Culture Club 101 Class: Part II

My last post on the Culture Club 101 class was me rambling and trying to lay these various processes out to better understand them. With that in mind I'll focus this one more on the class itself, what we learned, and why you would do it!

Culture Club 101 is a local Pasadena business that has a co-op and a stall at the Farmer's Market. I often pick up my vegetables for this blog at the farmers market they attend and have past by their booth each time usually muttering under my breath something about stupid hippies and their cultured sodas and kombuchas. It wasn't until Jessica visited me recently that I actual stopped at their stall to try and sample some of their products. Jessica, like my brother, is becoming more and more into kombucha while she leaves me behind arguing that it tastes like vinegar. So, being that Culture Club offers kombucha she wanted to stop and try it. We got to try their kombucha and their only cultured soda left, which happened to be apple cider.

Oh man, good kombucha is actually very good.

Slightly vinegary, but not overpowering. However, it has nothing on cultured sodas, which uses a similar process (fermentation), but are just not left as long. The sodas are insanely refreshing, fizzy, and have no sugar since the fruit juice has plenty in it to feed the microogranisms and still taste good! After tasting these I noticed that they offered classes in culturing fruits, sauerkraut, buttermilk, creme fraiche, sourdough, kombucha, and many more that were all focused around fermented goods.

The point of all this fermentation is to a) make the product naturally, b) preserve it, c) add a unique taste, and d) add healthy vitamins/probiotics. I basically think it's a cool process (nerdy) and has a delicious unique taste that I haven't found elsewhere so I decided to take their class on fermented fruits and fruit juices.

We got to make three things including cultured raspberries, spicy preserved mango salsa, and cultured fruit juice sodas.

Cultured raspberries? Uh, what? Sounds weird, but you have to trust me that they are delicious and the same goes for mangoes. It ends up being a bit tangy with a slight effervescence that you can increase or decrease depending on how long you let the fruit ferment for. It's simply 4 cups raspberries, 1/4 cup sugar (for the bacteria and yeast along with flavor), 1/4 cup milk whey (starter culture). This is all mashed together and then put in jars and sprinkled with some lemon juice. As I mentioned in my last post it's important to use organic raspberries since pesticides could inhibit the growth. This is left to sit out for 1-2 days until it's done, which is easy to tell if you use a pop-top lid because you won't be able to depress the lid anymore due to all the carbon dioxide released during the fermentation process. These raspberries and mangoes are fantastic over creme fraiche!















Same process basically goes for the spicy mango salsa except that you don't need any sugar since sugary salsa is, well, gross. There is enough in the fruit to keep everyone happy during fermentation. I haven't tried this one yet so we will see how it goes.


Now, the REAL reason I took the class. The culture fruit sodas. Mmm, so refreshing and fresh fruit juice is always a good thing. These were super simple it turns out and are just a gallon of organic fruit juice with two cups of culture starter whether it be milk whey, a bug, or kombucha. These are also left out to ferment for 1-2 days. Certain fruits will work better than others and just takes some experimentation. We made a pomegranate juice with the milk whey as the starter culture.

All of these sound kinda weird at first (like I said I scoffed at their booth many time), but you really just have to try it to be convinced.

Plus these all have potential benefits! I have to be a bit nerdy, but I'm not going to go in depth here. Both the fruit and the fermentation of the fruit have health benefits. Many fruits have natural antioxidants that protect against oxidative damage, which may occur naturally during aging or is induced by an unhealthy life style (ex. alcoholism). Oxidative damage can lead to protein and DNA damage along with lipid oxidation all of which have harmful effects on cells. Fermentation produces byproducts, such as certain vitamins, which are beneficial to us. The actual bacteria may be beneficial as well in terms of influencing our natural gut flora (i.e. fighting off bad bacteria, ect.).

(This is a picture of your gut epithelial; http://greaterimmunity.com/Files/probiotics.html)

I thought this image summed up nicely and simply why probiotic bacteria may be beneficial. 

Side note: my picture of all the goods we made is hardly fantastic in terms of composition or lighting, but I did need some external lighting as my kitchen bulbs are this weird, dim yellow that you can partially see in the final photo. I do try somewhat to compose and light my pictures (I got lazy like here) and I thought my lighting "set up" was particular funny for this particular photo.

