Happy Solstice!

Racked the dandelion wine for the second time today. It's clearing very nicely and I snuck a taste: flowery nose, light body, slight sparkle, nutty aftertaste. Pretty pale color in the glass. Still needs some time but so far so good.

Please excuse the messy bookshelf backdrop. Things at the cabin are tight as we are between apartments at the moment.

Also bottled the second successful batch of kombucha here at the cabin. I've been brewing 6 liters at a time but the weather has been so unpredictable so the timing of batches took awhile to get used to. The latest was made with a blend of mild smoked whole leaf teas. Yum.

Last Saturday we attended a big community bonfire to celebrate the solstice. To summer!

Lacto-fermented sodas + ginger beer

Lacto-fermented sodas are both fun and easy to make. And the possible flavor combinations are endless! More natural and less sugary, too. Below I will share a basic recipe for (non-alcoholic) ginger beer plus tips for sucessful fermentation, substitutions, and the best of my forays into experimental soda flavors.

The photo above was my very first batch of ginger beer, made almost two years ago. As you can see, I used an old plastic soda bottle. I now only brew in glass vessels but plastic is still a good and safe bet for beginners or those who live in warm climates. So what's in that little covered jar? Why, it's a ginger bug.

Making a ginger bug is very easy:

First you will need organic or non-irradiated ginger. A lot of ginger sold at big stores is irradiated before shipping to kill surface yeast and bacteria which are crucial to successful natural lacto-fermenation.

To make the bug, grate a piece of ginger the size of your thumb (skin and all) into a small glass cup or an old jar. Add a little bit of water and generously sprinkle the ginger with sugar. Cover your glass or jar with a small breathable cloth or paper towel and let it sit in a sunny place. Check on your bug each day and contiue to feed it sugar until it starts actively bubbling. Bubbling = success!

If several days go by and your bug is not bubbling, your ginger may be irradiated. That's okay because you can help the fermentation along by adding a little sprinkle of dry yeast. Either proper brewing or baking will work just fine, more on that later.

This exact same process can also be done with fresh turmeric if you are feeling adventerous.

For comparison: lemon, ginger, and turmeric. Sodas fermented with turmeric instead of ginger will naturally get an almost neon orange color. It's also supposed to be very good for your brain and is pleasantly spicy.

Once you have a bubbling ginger bug, you'll need to prepare a ginger syrup. A more detailed post on syrups is here but basically all you need to do is slightly reduce a mixture of sugar, ginger, and water in a pot on the stove.

Let's say you want to make 2 liters of finished ginger beer in an old soda bottle. You'll specifically want to make your syrup using 1 cup of white sugar and a piece of ginger like the one pictured above.

When you make the syrup, make sure to peel the ginger root. You can either slice it up with a knife or grate it; grating will yield a stronger taste. If you have it, adding citrus peel when making the syrup will add a bright note to the finished ginger beer. Remember: this syrup should be sweet, much sweeter than you want your final ginger beer to be! Both because you will water it down and because the yeast will ferment most of the sugar away and convert it into carbon dioxide.

Once the ginger syrup cools, strain using a small mesh strainer and pour directly into your fermentation vessel / bottle. Add a spoonful of bubbling ginger bug, the juice of one lemon (strained) and any additional spices. A tiny pinch of salt or cayenne pepper are favorites. Fill the rest of the bottle up with water, leaving about an inch of space at the top before capping.

Let your proto-brew sit out in room temperature and check daily until the desired carbonation is reached. When fermenting in plastic you won't even need to remove the cap to tell if it's done - just squeeze the bottle itself. When it's rigid, your brew should be moved to the refrigerator. Try squeezing a bottle of commercial soda so you get an idea of how rigid it should feel. When fermenting in glass, you'll be able to see how active the bubbles are if you hold your bottles up to the light. When first opening your brew be very careful and slow. Lacto-fermenting can produce many more bubbles than sodas one finds at the store. Depending on the temperature, the ginger beer should be bubbly enough in just 1-3 days.

Once you've mastered the ginger bug, you can use it to lacto-ferment almost anything. The cucumber and rosehip sodas (below) were made exactly the same way as ginger beer except instead of making a ginger syrup, I used simple syrup and cucumber juice / rosehip syrup.



