Blue Garlic

Fermented garlic can turn blue!  And it's perfectly fine, not an indicator of a ferment gone wrong.  We were pretty surprised the first time this happened, to say the least!  We first saw this happen in a batch of carrot escabeche.  We set up the batch to pickle just as we always have, nothing out of the ordinary or out of protocol.  When we were examining the finished product, however, we were all surprised to see, among the orange carrots, red and green peppers, and purple onions, cloves of garlic ranging from a mild aqua through blue-green to out and out blue.  An internet search quickly revealed that many other folks were getting similar results and that a relatively simple explanation was involved.  The Chinese even make a jade-colored garlic for their Lada celebration, so there's a specific and controllable chemical reaction at work here.

Garlic contains sulfur and certain amino acids that, together, can create blue pigments.  Reaction with copper (or other metals) and acid (such as that created by the lactobacilli) can facilitate this reaction and release these pigments. We were setting up an acidic environment that led to this color-producing reaction but cooking garlic with vinegar or lemon juice in a copper pan yields similar results.  The way we process our garlic bruises it, so there isn't a uniform color change, rather the bruised parts undergo a deeper pigmentation release as the acid is able to penetrate deeper into the garlic.  I'm starting to use this color change as an indicator of a good ferment, as it shows that our desired acid environment was achieved.  And, in addition to allowing the fermentation that we desire, this acidic condition is also keeping botulinum nasties from setting up shop.  Blue garlic means no botulism!

Here are a few good links:
http://sallystrove.hubpages.com/hub/Why-Does-Garlic-Turn-Blue-and-Is-Blue-Garlic-Safe-To-Eat
http://whatscookingamerica.net/Q-A/bluegarlic.htm
http://www.actahort.org/members/showpdf?booknrarnr=841_66

Happy pickling!

Update on the Sandwich Baggie Method

Pickleers, we set up a batch of garlic potpourri to bring the holiday cheer to Sigrid and Brak's house this week. Three folks went to work at the counter with $20 worth of garlic and quickly worked out an efficient process. The three stations were: rough peeling and separation; cutting the ends off; and fine peeling, using a silicone rolling sleeve that looks a lot like a yellow rubber canneloni. We had everything done within an hour.

We used the plastic bag seal in a half-gallon jar this time, far and away our favorite technique when not using the crock these days.

We got a great batch out of it but wound up with some dry headspace at the top, under the bag. We saw this last week, too, after each time insuring that we had enough water inside to provide positive pressure once the lil' critters started farting. Each time, we saw the scrim left by water as it burped out of the jar but we still wound up with open airspace on top of the fermenting goodies, which we want to avoid!

Where'd the water go? After talking and thinking about it, I'm gonna guess capillary action and surface tension are to blame. With the baggie so close to the jar walls, these two related processes aided and abetted fluid in its escape, pushed from behind by the CO2 generated by our little friends.

---> What we didn't do was fill the baggies with water, we just put the coconut juice cans in for weight like we normally do. And we didn't leave much headspace; now I know why we want that- water weight. I'm betting that, had we increased headspace and filled the bags with water, once putting the can of coco juice in there as the primary weight, we would have seen better sealing of the plastic layer to the top of the fermenting goodies.

Now, as that fluid burps out, volume will decrease. So, the plastic layer needs to be able to sink. So, we need to stop securing the plastic with the lid bands. Just weight it down with water and the can or water bottle.

Hmmmm. Details, eh?

Happy pickling!

Ginger, my Ginger

Oh, heavenly spell, let me crack that lid open again to sniff that perfume, and again... this is a special but silly moment, even broaching the subject of trying to convey to you digitally what's happening for me olfactorily right now.
-sniff-
This is the last indulgent few slices of ginger we pickled in vinegar (a change for us at the time) in Spring '09. We've had ginger keep mellowing and last almost this long before but this is something else, the nose is deeper and more fully developed, mellower yet richer, as it tastes. Like an angular, angry teenager or a Cabernet, ginger's beauty takes time to mature after fermentation. We originally preferred using whey as the inoculant for ginger, it left a creamier side to the flavor profile but it didn't keep as long. The vinegar-pickled batches are sharper initially but really show up to party after a few months in the fridge, quietly rounding off the sharp bits. There, I made it the whole way without making a Cougar joke!
Cheers!

Temperature Controlled Ferment Cabinet

Anyone got a kitchen cabinet they don't need?
I'm working on plans for an insulated curing cabinet with active heating/cooling, so we can pickle all year long and still maintain control over temperature. Keeping it local and frugal, I'm looking for a free-cycled kitchen cabinet, the under-the-counter kind but free standing, with one or two doors. I'm going to insulate it and make spaces above and below for a heating element and a cooling element. With a sliding horizontal divider to close one or the other off, we'll be able to maintain specific temperature ranges, whether heating or cooling the cabinet space. The cooling element can be as stupid simple as coffee cans or water bottles full of ice, periodically replaced. The heating bit could be a hot rock from the pet store but I'll try a light bulb first.
And if I get my hands on a dorm fridge, that's another level altogether, get to hack in a digital controller and mebbe play with moving the hot and cold elements around...
Happy pickling, y'all! Remember, if it smells off, toss it!

It's been a while!

Happy Spring! We've had a busy and delicious fermenting season!

• We've settled on using the plastic bag as an anaerobic barrier in place of the oil. A full water bottle on top acts as the weight, holding down floaters and keeping the bag in place. Inside the jar, the water line goes all the way to the top. As soon as the batch starts fermenting, the burping water creates positive pressure, helping keep the mold at bay. The trick is to not leave any airspace inside the jar- it's all veggies and brine. A little water inside the bag can help expand the bag to make this contact.
• We're sticking with the spicier ketchup formulations, thumbs up all around. Substituting Power (jalapeno, serrano, garlic, and onion) Mix for the garlic and cayenne is even better, just chop it down to a paste or sauce consistency if you're the "smooth peanut butter" type. And you can't leave out the fish sauce! Mmmmm, Umami!
• Three Crabs Brand Fish Sauce- great flavor profile, not too funky-fishy, and it's available at Kroger, as well as more esoteric spots.
• Certain dried food products, like polenta, is now being packaged in sewn bags made of the same breathable polyester material the popular reusable shopping bags are made of. The stuff is prone to tearing but these polenta bags make great whey strainers.
• The last batch of ketchup was close to three gallons and it's almost all gone. Some hungry critters up in here! We use it on its own or as a sauce base equally. Mix it with lemon or lime and some Worcestershire Sauce (can you spell that from memory?) for an old-school treat, balsamic vinegar and Power Mix for a surprise, as a sticky base to hold crepe or sandwich bits in place, ugh, I'm going to get some right now, before the other critters do! And just in case, Whole Paycheck carries a couple different Worcestershires that ain't made with corn syrup.
  
• The latest batch of Power Mix was three gallons. Equal parts jalapenos, serranos, onions, and garlic. Uh, a little less than equal part of garlic, call it four or five pounds to the six of each other ingredients. And we're not de-seeding all the japs now, just half or so. The idea used to be that we ferment everything separately and then make mixes to order. We go through so much Power, though, it's worth it's own batch. Just to keep the metrics straight, that 24 pounds of produce took between 25 and 30 man-hours to process from bags to jars. Which is about what filling the three gallon crock takes.
• Jardiniere, as per PB's request, was outstanding and didn't last long. We put cauliflower (< thumbnail sized), pepperoncinis (banana peppers), garlic, onion, red Anaheim peppers, carrots, and cute little purple and white cocktail onions all together for a party. We could've thrown olives and capers in there but nobody complained as we were eating it.
  
• We have a purple cabbage, beet, and carrot mix that's getting mixed reviews. I've still not pinned down the temperature range and ferment time for better cabbage mixes, that's a tricky one.
• New Items: Fingerling Radishes fermented as expected (by themselves, as a proper experimental batch); they stained the brine a bright orange-red, like someone threw a Jolly Rancher in there. They still smell very earthy, not appetizing in my nose but worth aging and mellowing for the rest of us. Nopales (Prickly Pear, Gringo) were edible after pickling but not appetizing- they developed a thick slime and some funky spots on the skin. Daikon radish, on the other hand, came out great- we successfully replicated the batch our mentor, Pat Greer made. Score!
  
