Ferment Therapy : WHEY TO GO

I've been ill since Easter and with that handicap have been less active in the garden over the time since. 

That means I have to amuse myself less strenuously so I've been baking sourdough bread and fermenting.

Yesiree I am on a fermentation kick...between lay downs.

Give me any excuse to ferment something...and I'll get down and dirty with my microbes.

VEG FERMENTS & RIG

I much prefer my 'pickles' to sit atop or mix 'em up with whatever else is on the plate so I'm keenly erring on the side of  julienne cuts.

I have adapted this carrot recipe -- obscenely simple as it is -- to make up a carrot/turnip/beetroot ferment and have this fermented chilli sauce on the go...as we speak.

That's my carrot mix ferment on the left of the image. But I thought I'd share my 'rig'.

I apologise -- but there is no way around getting a good quality Mandolin/V-slicer if you want to julienne. In my kitchen it is an essential. So long as you don't cut off a finger, the device will change your life for the better.

But all the pickling rigmarole stumped me for some time --especially if you wanted to experiment on the cheap.

As an Op shop groupie I found some workarounds. 

The yogurt making flasks (EasiYo) I had collected -- and never used to make yogurt -- work extremely well as fermenting vessels. 

Just fill 'em with your veg and liquid, slap on the lid and you're away...so long as you weigh down the flask's contents.

There's the rub: how?

You see that little Chinese rice bowl at the bottom right of the picture? They are cheap as chips and available all over either in Op shoppery or Chinese grocers.Well, these wee vessels  fit snugly inside the flask and make perfect weights to keep your fermenting veges submerged. Add water to the fermenting liquid to the bowl and let the microbes get to work.

THE YOGURT WHEY

If you want to ferment with flare and je ne sais quoi I'm thinking the trick to fermenting with the beasties at your service  is to use whey... as in 'Little Miss Muffet'.

When you make your own yogurt you always get whey. It's the puss like, almost clear, liquid on which the curds float. For the aficionados, to make 'Greek' yogurt you strain the whey off.

You can add whey to bread making and because it is a medium rich in lactobacillus -- it makes for a great inoculant for fermenting vegetables.

I make yogurt in a rice cooker. It works. It is sometimes hard to get the milk to heat to 80C but you can still get great, albeit milkier yogurt, at 70C.

At 70C you'll also get more whey.

So if you want some whey....there you go. 

We go through 4 litres of yogurt every 10 days or so. I just get the big 4L milk  containers and that's the volume of my rice cooker. Pour the milk into the cooker and turn it on.

My cooker is getting a bit cantankerous so it doesn't always take the milk up to 80C but I find if I double rise the milk to 70C I'm still getting great yogurt (and less whey if I only warm the milk once). 

The bottom of the cooker may crust up a tad but there is no burnt taste transference and it's all easy clean.

And yes: you need an oven thermometer to monitor the temperature of your milk. 

Add your inoculant -- fresh yogurt dobs or a few spoonfuls from a past batch -- when your milk cools back down to around 38C. But 40C is kosher. Then keep the milk warm for 6-12 hours by wrapping it up. 

This is why the yogurt flasks are sold but since I come from 'Greek yogurt' Melbourne (γιαούρτι), even there,  old jumpers or towels will keep your yogurt warm enough to ferment.So wrap up the vesselI(s) snugly. Cheap supermarket chill bags will also do the trick. 

Here's a good yogurt making DIY.

Making your own yogurt will save your heaps of dough and you get to eat and drink the stuff morning noon and night. I have it with porridge in the morning. As lassi or ayran throughout the day...and as a sauce or dressing with my evening meal.My wife makes smoothies with the stuff while I indulge in a mix of yogurt and mineral water -- that's  susurluk ayranı with a head of froth. As for curries: yogurt instead of coconut milk.Marinades are go. 

But yogurt and wine is yuk!

Just on the straining thereof in the pursuit of whey..I find straining yogurt a messy business and I don't bother. Unless you want buckets of the stuff, it is easier to simply spoon off your  whey needs with a spoon or ladle, as soon as it separates from the curds. Also, unless you have a use for the whey (eg:ferment inoculant, sourdough starter, or added to baking as you would butter milk) , why bother?

You can use whey to make ricotta cheese too. Then again, if you really want to make some whey, you can  create flavoured yogurt cheese balls,Labneh Makbus , from the surplus.

If you want to make a lot of whey -- for some reason -- I suggest you use the contents of one of the probiotic capsules you can get from the chemist. Because of the lactobacillus mix, for some reason the separation off will give you a large amount of whey at the price of less tastier yogurt. You can also mix a little of the capsule microbes with a dab of yogurt to adjust your yogurt texture and flavour. 

Unlike other ferments, with yogurt making it is definitely worth your while to cultivate your own bug breeds over time and keep making the next batch with inoculant from the previous one. You can also spoon a little  of other proprietary brands  if you want in order to really mongrelise your ferment.

WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY WITH WHEY

If you do strain or have whey or yogurt leftover from whatever -- sort of 'wheyed' down with whey -- whey makes a great inoculant for brewed teas for the garden. The whey microbiology is very conducive to making a probiotic for the soil. Just make up a cellulose mash and add some whey so that it can steep.

That's where my 'extra' whey or yogurt goes: into my aloe vera ferments. 

But then the US Greek Yogurt market is facing a HUGE whey problem:

The scale of the problem—or opportunity, depending on who you ask—is daunting. The $2 billion Greek yogurt market has become one of the biggest success stories in food over the past few years and total yogurt production in New York nearly tripled between 2007 and 2013. New plants continue to open all over the country. The Northeast alone, led by New York, produced more than 150 million gallons of acid whey last year, according to one estimate.

And as the nation’s hunger grows for strained yogurt, which produces more byproduct than traditional varieties, the issue of its acid runoff becomes more pressing. Greek yogurt companies, food scientists, and state government officials are scrambling not just to figure out uses for whey, but how to make a profit off of it.

