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.
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