• We have sampled a few commercial Kvasses from Eastern Europe that we really liked. Each was a beet/carrot mix, can't wait to try some of our own.

It's already hot again but we sure enjoyed a nice Spring. If asked, I might opine that the ferment gods gave us AC, for to extend our pickling seasons... Thanks for reading, I hope you're smelling lactobacilli farts, too!

Persimmons

Oh my goodness!

Have you ever made kimchi? It's the Korean version of cultured vegetables, very distintive, very spicy.

I have to admit it wasn't in my 'to-try next' list at all. Korean food is still so foreign to me. Does anyone know if Houston has a class like this ? The blog e*starLA chronicles a class in LA AND manages to make KimChi accessible to me via ChiliMango comparisions. Click on this post's title to see the entry.

This is just the weekend to find persimmons in our local farmers markets!

Enjoy.

Fermenting to make cake!

Oh my goodness!

I am absolutely making this cake in honor of some slow-it-on-down holiday time I have planned later this month. I think I will use dried apricots & black raisins.

I had no idea that for most of western civilization people used soured milk to ferment their grain into rising. It makes sense, but is still a bit of a revelation to me.

Thanks Nournished Kitchen for once again sharing useful information with beautiful pictures!

Ketchup, Cultures, and County Fairs

This long hot summer is almost over! We've had our first pickle in months at a friend's house on Monday.

We made ketchup from Nourishing Traditions but we spiced it up. We doubled the garlic and tripled the cayenne; Cajuns and Texas boys prefer strongly flavored condiments.

The ketchup will be featured in the Ft. Bend County Fair at the end of the month, BUT the judging is apparently all about presentation. What?!? No taste test? Strangeness

I'm just glad to be back in the kitchen, culturing good food and community connections.

Important Details We've Learned Lately

We learn as we go, on good days, here's the latest batch of pickling points:

- Salt; Many pickling guides and recipes state that pickling salt (pure NaCl) is what you're supposed to use. It offers a greater degree of control over the processes at work in the jars we're pickling. Iodized salt is not good to use in pickling, the extra stuff works against our aims, so it's easy to avoid. We've been using sea salt for a handful of years now and it's never been a problem but we tried pickling salt on our last round of pickling (which came out to about six gallons). It's cheaper, so that's good. Everything came out too salty, however. We wound up pouring off most of the liquor on the 3 gallons of Escabiche and replacing it with water. Never had to do that before, though we do now have half a gallon of bloody mary/michelada/dirty martini mix! We're sticking with sea salt and all its extra nutritiousness.

- Pre-Brining; The night before this last pickle, we filled an ice chest with the peppers we were going to use and poured in about a pound of salt. This set up an osmotic imperative, whereby the water inside the peppers was compelled to start vacating the pepper. This is called "sweating". When we dumped these peppers into our crock, they were then more ready to soak up the loving, living vinegar inoculant.

- Temperature; Most of our pickles want a pickling temperature range of 69 to 75 degrees F. Stuff ferments more quickly as temperature goes up and slows down as it drops. Going below about 69 shuts down the fermentation and going above it enters the range for Botulism. Cabbage is different, it's happier between 55 and 65, which explains why we're so challenged to make good cabbage-based batches. The famous Peanutbutter mix was pickled in December; Kimchee is held at this range by burying the pickling crocks in the ground. We're learning to stop fermentation after only three days on sweet stuff like tomatoes, sweet peppers, or beets, treating them as a chutney.

- Plastic baggie airlocks (instead of sealing with olive oil) work great! Here are the details as they're working out for us: Into a clean jar, measure your salt and inoculant, whey or unpasteurized vinegar. Close the jar and shake that stuff around so that it coats the inside of the glass. Fill and mash your stuff down as normal, leaving the same inch or more of headspace and brine covering the veggies. Then dip the outside of a sandwich baggie in your inoculant and stick it in the jar on top of the veggies, spreading it out and filling all the headspace. Fill the baggie with a bit of water and stick a tall water bottle in there as a weight. You might have to poke something in there to convince the bag to fill as much space as possible. You're aiming to have the liquid in the jar come real close to the rim of the jar and the full baggie pressing everything down. Fold the baggie over the rim and LIGHTLY secure it with one of the rims from a lid assembly- the liquor inside the jar needs a way to burp itself out once the ferment is going. Put your jars on a cookie pan or something with a rim around the edge to catch this liquid, just in case. This process leaves little room for mold to form, as well as inoculating the inner surfaces that it has access to.

The 3 Gallon Crock of Escabiche and a New Crew

The latest pickle was another success! Thanks and welcome to our newest host, Seth, and the new pickleers who stayed all night, Rebecca, Sorcha, and Carol!
I've been invited to sell some pickles in a few different venues lately, so we've been working on ramping up production. This latest pickle party aimed to prototype a commercial Escabiche recipe in our smaller crock while teaching a new crew the basics of our growing art. We did that and had energy left over to put together over six gallons of goodies to ferment in a crock and glass jars.
The Escabiche is still a work in progress, in terms of finalizing a commercial recipe towards producing a standardized product (as standardized as a fickle pickle gets) but we all enjoyed sampling the stuff! In a three gallon crock, we assembled:
a cup of salt,
3 cups unpasteurized vinegar,
a pound each of peeled garlic and pearl onions (the purple ones came out pretty and sized just right),
two pounds each of sweet peppers, yellow and white onions, and cauliflower (the purple cauli is overkill in the eyes),
half a pound of jalapenos,
not enough oregano,
and seven pounds of carrots.
All of this stuff was chopped or sliced into bite-sized pieces. I layered each ingredient initially, to eyeball the proportions, and then dove in with clean hands and arms to mix it all up. A 1.5 liter wine bottle was perfect for mashing and compressing everything, while adding enough water to cover stuff by a few inches. Then we covered stuff with a plate measured to fit the crock and worked it around to burp the air bubble trapped in the concavity underneath. A clean jug of water was added to the top of the plate, as a weight. This all holds the fermenting veggies down under the brine, away from oxygen. We draped a towel over all this, as a final cover.
As things were getting washed, peeled, chopped, and sliced, we worked through the steps in setting up a ferment. First, I set up the whey station to separate the inoculant from the cheese.
A gallon of yogurt almost fits in our standard nylon napkin setup. But not well enough to properly drain, so we won't try to filter more than a quart or so of yogurt at a time. After I explained the role played by the whey and vinegar, I measured a tablespoon of salt and a quarter cup of whey into a jar and we worked our way through a a baggie-sealed pickle. Once the crock was filled and sealed, we turned to on the rest of our ingredients.
We also put up a hot mix of seeded jalapenos and serranos, some with carrots added to fill (and heat up!). Seth later reported that it wasn't very hot, at least not until the accumulation of three or four spoonfuls of it hit him! We'll leave the seeds in and add a few habaneros for him next time.
We put up lots of okra, which came out pretty well. Next time, we'll use vinegar instead of whey as the inoculant. We'll definitely add more spices! We'll leave the tops on and look for smaller pods next time, to keep some of the Alien-esque slime at bay and help with packing securely- they like to float. And we'll add more brine, too. The batch that Carol put together came out with the favored flavor profile, with peppers, garlic, and a little beet. The plain ones proved that fermenting okra works but are too bland. Seth is now experimenting with okra-based tapenades. Once his okra plants start producing, I proposed that he sweats them in a plastic baggie with salt in the fridge until enough are harvested for a batch.
We had one jar of beets and carrots, using the oil seal method. A few floaters were poking above the oil, as we're now used to seeing with this method, but not enough to spoil the batch.
We put up one half gallon of mixed sweet peppers. It fermented fast, burped some fluid, and much of it rose above the waterline, where white mold set up shop. We scooped the top 15% out and discarded it but the rest was fine.
Mold is funky but as long as it's removed before stuff goes into the fridge, everything is fine. Mold can't get past the waterline, so everything under that is okay. This batch of sweet peppers and two other jars had white or grey mold trying to grow but it only could do so in the jars with airspace beneath the baggies. So controlling movement of the fermenting veggies seems to be the way to minimize this airspace. The crock had a thin layer of mold on some of the surface but nothing bothersome. We scooped and wiped the tops of each jar that had any mold before moving on and this was the lightest batch yet in terms of such cleanup.
When we got down to discussing the costs of raw materials and labor, we came to the realization that if everyone brings their own veggies and glass, we can work and barter together and money doesn't have to change hands! The ways that this supports local and seasonal permaculture opened an eye or two.
Seth deserves a special mention- he put in extra work to pull this pickle off! His house isn't cooled all day, just when he's home. So he had to not only commandeer the server-room's AC unit and set it up in such a way as to keep our pickles between 69 and 75 F, he had to go through daily acrobatics to empty the bucket of water it was condensing from the air as it worked! This points once again to the seasonal side of working more closely with nature instead of fighting it. Seth's decided that he wants to pickle on the equinoxes, when his room temperatures are in line with what we pickle. We'll see if he's down for a winter batch of kraut...