Makes one guilty about the indulgence, right? Going Greek has a downside.

FERMENTING VS OTHER PRESERVATIONS

I own a food dehydrator but hardly use it. While my garden isn't engineered to produce surplus,I will on occasion dry some tomatoes.I bought the machine primarily to make jerky but that fad faded.

Just saying: I think fermenting is probably a better way to go. I may freeze everyday stuff -- like ginger and turmeric roots, and cheap capsicums or celery -- to tide over my  ingredient preferences, but a fermented veg is something that can enrich one's culinary lifestyle.

The Koreans with their kimchi know all about  that.

The penny dropped for me when pursuing Turkish cuisine -- they are pickling obsessed. With their yogurt habits too they chase that sour edge to a meal....

Sandor Ellix Katz's latest book -- The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from around the World   is well worth reading. It will locate you firmly in the fermenting universe. His earlier work has the recipes --if you are not up to Googling -- but taking the logic on board is really about giving you confidence to ferment anything -- without fear of offing the fam.

It is also a great way to personalize your meal when the others at table may not be so adventurous.

Katz's primary motivation is that he argues that ferments have great healing properties and I'm tending to agree with him. We get offered all these super foods and magic bullets  but the scientific rationale for their consumption can often be dodgy and undeveloped. 

But if you get into nourishing traditions mode  there is a historical logic to the ferment enterprise so long as you pick and choose your allegiances. I mean  many of the things we may think are 'wrong' with the foods we eat -- whether legumes, grains, vegetables, dairy, etc --  can often be  overcome by fermenting them.

This is especially true with yogurt which will enable folk  of whom are lactose intolerant to consume dairy products.

Around 90% of Mongolians, for example, are lactose intolerant and unable to drink milk in any great quantity. Yoghurt, with its invigorating lactic acid tartness, provides them with a digestible dairy product, with the further advantage that it keeps far longer than milk.[REF]

Aside from preserving the food -- that's the point.

Then there is the gut zoo issue -- the microbiome -- and the role acid intake at a meal can play in sobering glycemic load.

Pretty much win win win if you ask me.

But here's the rub: modern food processing kills the bugs. Your supermarket pickles are sure to be sterile. Even the kimchi at the Asian grocers is likely to be pasteurised before it arrived on the shelf. You won't be able to get living sauerkraut for love nor money.The only things alive out there in retail land-- touch wood -- are some cheeses and yogurt. Everything else living is disallowed either on health or industrial processing grounds.

Your vinegar pickle may be tasty but if it is not always fermented together. While we may defer to the five star end of fermentable health the traditional ferments (some huge list!) out there are many and various.

All you have to do is choose...

Potato Delights

I've been investigating starches seriously for some time. I eat 'em. Grow 'em. Cook em. Starches are, in my ambit, the tubery things that grow under the ground....Yams. Sweet Potato/Kūmara.Standard spuds. Arrowroot. Taro. Cassava. Oca (NZ Yams). ...
Mainstays.
Compared to grains, the potato family is awesome tucker.You are sure to get so much more nutrition out of a spud than a slice of bread. And sweet potatoes are a fashionable super food. (You can live off both types of 'potatoes' with very few supplementary requirements).
Wheat consumption is falling -- not that you'd know it from takeaway options -- and while other grains and pseudo grains (like Quinoa) are displacing wheat preferences, there's a lot you can do with potatoes.
Indeed, even cold, spuds are versatile.
Now with many more varieties being marketed, the culinary options offered by Kumera and potatoes are becoming more accessible.And when you consider their nutritional attributes you can see why whole societies thrived so well on them.
To eat them cold -- all you need do is cook more than you need for the one meal. Cold potatoes are also an excellent source of 'resistant starch' which is all the internet rage for gut health. Unlike rice they don't have contamination reheat issues (ie: C.cereus ).
Potatoes also need less water to grow than rice or wheat, and they yield far more calories per acre. Sweet potatoes are even projected as the replacement 'futures' crop for wheat as climate change takes over more Australian farm land.
And anyone can grow potatoes. You can even grow them in chaff bags on a patio.There's no processing. Just dig 'em up, cook and eat 'em.

So here's a great selection of recipes for cold potatoes:Cold Boiled Potatoes

I don't eat pasta (much as I'd like to) but if you want to stay away from the grains and still indulge , here's a brilliant work around with spuds for gnocchi:Flour- (and gluten) free gnocchi! (Italian potato dumplings)

To add to the possibilities in the potato universe, here's a Chinese way with raw spuds;Cold Fresh Shredded Potato

My favorite breakfast dish -- which I eat VERY often -- is a cracked egg poached on a bed of cold mashed or crushed cooked potatoes in a ramekin. It's a form of coddled egg.Mash does the dish the best service. Absolutely delicious. While you ablute it cooks happily away.And all you do is spoon in the spud, crack the egg and boil up the water (half way up the wee ramekin sides) in a lidded pan.

 This is the 'poached egg dish when I used to use glass jars.Unsealed Ramekins work better.

At the moment I'm trying to keep cooked spuds in reserve all the time to see what I can get up to with them. Every spud gets eaten in our house. What  with bubble and squeak  and my breakfast options, no potato survives.I'm setting aside a container in the fridge just for cold/leftover spud storage.
So if you are growing spuds -- consider your culinary options.
The greatest potato dish, in my estimation, comes from Sweden:Jansson's Temptation
Here we always use anchovy fillets...the more the better.But hey! easy dish to make.
Then there is the hash brown world, especially Swiss style  --Rosti.
There should be certificates offered in hash brown making. A real skill.
Of course there are 'old' and 'new' potatoes; many varieties and different cooking  approaches, but Delia Smith has a great DIY for steaming them that warrants study or consideration:How to steam potatoes.
If you are going to grow your own spuds, you need to make sure you celebrate your effort with the best cooking methods. Any leftovers: waste not/want not.

