Spoonful Suppers

This week I realized that I am very far behind schedule and found myself staring at my excel spreadsheet for many hours. I have 174 ferments to complete this year, and 52 weeks in a year, so that is 3.35 ferments a week. I am on week 8 and have only completed 18, not the desired 28. I am officially ten ferments behind! Sound the alarms! Its too early in my fermentation journey for me to be behind! Granted, there isn’t an overwhelming amount that I can do about it because many of my ferments are simply fermenting and I have to wait till they’re done. However, I will not rest on laurels any longer.

I kicked off the week by starting the butternut squash vinegar, which included procuring pure ethanol, which it turns out is pretty hard to do. I looked at the local grocery store, but shockingly they don’t carry grain alcohol. At the BevMo, I asked an employee where they kept their alcohol with the highest proof and she brought me 151 Rum (think Caribou Lou). That somehow didn’t seem like a good idea, so I decided to buy Everclear at 120 proof. At checkout the BevMo employee wanted to make sure that everything was ok, something that I assume they ask all the folks that buy Everclear first thing on a Sunday morning.

I used my sister’s juicer (that I bought her for Christmas a few years ago and she has never touched) to juice the butternut squash, and then started the ferment at my place. It is a glorious color.

My panic from learning how behind I am bred quite a productive week. I made the apple kombucha smoothie, apple kombucha herb tonic, koji cure, koji cure marinade, bee pollen risotto, and perry vinaigrette. The bee pollen risotto tasted much better than the bee pollen smelled, however my favorite ferment this week was the koji cure marinated chicken I made.

Koji cure (shio koji) is a paste made out of water and koji (my moldy barley you’ll remember from before) with lots of salt added. This paste then has all of the enzymes of the koji, so it works well as a marinade for meat, because it breaks down the proteins in the meat, making it much more tender. However, it still tastes like the koji, so it’s sweet and complex. I used the shio koji to marinate a small heritage bird which I then roasted in the oven. The result was one of the best roast chickens I’ve ever had. It was unbelievably tender and juicy while also having a very unique taste. I am officially obsessed with shio koji and will make a compound butter to cook with using the rest of the shio koji.

This upcoming week, building off of the momentum I have, I will start the plum wine for my plum vinegar, and start some more kombuchas. I know I’ve said for the past two weeks that I would make the citric barley koji, but I simply cannot get myself to make it in my loft. I sleep (with my ferments) in a loft that you have to climb up a ladder to get to. I don’t want to have to deal with bringing the koji up and down the ladder, and inevitably spilling it all over my floor. However, my roommate is going to Seattle to visit her brother next week, so I will have the room to myself to grow as much koji as I can on the ground floor. So I am committing here and now to grow more koji next week, and if I don’t, I’ve asked my roommate to kick me.

Ferments Completed: 18

Ferments in Progress: 5

Ferments to go: 151