Prepping for a big session tomorrow. Looking for the answer to the age old question: to pre-brine, not to pre-brine our veggies? Tonight the answer was 'yes'. We'll see in 8 days, won't we?

Anyway, during the search for that, found this gem:

Lacto-fermentation is an artisanal craft that does not lend itself to industrialization. Results are not always predictable. For this reason, when the pickling process became industrialized, many changes were made that rendered the final product more uniform and more saleable but not necessarily more nutritious. Chief among these was the use of vinegar for the brine, resulting in a product that is more acidic and not necessarily beneficial when eaten in large quantities; and of subjecting the final product to pasteurization, thereby effectively killing all the lactic-acid-producing bacteria and robbing consumers of their beneficial effect on digestion. Nourishing Traditions, p. 90.

Artisan small-batch deliciousness it is!

Cultured Ginger = 'plop plop fizz fizz'

As is "oh what a relief it is". As reported by our good friend sailor and sometimes pirate, TJ. What she specifically said was that nothing had ever helped her celiac-like 'wheat bellyache' as quickly AND effectively as the cultured ginger she had at our house last week.

This particular batch has aged over a year, so the flavor was such that we were just snacking on the slices on their own.

She will be making a batch for her own shipmates at our next community pickle.

*yes* traditional food wisdom 1 : food sensitives 0

Carrots w/ ginger

Oh man!

We had nearly run out of everything pickled, so have been back in culturing party mode for the last few weeks. 2 words: gingered carrots. Just delightful.

We did carrot spears and carrot slaw in 1/2 gallon jars with about 2 Tablespoons of ginger finely diced in each.

I can't wait for our peppers to complete their ferment, so we can get back to mixing hot sauces. Hopefully Brooke will have pictures, soon.

Batch Updates

Our second full attempt at a Peanutbutter Mix came off adequately. In early October, the batch we made at Brooke's house is now down to just two quart jars. Two or three were tossed along the way but most of the batch has pickled, and preserved, well. We didn't get the flavor profile we so serendipitously wound up with in the first Peanutbutter Mix, hence the ho-hum report. I suspect my palate will appreciate balancing cabbage with root veggies, nixing the onion, and making sure there's some ginger in there. Sea veggies seem to need to be there but we're not sure in what quantities.

My birthday batch didn't last, good thing it was my birthday!

Here are notes from late May, that didn't make it into chronological order:
"Our latest social event centered around some of the pickles we've made (the ones that have survived our hunger). Beets, asparagus, and carrot spears were the hands-down winner in terms of a single batch. The beet stain was so thorough that most folks didn't know they were eating asparagus! The middle attempt at PB mix has mellowed nicely, a nice detail considering how much we put into it. Taqueria-style escabiche carrots (that weren't boiled before pickling, as is done in restaurants) kept their crunch through the months and garlic lost some edge.
Our latest batch was another attempt at recreating the now storied Peanutbutter Mix. We've got plenty of time for it to mellow and age but initial reactions are less than hoped for. We're thinking that the sea veggies won't get mixed in anymore. And we're not pickling cabbage in jars anymore! We have crocks! We also made a batch of peppers with some garlic and onion. Most of these will go to add heat and sweet to my orange relish (carrots, onion, garlic, peppers). And as per Stelly's prediction, the green bell pepper is raising its funky lil' head. Not too bad, though.
Our next pickle will likely be a cabbage workshop. Contrary to what we've learned the hard way, we'll pickle cabbage one more time in jars. We'll make a number of different mixes, varying the ratios of ingredients, towards finding a more favored cabbage and root mix recipe. We'll also make a batch of simple mixed cabbage for later mixing at the table or in custom mixes.

Life is short, go eat, nay, make some good food!"