Culinary Adventures

I'm dedicated to cooking. For me it has always been a life saver. The evening meal is my special time. 

Everyday it comes around and every day, for me, what-to-cook is an adventure.

So I get to explore different ingredients and different cuisines; pursue passions; indulge in foodish dilettantism...and eat.

I prefer to cook for others...but if I'm doing meal-for-one, I can sneak in the foods that others  may be distrustful of. 

Like offal. 

Cooking got me feeding 2 kids and rests as the baseline of achievement for those days that I'm ill. I may spend the good part of a day recumbent, but for me , being able to get up and cook an evening meal is an obsession.It is a register of worthwhile things done in a day that may have little else to show for it.

So everyday, come tea time, my habit is to experiment...

Consequently I'm grounded in a few culinary traditions.Over the years my core passion has been Middle Eastern foods but of late I deflected to an interest in Turkish tucker which is different again.

More recently I'm in East Asia, in Malaysia and Korea, with taste beds  half way to Latin America.

That may seem a strange mix but consider the core anthropological fact that so many vegetables, so popular in Asia, emanate from Central and Latin America. Preparing  them is both different and similar, each side of the Pacific Ocean.

But in this mix -- after decades of cooking meals -- I'm alighting on a 'style' -- a cuisine -- that has a certain dietary logic that, at least, suits me.

Its constituent parts are:

• Meze : small side dishes which I'm familiar with via so many Arab menus.And while I've put in the hard yards, making and growing Mediterranean style side salads, my passion today, meze-wise, is the way the Latinos create salsas. While 'salsa' means 'sauce' it doesn't have to be wet and runny, nor does it always include tomatoes or chillies.Salsas, like meze, can be made of many things...and I mean many things you may not realize can be served together in the same bowl.Similarly, the Malay tradition of sambals is a Occidental version of  the salsa. In Korea the side dish habit is referred to as Banchan. Indeed, in all these traditions your local menu is formatted by these small side dishes.They maketh the meal.
• Starch: Since embracing the family curse -- Diabetes II -- I've been following a low carbohydrate diet. It works and my blood sugars are stable.But recently I've been fascinated by what's being referred to as safe starches. These are the non-grain starches/bulk foods like spuds, sweet potatoes, yams, taro, plantains...and rice(although that's a grain). I keenly grow 'em if I can and I cook 'em. Despite the carb quotient. I explore their nutrient qualities, food traditions and attributes. En route I've become a sweet potato junkie and embraced an addiction to sweet potato noodles (called dangmyeon, Korean: 당면). 
• Yogurt and pickles: While I used to make sauerkraut I now limit my lactobaccilus indulgences to home made yogurt and the Melbourne Celto-greek in me wants to have yogurt at every meal. I've gone beyond Tzatziki (greek yogurt and cucumber, a Greek national obsession) and are now in free form Cacik mode. Cacik is 'yogurt and...'[insert vegetable here]. Wonderfully creative it is too -- region by region. Also from the Turks -- the Ottomans -- I leant to respect pickles. By that I mean   pickles per se, that aren't necessarily fermented. Indeed, pickles like this are really a salad as they are cut with vinegar in mind. A similar pickle tradition exists in Korea (say no more than kimchi) and Japan -- all very meze, very banchan , salsa-like. While the taste may be a fav, the underlying logic is that you eat an acid with your meal. Indeed research shows that acids consumed via yogurts, pickles our sourdough fermented breads impact on the metabolism of the carbohydrates eaten at the same meal.

Perhaps you are wondering, what all this has to do with gardening.As it turns out: a lot. The KITCHEN GARDEN lends itself to growing a range of different herbs and veges that can be employed as meze, table starch, or pickles. In all this: fresh is best. 

If you move away from 'salad' thinking or the melange of separated vegetables mono-culturally prepared as accompaniments to whatever,  you are stepping into a sort of trans-global mix of ingredients and food traditions that can be fed by your garden habit by dint of the adage: 'a little bit of this and that.'

And since I've recently planted some yam bean/Jicama I gotta say that Jicama salsa is a quintessential convergence of what this approach can generate: starch + vegetables + acid. 

That's the clincher you see: small dishes. Eclectic blend of what the garden delivers: served up as pickles, sambals, salsa....with a starch passion sponsored by what's gown out back.

Cheap and easy way to make yogurt -- in a rice cooker

I've been making my own yogurt for years and have developed my technique with easy DIY in mind.Home made yogurt is so much cheaper than store bought stuff as all you need is milk and a little starter (left over from a previous batch).

EQUIPMENT:

• Cooking thermometer: make sure you use one with a long stem and easy to read (very large) numbers.
• Rice cooker with a glass lid: if you don't have one of these, get a second hand one from an Op shop...and learn to cook your rice on the stovetop using the steaming method.
  
• Insulated bag.

COMBO

Make sure the steam hole in the rice cooker lid is of a wide enough diameter to allow the insertion of the thermometer stem. (Or that your thermometer arm is narrow enough to pass through the cooker lid eyelet).

My cooker takes 3 litres of milk...and makes 3 litres of yogurt. It lasts us a week. I used to make larger quantities but fresh yogurt will start to 'go off' after 10-14 days. Best to treat it like milk with a limited shelf life.

METHOD

• Fill the rice cooker with full cream milk, insert the thermometer through the eyelet hole in the lid and turn on the machine. 
• Heat milk to 82 degrees Celsius (180F)
  

There is no need to stir. Just keep checking back to monitor the temperature as it rises.