Culture Club 101 Class: Part I

I decided to take this class because I think the hardest thing for me about baking and the realms of fermentation, pickling, and canning is that it's very difficult to come up with my own recipe (canning excluded for safety reasons) and, frankly, their natural sodas are amazing. I feel like I'm reasonably good at creating recipes for savory cooking since, for one, it's much less precise, and two, I've been cooking for longer than I've been trying home ferments. But with the previously mentioned processes it either needs to be precise or there is some background knowledge needed. My trouble with fermented goods that use yeast or bacteria is where do I get those mircoogranisms? How much do I add of the seed culture? How long do I leave it out? None of these questions have clear answers I've learned, but I'm going to attempt to address these questions with what I've learned so far from research and from what I learned in my Culture Club 101 class on fermented fruit and fruit juices.

Natural microogranisms or brewers yeast?

Well, that depends on what you want your finished product to taste like and texture to be. For beer, you're going to be using brewers yeast from well established strains that produce the specific type of style of beer you're shooting for. But, when you deviate from beer and start moving toward cultured sodas, hard ciders, cultured fruits, and other things like this that don't have well established recipes it's to be more of a guessing game and less precise.

You can actually use brewers yeast if you so choose, but natural bacteria are famed for their healthy products of fermentation while the natural yeast will give you carbonation. The bacteria present on the fruit or seeded  from a culture (more on this later) will have probiotics and plenty of healthy vitamins that were not present before since these are products of bacterial fermentation while the yeast are contributing mostly carbon dioxide and a little ethanol. By using brewers yeast you're overwhelming any bacteria that were present and therefore you won't get the healthy byproducts that bacterial fermentation provides.

What does all of this mean? If you want a probiotic/healthy/vitamin rich product the natural microogranism root is the way to go. You'll get a product that is slightly fizzy (the yeast), but also rich in nutrients (the bacteria). If you want a more fizzy beverage with the possibility of heavy alcohol  (or don't want to culture natural microogranisms) you can use brewers yeast. If you let either culture go long enough you'll get something alcoholic, but with brewers yeast the product will be alcoholic enough to get a nice buzz off of it!

Where do I get natural microogranisms from?


First, you could make a "bug". The process basically involves taking fruit or vegetable and chopping it up then covering it with either its own juice or water with sugar added. An example is a ginger bug, which is chopped ginger, water, and sugar left to ferment for a week to culture the natural yeast and bacteria present on the ginger root. The added sugar is simply food for them. Another example is an apple bug, which could be used for a cultured apple cider soda or hard apple cider. An apple bug is simply apple peel covered in apple juice and left to ferment for a week. The natural yeast and bacteria on the apple peel will feed off the sugars in the apple juice. Once these are sufficiently fermented you can add some of the bug to juice you wish to ferment and let them ferment away! One important note is that the ginger or apple must be organic since pesticides will inhibit microbial growth and the juice must have no added chemicals as it will also inhibit growth.

Second, you could use milk whey. This can be obtained from filtering kefir, yogurt, or letting raw milk sit out for a few days until it separates and then straining the liquid out. The liquid (whey) has plenty of friendly bacteria and some yeast, which is sufficient for using as a seed.

Third, kumbucha could be used. Kumbucha is a fermented drink and thus has a ton of microorganisms ready to ferment whatever you add it to. However, kumbucha often has a more sour or vinegary taste from the lactic acid bacteria so this will affect the flavor of whatever you are fermenting.

How much of the seed (natural or brewers yeast) do I add?


I've found this to be a hard question to answer. It basically takes experimentation and some common sense. I wouldn't pitch an entire packet of brewers yeast into a gallon of apple juice since the package says it contains 50 billion cells...that's a bit much. Adding too much seed will basically result in rapid fermentation and exploded bottles and lids if you don't watch it carefully. You also risk your product tasting too much like the seed (either too yeasty or kumbucha-ey, ect.). Adding too little isn't bad since the bacteria and yeast will still replicated, but it will take long to get a fermented product. This part takes a bit of practice.

How long do I leave it out/let it ferment?


Well, this depends on the end product you want. Let's take apple juice for example. If we seed it with one of the above cultures and leave it out for 24-48 hours it will be nicely carbonated and have virtually alcohol. But, what if we were to leave it for a week? It'd get nicely alcoholic...probably ~2% depending on how much yeast is present. Two weeks? You're approaching hard cider territory. Three weeks? You'll end up with a hard cider that is 7-8% ABV.

All of what I've learned from reading and this class is that fermenting is a lot of experimentation and finding out what you want in your final product to taste like (i.e. heavy or light carbonation, alcohol or no alcohol, flavored partially by the seed or not).