The Big Fall Pickle, a new technique, & hard cider

The big Fall pickle was a delicious success! We tried a couple new tricks, solidified some hunches and showed off some hard cider, as well. We now have pickled raw materials on hand for a mess of custom mixes, plenty of backbone and bonifidus for all manner of yummy comestibles.
The pickle: We processed garlic, onions (yellow and red), carrots, and a mix of sweet red, yellow, and orange bell peppers with deseeded jalapenos. Local peppers are in season and we tried to use as much locally grown produce as possible. The original idea was to have each ingredient separate for custom mixing post-pickle but the pepper mix (vs. sweet peppers and hot peppers-a mistake in communication) has turned out to balance flavor with heat remarkably well. We used whey as the inoculant, so everything has a mellow (not vinegary) nose. 6lbs. of garlic turns into half a gallon shredded and half a gallon of whole cloves. 15lbs. of onions is about two gallons shredded. And 15lbs. of mixed peppers came out to 3/4 gallons shredded. There's a gallon of shredded carrots, too; they were left to ferment for three days, while everything else got a full week. Since we use the carrots to balance heat from the peppers, they don't need but a light ferment. We had one casualty- a mixed jar Christy made by herself looked good a couple days in but had turned brown by the end of the week. Not sure what went wrong with it (didn't clean the glass above the waterline is just a guess) but it smelled obviously bad, as well as was noticeably off-color. In contrast, everything else we pickled kept their bright colors, with the onion mixing intoa marblized pink. The process itself took two weekends but we could have done with just a pair of Sundays with more help.
The new technique is an interim step between pickling in quart jars under an oil seal (a la Sally Fallon) and pickling in a crock with a weighted plate to hold things down (history's technique). With a plate or flat, clean stone weighted by a jar of water, all the fermenting veggies are held below the waterline despite the buoyant effect of the offgassed CO2 bubbles. Larger batches do well in a crock and we considered just making one big mix but if your ratios are off a bit, you lose control of the flavor profile. Hence the individual batches of separate ingredients. In a smaller jar, it's easy to wipe the jar clean above the waterline and float in some olive oil. This seals out the air and lets the lactobacillii set up shop in an anaerobic environment. Lacto-fermentation generates CO2, though, and distributes it well throughout the mix. So stuff floats up into the oil, a potential for mess we didn't want to deal with in the half-gallon jars we planned to use. So, when it was time to seal each jar, we wiped them clean to the waterline as before and then capped them off with a plastic bag full of water. The weight of the water held everything in place, while the baggie made a seal. In a gallon baggie, we put a little over a cup of water, tied off the baggie, and used what was left to seal the top of the jar. This worked out very well for a first shot experiment. What was un-anticipated was the mold that set up shop in the humid space between the water-filled bag and the top of the jar, sealed in by the rest of the bag. Since all the hairy gunk was above the bag and waterline, the pickles were untouched and cleanup was relatively simple. Since most other pickle people we're reading have experience this, we were unfazed.
What we'll change next time: We left about two inches room at the top of each batch but we could leave more room next time. I'm not sure it's necessary to do this, however, as we're also going to use more water, enough to fully fill the rest of the jar. In a tied-off baggie, this will plug the top of the jar while still allowing fluid from inside to bubble out as necessary. While we didn't see as much expansion and bubbling over as we've seen with cabbage, there was still some overflow. So perhaps three inches room would solve the problem. As we did it this time, the waterline in each jar was just above the bottom of each bag. Expecting overflow, we could make that waterline at the top of the jar and use positive pressure to keep the moldies out. We won't fold the bag over the rim and seal it with a lid ring next time, keeping a closed, safe space for mold to grow! Since we anticipated bubbling over, we had the jars on a towel in a big pan to catch the overflow. With curious kitties in the house, I pulled the towel up and over the jars and capped the stack with a box of baking aids. This created conditions for mold to grow in the damp towel-enclosed space inside. Not a big deal but worth dealing with, say by finding a different kitty-proofing method perhaps. And newspaper will evaporate off the water quicker than cotton, thereby further inhibiting moldigrowth.
What we're doing with it all: I've called this stuff "backbone and bonifidus" because that's what it is to our meals. The basic Lewis "power mix" is two parts garlic, two parts peppers, one part onion, and one part carrot. I threw all of this in the blender with some soy sauce and dulse (for mineral content) and cracked pepper. Once it had blended well, I added a bit of olive oil, while the machine is still running, a drop at a time. Good food processors have a little reverse nipple on top just for this- I made an emulsion by mixing in the oil slowly, so everything stays together instead of separating. I put this in a squeeze bottle and took it to work. I put it in soup and pho, hummous, our beans, on sandwiches, tacos, whatever. At home, I took the same mix, added some carrots, and ground in olives to make a tapenade. If you add tomatoes, you get salsa. Avocado becomes guacamole. With the separate ingredients waiting, we can make custom batches for specific needs or, for barter, let folks make their own according to their tastes, whims or needs.
The cider: Cider is almost ridiculously easy. It makes itself, afterall, if allowed to, just ask the birds. In a gallon jug of pasteurized (first time I've looked for pasteurized in a long time, let me tell you) apple juice, I added a fifth of a bag of champagne yeast. Any yeast will work (bread yeast is most common in prison hooch) but the champagne yeast yields the best flavor. Wild yeast is in the air you're breathing right now, most likely, so I could just leave the stuff open for a while but I wouldn't have near as much control over what it tastes like. I stuck a sterilized cork and airlock on top and let it run for ten days, which is when the airlock stopped bubbling, indicating a cessation of the yeast's activities. This is a picture of the the kind of airlock I prefer: http://firstpitch.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/bubbly-airlock.jpg; I like this kind because it's easier to see the bubbles moving and thereby know when fermentation has stopped (when the bubbles do). This person filled their jug too much but the bubbles make it easier to see what's going on in the picture. You fill the airlock halfway with water. This provides the barrier that keeps wild yeasts n bugs out. Once the yeast gets going, the chamber connected to the jug will receive the CO2 coming off the juice and empty out under the pressure. Bubbles will then be observed rolling up into the (now full) other chamber, to exit via the top. Letting the batch go until the bubbles and fermentation stopped yielded a completely "dry" batch, meaning all the sugar had been eaten by our little friends and turned into alcohol. The test and "first" batch came out to about seven percent alcohol and was very dry- not at all sweet. The "second" batch received eight ounces of unrefined cane sugar to further feed the lil' buggies. This necessitated reserving a cup or so of juice and then pouring a couple cups into a saucepan. I heated the juice to dissolve the sugar. Once this was added back to the jug, I poured back whatever of what I'd reserved that still fit in the jug. Adding this half pound of sugar meant two percent more alcohol after ten days. Interestingly, Christy liked the dry character of the hard cider but Der Schtellinator deemed it too dry to drink. These were the batches we showed off over the course of the pickle. The latest batch received a pound of sugar and a half pound of honey, as well as yeast nutrient. The nutrient is basically a multivitamin for the lil' buggies and was purchased where the yeast was. This was a controlled fermentation process, so all the cleanliness rules from pickling apply.
The hard part of cider: Like I said, cider is easy. Measuring the alcohol content adds the challenge. Our local homebrewer's resource is DeFalco's (www.defalcos.com) and they had what we needed for all of this. To measure alcohol content, one uses a hydrometer to get a specific gravity reading before and after fermenting. Since alcohol is lighter than water and sugars are heavier, the difference between the two readings gives a clue to alcohol content. DeFalco's sells a hydrometer with a handy reference page and their hydrometer is graduated in a number of scales; since I don't care what else is in the juice besides water and sugar, the specific gravity readings, starting at 1.000 for straight water and 1.51 for juice (and potentially getting to .9somethingsomething) was too detailed. I found working with the potential alcohol scale easier than the specific gravity. According to this scale, the pound and a half of sweets added should give us an alcohol content of 13.5% if we allow full fermentation. I think I'll pull this one a day or two early, to leave a little sugar for the palate, though. When I bought the hydrometer, I also bought a wine thief and a standing tube for making hydrometer readings in. I also bought an iodine-based sterilant called Iodophor, to clean the 'meter, stopper, bubbler, and testtube. In hindsight, I didn't need to buy the wine thief (a large blown-glass pipette)- I could have used a turkey baster, if I was too drunk or lazy to pour from the jug into the test tube. And I can drop the 'meter into the jug and fish it out again (w/ sterile tongs), were I that frugally motivated.
We'll post pictures as we sort them out, come back for more! Happy, bubbly jars to you!

Sept Pickle

We are doing a basic spice pickle this Sunday afternoon at EconGrrl's house. Come one, come all, and bring your garlic peeling expertise. We'll try to take good pictures.

This chart of Asian spices comes via Flickr. Thanks avlxyz!

Cat-sup! a teaser

This weekend All We Need +2 are making living ketchup, from the recipe in Sally Fallon's book. I am really looking forward to this. With Stacey's delicious tomatoes as the base, how can we go wrong?

You'll find out! When we upload the photos and highlights next week. mmm sweet potato fries are going to taste even better with old fashioned, living ketchup!

I can't wait.

Nance Klehm has solved the floater problem

Nance Klehm posts under "Weed Eater" at Arthurmag.com (click on this post's title to get there). She's a forager and she'll take you on a walk and point out all edibles along the way. The post I'm linking to is an excellent little essay on hunger and dirt and how anything alive experiences the former on their way to becoming the latter. As an experiment to help illustrate her point, she explains how bacteria process veggies and how they work with us in pickling. Along the way, she shows us a neat way to deal with floaters AND obviate the use of an oil barrier- she fills a plastic bag with brine and uses it to weigh down the pickles to be, thus keeping them below the waterline. Using plastic is problematic but then again, floaters and funky batches of pickles COST MONEY. I'm gonna try this trick quick!

Frontier

It's been a quiet month here for cultures, after the frenzy of last month.

Sometimes right after a big pickling session, I don't even want to look at our abundance for a while. This week my body has been telling me that it misses the live microbial supplements I had been feeding it via the pickles, so I am back to experimenting with our cultures. I feel really lucky, because I do the same thing with my garden veggies, but after a month, the garden veggies are only good for composting, while cultures taste even better after a respite.

I am committing, now publicly, to eating at least a tablespoon of homemade cultured veggies every day for the next two weeks. We'll see how happy my body is then!

Enjoy!

Pepper Fool appears to know what's up! Sorta...

From a Mid-Americanish guide to pickling and canning, this site has a great basic canning and pickling primer. They appear oblivious to living vinegar or the distinction, perhaps a Heinz generation. There are still a good number of pickling waypoints there for us to consider. And their recipes will be fun to work through, more to come on that!

pickling in Popular Science

Popular Science has a website for DIY projects and they've published an article on home pickling. They did a good job of covering the important details, in the sense that this article is a good introduction to pickling. They also offered a recipe for pickled ramps (wild leeks), though it's not a pickle like we make. The neat idea included here is using vacuum bags (the heat-sealed kind) to make the anaerobic environment- fill the bag, squeeze out or suck out the air, and heat-seal. We're trying to move away from plastics to avoid BPA and other pollutants but this is an important idea to chew on.

The Gardener & Pickler's Fridge

Sorry about the lighting, this is from my cellphone camera. My sweetie counts thirty-some-odd jars of pickles right now, back behind the local, organically grown produce in there. Barely room for some salame! We're trying to plan a household around numbers that include a separate cooler for pickled stock, seeing as the American Third Coast is a lousy place to site a root cellar. And whatever ain't pickled now, I think I'll be reaching for soon, well, 'cept those peaches, I don't have pickled peaches figured out yet...