• Turn off rice cooker as soon as the milk warms to  82 degrees, remove milk filled bowl, with lid still on and thermometer inserted, and place in an airy spot to cool.
• Allow warmed milk to cool to 43/44 Celsius (110/111F)
• When cooled, spoon in 2 tablespoons of store bought Greek yogurt  or yogurt from an earlier batch.No need to stir it in. Just plop.

Chris' Yogurt is good ...so too is Dairy Farmers Greek Yogurt. "Pot set" yogurts are all good. So long as you like the taste. What you want is a reliable culture that's still very much alive. You can also add any probiotic strain you may have if you want -- such as from a probiotic supplement (just screw open the capsule).But remember, once you've done one batch, it can be used to inoculate the next. Over time the bug mix will be specific to your kitchen just as sour dough strains are.

• Replace the lid, then place the cooled and inoculated milk in an insulted bag.

I use 'Hot Bags' I got from South Africa...but if you wrap up your rice cooker bowl in a beach towel and placed it in an insulated shopping bag you'll get the same effect.

• Leave the yogurt to ferment overnight or for 12 hours at least. 
• Refrigerate your yogurt in the container you made it in: the rice cooker bowl. 

You can decant your yogurt but it can be a messy and wasteful business. It also fosters contamination.The Easiyo insulated yogurt maker containers you can get in the supermarkets are too tall for easy fridge storage...and the lids aren't secure. A rice cooker bowel fits in my refrigerator OK. I recommend that you store as you cook.

• As you come towards the end of each batch, set aside (in a clean glass jar) a couple of tablespoons to inoculate the next.Don't rely on bottom scrapings.

Bon appetit!

The mistakes you can make with yogurt making are straightforward:

• Burning the milk. Some caking on the bottom is OK but don't lift that layer up so that it mixes with the milk above.With the rice cooker method, burning has not been an issue.
• Not keeping to the temperature parameters. Don't add the inoculant above or below the recommended temperature. You'll still get yogurt but much less of it as the ferment will be very milky.
• Ferment times. I ferment for  about 12 hours (overnight). The longer you ferment the tarty-er the yogurt flavour

Cold green tea and me and my body.

I'm not a keen food culinary snob. I just like what I like.Preferably without fuss. But I've been drinking green tea brewed cold for years. It's less bitter that way.

It turns out that hot brewing releases different Catechins , a type of disease-fighting flavonoid and antioxidant, than does cold steeping. So I've started to brew up jugs of tea with hot water. But not just any old hot water. I'm trying to keep the initial brew temp within the 60-80 degree centigrade range in the hope that I can avoid the taste of bitter tannins.

This range is supposedly serendipitous  for green tea.

That may seem fastidious but it works. The flavours are stronger but I use green tea as a cordial anyway. 

Since I use a thermometer to make my yogurt -- an essential -- the tea temp thing comes easily to me. 

I indulged myself last week and bought 50 grams of locally grown Sencha. Ouch! Vereey priceey.

The literature may be keen to distinguish green teas one from the other in way of benefits but I think there's not much in it. In Summer  cold green tea is my preferred daytime tipple but I'm gonna stick with the supermarket blends as that's my price range -- esp my preferred Madura Green Tea and Papaya Leaf. I rip the strings bits off the teabags and steep the little pockets of tea. The Papaya Leaf is supposedly a therapy addition but I just like the taste...and besides Pawpaw/Papaya is my favorite fruit.

Why bother with green tea?

While I like drinking it I'm currently extra keen to exploit any means of pain relief I can find. It has  been a very painful last 8 months inside my body and after obtaining some relief  with Curcumin (Tumeric) I'm looking for similar options. I've been a bit desperate you see...

This snippet- Natural anti-inflammatory agents for pain relief - caught my attention:

Green tea has long been recognized to have cardiovascular and cancer preventative characteristics due to its antioxidant properties. Its use in the treatment of arthritic disease as an anti-inflammatory agent has been recognized more recently. The constituents of green tea are polyphenolic compounds called catechins, and epigallocatechin-3 galate is the most abundant catechin in green tea.Epigallocatechin-3 galate inhibits IL-1–induced proteoglycan release and type 2 collagen degradation in cartilage explants.In human in vitro models, it also suppresses IL-1b and attenuates activation of the transcription factor NF-kB. Green tea also inhibits the aggrecanases which degrade cartilage.Green tea research now demonstrates both anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective effects. Additionally, green tea research includes the “Asian paradox”, which theorizes that increased green tea consumption in Asia may lead to significant cardiovascular, neuroprotective and cancer prevention properties. The usual recommendation is 3–4 cups of tea a day. Green tea extract has a typical dosage of 300–400 mg. Green tea can cause stomach irritation in some, and because of its caffeine content, a decaffeinated variety is also available; but the polyphenol content is currently unknown.

Mind you I drink black tea too. That's my favorite drink. Maybe four large cups per day (although my black tea is low caffeine). And I drink coffee -- black -- each morning.

KimChi Ferment

My fermenting habits are skilling up. Making yogurt is a routine and I've established an easy way with making sauerkraut.

I relate the two procedures as I snaffle some whey from the yogurt  (and the whey is alive and  rich in lactobacillus) to kick start the ferment for the sauerkraut. Adding a lactobacillus rich  fluid like this also speeds up the process.

But I wanted to point out some of my hardware preferences. 

I use EasyYo yogurt flasks but I don't use them to make yogurt! I use them to ferment cabbage.For fermenting -- bought second hand from Op shops ($4-10) -- they are ideal -- and I have collected  a few flasks to serve my needs.

The EasyYo flask comes with little round shelf which fits inside the cylinder so that it can be pushed down or raised and that makes an ideal rest for my weights: glass jars filled with water. (But don't put metal lids on these jars. Use glass or plastic lids or simply leave them open.I think it's cleaner with less chance of contamination to use an open or glass lid.)

So long as you ensure the ferment liquid in the flask doesn't rise above the top of the lip on the  glass jars (which would cause the two fluids to mix if open) , the water in the jars function as a handy weight pushing down on the cabbage.

