Spoonful Suppers

This week was punctuated by several very exciting events. The first was my best batch of koji I have grown yet. When growing koji, the desired result is a thick “cake” of mycelium (the white strands that bind fungus together) that holds the grains together. It is not necessarily desirable to have the koji spore, but that has continually been happening to my koji babies. This batch of koji is beautiful. The second exciting event was that I secured a job for after graduation, which I celebrated with a vodka and rose kombucha cocktail. It was the perfect spring day and I felt like I was drinking flowers in a fancy garden with statues and fountains around me, and not in the concrete Berkeley patio that I was actually sitting in.

I have reached the 3-month mark in my fermentation journey, so all of the ferments that I started at the beginning of the year that take three months are just now finishing. This week my yellow pea miso finished, and yesterday my squid garum finished. This means that I am on to round two of my long term ferments. I used my new, perfect, koji to make rose pea miso. I blended the rose petals, peas, koji, and salt together and packed the miso into one of the jars, where it will stay for 3 months. I also started a short-term garum, chicken wing garum (on the right below)! It smells heavenly currently and I am excited to try it when its all done.

I know I said that I would be making my whiskey vinegar this week, but things did not work out that way. A few weeks ago, my mom got me an oak barrel for my birthday to age my elderberry vinegar in, so I started to cure it (fill it with water so the wood can expand) in my bathtub. It was the perfect place to let it sit while it leaked a bit, but my housemates did have to get used to moving it back and forth from the floor of the tub when they showered. Now, the barrel is cured, but my elderberry vinegar will not be ready for a few weeks, so I have deployed the airstone to speed up the vinegar process. Since the airstone is in the elderberry vinegar, though, I cannot start any more vinegars until this one is done. A classic vinegar stalemate situation.

At the moment I only have two jars in the works in the kitchen, which is the least amount of ferments that I’ve had going in a really long time. I am all done with the kombucha ferments from the book, so I am back to making kombucha exclusively to bribe my housemates. However, now that the squid smell is gone and so are many of my jars, I feel like they aren’t quite earning their kombucha like they used to. I do currently have a lot of finished ferments that are waiting to be used. My fridge is feeling quite full, so putting those ferments to use is on my to do list for this week. Once I have sufficiently used my finished ferments, I am planning on tackling the lacto-ferments in the book. These are pretty hands off, but fast, ferments, completing in only a week. With any luck I will also figure out my vinegar situation this upcoming week.

Ferments Completed: 47

Ferments in Progress: 6

Ferments to go: 121