On the quest for hard cider...

I ran across a few postings and videos about making hard cider at home. It ranged anywhere from letting your apple juice ferment on its own to full on homebrewing. Although I do enjoy homebrewing beer I wasn't too keen on launching a full scale operation for hard cider. To be honest, I don't think I've even tried REAL hard cider from a brewery. So naturally the easiest recipes were appealing to me. These simply involved taking some sort of apple juice (with no preservatives), adding yeast, and letting it ferment for a week or two depending on the desired alcohol content. A week of fermentation will probably net ~3% alcohol. This is very similar to my ginger beer and fermented pomegranate juice I posted on, but with a longer fermentation time to add alcohol.

Now that I decided upon this simple plan I had to procure the ingredients. The Pasadena farmer's market has a vendor that sells non-pasteurized juices, which includes apple juice. The real fresh stuff. Yummy, and I don't even like apple juice all that much! Now that I had found my juice I needed to get my yeast. I had a couple of options. Like my ginger beer I probably could have used store bought active dry yeast, but I wanted to use something a little more high class. My next option was to make an apple bug by adding an organic apple peal to apple juice and a little sugar then letting the natural yeast on the peel multiply. I'd have let the yeast to take over until it got to the point that I could see bubbles rising and I really didn't feel like waiting. Finally, I could use brewers yeast that is specially made for cider. Me being me this of course sounded like the best bet and I could find it at the local brew shop.

The recipe I found called for using the apple bug so I had to figure out how much of my brewers yeast to add since it's much more concentrated. Ironically, this is almost EXACTLY what I have to do in lab often except I don't have an sophisticated tools to help me out so I had to guesstimate how much to add. I somehow came up with a tablespoon. Looking back on it this was probably a huge mistake. And by probably I mean definitely. Microorganism cultures get denser the more organism you have in it. This is often how we calculate growth phases and how much of a culture to add to something else via optical density readings. The brewers yeast was so dense that you can't see threw it at all. That's A LOT of yeast. But, I was afraid I wouldn't get any fermentation if I didn't add enough, which is silly because even if I added the tiniest amount I'd get fermentation it would just take forever. So I ended up adding ~1.5 tablespoons total to the 1 gallon of apple juice.

50 billion yeast cells should have been a hint...

While at the brew shop I also picked up a neat 1 gallon glass jug and an airlock to fit them so I could have something to ferment my cider in. I left it out to ferment for a week and then bottled it in some 8 oz. plastic water bottles. These were left out until I could not longer push the bottle in (i.e. "charged" with gas) and subsequently went into the fridge for 24 hours. The point of charging the bottles is so that you have a more carbonated drink. The whole week it's been fermenting the airlock has let gas escape so it doesn't build up and inhibit fermentation/blow up your fermentor.

I was really excited to taste this. I really didn't know what I expected since I had never had hard cider before, but, like a lot of things, I think I liked the idea of it. Immediately after opening it I could tell something was off. What did it taste like? Well, probably the best description I could give is bad, yeasty apple flavored champagne. It over fermented. That 1.5 tablespoons of yeast I added was too much.

After this botched hard cider experiment I realized what I actually wanted was fizzy apple juice so I set out to try and attempt that before I tackled hard cider again. The difference here is that I'd ferment in plastic bottles just enough to charge them and then stick them in the fridge instead of leaving it out for a week. This is what I did with my ginger beer and that worked out great. It yields a fizzy product from the short 1-3 day fermentation time with a negligible amount of alcohol. I also decided to try the apple bug route since it seemed harder to mess up and more natural. I bought apple juice from the store (didn't want to experiment on the good stuff) and added 1/2 teaspoon of my apple bug to the 1/2 gallon of apple juice and let it ferment until the bottle was charged, which took ~3 days. It turned out great! Very fizzy. It didn't taste amazing but that's because the quality of the juice wasn't great to begin with so I'll have to try it again with the fresh stuff.

Apple Bug Makings

Now that I have an apple bug and know how much to add maybe another shot at hard cider is in the near future.

Brined Olives

Ever since last year when I learned that curing your own olives is very easy I've wanted to get my hands on some fresh ones. Unfortunately, the olive season is mid-October and can last anywhere from one week to three months depending on the weather so I couldn't get any online in time. However, I was on the look out for them this year at the Farmers Market or, if I couldn't find them there, online. Luckily I found some small-medium green olives (no idea what kind) in Pasadena and bought ~2 pounds. One other good thing about olives are they are cheap! Only $1.50 a pound at the marker or I think 10 pounds online is around $15.

Why cure the olives and not just eat them fresh? Have you ever tried a fresh olive? I certainly haven't (though I was almost tempted when making these...)! I've been warned that they are quite bitter and disgusting thanks to some phenols (an acid) and a carbohydrate called oleuropein. Although there are different methods of curing they share the common goal of removing this molecule from the olive to make it palatable. There are a few ways of curing including a progressive water soak where the olives are opened up somehow either by smashing or a small knife slit. This length of curing only takes about a month, which is fast for olive curing. Or, you could try chemically removing the bitterness with food grade lye. This method only takes a week.

