View From the Kitchen Today, Nov 11

Well, it's been a good week, if you're a mad kitchen scientist like me. The apple cider and plum vinegars are souring nicely. I siphoned out a small taste of the plum last night with a sterile straw, and so far it's promising to be as wonderful as the small batch we made last year. The apple cider vinegar was a bit slower to get a good thick coating of "mother" on the top, but it's also moving along well.

The mead is in its third week of primary fermentation! But to give it credit, it didn't go quite as strong as the plum and cherry did at first, so it's not surprising that it's taking longer to finish up. I also added a bit more honey a week ago, because I wanted the honey taste to be stronger - so that probably lengthened this first step out a bit as well. The plum is showing signs of allllmost being ready to rack again. The cherry is still cloudy, so I'm leaving that one be for now.

My newest project is the home fermenation of soy foods - I'm doing tempeh, miso, and shoyu during the coming weeks. I did some research and found that okara actually makes great tempeh (at least, according to some folks) and since it's a byproduct of soymilk making, which I already do, it gives me another use for the leftovers. I also found a tip online about adding a bit of oats to the soybeans to make the milk "creamier" and better tasting, so I tried that today. It worked great, but it's actually a little *too* thick for my taste. So next time, instead of using one cup of old fashioned rolled oats per 6 cups of soaked soybeans, I'll use 1/2 cup. That should be plenty, judging from this batch. But the beany taste I sometimes still have in my soymilk was nearly completely gone this time and it did taste richer. Plus, if oats are a grain, and soy is a bean - doesn't the combination make a "complete protein?" Maybe. But in any case, I think the oatmeal trick is here to stay.

I kept the okara/oat leftovers, rinsed them through once to get rid of the oat starch goo (saved the rinsings for the whole wheat bread I'm going to start this afternoon) and then rolled it all up in a clean terry towel to dry a bit before mixing in the vinegar and tempeh starter. I'm trying to find ways for us to eat less meat, and do more good food here at home, so tempeh seemed a natural choice. I was thrilled to find that it also helps me to use up the okara. Okara is good for a lot of things, but it's hard to keep up with it. If you make soymilk more than once a week, it really seems to pile up. If we had chickens, I'd give the extras to them - I'm sure they'd love it. But we don't at the moment, so as much as I hate to, I'd have to compost it or we'd be eating it breakfast, lunch and dinner! Making tempeh is a good compromise - we don't get tired of okara this and okara that and less of it goes into the compost bin.

My next experiment will be making koji rice for making miso and shoyu. I'm really looking forward to this part! I've wanted to make miso for a long time, and the shoyu or tamari is a welcome bonus. I think tempeh is as far as I'll get this week - but next weekend begins my Thanksgiving holiday break where I"ll have about 10 days off from school to "play." So I think I'll wait till next weekend to start the koji, since it requires a lot more watching and preparation. In the meantime, I need to find or buy some miso crocks. I don't expect to find any actual miso crocks, but I think I can find some straight sided glass cannisters at the store that will do really well as replacements.

Another project for the upcoming holiday week is starting our first batches of homebrew beer. I'm going to start a very small wheat beer batch for me, and a larger nut brown ale for my sweetie. He's brewed before, but I haven't - just the wine and vinegar and such - so I'll be doing most of the work and he will be there to supervise and help out. We've probably got 20 dozen beer bottles in the storage room that I've saved over the years, so we have that covered! I also bought a corker/capper the other day for sealing up all these goodies, so we're covered there. All we need is a larger carboy (3 gallon) and the ingredients. So I'm going to start gathering those last few items up this coming week, and if I have everything I need, I'll put at least the wheat beer on next weekend while working on the koji.