I received this email from a fermentation experimentalist named Amber, about a mushroom condiment she fermented:

I thought you might find interesting a project I did last summer. I was trying to figure out a substitute for soy sauce. With it being mushroom season and me being
highly influenced by the constant fermentation projects happening at my house, I thought a fermented mushroom sauce could turn out really good with a similar flavor to soy sauce.

 

I harvested big bags full of hawks wing mushrooms. I thought their savory flavor would be adequate. I’m interested what flavors other mushrooms would bring to a sauce. I added fresh ginger, garlic, seaweed, and maybe horseradish. and poured a salt brine over it. I used some extra brine from some pickled beets I had going.

 

It turned out amazing!! Very much the flavor I was hoping for. It would have been closer without the beet juice added, but it definitely couldn’t be considered lessened by it. My brain/stomach is going crazy imaging how the same combination would taste if I was using Lobster mushrooms instead of hawks wings!

This past weekend I taught a workshop at the Rowe Center in Rowe, MA. One of my students, Sasha Kellner of Ithaca, NY repeatedly blew my mind with her creative experimentation. First, she pulled out dehydrated sauerkraut, which she had made to salvage a batch that had started to get mushy. The dehydrated kraut (with apple and hops!) was crispy and delicious, like a probiotic answer to potato chips.

Then she pulled out more flavors: sunchoke (pre-cooked)-cabbage-caraway; vanilla bean-mustard seed-nasturtium; apple-cabbage-carrot-rosemary. All were delicious and distinctive.

Here’s to bold experimentation!

A letter from Russia with recipes for two new ferments I haven’t heard of before…

Dear Sandor,

Firstly, I really love your books, and thank you for helping keep traditions alive!

I have a recipe to share with you; I am from Russia, I grew up in the countryside, on what was basically a farm, and my family have a huge lore of recipes passed down generations (including a sourdough starter that predates the revolution…!)

It is a porridge known as Solodukha (from the word ‘solod’, which means ‘malt’ – the word ‘solod’ itself, in fact, basically means ‘sweet’) My granny often made this porridge for me, and its especially comforting on a chilly morning.

Ingredients
malted (sprouted, dried & roasted) rye, ground fine, around 50 gr per person
water, about 150 gr
1 tsp sourdough starter (preferably rye-based)
a few tablespoons squashberries (according to wikipedia, that is the english equivalent of kalina - a small red berry from the genus ‘Viburnum’) – if you cannot find these, raspberries or fresh ripe red currants work well too.
1/4 tsp salt

Grind the malted rye to a fine powder, add the water, salt, and starter, and leave in a warm place for at least 8 hours. Once fermented, stir in the berries, place in a clay, ceramic or cast-iron small pot, cover with the lid and cook overnight in a very low oven; for the last hour or so take off the lid. Or make a bain-marie in a slow cooker and cook on low overnight.

My granny would always put this into the Russian stove before bed, hot from a days’ baking, and the porridge would cook in the slowly falling heat. if I beat my granddad to occupying the top of the stove for the night, I would wake up to the aroma of roasted rye and berries wafting up from below…

Serve it with plenty of good, yellow butter, and a glass of fresh, or soured, creamy milk, or ryazhenka (recipe follows…)! Enjoy!

Here is also a recipe for ryazhenka, a fermented ‘baked’ milk.

Place fresh, creamy raw milk (I’m sure you know to stay away from the stuff labelled ‘milk’ in the supermarket…!) in a heavy, cast iron pot, cover with a lid and place in a very low oven overnight (not higher than 110 Celcius, lower if your oven can). In the morning you should have a beige to light-brown, slightly nutty smelling milk with a ‘skin’ on top – you can eat the skin now, or, if you can resist, leave it in for now! Once cooled to blood temperature, add a tablespoon of raw soured cream. Put in a very warm place (or in a thermos flask!!!) for about 8 hours, or till thickened and soured. If you left the ‘skin’ in, it will be deliciously chewy…*wipes drool from keyboard*

Enjoy!