Oh, ok. Cool! Wait...there must be a downside to this method if its so short and not used often at home. Not really...lye is just SODIUM HYDROXIDE, a highly corrosive substance capable of causing chemical burns and corroding GLASS! I don't care if it's food grade, used in small enough concentration, and is USDA safe. I'm not messing around with it.

Now, the third way is to brine the olives in a water, salt, and vinegar solution allowing them to ferment. This method is beyond easy. You simply take the olives, wash, pick out ones with obvious blemishes, add brine, and let sit. It simply involves checking on them once in awhile to make sure the brine isn't gross or murky and, if so, just replace it. Again, if it's so easy what's the downside?

It takes anywhere from 4-8 months.

Hmmm.

Well, I don't want to break my olives open...so water curing is out. I don't necessarily want a chemical burn in my esophagus...so lye curing it out. And brining is by far the easiest. Well, brining it is! I followed a recipe from the "Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook" blog that involves brining the olives in a solution of 1/4 kosher salt to 4 cups water, plus 1/2 vinegar (I used white wine vinegar). Around the new year I can begin adding spices like chiles, garlic, bay lay, ect. If you add the spices too early in the process they become over powering.

Hopefully, come June, they will be cured and not bitter. If so, 10 lbs of olives curing in a giant vat next year here I come! If not, well, at least it was really easy and cheap. 

Napa Cabbage Kimchi

I found out while looking for kimchi recipes that everyone has their own variation. Some have sugar. Others call adding sugar a sin. Some ferment for a few days outside the fridge, others buried in the ground for months, others begin in the fridge. Soon I was overwhelmed by the variations in recipes I had been finding and decided to settle with the Momofuku cookbook's version since it was one of the most simple and I've actually tried the end result.

Kimchi is a fermented pickle so the flavor of the end product will vary on how long it is left to ferment. Some recipes call for leaving it at room temperature for 3-7 days then sticking it in the fridge. I even found a refrigerator specifically for making kimchi! Momofuku's recipe calls for starting the fermentation in the fridge, which seemed a bit odd to me since it seems to cold inside to really get a good ferment going, but whatever. I'll take their word for it.

The basic ingredients are cabbage, carrots, green onion, sugar, garlic, ginger, kochukaru (Korean chile powder), fish sauce, and soy sauce. Everything besides the cabbage, carrot, and green onions is pureed and then added to the vegetables and put in the fridge. The book says it's best after 2 weeks of fermentation so that is when I tried it. Two things. First, there was WAY to much brine...I could probably half or fourth the recipe next time. Second, I didn't think the kimchi actually tasted all that great. It was OK, but didn't taste ferment-ey enough for me (and I like fresher rather than funkier kimchi)!

But, both of these problems turned out to be good. I used the kimchi for a kimchi fried rice so the extra brine turned out to be great flavoring and the kimchi worked really well. I think I'd opt for a new recipe next time I do this, but it wasn't terrible for a first try. Or, I'd try leaving it out on the counter for 2-3 days before sticking it in the fridge to find out if the flavor is enhanced at all.

Demi-glace

If the longer something takes to make the better it is then demi-glace is possibly one of the best gastronomic delights. It is a rich, concentrated sauce made from a basic veal stock, which is simmered at the rate of a few bubbles per second for 12-48 hours. This reduced stock is then simmered down even further to about two cups of liquid. I reduced it to one cup since, apparently, I need practice at eyeballing measurements. Oops.

Most people are afraid at the time that this takes to make, but in reality it's really easy and involved minimal effort  such as skimming every so often. I think the worst part was that it filled my entire apartment with veal stock aroma for two days, which if I had a house would be fantastic, but if you're trying to sleep it starts permeating into your dreams. Seriously.

It starts with 10 lbs. of veal bones, carrot, onions, leeks, and a bouquet garni. The bones are roasted until lightly browned at which point the vegetables are then added until the bones are a deep brown. The bouquet garni is made out of parsley stems, fresh thyme, and dried bay leaf all wrapped in the green parts of the leeks (a trick taught at La Ferrandi in Paris). Once the bones and vegetables are ready, and the roasted pan deglazed with water, everything is added to a giant pot and covered with ~8 quarts of water, boiled, and barely simmered for the 12-48 hours. I poured the finished, reduced product into ice cube trays, froze them down, and then individually wrapped them so I could easily through toss them into a pan sauce or soup.












The handy part of making the demi glace is that the bones, along with new vegetables and bouquet garni, can be used for remouillage (meaning re-wetting in French). Essentially, you make a new stock from the used bones yielding a lighter stock than you would if you were using fresh bones. So, out of 10 lbs. of veal bones I got one cup (12 ice cubes) of veal demi-glace and five quarts of light veal stock. Not bad for $30 worth of ingredients. All of this should last 6 months in the freezer, which when you think about it, is not bad for two to three days worth of minimal work!

(This was what my kitchen looked like all night!)