Birthday Love Sweet Pepper, completed

This is the Sweet Pepper Birthday Love Batch, right next to my favorite Mister PotatoHead Parts Poacher. The colors show up well here, online, so you can get a good idea of the mix/ratios. The carrot always wears its orange, day in, month out. After that, the serranos and jalapenos show their dark(er) green, alongside red, yellow, and orange bell peppers and my baby's red lips.

Photos, Sweet Pepper Love Batch

We're trying to figure out how to measure the makeup of each batch or jar as we go. It's tricky- there's so much going on during a pickle that it's hard to keep up with little things like how much of what goes where. This is where a camera phone comes in handy: Here's the bulk of the Birthday Love Sweet Pepper Batch, done fermenting 1 June '09..

Birthday Love Pepper Batch

John's birthday was celebrated with both organic and local love this year! Stacey Roussel's polychromatic carrots were added to Brad n Jessica's garden-fresh jalapenos, serranos, and fresno peppers. A couple pounds of sweet red, yellow, and orange lil' bell peppers added bulk and the liquid remains of the last batch of orange relish added garlic, onion, and some inoculants. I'm expecting this batch to be sweet and hot, just like an approachable peck of pickled peppers should be!

What We're Learning So Far...[updated]

We don't get to pickle as often as we'd like but we're working out some more enduring guidepoints. In no particular order,
- Checklists are handy when you're packing for a pickling off-site. Conversely, each kitchen DOES need its own canning funnel and cheesecloth. Did I say cheesecloth? I mean a nylon napkin from a middling-level restaurant. Cheesecloth is a dodo as long as we've got restaurants!
- Keep ingredients separate through processing and measure as you mix. It's easier to work out recipes and ratios this way. And recipes get useful!
- A kitchen scale is a real easy way to keep tabs on the above. Find one with a tare function, for easy measuring on the fly!
- Basic staples (garlic, onion, peppers (separate hot from sweet, or any special harvests), beets, cabbage, carrots) pickle just fine in their own jars and can be easier to work with post-pickle. Different members of the household love to make their own custom mixes. Sea vegetables especially make this a good rule- we're not liking the way they change cabbage/root mixes. Pureeing is overkill in pickling, grating or shredding is all you need. After the pickle, you can further process stuff for specific needs. Leave some stuff whole, like sm. onions, garlic cloves, or baby beets- these are good for "cocktail," escabiche, or related mixes.
- Cabbage expands. Beet stains. Asparagus delights. Garlic is ALL POWERFUL but still really mellow when whey is used instead of vinegar.
- Whey makes for mellower pickles, an especially nice detail when pickling ginger or garlic. Vinegar works great for power relishes and stuff with a sweet side. Cabbage has its own inoculants, at least more noticeably so than other stuff fresh from the dirt.
- Iodized salt is bad but coarse salt is fine. Pickling needs salt, either way!! Dry veggies want to soak overnight (after chopping) in brine. Brine is saltwater. It's heavier than water, more useful than just keeping putrefaction at bay!
- CO2 production makes batches both float and expand, so you either have to weigh your veggies down or cut your ingredients into spears that you can wedge into place. Spears are a better idea when pickling in jars and sealing with oil, while plates work well weighing things down in a crock. Beet-stained cabbage functopus juice bubbling up out of your jars is quite alarming, especially when the batch is inoculating in someone else's kitchen! It's better to be prepared: Line baking sheets with lots of newspaper and let your jars ferment on this.
- Smaller batches work better in jars, while larger batches work better in a crock. Large (1/2 gallon) jars bridge the gap well. And crocks (fired ceramic, cylindrical pots) can be had in various sizes.
- Jars and crocks both are worth skimming through resale shops for. Reduce, reuse, recycle that picklejar!
- Label and date your batches. Pickled food can last well beyond seven months and many pickles want to age and mellow for a few months. We enjoyed some pickles recently that were over a year old. The space issue makes it easy to envy Koreans who can bury kimchee crocks while they age!

Purple Mix

Our dear Brooke has volunteered to host the next pickle circle! We are going to attempt the 'Purple Mix', PeanutButter's cabbage & root vegetable mix. Currently looking at 2 or 4 weeks out; do you have a preference? Leave a comment if you do!

John & I made the hot sauce last night. This time we shredded everything and used the 1/2 gallon Ball jars. It went smoothly, but I missed Patrick's cheerful garlic peeling prowess. Tif took some great photos--we'll add those when she uploads....

Anyway, stay warm, stay funky, and post occasionally on what's fermenting in your world!
IntraSpeck

A whole new way to have fun AND be healthy

This is a new and exciting thing for those of us at BadPixie Central. Snoe's been enthusiastically adding some of the first batch to everything he's eating. According to him, it's even a wonderful way to spice up chicken and dumplings. I've found that I enjoy it mixed in with some black beans and brown rice. It was even a success with some pork and chicken mole I purchased from one of the wonderful Green Market vendors. I'm dying to see how it is on eggs, but that will have to wait until The Bear outgrows his allergy to them.

In addition to the gastronomic delight of the finished product, the creation process is great. As a history buff, I find myself pondering the days of yore when folks regularly got together to do this sort of thing, something that is rapidly disappearing in this increasingly isolationist society. It's a nice feeling, having a kitchen full of people talking, laughing and being industrious together. The mix of personalities is as much spicy fun as the results.

Now I'm eager for more, more, more. I'm thinking fondly of asparagus spears and garlic with dill. It will also be interesting to see how the probiotic benefits affect the baby, hopefully by easing his body's overreaction to certain common foods. I think I'll do some research into that area and if I find anything interesting, I'll be sure to share it.

Thanks again for including us in this community. Great people, great food--it doesn't get any better than that!

The Famous Peanutbutter Mix

Isn't this gorgeous? Special thanks to hand model Patrick Bertolino. Carrots, two kinds of beets, two kinds of cabbage, and a bit of ginger. It was ready to eat right after fermenting but the flavors developed and mellowed as it aged. And we haven't been able to recreate it since! That was a special batch...

Saurkraut

Stelly & I made saurkraut last night! We were without our fearless leader (instigator?), but it was so simple. Totally manageable for two mildly experienced picklers. Even better, it was a short process.

We'll let you know more about the deliciousness in a week!

IntraSpeck

118 degrees F.

That's an important parameter for a number of biological processes. Water starts its phase-shift to vapor at that point, the liquid expanding into steam. Because of this expansion, our bodies feel 118 degrees F at the cellular level as pain- this is where our mouths start telling us "too hot!". Now, directly related, food starts losing its precious natural enzyme content at the same temperature- this is a process of cellular breakdown as water starts turning to steam. Multiple sources advocate a raw diet, primarily to maximize natural enzyme content and therefore maximize nutrient uptake. The dotted line to draw between warm and cooked is 118 degrees F. Cooking food beyond 118 degrees starts breaking down the enzymes that were there naturally, which makes your food harder to digest and keeps nutrients from getting added to our bodies. A fourth interesting thing happens just below this temperature, related in process but not culinarily- sperm dies. See: http://www.newmalecontraception.org/heat.htm. The testicles are outside the body because sperm start dying at 95 degrees F. Soaking your nuts (doesn't have to be brine this time) in water almost at the pain threshold (116) removes fertility for weeks. Men in India are having great successes at voluntary birth control using this method, take that big pharma!