From Russia with love
Milla

We are thrilled to be able to offer for sale copies of Permaculture founder Bill Mollison’s 1993 book on fermentation, which was out of print for many years. Published in Australia, the books cost $50 (a lot less than what it was going for online after a few years out of print, over $800). To purchase a copy, click here. This was the book that began Sandorkraut’s fermentation education, now expanded and revised. Topics covered include:

• Storing, Preserving and Cooking foods
• Fungi, Yeast, Mushrooms and Lichens
• Grains
• Legumes
• Roots, Bulbs, Rhizomes
• Condiments, Spices and Sauces
• Agricultural Composts, Silages and Liquid Manures
• Fruits, Flowers, Nuts, Oils and Olives
• Leaf, Stem and Aguamiels
• Marine and Freshwater Products, Fish, Molluscs and Algae
• Meats, Birds and Insects
• Dairy Products
• Beers, Wines and Beverages
• Nutrition and Environmental Health

In Mollison’s own words: “All the recipes given herein are traditional; they belong to humanity, even though they have been collected or tried by various authors, they have all been used for centuries by thousands of human beings. Only a few recipes are my own inventions (you may guess at these) but even these derive from my family or friends in their main ingredients or procedures.”

To purchase the book, click here.

Peanut butter and kimchi sandwiches, a shockingly delicious combination that never occurred to me, served up by the experimentalists at the Yale Sustainable Food Project.

Riana Lagarde in France sent me links to photos of artist Michel Blazy’s gorgeous kombucha art. “He calls it Jus de Nympheas and it is various kombucha scobys made to look like lily pads in the style of Monet’s garden.”

Photo below by Debra Solomon. More at http://www.flickr.com/photos/debrasolomonvanculiblog/sets/72157611391465072/with/3117414609/

During my visit to New York, I had the opportunity to visit the testing laboratory kitchen of chef David Chang of Momofuku fame. My guide was kitchen lab director Dan Felder, a fellow fermentation geek. They have teamed up with Harvard microbiologists and have even been publishing scholarly papers on some of their experiments. They are doing a few things I’ve never tried, seen, or heard of. The most exciting was making miso from nuts and seeds rather than just legumes.

I sampled the flavors pictured above, and loved their rich flavors. Pistachio miso was my favorite. The nut misos were low-salt sweet misos, fermented for just a short time to avoid the oils going rancid. I don’t have recipes to provide, but I share this as inspiration for fellow experimentalists.

Another innovative project I sampled was koji, simply dried in a dehydrator and ground into a powder. They were using it with salt as a curing agent for lardo, and as a seasoning for fish. Koji has  a distinctive sweet flavor that could be used to season many different things.

An amazing group of people has come together over the past few weeks to help me rescue and restore a beautiful 1840’s log cabin, Walnut Ridge, near my home in Tennessee. We’ve had a core group of a dozen people here for the whole month, and more than that cycling in for a day or a week or two. Altogether, at least 40 people have pitched in.

Repointing the chimney. Leopard, Fish, and Tom approach the roofline, as masonry mentor Willy advises.

Jen and Sarah beginning to deconstruct the roof around the chimney, so the pointers can access the top of the chimney. Roof will be replaced later in the summer.

We have built foundation walls, jacked up many parts of the house and replaced understructures, repointed the chimney, removed and replaced a rotted out sill, dug new drainage, removed walls and cladding, rechinked, and built a small kitchen addition. The project is ongoing; I think it’s still two years away from being ready to move my fermentation school into it. I am patient, because it is a beautiful building in a beautiful spot, and it feels so good to be addressing the underlying problems and giving it a new lease on life. And best of all, for the space to already be bringing people together, learning new skills and filling it with their hard work, good intentions, generous spirits, and love.

Sarah and Jen open up the roof.

The partially-removed roof with gorgeous shadows

Sarah and Josefina repointing above the roofline.

Josefina, Kayvon, and Kassidy ripping up a termite-damaged floor.

Gabriel checking measurements for a rafter cut, while wearing ear protection in the style of the Mouseketeers.

David and Joe “rechinking” between the logs using a mix of earth, sand, and straw.

Willy Rosencrans, who taught us all the art of stone masonry.

Alicia and Fish laying stones for the new foundation walls (where there had been none).

Oak setting cornerstones in what has affectionately become known as Oak’s corner.

