Category: Recipes

Lactic Acid Fermentation at Home

My homemade sauerkraut in progress. Mmm-boy, look how turbid that brine is! Those bacteria are really going to town. There are also tons of CO2 bubbles constantly forming in this one (which you can’t really see from the photo)

I’ve been fermenting a batch of cabbage to make sauerkraut, as well as a batch of Brussels sprouts to make (wait for it)… fermented Brussels sprouts. Yea, turns out there is not a special name for this delicacy.

It has been 3 weeks of fermentation for these jars, and we tasted them for the first time last night. I really liked the Brussels sprouts, they were getting soft and sour and everything I had hoped for. Doc didn’t like the Brussels sprouts, he liked the sauerkraut better. I thought the sauerkraut was OK, but not nearly as far along as I would like. It was only slightly sour and still very crunchy and salty. Over time, as the juices get pulled out of the plant tissues, the culture gets less salty-tasting and the plant tissues get less crunchy. So salty saurkraut is often a sign of not-finished sauerkraut. I’m reserving judgment on the saurkraut for a few more weeks.

Fermenting Brussels sprouts. Note the brine-filled sandwich bag I use as a weight to keep all the vegetables submerged. It is filled with brine in case it leaks. These have been fermenting more slowly, and with fewer CO2 bubbles, due to their not being shredded. But I tasted one yesterday and they are definitely getting sour and tender. Also notice how much less turbid the brine is here. Must be a lot less bacteria.

Unlike homemade yogurt, where you pretty much have to add a starter culture (ie: mix in a little bit of already-made-yogurt into your milk), the process of fermenting vegetables feels way cooler because the lactic acid bacteria are commensurate with the vegetables, and are already hanging out on their surface. Waiting. All you do is make a super salty brine, plop your vegetables into the brine, and let the bacteria have at it for about four weeks (whenever you enjoy the taste, just move the jar to your fridge to slow/stop the fermentation – the longer the bacteria ferment, the more sour the vegetables will get).

The main purpose of the brine is to suck the juices out of the vegetable tissues via diffusion. Basically, the brine is way saltier than the inside of the cabbage cells, which are housed in semi permeable membranes, and so the liquids get sucked out through the membrane as the outside and inside approach an equal ion concentration. And then your bacteria buddies go to town. It also happens that many of the lactic acid bacteria are halotolerant (salt-tolerant), so the brine also gives you the added benefit of inhibiting the growth of many pathogens and other agents of spoilage, whilst not hurting the lactic acid bacteria. Note that the lactic acid bacteria are not usually halophilic (halophilic organisms need high salt to live), so it is possible to ferment things without a brine (consider, if you will, sour beers and yogurts which are not salty), but you would run a high risk of spoilage.

The lactic acid bacteria are non-respiring, which means that all they can do is ferment. Technically they are aerotolerant anaerobes, which means that oxygen does not kill them or harm them, but they don’t use the oxygen in any way. They don’t even notice the oxygen (or lack thereof). Since fermentation yields a lot less energy than respiration (which doesn’t always require oxygen, but let’s assume for simplicity’s sake that it does; especially since we are not likely to have loads of metals in our brine), fermenters can easily get out-competed in aerobic environments by oxygen respirers.

So, to give my bacterial buddies a leg up on the competition, I sealed off the jars and put a vent system in with a water trap. Fermentation produces CO2, you see, and I didn’t want the jars to build up pressure to the point of explosion. I want to eat the sauerkraut, not blow up my kitchen with it. With this set-up, CO2 can leave through the vent, but no new oxygen can get in. This means, once the undesirable aerobic bacteria use up the tiny bit of oxygen left in the jar, they won’t be able to do anything else. They’d have to either switch to fermentation themselves (in the case of facultative anaerobes – bacteria that will use oxygen if present but will switch to fermentation in its absence), or sporulate to wait around for more oxygen, or just die. And there will be no more respiration out-competing fermentation.

Lactic acid bacteria are a diverse bunch, spanning several genera and many of the species do slightly different things. They all ferment the sugars from the vegetable tissues, but some only make lactic acid, while other species might make other compounds in addition to lactic acid. You can even get esters and other weird things produced if you let the culture go on long enough, which can really contribute to a unique flavor.

Supposedly the most common player in fermented vegetables is Lactobacillus plantarum, but I will attempt to identify the bacteria I have growing in my fermentation jars. Will they be monocultures? Will they be mind-bogglingly diverse? Will the Brussels sprouts have a completely different community compared to the cabbage? Obviously, different strains will be dominant at different stages in the fermentation.