Some tips:

If you are feeling lazy or don't like ginger, you can skip the ginger bug step entirely and just add a little pitched yeast directly to your soda base. Let's say a spoonful. Pitched yeast is dry yeast that has first been activated with a little warm water and perhaps sugar to help it along.

Even if you don't want your soda to be sweet, there is such a thing as not having enough sugar. If there isn't enough sugar, your yeast will not have anything to eat and carbonation will suffer.

The juice of a lemon can also be replaced with any other citrus on-hand in a pinch.

If you are using yeast, the type won't really make that big of difference because you're only using a tiny amount. Very tiny, there is such a thing as adding too much yeast. Though if you want to get an extra "ginger beer" taste, I recommend ale yeast.

I've also had success reusing residual yeast from other home brewing projects to ferment sodas. Last week I did an experiment using residual yeast from homemade chestnut beer. In the first few days of fermenting the nutty taste was clearly present in the sodas, but seemed to mellow out within the week.

Popular flavors:

Cucumber and mint
Rosehip and lemon
Turmeric and orange
Gooseberry and mint

Good morning, Kimchi

Last night we made a big batch of kimchi. What a sweet sight it was to behold this morning:



Each time we make kimchi we like to experiment with the ingredients, so we have never have actually followed a single recipe. However, this webpage by Eric Armstrong is highly recommended as a guide. Just a taste:

After sprinkling salt, gently stir it into the cabbage. Do this with your hands, rather than with a tool... Use your hands like you're hugging the cabbage. Move them gently around the sides, and then gather them into the center. Then push the cabbage to the sides (gently) and pull your hands around the edges like you're swimming with a breaststroke.

The hugging motion is gentle. Generate love while you're doing it. Its hard to overstate the importance of this step. Whenever we make Kimchi, it comes out good, but nearly as good as Grandmaster's. We're pretty sure that the missing ingredient is love.

Love! But really, why not? I always try to think positive thoughts while finely chopping and massaging the vegetables. And each time we have made kimchi, it has been delicious. Coincidence or?

For you skeptics, here are some more practical tips we have learned through experience:

Always choose the most fresh looking vegetables at your local shop and don't be afraid to experiment. Yesterday Rolf came across some especially firm Pakistani carrots so in they went with the more traditional nappa cabbage, daikon, and scallions. Unlike the ubiquitous orange carrots, Pakistani carrots are reddish purple and have a distinct sweet taste.

Dried shrimp. Dried shrimp = umami. Armstrong's recipe actually doesn't include this very vital ingredient, maybe he is a vegetarian? A word of caution, though: we have broken two immersion blenders within the last 6 months making dried shrimp paste. If you attempt this, try adding a tiny bit of water or invest in immersion blender with more power than 450 watts.

Do not be afraid to add a little more ginger or garlic. Or chilies if you like your kimchi hot!
Usually we will create the spicy paste in one bowl before mixing it together with all the vegetables and salted cabbage in another (bigger) bowl. Remember to taste this paste before mixing the two together and that it should be spicier than you hope your final kimchi to be.

If you want to your final kimchi to be (naturally) extra colorful or even neon, try adding turmeric. Not only will turmeric give your kimchi a beautiful color but it is a healthy and spice-spicy (as opposed to hot-spicy) addition.

Once the fermentation gets going, we put our kimchi in the fridge. But before it does, we let it sit out in the kitchen to let the ambient warmth help it along. The metal pan in the photos above is insurance against the kimchi juices that escape (once the kimchi really starts fermenting, they often do) staining or otherwise ruining the kitchen counters. Just a tip.

Grey days + slow fermentation

These last few weeks in Oslo have been overwhelmingly rainy and grey. So what have we been up to? Fermentation-wise, things are slowly coming along; the drop in temperature literally has everything going slower than usual.

Pictured above are 3 liters of (alcoholic) ginger beer and 5 liters of mint wine made over the last two days. Other recent projects have included an experimental 5 liter chestnut beer, attempting to grow a 20" kombucha scoby to mass-ferment tea, and checking in on / racking all our fruit wines.