One of the most important ingredients

Salt is an ingredient in almost every pickling recipe we use, whether it's added by the spoonful or making the brine other ingredients are soaked in. Iodized salt is bad but the rest is salt- the purpose of salt is to inhibit the growth of unwanted bacteria and other putrefactants before the fermentation process we're setting up can kick in. Lacto-fermentation takes a day or two to get started, depending on temperature, so the salt guards the door until the lactobacilli are up to the task.
If you're just getting started with fermenting, you might think that the salt will inhibit the growth of the little critters you're trying to cultivate. Seems reasonable only until you see how few pickling or fermenting recipes DON'T use salt. Or until you open something you were looking forward to sampling, only to be warned away by its smell (see the previous post). For instance, beet kvass, as explained by S. Fallon, only has three ingredients: beets, whey, and salt. Well, water, too. Kvass only takes three days to ferment, doesn't seem like much time for other bacteria to move in an set up housekeeping. And folks have complained about the saltiness of previous batches of kvass. We found out the hard way how important the salt is- the salt-light batch wound up slaking the thirst of the compost pile!
Many ingredient lists don't include salt explicitly but do call for a step of soaking the veggies to be pickled in brine- that's salt water. This step also makes sure that your veggies don't get too dry, such as when we had the problem with with floaters.
If you're making a batch of pickles without using an inoculant such as an existing strain of culture, whey (the living, liquid component of yoghurt), or unpasteurized vinegar, the salt is even more important. Root vegetables already have living bacteria in them from the soil they were grown in and can begin fermenting on their own if the conditions are right. This takes a bit longer to start than with an inoculant, so the salt is crucial in keeping bad bacteria at bay. We always use some sort of inoculant as a starter but we've learned to keep the salt in there, first. There's just too much heartbreak involved in having to dump a batch that you've put money, effort, and anticipation time into. And that doesn't even begin to cover the gastro-intestinal grief that comes with eating food gone bad!

Gone Bad

Humans have been recognizably human for a million years. Critters have been consuming fermented foodstuffs on this planet for longer than that; ask anyone who's observed birds eating fermented fruit if they saw any hesitation but rest assured it's been going on a while. Within this group, we try real hard to set up proper and specific conditions to create changes we're looking for but ultimately, we're putting control of things back into Mother Nature's hands. It doesn't always work out like we want and we have to be careful not to eat something that's spoiled. Case in point, two batches in a row of pumpkin seeds gone awry during the soak and dehydrate process. If you soak your seeds or nuts in saltwater overnight and then dry them slowly in the sun or dehydrator (or even oven, if you can keep things just over 100 degrees F), you will end up killing the enzyme-inhibitors that are intended to make that seed or nut pass through your bowels and make a tree later. This means you get to enjoy all the nutrients that would otherwise have fed said tree. So, it turns out that you need to change (and rinse) this water every 12 hours or so, otherwise, fermentation begins (as evidenced by fine bubbles generating and rising to the surface of your brine). If the telltale bubbles that we look for during purposeful fermentation didn't tip you off that you weren't properly soaking your nuts, then hopefully you got a putrescent scent to help out. This is a really good thing and it takes us back to the "recognizably human for 1,000,000 years" bit- our noses are exceedingly good warning devices, having evolved to detect putrescence as a defense mechanism through the years.

While fermenting or otherwise processing raw foods, always trust your nose. If you aren't sure, ask someone else to take a sniff and watch their reactions. Bad stuff makes for negative reactions and, truly, things aren't so dire yet that we need to eat putrescent food. Now, if you're some kind of mad scientist, we're all trying to figure out how buzzards eat putrefied flesh all day without getting sick but luckily, we don't yet really need this knowledge. Either way, if your nose detects an "off" odor, trust your nose and toss that stuff. Along the same lines, if you aren't trying to ferment something but wind up with little bubbles like you normally find during fermentation, be wary. And if you go to open that jar of pickles and the top wants to POP off, indicating an off-gassing inside, you might have a runaway jar on your hands. If you'll read back, you'll see that we previously had an issue with veggies that floated into the boundary layer that was meant to create an anaerobic environment for our fermentation processes. Once all the floaty bits were removed, the process was allowed to proceed. We started this culling process after fermentation had begun, so we happily tossed anything that smelled "off". And we later tossed anything that popped open once we released the lid's pressure- this indicated further putrefying activity. Jars that we weren't sure didn't have that "off" smell got labeled with a "?". These later turned out to have that telltale positive pressure and resulting "POP" upon opening. And the smell inside confirmed our suspicions- this shit ain't right. So, if that batch of garlic in oil wants to go POP when you open it, toss it. Botulism, for instance, just isn't on our menu. If that old stuff looks great but smells bad, say goodbye. Our noses are incredibly good at detecting food gone bad and our brains can spot these dangers in even more ways, it's a good thing to heed these warning signs Mother Nature offers us. Darwin Awards, after all, only benefit the living!

Hello and happy holidays, my pickled friends!

So far this season, I've given our pickles as presents to three of my Dearies, and it has worked out well in two cases (the third loves my-quirky-self enough not to mind).

What I haven't managed is to eat much of the darn good stuff we've been making! I am hoping it is just a sign of the holiday crazy schedule and the whirlwinds, both of which will be abating with the ringing in of the new year tomorrow.

The Kvass is rather like radishes for me--I resist beginning to drink it, but once I've 'broken the seal' I really enjoy it. It is good & thirst quenchingly salty.

Let's make a date early in the new year to play pickles! And take that darn poll!!

Wishing you lots of peace, prosperity, & pickles in 2008!

IntraSpeck!

What NOT TO DO when pickling...

Hey kids...please take a look at the link I've posted...this is something that you really need to look out for when you are pickling...
Be a safe pickler!!!

Blas

Making Vinegar, including honey vinegar and more

http://www.gangofpour.com/diversions/vinegar/vinegar1.html
http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/how-vinegar-works2.htm
http://vinegarman.com/VinegarMaking.shtml
http://www.countrysidemag.com/issues/83/83-4/Countryside_Staff.html
http://www.publicbookshelf.com/public_html/The_Household_Cyclopedia_of_General_Information/howtomak_bjc.html

The last two links are the juiciest, offering recipes for many kinds of vinegar, including honey and liquor based, as well as a home acidity test.

Less of a group event, making vinegar involves setting up cider or wine (or other sweet bacteria food) to sit and ferment for months. The vinegar crock becomes a near-permanent addition to the kitchen and then storage vessels begin to multiply as time goes on. A good working setup is a barrel or crock for aging vinegar and a separate barrel or crock for generating vinegar. Aged vinegar and a constantly maturing flavor in the crock become the fruits of this new course of regular, light labor. Wine vinegar is merely feeding a growing colony small amounts of wine regularly and occasionally drawing off vinegar. Other kinds of vinegar, such as the honey vinegar referred to in the Countryside Magazine, are better as stand-alone batches that turn and are then bottled. White wine vinegar is more challenging but will be worth the effort. Apple cider vinegar seems to be the best choice for the pickling we do.
Vinegar is the oxidation of alcohol as carried out by a growing colony of airborne bacteria; acetic acid is the result.Vinegar will make itself if you leave wine or hard cider open to oxygen but, more expeditiously, use existing vinegar or "mother" to turn wine or hard cider at close to a one to one ratio. Mother is the visible bacteria colony, appearing slimy and filmy. It forms initially on the surface, looking spongy and grey and signaling the start of its growth process. The oxidation process is fostered by surface area, so a good vinegar-making vessel is wide-mouthed and covered with something porous like a cloth. Ceramic such as CPB's crock is excellent, avoid plastic and iron. Light ain't good for growing vinegar, so use an opaque vessel. Like our other cultures, vinegar needs a warm temp, 70-80 degrees f. As the bacteria colony consumes the sugar or alcohol and grows, mother will form inside the fluid. It will sink to the bottom once all the sugar or alcohol has been converted. The mother is then strained and the vinegar can be put aside for aging. Left unstrained and unrefrigerated, vinegar will continue to grow until it spoils after a few months. Five percent acidity is required to culture vegetables like we do, lower strength is courting nasty problems.