Trust me on this: fermenting is all about drowning.

You push down -- weight -- the cabbage in a ferment in order to drive out, or sweat out, a lot of the liquid in its leaves. You also need to ensure that the vegetables in your ferment are always submerged and not exposed to the air. Fermentation -- ie: safe fermentation --  is an anaerobic process.

As the ferment proceeds more liquid is produced  because of the chemical impact   of the added salt on the vegetables tissues. 

My current ferment is my first attempt at tackling kimchi -- the traditional Korean ferment. 

So far so good. Looks like/tastes like/smells like...kimchi.

One week later...

Not red enough (because I used fresh chilli rather than powder) and a tad too 'wet' compared to the Real Kimmy McCoy -- but my DIY kimchi turned out really tasty...and just right for my palate's preferences. Easy too. More exotic than sauerkraut, of course, and coincidentally less laborious...My fermenting habits may indeed switch from the Germanic take to those of north Asian persuasion.

I used this recipe approach but adapted it a little by adding my own fresh whey. I think I have more control that way. The main difference from sauerkraut is that the  sauerkraut   cabbage (although a different cabbage -- Napa ) is traditionally grated and it's easier to squeeze out the juice. In kimchi the pieces are much larger so the 'squeezing' and weighing down has less impact. I also think Napa is a drier cabbage than the standard drum head, although it's also softer. Of coure sauerkraut's primary taste is sourness whereas kimchi has a range of flavours -- in comparison hereon sauerkraut may seem bland 

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Mince meat as a hobby

I start each day with mince meat. Such versatile stuff.

Cheap too. MM is the guts of a sausage. MM  fills  a meat pie.

'

Tis dead animal chopped up real fine.

My preference is minced lamb...

Whatever part of the dead beast is desiccated, I eat it no questions asked.

So my breakfast habit is to fry up mince with other ingredients and eat it with yogurt and sauerkraut. One fry up will last me a few days because the trick is that mince meat will keep longer after being cooked than if left to sit raw in the refrigerator.

Betwixt the spice and herbs the flavours  deepen.

Cooking Mince

I use the Turkish approach when cooking mince and fry it up first in a pan without oil or other ingredients. You let it brown and sweat... and dry out a little. Then I add spices, garlic, onion or whatever veg takes my fancy (I love adding kale). As it dries out again I add olive oil. If it dries out further I throw in a few tablespoons of water.

I add the olive oil late in the process because I don't want to over heat the oil , oxidise it or destroy its flavour.

Once stewed like this I can, if I want to, add some pre-cooked rice, mix it up and get myself a quick pilaf going.

If you are without cooking talent you can add a supermarket mince meat flavouring packet which folk like Continental or Maggi market. Their Chow Mein mix is particularly useful means to a tasty meal.

But if you are keen to Do-It-Yourself,  500 grams of minced meat is a wonderful platform for culinary experimentation and creativity. You can stuff vegetables with it (eg:Dolmades) . Cook it up with beans (eg: Chilli bon carne ). Turn it into pasta  sauce (eg: Bolognaise). The Lebanese make an  awesome pizza topping with it (Lahm bi ajine). Then there is Moussaka -- minced layered with eggplant -- various pies and the plethora of minced meat inventions created and grilled or baked by the Turks such as Köfta....

Mince is a world unto itself, but in my experience of eating it the height of MM cuisine lives in the Eastern Mediterranean -- the Levant and Turkey.

But there's an element in  MM cooking that is usually overlooked: minced meat in soups . Şalgam Çorbası is an Anatolian MM soup made with turnips and one of the exciting Chinese traditional soups, West Lake Soup , exploits the irony of being minced beef cooked in a chicken stock.

So wonders never cease do they? 

Maybe you get my drift: there is a lot  of fun to be had cooking up a storm with mince meat. Hell, you can even forget about the labour of cooking and simply serve it up raw as in Beef  steak Tartare or  uncooked and blended with cracked wheat as in Kibbeh Nayeh.

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Sauerkraut adventures: turnips

I'm now committed to my sauerkrauts so much such that I have tooled up. Eating the ferments and making them is now an addiction and a routine.

I purchased a Borner V-Slicer Multibox V3 'grater' (pictured left) at a seriously cheap price and can now grate with  abandone -- including my fingers if I am not careful.

I also picked up second hand in the local Op shop  two more EasyYo yogurt making flasks. I don't use them to make my  yogurt but they are excellent crocks for fermenting vegetables.

You can ferment in anything, really -- even a bucket will do -- but I like the EasyYo size and sturdy build.

So today I experimented and grated up a batch of Turnips inspired by this recipe.

I added one beetroot for colour. 

The routine is simple:

1. Get some live Greek yogurt and pour about a cup of it into a colander lined with two paper towels. Leave for an hour resting on a bowl and  gravity will separate the Whey. Its' the Whey you want. It contains the bugs that will do your fermenting-- like lactobacilli -- and harvesting them this way will give your ferment a kick start.
2. Scrape the (deliciously) thick yogurt mix in the colander into a jar for later consumption and set the whey aside. You should get one third to half a cup of clear fluid in the bowl below.
3. Grate your cabbage or turnips or whatever.  The size of your fermenting container will determine the quantity you need to grate. I grate into a square plastic storage box with high sides. That way there is no mess and there is plenty of room. Much better than using a bowl to grate in or onto a kitchen bench or chopping board. 
4. Sprinkle the grated vegetables with salt. I use one tablespoon for my quantities. Mix in the salt and start squeezing the beejeebers out of the grated vegetables. Pound them with your fist. Throttle them. Then leave them to sweat.
5. Drain  off most  the liquid  after half an hour of sweating; squeeze the vegetables some more and pour in the Whey. Mix. 
6. Shovel the grated vegetables into your fermenting container and push down them firmly so that liquid rises up above  and drowns them. The grated veges need to be submerged in fluid otherwise the microbial growth won't  be the ferment you seek. The process has to be anaerobic. 
7. You need to weigh down the grated vegetables with a china plate or plastic disc that covers the gauge of the vessel you are using. On top of that put a weight. I prefer to use an old anchovy jar that has a glass lid. I have removed all the metal  from the jar and to add weight, I fill it with water. The jar is easy to keep clean and it works. If I had a rock the right size and it was a smooth easy-to-wash river stone I'd use that. 
8. Cover the container so that flying bugs can't get in and leave the ferment to go about its microbiology for at  least a week. Depending on the weather and where you live or the time of year or how hot or cold is your kitchen --  the fermenting time is up to you. 
9. Bon appetit.

