Do You Want to Learn to Ferment?

Well, folks, if you find yourself in the Winnipeg area in the evening of October 18th, you have an opportunity to put your hands into some cabbage. I am going to be teaching an intro-to-fermentation class at The Red River General Store, 5700 Henderson Highway (about 12 km north of the Perimeter).

We will be cutting up cabbage and pounding it within an inch of its life, salting and spicing and pressing down into jars (much smaller than pictured here), so that the lovely lactic acid bacteria on the vegetables can do their magic and turn them into the kind of delicious sauerkraut people used to make 100 years ago - and you get to take one of those jars home with you to continue its journey, first on your counter and then in your fridge.

I will explain why this is safe (a darned sight safer than buying beef nowadays, that's for sure!), the lovely Monique will provide the space and refreshments, and a good time will be had by all, I hope.

$20 gets you all the materials, the instruction and an informative handout. Come on up and get fermenting! Space is limited. Click here to register.

Kombucha Love

 

So I've developed this thing for fermented foods and drinks. They are supposed to be really good for a damaged gut, and G-d knows I've got one of those. So I started buying kombucha at the store. Tastes good, maybe half a glass every morning followed by a glass of water really makes me feel better. It's just freaking EXPENSIVE, and since I've been following all these fermentation groups on FB, it was obviously time to try doing it myself.

Kombucha is a fermented tea beverage that supposedly dates back to the ancient Chinese. The Wikipedia page for it is full of wild discussion of the pros and cons. It certainly is not a subject that leaves people indifferent, if they get into it.

For one thing, the Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast (SCOBY) used to ferment kombucha looks kind of scary. I got one from a friend of a friend here in Winnipeg, put this picture on Facebook and got some really freaked-out reactions. It looks like a big slippery pancake, and I have to admit that I don't like touching it, myself. But it does the job, and I figure the only difference with yoghurt is that you can actually see the micro-organisms.

 So I brewed up my sweetened tea in a 2L jar, flopped the SCOBY in, covered it up in its sheik outfit (as my friend Barbara called it) and left it there for a week. I resisted the temptation to check it out as apparently the mother grows better undisturbed.

By the end of the week, the smell from this corner was just like the one from the commercial bottles, only better. So I flipped the SCOBY (and its new baby!) out of the jar and popped them both into a new jar with 2 cups of their product - a SCOBY hotel. They are now waiting patiently on top of my fridge until I am ready to brew up some more.

The rest of the tea, which tasted like the commercial stuff only better, went into the bottles at the top of this post, one with a few blueberries and one with a piece of ginger. I'm told I should burp the bottles regularly to avoid explosions, and I've got them sitting in the same corner in a cardboard box, just in case. I'll be sure to let you know what they taste like. I don't want them too fizzy as carbonation and I are not friends.

So that's my kombucha tale - what have you been experimenting with?