composting

We got to talking about composting and under-sink worm bins lately. Keeping worms under the sink to feed table scraps to goes back a long way but current lifestyles could find it a bit funky- you have to put up with some smells sometimes, as well as fruitflies. Of course, some systems are cleaner than others but we are talking about a living process here.
This link: http://ecotality.com/life/2007/12/10/indoor-composting-made-simple/ goes to a new product featured on the Ecotality blog, an indoor composter. This one is sealed, with a fan and a heater, so it fits into the "modern" lifestyle by alleviating older complaints. The fan helps control the odor and the heater keeps the process running. Says it can handle meat because of the heater, which means it will kill worms (rather, take the place of). So, for lack of outdoor space, this isn't a bad idea but it has limits and it adds to your carbon footprint.
Keeping worms under the sink (or anywhere dark and quiet) is a much older alternative. Feed them your table scraps (no animal products or fat, though- this is the advantage the heated system enjoys), give them moist, shredded newspaper to bed in, empty the worm castings every couple months. A container with a lid, as well as the paper bedding, keeps the fruit flies to a minimum. Bigger households can run stacked containers to handle larger loads of daily refuse. While full containers are being converted to compost, the one on top is still receiving scraps. http://www.compost-bin.org/vermicomposting-with-can-o-worms/ is a good commercial site for seeing what you can buy towards this end, where here's the wikipedia entry on vermiculture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermicompost. This site is all about worms: http://www.wormdigest.org/.
Worm dirt is excellent plant food. Well-fed plants (i.e. not raised for commercial profit plants) are excellent people food. Table scraps converted to worm dirt saves landfill space and stretches our budgets, as scraps wind up in our bellies, just the way this planet has been recycling its upper layers for the last few million years. Oh, got a fishing trip coming up? Got worms!

fermented beans and southern relish

Beans (black and red, soybean) will ferment. This makes them easier to digest and offer up more of their nutrients when fermented first. Now, if you're the singing kind, you might not appreciate this but fermented beans don't bring the wind nearly as much as unfermented beans. To ferment beans, just add a couple fingers of unpasteurized vinegar to cooked beans (soak them overnight before cooking) and let them sit for five to seven days. Soaking the beans starts the germination process, breaking down the enzyme inhibitors and unravelling some of the tightly-packed nutrients. Cooking raises the level of available proteins.

http://www.tigersandstrawberries.com/2006/04/27/beans-out-of-gas/
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jafcau/1998/46/i12/abs/jf980674h.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060426080023.htm:

~~ note: this article is easier to read if you click on the little
pencil at the bottom right of the post ~~

Ferment And Cook Beans For Gas-free Nutrition ScienceDaily (Apr. 26, 2006) — Fermenting beans and then cooking them not only reduces the majority of the soluble fibre that leads to flatulence, but also enhances their nutritional quality. Now we know which bacteria are important for the fermentation, reveal findings published online today in the SCI's Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. Beans are already an important source of nutrients, and many people would eat more of them if it wasn't for the flatulence. In many situations treating food to remove one problem often reduces its nutritional value, but a team of researchers at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, Venezuela, have shown how flatulence can be reduced, while the nutritional value is enhanced. Flatulence is caused by bacteria that live in the large intestine breaking down parts of the food that have not been digested higher in the gut, and releasing gas. Led by Marisela Granito, the researchers had previous shown that fermenting the beans could destroy many of these compounds. Now this team of researchers at has identified the bacteria that perform this fermentation. Publishing their work in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, they show firstly that Lactobacillus casei and Lactobacillus plantarum are the key bacteria. These can be encouraged to grow either by deliberately adding it to a batch, or by inoculating with liquor from a previous batch. Secondly, they discovered that once these fermented beans are cooked, the amounts of nutrients in the bean that could be digested and absorbed had increased significantly. "Our results show that L. casei could be used as a functional starter culture in the food industry," says Granito. About the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture is an SCI journal, published by John Wiley & Sons, on behalf of the Society of Chemical Industry, and is available in print (ISSN: 0022-5142) and online (ISSN: 1097-0010) via Wiley Interscience www.interscience.wiley.com For further information about the journal go to: http://www.interscience.wiley.com/jsfa Adapted from materials provided by John Wiley & Sons, Inc..

Southern Relish
2 cans white shoepeg corn
2 cans worth of cooked, fermented black and/or red beans
2 medium yellow onions
4 jalapenos
1 small carrot
half a head of garlic
The beans will bring some of the vinegar flavor, so some folks add sugar if the corn isn't enough to offset the sour taste. Serve with corn chips.

It ain't pickled but

Unpasteurized vinegar is some impressive stuff. I'll let you do your own research for now but I do shots of escabiche juice (vinegar w/ fermented garlic, onion, peppers, &ct. essences) alongside my daily kvass shot. Lots of nutrients in there, lots of dietary power I can't get anywhere else, lots of dietary power lost to most folks on a Western Commercial diet. Did you buy your meal, as opposed to creating your meal from raw ingredients? If you "bought" your meal, chances are it's a dead one. Trying to feed a living organism, on a planet where other critters that eat dead stuff exist outside or atop the food chains- scientists still can't figure out how buzzards don't die from eating putrified meat- living organisms feed off other living processes. Milk was once collected and kept long enough for airborne bacteria to turn it to cheese. Some hungry fella ate it and then told his family about it. We all did it and lived healthily until we were convinced to buy the convenience food offered by the corporations. Perhaps it's a different enzymatic process from the buzzards but eating things that have fermented or aged or otherwise been altered by growing processes have a propensity for healthy benefits. Among others, vinegar prevents putrifaction.

White vinegar is an evil, in-organic by-product of the phenol production process (industrial waste material that Heinz found a profitable end for) but it's still worth knowing about. "57 varieties" is famous for when Heinze took common preserves and pickles and mass-produced them for commercial sale. Now, to run a profitable ketchup biz, you have to maximize price while minimizing your costs. Selling live, cultured foods is very hard to do on a wide scale, let alone a national one. It's too hard to keep a consistent product, let alone ship it somewhere. The feedback to this profit-based rape of your nutrition is part of why we're seeing a "locally grown" movement in produce lately. Not only is it contributing to global warming (14% of carbon emissions are from our transportation sector and 14% come from our agriculture sector) to buy food made somewhere else but it comes at the sacrifice of quality and nutrition. If you are in a bind, say weathering a hurricane or other "disaster" that shuts down the electrical grid, eat your food from the jar it's packaged in. When you are done, if you have nothing else, pour in some white vinegar, it will keep your food from going bad for a few days longer. Hopefully, you will have some living vinegar to use instead and can preserve what's at hand better but let's at least profit from our high-priced conveniences if not!

On a brighter note, Shit doesn't happen every day and we can pay attention to certain things that don't ferment well: citrus, fruits (tomatillo and tomato!), spinach.
I make pesto with equal parts cooked spinach and basil. I add many nuts, many living cheeses, and living vinegar. The spinach won't ferment but the vinegar and cheese cultures keep this sauce edible and aging for months in the fridge!
I take raw nuts (no peanuts) and soak them in seasalt brine overnight, then dry them at low low temps in the oven the next night. This kills the enzyme-inhibitors that evolution has built into seeds, which are what makes a seed a seed instead of a food after it's gone through your gut. Killing the enzyme-inhibitor allows your body to make the most of seeds, a rich source of varied nutrients.

Floaters

Our latest two batches have been concerning me- cut veggies have been floating into the oil layer. They shouldn't bother the fermentation process, the oil still keeps oxygen out of the way. They won't, however, get fermented with the rest of the batch and will have to be removed once refridgeration solidifies the oil layer. They will/should be worth eating but would otherwise destroy an aging batch of escabiche. Hmm, they just might botch the batch, we'll have to see...

The problem was dryness- all of our raw ingredients had time to sit and wait for us to get to them, between drop-off by the farmers at Central City Co-op and processing in Stelly's and Rowan's kitchen. Stelly, Rice, and Lewis now hypothesize that a two-step process, soaking overnight in water, will solve this problem. It's proposed that further batches be put into jars filled with water and soaked overnight, in the fridge if possible. The next night, an inner-circle crew can then join the host/ess in the final stages: decanting excess water (about two inches per jar), adding the vinegar, and topping with oil, before sealing and setting on the shelf.

ideas & requests for later

Please add to the list of upcoming cultures:

beets and ginger (pretty damn yummy, ask Patrick or Christy for some quick)
italian style, banana peppers, cauliflower, carrots, etc.
beets and turnips (thanks Anne)
tomatillo salsa (don't know if it will work but it's worth trying)

beet kvass

Beet Kvass

6 beets, peeled
1/2 cup whey
2 tablespoons salt

Chop beets coarsely- if they are cut too fine, their sugar will be converted to alcohol in the fermentation process. We spread the six beets, whey, and salt out between four quart jars but making this in a gallon jug works just as well. Cover the mix with clean water and let ferment for 2-3 days before storing in the fridge. Drink the kvass as a tonic, lots of healthy compounds in there. When the batch is almost done, cover again with water and let it re-ferment. There won't be enough goodies left for a third time, though.