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Yogurt + Carrot = simple soup

After yesterday's post on oligosaccharides and prebiotics I am eating my way through a bunch of carrots.

I had to be re-supplied,  but now I'm carrot sufficed.

Carrot moments are readily had and I'm souping them up: garlic, onion, ginger, cumin, and (I prefer) Allspice -- salt and pepper. Boiled and  blended.

Green herbs are kosher esp fresh coriander if you have some. Add in chopped after blending. Chilli is good too...

Into bowl when hot and upon the red surface dollop on heaps of Greek Yogurt. 

It's gotta be Moorish...in flavour. 

Spoon into mouth. 

Now if you are of the sweet tooth persuasion you can hold back on much of the salt and pepper, not use yogurt,  and flavour your blend with honey so you  deploy it as a dip or dressing for bread.

But here's preparation rule of thub:

Food chemists at Newcastle University have found that boiling the vegetables whole rather than slicing them up increases the supply of healthy ingredients by a quarter....
 "By cooking carrots whole and chopping them up afterwards, you are locking in both taste and nutrients so the carrot is better for you all round." [Research report].

If you want to know more about carrots, the World Carrot Museum's web pages.

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Carrots, oligosaccharides and gut health

Of late I've become addicted to Purple Carrots.

Love the taste. Now readily available.  They've even been dubbed 'the new superfood'.

Since they are currently 'out of season' I've had to make do with the standard red carrots. But it it turns out that even 'normal' carrots have some extraordinary attributes.

In a segment on the German program -- The Health Show (segment begins at the 20 minute mark ) -- there is a fascinating discussion about the medical use of carrot soup to treat diarrhoea in children. That's instead of relying on antibiotics.

Why? What's so special about carrot soup? Therein  hangs a tail  about the power of oligosaccharides. When oligosaccharides are consumed, the undigested portion serves as food for the intestinal microflora -- and as chance would  have it, carrots are dense in oligosaccharides.

...oligosaccharides are carbohydrates which have 3-10 simple sugars linked together. They are found naturally, at least in small amounts, in many plants. ... Recent interest has also been drawn to oligosaccarides from the nutritional community because of an important characteristic: the human digestive system has a hard time breaking down many of these carbohydrates. Almost 90% escapes digestion in the small intestine and reaches the colon where it performs a different function: that of a prebiotic.

Prebiotic is a kind of an odd term, fairly recently coined to refer to food components that support the growth of certain kinds of bacteria in the colon (large intestine). At first it was thought that oligosaccharides were the main prebiotics, but it turns out that resistant starch and fermentable fiber also feeds these bacteria. We’re learning now that a whole other digestive system is happening in the colon, with important influences on the rest of the body [Source:Oligosaccharides and Prebiotics.]

The point about carrot soup is that the carrots are not raw and the extended cooking of the carrots ( simmer for approx  40-60 minutes) releases the  oligosaccharides more effectively so that they can get going in prebiotic mode.

Since I'm a probiotic aficionado -- dedicated , as I am , to  the celebration of lactobaccilus et al --  with all my yogurt and sauerkraut making and consumption -- the carrot story rang a few bells.

I eat yogurt and  sauerkraut daily. For instance, for lunch I usually have a yogurt drink made up of yogurt  combined with something else (eg: pawpaw, berries, avocado, or garlic, etc).

I love my liquid lunches. So quick, tasty, cheap and easy.

Well now, I'm thinking I get to enrich the experience by heating up some carrot soup (carrots, onion, garlic, ginger -- gotta have ginger) and eating it with dollops of yogurt. 

The taste is superb. 

I'm usually known -- when in catering mode -- for my carrot Moroccan  salad/dip which always amazes folk when they eat it. If you want to understand and relate to the taste potential of carrots -- this recipe is the one to tune you in.

So whether it's gonna be souped or dipped -- carrots are go.

You gotta love em...and  your insides are sure to thank you for your indulgence.

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Lacto fermentation rocks!

Further adventures in lactobacilli... 

 Another batch of DIY sauerkraut bottled, patted down and refrigerated for many happy ever-afterings. Without getting into additions (and recipes can become quite exotic) I rely on the core basics using salt and whey -- and it's fascinating how the taste nuances change and develop. 

 I'm bottling up early in the ferment -- 10 days this time -- but hope to explore longer times  before refrigeration slow downs the activity. Being a humid Summer in the sub tropics I don't have the ambient temperature advantages offered to sauerkraut production in temperate zones so I'm trying to see what I can do under conditions of a faster ferment.

Besides I like crunch.

Slow ferments enrich the sauerkraut flavours but here I'm risking evaporation and you need the cabbage to be always submerged in liquid.

Once my chokoes fruit again I'll try another batch of choko sauerkraut .

Since I have planted more cucumbers  I may ferment those : Lacto Fermented Cucumbers.

Out there waiting for me is an even bigger world dedicated to  lacto fermentation.

But why bother when you could buy some of these preserved foods at the local supermarket? [Asks he with a mouth full of  morsels  from my two latest sauerkraut ferments. De-lish-us.]

