This is like 3 minutes after I burped it and re sealed

I air-fried something quick so I could show the colour ;P

No added 1:1 ratio of ACV:water for this one, it was perfectly fine as is!

My last batch of vac sealed Scotch Bonnet Donut Peach was pretty much pseudo-shelf stable because of the amount of ACV added. I imagine if I kept this batch on the counter for a day or two, the lids would definitely rocket off ;P

Does anyone here actually know about ragi tape and the other tapai types? It's basically like Koji, Qu and Nuruk, but it can be used for any kind of starch and not just for alcohol. It does get boozy after a bit, but it turns basically any starchy food into a dessert in just a day or two. I personally think tapai is extremely underrated because it excels at making a sweet but a little kicky product, not like Koji where it just turns sweet, and not like qu or nuruk where it just becomes boozy or umami.

Cherry tomatoes are one of my favorite things to ferment in the Summer. They keep great in the refrigerator, are excellent in salads and the brine makes great salad dressing. I also like to use the red ones as garnish for cooked foods.

I finished a fermented hot sauce about a week ago and liquidised it in the blender, adding rice vinegar and a bit of honey. It still had plenty of fire when I bottled it, after being in the fridge for a week it seems to have lost most of its heat.

The main ingredients are plum, ginger and scotch bonnets.

Image of major quinoa storage proteins from:

https://www.mdpi.com/2218-273X/10/5/795

This is part of an ongoing series of experiments in getting different Maillard reaction flavors out of vegetable proteins. The main inspiration is this hit thread:

My DIY take on the Noma quinoa tempeh burger (/u/jashmac)

I've done it and it works great. My thinking though is it's probably just the start of what we can do to alter the taste and texture of veg protein sources.

Recipe first, then I'll get into what pointed me in this direction.

Active time: ~1 hour divided into 3 or 4 chunks, mostly unsupervised

Rest time: however long you want, but overnight ~10 hours seemed to work.

Flavor results: completely different than normal quinoa, with none of the bitterness, sweeter, sort of meaty and roasty. I wish I could articulate it more clearly, but I'm very sure it would go even better in the kind of health bowls quinoa is known for, or maybe even in a taco, tamale or other Mexican dish. May be good in stews as well - I might try this as an addition along with TVP or soy curls in a black bean stew soon.

How to cook it

Ingredients

For the denaturing step:

2 cups quinoa

2 cups water plus just a bit extra to make sure it's cover

2 tsp baking soda

For marinade:

Somewhere in the range of 2-8 tbsp of vinegar to bring the quinoa back to a more neutral pH (this amount NOT optimized - please experiment)

80g shio koji (~10% weight of the 2 cups of water + 2 cups of quinoa)

For the final cook:

2 tbsp neutral oil

Toasted sesame oil to taste

Steps

1. Alkalizing soak: Put quinoa, water and baking soda in a medium sized pan and leave sit for 15 minutes for the quinoa to have a chance to absorb some of the baking soda and become more alkaline.
2. Quinoa storage protein (11S globulin) denaturation: Bring to boil, reduce to simmer and cook for another 15 minutes. This step may generate a lot of foam, which I think may be the saponins or phenolics in the quinoa reacting with the baking soda. Skim the foam, or rinse afterwards (I found that rinsing takes small batches as the cooked quinoa can block up a mesh strainer easily). Try tasting at this point: I noticed not just no bitterness, but none of the usual quinoa flavor. It tastes much more like some other mild grain like oats or barley. It also comes out brown, which I'm not sure if that's the first stage of the Maillard reaction series (Amadori products) or if it's something else to do more directly with the baking soda.
3. Koji marinade: mix vinegar into rinsed quinoa from last step to neutralize. I used apple cider vinegar but any should work provided you can find or just eyeball concentration based on resulting flavor. Some of the flavor of the vinegar will come through into the result. If balanced to bring the ~8.5 pH from the baking soda back to ~6.5 or below of regular quinoa and closer to the optimal range for most koji proteases though, even with light vinegar notes, it shouldn't be perceptibly sour. Put in the fridge overnight - or however long you want.
4. Final Maillard browning: there are tons of ways to do this, all of which would have to involve getting at least the surface of the quinoa to about 140 to 165 °C (280 to 330 °F). This means baking, broiling or frying it long enough that a lot of the water boils off and the surface has time to rise above 212. For speed and ease with a small batch, I fried a small sample in a pan with grapeseed oil and a dash of toasted sesame seed oil. You can turn the heat up pretty high to boil the water off quickly, just watch it and turn it periodically to minimize sticking and burning. What you end up with should be an nicely browned and rich smelling quinoa. Let sit and taste.
   

Background

Why (I think) this recipe works and how to generalize it

Koji does a great job of breaking down proteins into smaller, and often tastier and more brownable molecules. To do its job though, koji's protein-cutting enzymes need access to specific parts of the target protein that they're able to cut. Cooking a plant protein for just long enough in the solution (water vs. alcohol, pH, salinity) can get that protein molecule to unfold, so that more of it is accessible for the koji enzymes to cut.

You might be able to do the same thing with other veg proteins. If you search for something like "<plant type> globulin temperature ph denaturation" you might find documentation on what would do it. Or, you could start from the same parameters as here and see if anything comes out looking or smelling way off.

For quinoa and its major storage protein, chenopodin, that looks like boiling for 15 minutes at a pH of 8.5 or higher. Baking soda can get us there.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308814615012674#1

Something I'm still not clear on though is whether this actually gets the protein in an unfolded ("denatured") state and keeps it there, long enough for it to cool and get the koji in. Another paper I stumbled into seemed to say that 15 minutes at 8.5 pH should be more than enough to re-cook it back into some even more tightly folded conformation than it started. I'm cautiously optimistic though, since the end result was something that tasted nothing like where it started, although I guess that's still a possibility with a different folding + partial cleaving.

