Adventures in Fermentation

In February, Anna at Fermented Homestead hosted a collaboration called Fermented February on YouTube. Each day a different content provider created a video on some form of fermentation. The idea was that you would watch the video, make a constructive comment, and be entered in a drawing for a variety of prizes. I was especially interested in the fermentation books and the crock. So I watched them, took notes, and commented. Did I win? No, I did not. However, I got some ideas (good and not so good) for fermenting.

I started by making a ginger bug. I don’t know why it’s called a ginger “bug,” but it’s a very gingery ferment that can be used as a base for some yummy beverages. It’s made with organic (MUST be organic) ginger, sugar and filtered water. Unless you’re me, then it’s made with our delightful spring water. The instructions said that it shouldn’t be covered more than to keep bugs and dust out. I had no luck getting bubbles to form, so I did a bit of research and found more people saying it should be covered. So I did that and voila! bubbles.

I used the ginger bug for two ferments: ginger beer and fermented lemonade. The ginger beer was A. MA. ZING. Well, only amazing if you like ginger. It was so, so good. Just in case you don’t know, ginger beer is NOT “beer.” It doesn’t taste like beer and it’s not alcoholic. Think ginger ale with more ginger. My favorite ginger ale used to be made by Deschutes Brewery, and you could only get it in Bend, OR. They stopped making it in 2020, so it’s been awhile since I tasted it. My ginger beer certainly had a stronger ginger flavor, but I don’t think it had quite the depth of flavor. Not that it wasn’t good. It was. I just think it could be better. I think next time I will add just a tiny bit of allspice. Stay tuned for those results.

The fermented lemonade was also very good. A nice strong lemon taste with a bit of fizz. Definitely making that again. Since lemonade is really more of a summer beverage, I put it in swing top bottles with plenty of headspace with the caps off and put it in the freezer. Or at least, I thought it was plenty of headspace. As it froze, it expanded more than I expected and I had frozen fermented lemonade puddles in the freezer. I had to scoop out some (which of course I had to taste…yum) just to close the bottles. But now I have two good-sized bottles of delicious, healthful lemonade in the freezer for when the weather turns warm. I recently bought some more lemons to make it again.

Not wanting to waste the lemon peels (organic), I also made the limoncello that the video on the lemonade recommended. (That would be limoncello-the Italian lemon-flavored liqueur, NOT lemon jell-o.) It’s quite easy. You steep lemon peels in Everclear for a couple of weeks, strain it and mix it with simple syrup and let it sit for another couple weeks. Then you can store it in the freezer. Pretty easy to do. I have two take-aways. First, cut the lemon peels quite small. They are nice and supple when they go into the bottle, but are crisp when they come out. It took me almost half an hour to work all of the now white peels out of the bottle. Second, I would definitely use a lower proof alcohol. At 190 proof, Everclear is pretty potent and is the dominant flavor in the liqueur. The next time I make it, I will try vodka. I’m hoping it will give me a stronger lemon flavor because right now Whoo baby!!

I highly recommend fermented carrot sticks as a good entry ferment. Super easy to make and not too much of the ferment funk. Carrot sticks, salt and water is all you need. Although you can add lemon, garlic, or other flavors. I added garlic. They are all gone now. I bought rainbow carrots from my favorite farmer to make really pretty ones.

Almost all of my ferments were successful, and I ended up with some really yummy, healthy food. (Although I’m not sure about the health benefits of 190 proof limoncello!) However, I did try to make Douglas Fir soda. The video was for “Pine Needle Soda,” but I don’t have pine trees growing on my property. What I do have is Douglas Fir. I’ve made tea from the needles before, and it was tasty, sort of citrusy. So I cut a few branches and put the needles in a swing top bottle along with some sugar and water. I let it sit in the window sill for a week, and then I burped it. It spurted a little bit out, but not enough to worry about. Back to the window sill for another week. (The instructions were to ferment in direct sun for 2-3 weeks.) When I burped it after another week, it did more than spurt. It was sort of like Old Faithful. Liquid (sticky liquid) shot out of the bottle and just wouldn’t stop. It kept going and going and going. Eventually it did die down enough that I could put the lid back on it. But by then there were fir needles stuck on the ceiling, the window, the sink, the counters, the floor and me. And there was only a couple of inches of soda left in the bottle. I put the bottle in the fridge to sample later and spent the next half an hour cleaning needles off the surfaces of the kitchen. Later my friend and I tasted it. We both decided that it tasted medicinal. I could probably figure out how to make the carbonation more manageable. But the taste just made it not worth the trouble.

Currently I’m finishing up some mushroom umami sauce and powder. The fermentation is finished and I strained out the solids. The initial tasting was pretty good. I’m looking forward to use it to add more depth to various dishes I make. As I write this, the solids are dehydrating to grind into mushroom powder which will have the same purpose. Until I actually use it, I will withhold judgement on if its worth repeating.

If you haven’t tried fermenting, I highly recommend it. It’s easy and inexpensive. Often all you need are vegetables with a brine. And it’s so very good for your gut. Give it a try!!

Spring is Springing

Decades ago my friend Dorcas shared some daffodils from her garden with me. These were not just any ordinary daffodils. These had been planted by her mother-in-law. But that is not all. If you have driven HWY 99E north of Harrisburg in February or March (it varies year to year) , you will have seen the famous Daffodil Drive. The daffodils were all planted by a man called Bruce Witmer. According to Dorcas, he was a talented craftsman and a well-known and loved member of the community. And Dorcas’ mother-in-law dug up some of the daffodils from her field to donate to the cause. Since daffodils reproduce through asexual cloning (also from seed, but that is not germane to this conversation), my daffodils are genetically the same as some of the daffodils growing along the highway. In years past, these same daffodils were celebrated at the Daffodil Festival at the Long Tom Grange. Sadly, there won’t be a daffodil festival this year. All that to say, my daffodils are blooming. But just the ones from Dorcas. The ones with history. Originally I planted them along the fence line to start my own daffodil drive. The fence line has been moved, but the daffodils remain, some of them bravely trying to bloom in the gravel of the driveway. Tough things, daffodils.

