Wednesday 16 September 2015

Pickles, Ferments and Sandor Katz




Been having a lot of fun and playing with my ferments. Started to broaden out from just krauts, brining more things, making more cultured drinks and being a bit more experimental, just made a small trial batch of coffee kombucha!

My spicy pepper kraut (more like a kimchi, i guess) is always a hit. The continuous kombucha gets amazingly fizzy, love that stuff! I've made pineapple skin vinegar and a melon scraps one, fermenting has become my form of composting!

I've made fermented buckwheat bread, thanks to Amanda Feifer at Phickle (a great resource for us fermenters!) I've pickled water melon rinds (a bit tough) and recently made some garlic-dill sour pickles, they were delicious. I took Sandor Katz advice and added a couple of cherry tree leaves to the brine as the tannins are supposed to help keep the pickles crunchy. They were crunchy, sour and absolutely gorgeous! I left them to ferment for 20 days in a 5.4% brine.

Then i made a ginger bug starter and a batch of ginger beer from it, still have a week to go until that's ready to drink. Yesterday i pickled some carrots and ginger. I'm so glad i started to lacto-ferment... and discovered Sandor Katz. My innards have never felt so good!! ;-)
It's great fun, have a go... it's alchemy!

'Ginger bug' starting to ferment.
water, ginger and sugar, which you keep feeding like a sourdough starter

My garlic-dill sour pickles at the start of their journey.


Tuesday 15 September 2015

This Will Take You Places


Built To Spill cover Neil Young's Cowgirl In The Sand. Love both. Going to see these guys play soon too. Looking forward to it. Now listen, get in the groove... and drift off...