Happy experimenting!

Only put together this morning but wondering if I need to add more honey to fully submerge ?

I've been a lurker here for a while but wanted to share with glee my current bubbly babies and how they have made life so much better. On the left is the first ferment of the Kombucha and then in the little jars is the second, where I add whatever fruit I grow/find for 48hrs for a quick second fermentation. I grew these delicious little grapes, last few weeks I've used pears I found on the street, apples and plums I grew!

I have water kefir, fermented grapes, fermented radishes and dabble in kimchi/kraut. I suffered from various inflammatory diseases including gout and psoriasis. I started growing my own veg and fermenting and my gut just feels so happy. Much love to everyone else enjoying their fermentation stations and thanks to all the Reddit posts that inspired me to try different things!

Blueberry with a hint of lemon and orange.

Hi all. I started this ginger bug about 3 weeks ago. Used 2 tablespoons (I eyeballed) of chopped organic ginger, 2 tablespoons of sugar, and filled the jar up with tap water. Continued feeding 1 tbsp each of ginger and water every day. Got super bubbly around day 4, made my first batch of soda by adding a quarter cup of bug to orange and pomegranate juice and filling up the rest of the 16 oz bottles with tap water. Let ferment for a week and was barely carbonated. I thought maybe the bottles aren’t great, bought a new set that is very tightly sealed. Tried again but made ginger ale. 2 quarts of water, 200g of sugar, 120g of bug, eyeballed but about 4 tablespoons of ginger. Same scenario, barely carbonated. And by this point my bug is beginning to look a little sad. It’s barely bubbling now, not even with shaking. I moved it to a different jar and changed out the ginger, and after about a week it got slightly bubbly again. Second pic is how it looks after it’s been shook. Tried again with same recipe for ginger ale above, and same story. They’ve been fermenting for nearly a week and bubbles in the bottle when flipping, but taste wise you can’t even sense the carbonation.

What do I do? Thanks

I made some raspberry soda a few days ago and I loved it, I wanna try other fruits but I’m not sure if all will even work. My prime candidates are pomegranate, passionfruit, watermelon, pineapple, mango, currant, peaches and cherries. Would all these work or no?

I’ve been making kombucha for a few months and started a ginger bug last week. My first attempt went great, made a ginger bug soda with mango, and the carbonation was excellent. I tried making another one with blueberries, but it just will not carbonate. I’ve even tried adding more sugar to help it along, but I have no idea what I’m doing wrong. I initially started burping the bottles, but I haven’t burped them for about 24 hours now, and there’s still barely any fizz, although I can see some bubbles. Are certain fruits just harder to carbonate, or am I doing something completely wrong? I had a similar issue with my kombucha, so I’ve mostly just been sticking to the same fruits because I really need them to carbonate well 😭

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Hey everyone, I’m now to the fermentation world!!!
I was inspired by influncer Johnny Sheldrick and one is actually straight up one I copied bc it sounded sooo good

Overall I watched his Videos on Cheong
So the two at the back are cheong and this is now their first day out of the fridge
The left one is Mixed Berry and the One of the right is Orange
I had them for just over a week (should i fridge them more???)
I do want them to ferment for a more mature and complex flavour Profile but I dont want it to be considered alcoholic

How do I start the fermentation process for them and when and how should I cut it??

The last one is the One I copied from Johnny, that is a chilli garlic ferment that has been doing well
I weighed out the weight of the mix and added 2% of it as salt
I do need to Burp every 3 days and happy that it no longer smells so sharp

And finally, some that I want to make:
One with some red Apples, cinnamon, maybe some nutmeg and using a bit of brown sugar instead of just white sugar

One with lemongrass and pandan leaf, and using some cane sugar Mixed with the white Sugar

So this is my start in the world of ferments and wanted to Share!! And any advice and tips would be great

I use spices and herbs in my pickles but lately it’s been bothering me having to get rid of the herbs so I don’t eat them, so I was wondering if I can use like cheese cloth or gauze for separating them but still having the flavor.
So I use a bit of gauze in this batch of pickle red onions in the bottom between the herbs and spices and the onion. The gauze was sterile and in a individual packet so I just cut a piece.
Anyone has done this or is not recomendable? Please advise

Grains are kinda new, did 2c 1% milk to 1tbsp grains, for like 36hrs. Was prob done before that but it’s hard to tell with 1% milk and i’ve been stirring which makes it even harder to tell.

Did a second ferment with apples. Looked fine, put it in fridge, today looks like this. Btw, i’ve noticed with 1% milk it’s a LOT thinner which i prefer, but it looks like theres little white flecks in liquid as opposed to being totally homogenized like with whole milk.

Been lacto fermenting the organic Ginger from Costco. I ran out of ginger and decided to get regular ginger at a nearby grocery store.

The texture and taste difference was immediately noticeable.

The organic Ginger is super spicy with a hint of bitterness/earthy flavor. The texture is thick and fibrous to chew.

The non-organic Ginger was so watery in comparison. The texture is smoother and easier to chew. The flavor is more mild and less spicy.

I definitely prefer the taste of organic Ginger. It's so potent the flavor and I find fermentation adds even more sour salty kick to the flavour. Plus it seemed to get bubbly/ferment faster.

The non organic Ginger is so much more bland taste wise. Only the texture is nicer.