Dorcas’ Daffodils

Last year I suggested that we move the chickens down into the orchard to control pests. My thought was that we would have a mobile chicken coop that we could move around the trees. That way the chickens could fertilize the trees and eat pests and would have ready access to grass and weeds to make their eggs more nutritious and delicious. And they would stay out of the garden. Unfortunately DH had a different idea and created a permanent coop and pen, meaning the chickens need to be let out daily to wander around the orchard garden. So my garden is a total mess because they are having a wonderful time scratching and totally digging everything up. Not exactly a great plan when you are trying to grow things. Our previous chickens were kept near the garden in a very large pen fenced with moveable fencing. When I wanted them to dig up garden beds, we’d move the fencing so they could get to only the beds I wanted taken care of. But mostly it just stayed in place so that the grass and weeds could grow through the openings. Exactly what was needed to keep the chickens out of the garden. So this week’s task has been to remove it from the grip of the weeds and set it up around the garden. Sounds easy, no? No! Field grass does not like to let go and is hard to pull. But eventually DH was able to get it to release and is in the process of using it to protect the garden. Just in time too. I’m ready to plant chard.

We’ve had a fair bit of rain this week–almost 4 inches. Since I’m a total wimp about being out in the rain– even with rain gear– that meant inside jobs. Of which there are plenty. I have been having mixed results with my sourdough, so I fed it twice just to make sure. It ended up making a lovely loaf of bread that we are enjoying.

Sourdough

Because I hate throwing anything away, I had to do something with that discard. I already have crackers on the shelf and really didn’t want to do flatbread, so I made pasta. Because that’s so much easier. Ha! It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad. I’m still new at the process and it really does take two people to run the dough through the pasta maker. I did enlist DH’s help, but he didn’t quite understand the need to gently pull it out, especially of the cutter. So I had trouble with it sticking together. And I really need a better method of drying it that in little piles. It all clumps together. But it did taste good.

Pasta

The biggest success was kombucha. My friend Cathy showed me how to make it last year and gifted me with some starter and a SCOBY. I have to say that I thoroughly enjoy the whole process. My favorite part is coming up with the flavors. Usually I make fruit flavors, which are our favorites. That means this time of year we have a lot of citrus. But also blackberries from the freezer. DH was quite skeptical at first. I mean have to SEEN a SCOBY? They’re pretty disgusting looking. But now he loves it. I usually do the first ferment for 10 days-2 weeks. Sometimes if I’m busy, it goes a bit longer. But we prefer it more lightly fermented. On kombucha day it takes me only about an hour for the whole gallon process. I get the new batch started with the tea brewing while I am adding flavors and kombucha to the bottles with a little squirt of raw honey. Then 3-4 days later, into the fridge and they are ready to drink. This schedule seems to work out so that we rarely run out of kombucha before the next batch is done.

Kombucha in bottles starting their second ferment

Yesterday I saw a video on making beet kraut, so that will be my next project. Sounds yummy to me. I bought the beets and cabbage today. Stay tuned.

Sourdough Woes

Most people who know me know I love to bake. It’s one reason that I could never attempt a low-carb diet. I love baking just too much. I bake cookies, cakes, and most of all, bread. A few years ago, I, like everyone else, took up sourdough baking. I had done it in the past, but mostly used my starter as flavoring. I still relied on commercial yeast.

Traditional skills fascinate me, so mastering “real” sourdough became a goal. I watched lots of YouTube videos and read (and tried) lots of recipes and techniques. Most just did not work well for me. Most of them required more time than I could devote to it. But then I found a recipe from Backwoods Home Magazine that I liked. Instead of the normal stretch and folds, which never seemed to work well for me, this had me pat it out into a rather large rectangle and then fold that up. Eureka! I found a recipe that consistently worked.

Consistently does not mean always. Or foolproof, however, If it had been a while since I used my starter (it lives in the fridge), it wouldn’t be strong enough and I wouldn’t get good bread. Sometimes if I got scatterbrained and didn’t get things done at the right time, it wouldn’t work either. And the problem with that is that I wouldn’t know until I took the lid off the Dutch oven while I was baking, only to discover no oven spring. On my. third. day. of working on it.

And that is what happened to me today. We have our new pastor coming to dinner and I really wanted to have some good bread to serve with dinner. So I started two days ago waking up and feeding my sourdough. Then I was supposed to start the levain (The sponge that starts the process.) going that evening to be ready for the process of mixing and folding the next day. BUT I totally spaced it out. I remembered in the middle of the night. Of course. In retrospect, I should have got up and made it. However, I thought it would be fine to do that first thing in the morning and then try to “hurry” the other steps along. But here’s the thing. You can’t hurry sourdough. It needs time, sometimes a LOT of it..

But I gave it a try. The dough felt very luscious as I did all the folds. I could tell I was building strong gluten to support the rise. Unfortunately, all the strong gluten in the world won’t help if the wild yeast doesn’t have time to rise fully. And I didn’t give it that time because I didn’t have it to give. So with great hope, I plopped my lovely loaf into the Dutch oven, set the timer and waited. And when I took the lid off, nothing had happened. NO oven spring. Just a blob of thick half-baked dough. So disappointing. I want to cry.