You bother because aside from the taste you can engineer yourself when you make your own, bought product is likely to have been pasteurised before sale thus killing the lactobacilli. 

It's  bug murder! Imagine if they pasteurized yogurt after it was made? But if you wanted to ship, warehouse and shelf life sauerkraut in a can or jar the liklihood is that it would be heated to at least 67-72°C for at least 15 seconds to ensure that all the bacteria were dead. Good or bad it wouldn't matter at that temperature.

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Yogurt and I are 'in a relationship'. It's not complicated at all. We are in love.

Ayran

Yogurt and I are 'in a relationship'.  It's not complicated at all. We are in love.

Deliciously  in love.

For ever so long all those lactobacilli and I have been getting along famously.

There's not a day goes by when we don't get it on together.

I can find an excuse to have it off with yogurt, breakfast,  lunch  and dinner.

I have a yogurt sauce on my breakfast plate. A yogurt smoothie at midday. Any number of yogurt excuses at dusk.

Such is my habituation that I have to make my own yogurt which I do as a matter of routine. So the budgetary complication of being addicted to the stuff is transcended. For me, yogurt costs as much -- and as little  -- as milk.

So now that I'm swimming in yogurt -- and I could if I wanted to -- I can explore all the possibilities it  may offer.

Recently I have been delving into the big wide world of yogurt sauces -- from variations of Tzatziki to salad dressings, and cute  blends such as yogurt with Tahina. 

This world is huge. So big that rather than wing it I thought I'd explore yogurt with greater consideration.

I have been cooking Middle Eastern food for 40 years and I know my way around the Mediterranean. But when you come to tackle yogurt culture -- not just the lactobacilli but yogurt cuisine and enjoyment -- you have to go Turkish.

After all, yogurt  is a Turkish word -- “yoğurt” -- and for Turks, yogurt is a passion. 

At the everyday centrepiece of Turkish yogurt consumption is Ayran which is consumed like a soft drink. Ayran is a Lassi but without any sweet ingredients. Just yogurt, water, salt and mint or garlic blended together.

Like a Capuchino, Ayran  is frothy.  

But Ayran tells us a lot about how yogurt is used in Turkish cuisine -- and that's what I've been trying to get a handle on.  If you explore Turkish food -- the savory stuff anyway --  with the taste of yogurt in your mind, there's a delightful sour logic to  it all.

I mean all these wonderful dishes almost seem  just so many delicious excuses to eat yogurt.  

For a yogurt junkie like myself this is one helluva revelation. 

Mind you we aren't talking about yogurt according to what's in your supermarket. None of those low fat, fruit flavoured, sugar enhanced concoctions that are passed off as 'healthy'.  We're talking plain, often thick, (what's called here) Greek style yogurt with or without the whey.

This is the stuff that is extraordinarily good for you.  

My problem is that I can't get too much of it. 

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Yogurt going cheap. Domestic product. Big pot=more yogurt.

I have been making my own yogurt with abandon.

It's easy.

I hadn't made yogurt so industriously since my 'Greek period' in the early seventies.

Then we used wooly jumpers and towels to keep the ferment going. 

But today I use my 'Hot Bag' which I imported from South Africa. 

My hot baggery is a domestic essential and I find many uses for the insulator -- including making my own yogurt. 

If you haven't got yourself a Hot Bag yet, and you are in yogurt mode -- use a sleeping bag. 

Aside from a quantity of milk and a stirring implement all you need is a cooking thermometer -- preferably one with large numbers as they can be hard to read when the lettering is minute. 

But it's easy so long as you are prepared to set aside the time to stir the pot on the stovetop. A big pot makes sense. 

Big pot=more yogurt.

And don't burn the milk. Keep within the temperature parameters.

Being a man I have trouble doing two things at once so pot stirring tends to be a full time project. Depending on your skills and the pot volume : 10 -20 minutes at the lactose coal face. 

Then next morning after you've tucked the lactobacillus away in its cosy chamber you get yogurt. 

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Making kraut sour my whey.

I haven't been at all happy with my DIY sauerkraut this far but my latest batch driven  primarily by whey -- drained from my  own yogurt making -- passes muster.

This batch was made from purple cabbage...considering the colour in the photo.

You can drain whey from any thick Greek style yogurt, and while I don't drain my yogurt because the lactobacillus  keeps on converting the milk carbohydrates and the yogurt will keep on thickening the longer you keep it -- if I want whey, it's like milking a cow.  

Whey's a clearish liquid so you just pour that into your cabbage mash, add some sea salt; pack down and let it naturally juice up. 

The salt drives the sweating process and the moisture leeches out of the grated cabbage drowning it in juice.

If you want to partake of a gastro entestinal 'hit' -- drink  some of this juice as plenty is generated. Kapow! 

Voila: sauerkraut!  With the whey on board and our sub tropical conditions I'm currently letting the ferment develop for a week before jaring the cabbage up and refrigerating. 

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I like my kofta on the dry side

I really love breakfast.

Its delights have become an obsession: a daily ritual.

I eat the same food each morning -- day in  day out.

I keep tweaking the setup, improving the preparation -- but am convinced that I'm on a darn good thing that I'll be sticking to.

For breakfast I eat lamb kofta with sauerkraut and a yogurt sauce; washed down with freshly brewed black coffee.

I make my own kofta. I make my own sauerkraut and yogurt.

As a hobby, focusing on kofta preparation

koftas consist of balls of minced or ground meat—usually beef or lamb—mixed with spices and/or onions.

has an almost Zen presence about it. I take  a careful selection of spring onions, garlic and spices and pound the lot into a mushy pulp with my mortar and pestle. I then mix this by hand with 250 grams of minced lamb (I prefer lamb), form it into cigar like rolls and fry or grill it.

What I don't cook up from the minced meat mix, marinates for later breakfasts. 