From left to right: turmeric, lemon, ginger, lemon, tumicuni root

So far so good re: everything, except the cold weather thwarted our last batch of apple cider (we also used a different yeast) so it's now on it's way to becoming apple wine instead. The raspberry wine will be ready to bottle in January, though it's almost completely clear of sediment now and is starting to round and smooth out. The raspberry-rhubarb second wine has already been bottled, though it won't be ready to drink until the spring. We took a taste from a test bottle last Sunday and while it still tastes very young, the bouquet is amazing: very sweet and candy-like, almost artificial.

Until next time..

Apple cider vinegar

Signs of fall are popping up all around: shorter days, chilly nights, and apples falling off trees everywhere you look. Over the last week we've harvested at least three crates.

Epleslang (literally "apple stealing") is practically a national pastime here in Norway. Usually it falls within the domain of young children and adolescents, though a few weeks ago we were woken up at 4am on a Sunday morning by a gaggle of drunken university students on the hunt for apple trees in our kolonihage. For those outside of Norway, a kolonihage is essentially a collection of allotment gardens with small cabins parceled out to lucky apartment-dwelling residents of Scandinavian cities. The one we are part of in Oslo used to be in a rural area when it was built in 1929, but now is wedged between affluent suburban neighborhoods, university housing, and a forest.

Anyway, the apples pictured above were turned into a cider that is slowly fermenting in a glass carboy with ale yeast—supposedly this yields a sweeter alcoholic cider as ale yeast is "lazier" than traditional cider yeast. Once it's ready and tasted I'll post our recipe.

But before that, consider this excellent way to use up all the peels and cores usually discarded during cider making: make your own apple cider vinegar.

Not only is apple cider vinegar extremely easy to make, it's a folk remedy for a myriad of ailments. I personally don't know if all the claims are true, but my digestion is pretty great and vinegar is a delicious culinary addition to all sorts of food. Here is the way I make mine:

1. Find and clean a large wide mouthed glass jar with or without a lid.

2. Fill the jar almost all the way up with apple peels and cores (preferable organic / non-waxed) and then with water. The tap water in Oslo is very clean but used distilled if this is not the case where you live.

3. Cover your jar with a square of clean cheesecloth or towel and store it in a dark place. For the first week, try to stir your apple mixture once a day to get the fermentation going.

4. After two to three weeks (or longer, depending on the temperature) you should see a white or grey, sometimes stringy mass on top. This is the mother. Success!

5. Strain the liquid but make sure to keep the the mother. Discard the apples.

6. Let your strained liquid and mother keep fermenting together for approximately a month. After that, taste your vinegar with a clean spoon every few days until it is strong enough (to taste).

7. When you are finally ready to bottle your apple cider vinegar, make sure to bottle the mother along with the vinegar. It is more nutritious and will stay fresher longer this way. Store in a cool and dark place.

Bonus: you can reuse your healthy mother to make other vinegars. A few years ago, for example, I did this with half bottle of old red wine that I added fresh rosemary sprigs to. Yum!

Raspberry wine

Either this summer was a banner year for wild raspberries or I am the only person picking—by the end of July we ended up with over 10kg of berries in our freezer.

Naturally, a few weeks ago I decided the time was ripe for our berries to begin their journey into becoming wine. Before this summer I had never made wine before which is a bit strange actually, since for the last two years I have literally attempted to ferment everything in sight.

Pictured above are two 10 liter buckets of raspberry must undergoing primary fermentation using these recipes as a guide. Soon after this picture was taken we purchased a 27 liter "alpha bucket" which is now our go-to primary fermentation and racking vessel. Because there were so many raspberries, we were able to make a second wine to which I added about 2 liters of the season's last rhubarb juice from our garden.

Because I didn't use a bag to contain the berries (probably will next time) this meant it was a little difficult to separate the must from the young wine. However, it was cool to see how all the berries floated on top in dense bricks almost like mothers. When moving the wine into the secondary fermentation vessel, I also had to siphon it twice to remove the berry sediment (those peachy blobs). But check out this color!

Today, after just about two weeks of fermenting in the glass carboy, I racked it to the alpha bucket and back into the (cleaned) carboy. The color of the wine is still vivid, but noticeably deeper:

This wine still has at least 2 rackings and 4 months left to go before bottling and I'm deep in the learning process. After it's all over I'll post an overview of wine-making terms and tips garnered through experience. For now, I've found the home wine making articles on E. C. Kraus to be really helpful. Their page on wine racking is especially good for beginners for whom the term is most surely confusing.