Stay tuned! I will share all of my results, and even some super awesome photos of the bacteria growing in my fermentation jars – taken with a microscope. Will they be coccoid? Bacilloid? Spirilloid? Probably not spirilloid, but still. WILL THEY BE ALL OF THE ABOVE? How will you handle the suspense?

How to Make Pecan Liqueur

I have been on a liqueur-making rampage recently! They really allow you to make delicious craft cocktails that taste like you paid $16 for it in a bar. I’ve never really bought any bottles of liqueur, however, because: a) you seem to need to have, like, a million different liqueurs; and 2) they cost a lot. Instead, I’ve just been making one or two at a time, and focusing on making cocktails which feature those liqueurs until more are done.

This liqueur is my own personal recipe, that I came up with because it sounded like it would be good.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup pecans (roasted and finely chopped)

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup molasses

1/2 cup dark spiced rum

Method:

Mix all the ingredients together, and seal in a mason jar.

I like looking at the sedimentary layers that form whenever I make liqueurs.

Let the mixture macerate for 2 weeks, mixing the jar once a day.

After 2 weeks are up, filter the mixture. First use a coarse filter (such as a metal mesh) to remove the coarse pecan pieces.

Get those pecan pieces out of my liqueur!
Yea, that’s the stuff!

Then, use a coffee filter to filter out the finer silty stuff.

The second filtration – and then you are done!

Et voila! You have yourself some tasty pecan liqueur. I can’t wait to see what sort of cocktail recipes I can use this in!

Making Milk Liqueur

There is a way to make a milk liqueur that you can add to acidic /fruity drinks, and it won’t curdle! Sure, this is mostly because it has already curdled, but hey! You still get a surprising amount of milky delicious flavour from it. So much so, that I am willing to bet that letting the milk infuse the alcohol for a long period of time allows many more of the alcohol-soluble flavors to leave the milk and go into the alcohol than you would get if you simply added whey to alcohol as a shortcut. You even get that miraculous milky velvety texture.

It is easy enough to make your own, you simply mix equal parts milk, sugar, and vodka together and let it sit for two weeks. Hopefully by then, the milk proteins will have denatured and separated out from the liquids and the alcohol. If this has happened, you should then filter out the curdled solids with a cloth or coffee filter, leaving a rich golden liqueur for sipping or mixing (discard the solids).

Some milk liqueur in progress.  You actually want/need it to separate like this. And it will get yellower as it ages.

I was lucky enough to get some separation doing it this way, but apparently this doesn’t always work. Some people suggest putting a lemon, orange, or other citrus fruit into the mix. The acid in the fruit will help denature the proteins and speed up the clumping process. However, I just wanted a pure milky flavour, without any overpowering citrus in the mix. Especially if I want to mix this into cocktails, I don’t want the extra complexity of orange in there. Don’t get me wrong, I can imagine that this could taste like a delicious Creamsicle. Just not what I was going for. Apparently, some people also put chocolate into the mix. Again, sounds delicious, but not the pure essence of milk that I want.

And here is the same jar of in-progress milk liqueur, 2 weeks later. Note the interesting separation pattern of solids, liquids, solids. Some pretty cool density separation going on here.

So is there some other way to make sure your milk will curdle correctly, every time? I guess you could use vinegar, but that would be even grosser than lemon. And then it hit me… why not use cream of tartar?

All you need is a more acidic environment to denature the milk proteins, and cream of tartar is a relatively flavourless acid – one that is often added to pastries which need acidity for the chemistry to work, without adding any offending flavors.

Seemed like it should do the trick, so to the second batch (which was about 2 cups total) I added 1.5 teaspoons of cream of tartar before sealing it up and mixing. This worked perfectly! By the second day I already saw loads of separation, and the alcohol/water phase continued to get richer and more golden as time went on. It was absolutely a better result than without the acid!

Now I can make drinks with shrubs (and other acidic flavours) in addition to milk liqueur, and not worry about it curdling and becoming gross.

Whiskey, cherry shrub, milk liqueur, and a cherry. It was surprisingly milky and delicious. How often can you taste these flavours together? Not very, since the milk normally curdles! This is a breakthrough.

I hadn’t considered this before making milk liqueur, but this could even the be the first time you get to taste milk mixed with acidic ingredients like lemon or shrub, because the 2 week infusion process brings all the milk flavours into the liqueur while also removing the curdling elements. So essentially this liqueur opens up all new possibilities. Delicious possibilities.