch of sauerkraut.