Saturday, February 23, 2013

The Fermented Cabbages Part Two

Kimchi definitely smells strong, but has a lovely spicey/fishy/veggie taste. I can see why people like this stuff. Kraut on the right, it's pink because it's a mix of red and green cabbage, and you can see the caraway seed and juniper berries if you look close. The brine-filled bags I was using to weigh the kraut down evidently broke, so I switched to a salad plate which fits perfectly into the bucket. The kraut has a definite sour taste now, but is still very crunchy. I'll bottle some of it up for the Emeritus Feast auction next week, and the same with the kimchi - only I'm going to try to get some carbonation going on the kimchi, so I'll leave it at room temp. Miach likes the kimchi, so that's a good sign. Although he did say "it's beginning to smell ripe out there!" when I went out to the back deck to dig around in my fermentation box.

Monday, February 11, 2013

A Tale of Two Fermented Cabbages

About 3 or 4 days ago, I cut up 3 heads of Napa cabbage, and 5 heads of regular cabbage (both green and purple) to make some vegetable ferments. This is what they look like after the intervening time submerged in brine and sitting on our back deck nesting in straw inside a covered box. The weather has gotten down to sub-32F nearly every night and daytime temps have been in the 40's to a bit over 60. No sun hits the back deck, no matter what time of day. 

The Kimchi, made mostly for Miach's knight, Gunther, who had a Korean grandmother, was made like this: quarter and then slice into 2" pieces, sprinkled with salt as I layered it into a bowl, and set aside for a couple hours. I ground up about 10 to 12 dried chili peppers (California mildly spicy, sold in the Mexican spice section in a cellophane bag) and tasted them, and they weren't very spicy. I know Gunther likes spicy. So, I sprinkled VERY CAREFULLY some of the habenero powder that one of our other friends (Dregel and Bronwyn) grew and gave us. I tasted again, and it had a bite to it which wasn't bad. I pulverized in a food processor: 8 cloves of garlic, 3" of ginger, 1/2 yellow onion and about 20 small red radishes. I used regular radish, because I can't find Daikon radish this time of year anywhere. Really, you want this mixture to be mush, and it was. 
I added 2 or 3 tablespoons of rice flour to about a cup of water and cooked it over a low flame until it thickened, then scooped it into a bowl to cool. 
After it cooled, I mixed it with the spice mush and ground peppers, to form a red goo and I added about 1/4 cup of fish sauce. I was amazed to find fish sauce in a couple of stores, and I chose one that only had anchovies and salt as ingredients. I tasted it, too, and it didn't taste bad -- it tasted salty. 
Then, I sliced up another 20 or so radishes and three bunches of green onions including the tops and set that aside. 
I retrieved the cabbage, which had wilted and was very watery, and rinsed it off until it tasted nearly salt-free. (The hot pepper goo has salty fish sauce in it, remember...)
Then I mixed the cabbage with the veggies, and dumped the sauce on them and mixed that very well, and packed it tightly into a 2 gallon food-safe plastic bucket with a lid that snaps down. I weighted the mixture down with 2 gallon size ziplock bags filled with a mixture of water and 3 teaspoons of salt (in case they break or leak...) and I had to adjust the fill of the bags so that they would fit into the bucket and still allow the lid to be loosely snapped on top (to let gas out as the kimchi ferments..). 
Making the kimchi was fun, if a bit labor intensive. The kitchen smelled pretty good from the spice mix, and I know that can change as it ferments, which is probably why Koreans tend to do the fermenting outside. 

The Sauerkraut was downright simple compared to the Kimchi: shred cabbage in food processor using slicing side, and feeding 2 or 3 inch chunks into your access port. Add what seems like a good amount of caraway seed, and about 1/4 cup of dried juniper berries for my 5 heads of cabbage, toss that all together, sprinkle it with about 1/3 cup of salt but again: layer it and sprinkle, etc. Then punch the mixture, toss it, punch it HARD, toss it, and finally pack it down into another food safe plastic bucket tightly and again weigh it down with the ziplock bags covering the entire surface of the mixture, and loosely place the lid. I added about 1/4 cup of whey that I collected from a jar of yogurt that I had made and put in the back of my fridge quite some time ago. It had not spoiled, and still tasted like yogurt, and I'm not dead, so I think it was fine. The whey is supposed to kick-start your kraut, add in good bacteria and acidify it more quickly, which keeps it from spoiling. But really--from what I've researched, you don't need to worry about it spoiling if you keep it submerged in it's own brine and you skim any mold and floating veggies off and throw them away. 

You don't have to add anything but salt and cabbage to the kraut, if you don't want to or if you don't have it. We happen to have stuff from our brewing and cooking hobbies that are traditional ingredients! You can also add other vegetables to the kraut, so long as it is mostly cabbage - cause otherwise you have some other kind of fermented vegetable dish, and not kraut. Which might not be bad, just not kraut. 
Kimchi is different. I think recipes for kimchi approach religious belief, and they vary from season to season and family to family and region to region. You almost can't make it wrong -- but you are never going to make it "right", either, unless you hit on the exact recipe that the person eating it had in the past. It's like my grandmother's egg noodles that no one can duplicate, but the efforts are still tasty and still egg noodles. 

So, here we are with VERY young ferments, and following Sandor Katz's http://www.wildfermentation.com/ advice to taste, taste, taste until you get where you're going with a ferment, I carefully plucked some of each out this morning. Both of the containers smell "gassy" but not bad. There is no mold on the top of either, and the bags appear intact and are continuing to submerge the veggies. It rained and sleeted/hailed during the past few days, and there was some water on the lids because the box the containers were in couldn't be totally weather-proofed (I lined it with a large garbage bag, set it inside another large garbage bag, and put clean straw inside it for insulation before setting the buckets inside, and I covered it with a large plastic storage box lid that didn't fit tightly). There was a large amount of brine in both containers, all the way to just below the brims, but it appeared to be from the vegetables and not from outside. Both lids were still on, and covering the buckets completely, and all bags were still full, so I really think its just the juices of the vegetables being drawn out by the salt. 

The Kimchi smells onion/garlic-y and is in a light orange-red brine. The cabbage and green onion taste similarly and are still mostly crunchy. There is a notable ginger taste, and a very mild spicy bite and warming effect to the palate. No notable fish taste, and only mildly salty. As a person who has never actually tasted any kind of kimchi, I find it pleasant so far, but I suspect a Korean would find it very bland, so I'm thinking about adding a bit more habenero and fish sauce. I won't be able to mix them in, so hopefully they'll disperse through the brine on their own. 

The Kraut smells mildly of caraway, and is still both green and purple pieces in a light purple brine. It is mostly crunchy, with a light salty taste, not acidic at all at this point. 

Although I'm sure that a bit of fermentation is occurring in both, due to the cooler temps that they are being stored in, it isn't really evident yet. I may bottle the kimchi at some point and let it carbonate at room temp for a day or so, then put it back outside, but I think I'm going to give it another week at least. The reason for doing that would be that carbonated kimchi is considered by most to be a better dish, so I'd like to try. The kraut just needs to acidify, and slow fermentation is supposed to be best for it, so we're right on track. Both ferments can be eaten at a few days, or can be stored for months or even years at cool temps, although for kraut at least I've heard that it can eventually turn quite soft and unappetizing.