My spicing relies on pounding in-tact whole seeds -- especially cumin, my favorite -- and a rigorous mixing in of the meat. In parts of the Middle East they pound the mince with the spice mix for long periods so that the kofta is silky smooth. 

For now I just marry the spices and the mince. Sometimes I may add a little cracked wheat -- bulghur but only for a nutty flavour change. That still leaves me so many options to explore. Fresh herbs such as mint, parseley or coriander. Nuts. Vegetables.... The one limitation being 'wetness' and how willing you may be to compensate for that by adding cracked wheat or bred crumbs.

But as for me, I like my kofta  on the dry side and preferably without any wheat....

  

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A Whey with squashed cabbage a sauerkraut makes

My attempts at making my own sauerkraut have not been productive.

I suspect that I have been hampered by high ambient air temperatures than what the kraut  Lactobacillus appreciate.

The best quality sauerkraut is produced at 65-72° F (18-22° C) temperatures. Temperatures 45.5° F (7.5° C) to 65 F (18 C) favor the growth and metabolism of L.mesenteroides. Temperatures higher than 72° F (22° C) favor the growth of Lactobacillus species. Generally, lower temperatures produce higher quality sauerkraut, although at 45.5° F (7.5° C) bacteria are growing so slow that the cabbage might need 6 months to complete fermentation. Higher temperatures produce sauerkraut in 7-10 days but of the lesser quality. This creates such a fast fermentation that some types of lactic acid bacteria don’t grow at all and less reaction take place inside what results in a less complex flavor. Below 45.5° F (7.5° C) fermentation time is up to 6 months. At 65° F (18° C) fermentation time is 20 days. At 90-96° F (32-36° C) fermentation time is 10 days. (Source)

But there is a short cut: the way the Greeks do it.

And this is what I'm doing with my latest effort. 

The Greeks use the whey taken from the making of yogurt and add it to the cabbage mash as a starter. The whey is often drained from the yogurt to make  it thicker. It already contains plenty of hard working Lactobacillus  so when married to the cabbage and salt things supposedly happen faster.

Indeed, I'm hoping to bottle my sauerkraut after 3 days of fermentation.

If, after 3 days, I have dinky dye kraut I can then begin to experiment with extended lengths with later batches.

I can get plenty of whey as I make my own yogurt almost twice per week and whey is easily made by draining dobs of this yogurt through a cloth. 

Making sauerkraut should be easy but so far I haven't been blessed with an edible result.  Its' rustrating. But then, failure only encourages me to do more homework.

Now I suspect I'm on the right track with the CABBAGE + WHEY + SALT approach (more whey/less salt). 

The only procedures you need to know is how to bruise the shredded cabbage so that it sweats...and how to pack it in a crock so that it is stamped down and  reamins drowned in its watery juices. 

Time does the rest -- and all those  hard working  Lactobacillae. 

Afterward:

After 3 days of fermentation the sauerkraut  was delicious -- even compared to the Polish import I so often buy. Still a tad crunchy but with a mix of exciting flavours and not as salty as some I've tasted.  I prefer my sauerkraut simple and don't take so much to all the additions of spices, other vegetables or white wine that are favoured by the Germans. I know that if my sauerkraut ferments as my yogurt does then even jarred up in the refrigerator I'm still gonna get more activity and deeper flavours with longer resting time. And if I use my own whey I'll get a partnering of Lacto species and tastes -- yogurt and sauerkraut. So now, while I've given up brewing beer or baking with sour dough, I can still wallow in the joys of  ferment.

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Yogurt -- you can do a lot with fermented milk if you make it yourself

Yogurt.

A dairy product produced by bacterial fermentation of milk.

I've been eating so much of the stuff that I've gone back to making my own.

It's so easy to do .  Outlay is cheap: the cost of the milk.

So if yogurt is your staple: Make it yourself.

All you need is a cooking thermometer. There are sight and feel methods but they aren't reliable unless you are well practiced.

For me now, yogurt making is routine. Every few days given my consumption.

• Simmer the milk to 82 C (180 F) while stirring.
• Let milk cool to 43 C (110 F).
• Add two tablespoons of already made yogurt.
• Cover the container. Keep warm and insulated overnight.  I use my cooking bags but any insulated container or sleeping bag/dooner like cover would do.
• Refrigerate.

For some reason this is called "Greek"yogurt if you strain off the whey . But you really needn't bother.

I have yogurt smoothies for lunch. My preferred blend are either with pawpaw or berries. You can suit yourself.

For Lassi stir to a smooth blend one part chilled water to two parts yogurt. I sometimes use chilled green tea instead of water.

For making curries -- and I prefer yogurt based North Indian curries to their southern cousins made on coconut milk -- follow these tips to prevent curdling if it becomes a problem.

I also use plain yogut as a condiment with köfte meats, roasts and tomato dishes like Sicilian Caponata. There is also a large range of Middle Eastern sauces which are yogurt based. 

So for drizzling or dipping, or salad tossing you can do a lot with fermented milk.

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Uses of Mineral Water

Who woulda thought?

Mineral water can be so useful. That is , so long as it is sparkling.

Still waters may run deep but they  leave me cold.

As a green tea blend

Every day I drink green tea (made on cold water) 'alf n'alf with mineral water. I love it. It's a tipple that's displaced a lot of my (hot)white tea consumption.

As a spitzer for red wine.

I drink cask red wine. I half full a jug with water and freeze it. I then pour in one part red wine to one part mineral water. The water  melt sand the mineral water dilutes the alcoholic hit without any perceptible loss of taste.

As a base for lassi

Instead of adding water to yogurt to make lassi -- I use mineral water. One part mineral water to two parts yogurt. Traditionally lassi is a salted drink and the salts in the mineral water suit the convergence of tastes.

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The Quest

A meditation on Chokoes, Millitons, Chayotes... 

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