Making whey: separate the cheese from the living liquid component of unflavored, plain yogurt by straining through (surprise!) cheesecloth or a clean cloth. I tie up the corners and hang the bundle from a kitchen cabinet handle with a bowl underneath the catch the drippings. Don't toss the cheese, it has a fun, tangy flavor and spreadable consistency.

From the Weston Price website (http://www.westonaprice.org/foodfeatures/kvass.html):

"

Kvass and Kombucha: Gifts From Russia

By Sally Fallon

Visitors to Russia can observe the following typical sight on Moscow street corners: a large metal drum, larger than a beer keg, turned sideways and mounted on wheels. A spigot on one end releases a brown bubbly liquid into a glass. Customers line up to pay for a draught, down it in several gulps and return the glass to the vendor who wipes it clean for the next customer.

The beverage enjoyed by Muscovites, other city dwellers and villagers throughout Russia is kvass, a lacto-fermented beverage made from stale rye bread. It tastes like beer but is not alcoholic. Kvass is considered a tonic for digestion, an excellent thirst quencher and, consumed after vodka, an antidote to a hangover.

It is also recognized that kvass is safer to drink than water. Tolstoy describes how Russian soldiers took a ladle full of kvass before venturing from their barracks onto the Moscow streets during a cholera epidemic. Because kvass protects against infectious disease, there is no worry about sharing the glass.

Russians have been enjoying kvass for at least one thousand years. Wrote Pushkin: "Their kvass they needed like fresh air. . . " Lomonosov, a prominent scientist of peasant origins lived in "unspeakable poverty" as a student. "With a daily allowance of three kopecks, all I could have by way of food was half a kopeck’s worth of bread and half a kopeck’s worth of kvass. . . I lived like this for five years, yet did not forsake study."

But kvass was enjoyed by czars as well as by peasant. In wealthy households, various kinds of kvass were made either with rye bread or with currants, raspberries, lemons, apples, pears, cherries, bilberries and lingonberries. Peter the Great enjoyed splashing kvass on red-hot stones in the steam bath, to enhance the steam with the fragrance of fresh bread."

Escabiche, taqueria table pickles, updated

Taqueria table pickles

15 carrots
15 japalenos (seeds in)
3 heads of garlic
10 stalks of celery
2-3 onions
oregano
2 bay leaves, crumbled
coarse ground pepper
2 fingers of unpasteurized vinegar per quart jar
olive oil to seal

By the quart jar:
1/2 onion
2 heads garlic
2 jalapenos
2 serranos
1 or 2 carrots
1 celery stalk

other possibles: cauliflower, cabbage, various peppers

Slice and chop to the size you want in your mouth- peppers very thin, carrots up to double-nickel thick, etc. Mash everything down firmly, cover with clean water then oil. Ferment for 5-7 days at 70 degrees or above. Smaller jars seem like a good idea for gifting but not with escabiche- you wind up with too much liquid, not enough goodies.

Cabbage, cauliflower, small, whole peppers, and dry carrots like to float, breaking the oil barrier and escaping fermentation. Presoaking in water overnight might help this...

Orange Relish

~~~Slingshot's Pickled Pepper Relish~~~
4 large yellow onions
8 pods of garlic
4 red bell peppers
2 yellow bell peppers
1 green bell pepper
2 lbs. japaleno peppers, sorta deseeded
2 lbs. serrano peppers
4 carrots
chipotle chili powder
4 peppercorn mix, coarse ground
2 fingers unfiltered, unpasteurized apple cider vinegar per jar

this recipe fills eight and a half quart mason jars

clean all jars and lids, you're gonna ferment in them, so you need to insure that your vinegar culture doesn't have any competitors. The fermentation will prevent spoilage by excluding bad bacteria, as well as add nutrients and digestive aids.
clean the produce and chop into bits easily processed by your machine.
process everything in a quisinart or similar machine. The Vitamix leaves a saucier consistency unless you're very patient and quick on the buttons
add the vinegar to each jar and then fill w/ the processed mix. leave an inch of room from the top of each jar and clean the glass inside down to the waterline. Gently shake each jar to level the top of the mix.
float a layer of olive oil gently onto the surface to seal, making sure all the veggies are completely submerged, and seal the lids. The oil prevents oxidation, which is an enemy of fermentation, and is easily mixed in later.
leave the sealed jars in a calm spot no cooler than 69 degrees F for four to eight days. Look for fine, well-distributed bubbles to indicate CO2 production- that shows fermentation. Also look for a sediment (harmless) of dead lactobacilla bacteria in the bottom of the jars. Refrigerate after fermentation. They'll last six months or more unopened, developing a finer flavor profile as they age.

Option: use whey instead of ACVinegar but consume faster- ACV seems to preserve the pickles longer.

vary the coarseness of the cut to suit your cooking styles- coarser is easier to make stay in place until you close the sandwich and it leaves more juices for flavoring or juicing (pickle juice shots!), where the Vitamix leaves a saucy consistency that's good in a squeeze bottle.

Uses: use as a base for salsa (add tomatoes, cilantro & lime, carrots, etc), use on sandwiches, omelettes, in soups, as sauce base or add-in, anywhere you'd like a shot of power-flavor with lots of vitamins, minerals, and home-grown cultures. When cooking, add the relish at the table, to keep from killing the active and beneficial cultures with heat. Sick folks love this stuff in their broth, vitamin rich!

Note: Most of the heat in this relish comes from the japs and serranos. Deseeding most of the japs keeps this under control. Ratio of sweet to hot peppers is important, too. The carrots add a bit of body and help round out the flavor profile. This is a concentrated recipe on purpose and will produce a rowdy relish!

26 Nov at Pat n Christy's

Beets night. Four jars of Co-op beet Kvass. Yogurt is strained to separate the cheese from the biologically-active whey. Whey and salt are added to water (refer to newer post on Beet Kvass) that covers the beets. Ferment for 2-3 days. Drink the juice but don't eat the beets yet. Once this batch is done, top off with more water, ferment again for a second batch. Won't work a third time. The batch came out nicely, good clean taste. Have a small glass per day.
We also used the whey to ferment some local, homegrown beets, they are delicious-- I drink kvass because it's good for me, not from being a beets fan (hell, I'm a recovering picky eater) but these beets tasted really good! Check Christy's comment for a couple more details.
The dikon radish did not work out, whew! I suspect it was too far gone already.

2 Dec at Stelly's, updated 11Dec, 12Dec

Stelly has a bangin' kitchen!
escabiche with cabbage and cauliflower added, eight jars
orange relish, four jars
ginger fermented with whey, five small jars (one fine-sliced, like for sushi)

Problem: cabbage, cauliflower, and small, whole peppers like to float- the oil seal isn't looking good. We'll have to pull the bits out of the oil once fermentation is done- they won't have fermented. Larger jars or using the crock can help with this, also require less oil.

Update: we'll pull almost 25% of the stuff out and eat it quick, depending on smell. We're waiting for the oil to congeal to ease this process- should be able to pull the whole layer out whole.

Possible solution: soak veggies in water overnight (cabbage would need to get cut first for this)

Chicken stock: three packs of chicken feet made eight ice-cube trays. Very clean flavor, very rich, too! Cooked for almost four hours, sufficient.

Materials cost is working out to about $5 per jar, not including glass. Folks, please be on the lookout for free/cheap jars with good lids... There is a chance that Central City Co-op will be able to offer wholesale pricing on vinegar and oil.

Update II: the sliced ginger looks great but there's mold at the oil/air boundary on top. If it passes the smell test upon opening, we'll try to cleanly scoop out the offending bits and see if the ginger below held its own. The rest of the ginger came out fine, so it's surmised that this particular jar wasn't cleaned well enough.

Let's get started! Making cultures, having fun.