An Australian scientist, Gary Cass, and designer, Donna Franklin, recently created a garment from mother-of-vinegar grown on red wine (see links below), reminding me of a story from a couple of years ago of a English designer Suzanne Lee, who made a dress from mother of kombucha.

Kombucha fiber biker jacket designed by Suzanne Lee. Photo by BioCouture copyright 2011

See links below for more info and images. If you experiment in this vein and make any garments or sculptures from these cellulose mothers, please send images for me to post here!

http://bioalloy.org/o/

http://eco-chick.com/2012/06/11117/aussies-create-dress-made-from-microbes-found-in-wine/

http://shine.yahoo.com/fashion/dress-made-wine-181300537.html

http://www.biocouture.co.uk/

http://antenna.sciencemuseum.org.uk/trashfashion/home/wearwithoutwaste/material-desires/biocouture-jacket/

I received this email today from Boaz Shuval, a fermentation experimentalist in Israel, about a fascinating experiment he tried:

One of my favorite fermentations is yogurt making, and I’ve been making my own since 2005. For years I have been using commercial yogurt cultures as starters, and have had to replenish them every few generations. In your book you mentioned the heirloom yogurt cultures, which intrigued me. Unfortunately, the commercial sources of heirloom yogurt cultures do not ship to Israel, where I live. Nor do I know anyone who has an heirloom yogurt culture here in Israel. Therefore, it was with great interest that I read the chapter [in The Art of Fermentation] about plant origins of yogurt.

You mentioned a great deal of possible natural sources for yogurt cultures, some of which, like ant eggs, I was not keen on trying. However, you did mention that in India chili-pepper stems may be used as a source for yogurt cultures. This was something I was willing to try. So, I bought a package of red chili peppers from the store. I heated one liter of whole milk to 180F, and let it cool gradually to 110F (I let it cool slowly, over 2-3 hours). I briefly rinsed the chili peppers, and cut the stems off a dozen. I place the stems in a container, and added the milk. I placed that in my yogurt incubator. After 10 hours, nothing had happened. I decided to let it continue fermenting. After about 13 hours, the magic happened, and the milk had gelled! In fact, it had over-fermented a bit, and split. I had a layer of whey at the bottom, on top of which floated a very thick curd. I cooled it in the fridge, and it tasted like spicy, chili-flavored yogurt. I used one teaspoon of this yogurt to inoculate a fresh batch of milk.

Again, I repeated the same process: heat to 180F, cool to 110F, incubate at 110F-115F. The yogurt set beautifully after about three hours. This is a really fast-setting yogurt culture. The result was a very thick yogurt (this time I stopped the heat on time, so it did not split). I should probably say that it is a yogurt-like product as I don’t actually know what’s in it. Flavor-wise, it tasted very good. It is quite sweet and not very acidic, even thought its pH level does go down to 3.5-4 (I used a pH strip to test).

This yogurt culture so far has reliably made 5 generations of yogurt. My routine now begin at about 6:00 PM, where I heat up my yogurt. I then let it cool gradually over three hours. If, at 9:00 PM, it has cooled too much, I will heat it a little to raise the temperature to 110F. I add a teaspoon of yogurt culture from the previous batch (this I remove after the initial cooling of the yogurt and set aside). I incubate at 110F-115F for three hours, until midnight. By this time, the yogurt has begun to gel, although the gel is quite fragile. I kill the heat from my incubator at this point, and keep it insulated until the morning. By morning time, the yogurt will have beautifully set into a firm curd, and be just slightly warmer than room temperature. I then refrigerate it for several hours, where it continues to firm.

I am very excited about this. Naturally, I was very doubtful that this would even work. I have been sharing it with whomever would listen. I have also given some culture to a friend. I wanted to share this with you, so you could share it with more people than I can. It also makes me wonder what other sources of plants are used to make yogurt. Perhaps different plants can make different flavors and consistencies of yogurt? If you know of some information on the matter, I would greatly appreciate it if you could share it with me.

Thank you again for writing your fabulous new book. It is indeed a fantastic source, possibly the best source, of information about fermentation. It has been the source for many fermentation experiments at my home.

Best,

Boaz