Since I've now begun to grasp the theory behind all of this I think it's time for some experimentation. I'm going to use apple cider as my base and try various seeds such as an apple bug, milk whey, and brewers yeast. I'm also then going to leave each out for either 24-48 hours. I'm also going to leave a separate one out for three weeks to make hard cider, but I'm only going to do this with brewers yeast because it'll be more efficient and I don't care about the health benefits of the bacteria from milk whey and the apple bug because the alcohol basically cancels that out.

Part II coming soon...it'll be about the class and have recipes.

Ancho Chile Blackberry Syrup

If you know me you'll know my affinity for Mexican food.

Er, OK, more like obsession.

Being in LA I consider myself blessed  with the multitude of taco trucks to choose from and, usually, a salsa bar to indulge upon. I think my love for this street food partially stems from these variety of salsas and condiments. I love salsas partially because of the heat that they can pack. For as long as I can remember my dad has called me "asbestos mouth" (as well as numerous other, um, charming names), which had to do with  dumping cayenne powder all over my pasta. I really don't know where this was going except for the fact that it leads me to the fact that I like spicy food. And what this means, getting back to my first point, is that I love the unending number of chiles that Mexican food has to offer not only because of their heat, but also because of their flavor.

Initially, this recipe was published in Gourmet and called for dried pasillas as the chile of choice. The rest of the recipe is pretty simple: lemon juice, dark brown sugar (I used light), cane sugar, water, and blackberries. Being that I didn't see feel like braving the LA traffic (and because I'm lazy) I decided not to go to Grand Central Market for their wonderful chile selection, but instead I picked up some dried ancho chiles from Whole Foods. Upon opening the bag I realized I forgot how raisin like these chiles got when dried. Woops. Oh well, it's all I had so I moved forward. Basically, you make a syrup by boiling the lemon juice, water, and sugars together and infuse it with the chiles (aka throw them in...seeds and all) then stir in a blackberry puree when the syrup has cooled. As you can see from the picture three measly chiles yielded A LOT of seeds (insert flash backs to deseeding chiles at Thanksgiving for a mole). From my earlier rambling you'll remember that I love spicy food so needless to say I was excited at this site...the possibility of a spicy yet sweet syrup!

After the syrup had cooled and I added the blackberry puree it was time to try it. Hmm. Apparently the anchos were more raisin-ey than I expected because it was all I could taste. AND NO HEAT. So much for appreciating the variety of flavors that chiles have to offer. There was a little blackberry taste there, but not much.

Great...I essentially made raisin syrup and could have left out two decently expensive ingredients.

Since I now had about a cup and a half of the stuff I thought I might as well use it. I though that some drinks were a good application and a made a ancho chile blackberry rye cocktail with a little muddled mint. Hm...not bad actually. Although it still tasted raisin-ey (ugh) the heat was beginning to linger on my tongue halfway through. Interesting. I also made a ancho chile blackberry soda with just the syrup and some club soda, which actually tastes pretty good if you ignore what I was actually trying to achieve.

I suppose next time I'll try using guajillo or the called for pasilla to get rid of the raisin flavor. If those fail to achieve a good heat level I might just throw in a habenero for good measure. Also, I think the flavor of blueberries might not be overpowered as easily as the blackberry was. But before all of that I need to get rid of a bunch of ancho chile blackberry syrup. Maybe a good sauce or rub for venison? Throw some grilled strawberries on the plate as well....hmmm.

"Quick" Crema

This weekend I got the opportunity to brush up on my Mexican cooking since Jessica made a surprise visit! I've been hankering to make some chile rellenos from a cookbook by Diane Kennedy. I thought I'd fill one with potatoes and roasted corn and another with a mild cheddar then pair them with a salsa ranchera that is typically used with huevos rancheros. Crema is a sort of Mexican sour cream, however it is much lighter in flavor and a bit creamier making it a good yet unobtrusive condiment to dishes like fish tacos and chile rellenos. I wanted to make homemade crema, but upon discovering that you basically have to let a starter culture from yogurt ferment some heavy cream for a few days I decided to make a quick crema by mixing 1:1 sour cream to heavy cream and adding a tiny bit of yogurt. This was then placed in a warm place for ~5 hours. I thought it turned out well, was just barely sour yet had a really nice texture, and didn't take multiple days (we can save that for another project)! Crema can be fancied up a bit with either some lime zest or a chipotle in adobo blended in.

Side note...I now have new respect for the batter on chile rellenos. This is clearly something I still need to perfect.