Tag: fermentation

Umeboshi! Japanese fermented salty sour plum. These are a Mirabelle/cherry plum growing close to my house, local as it gets. They're used in dressings, cooked in a sardine stew, or eaten with rice in Japan. Super salty and a bit sour, best not eaten on their own.

Cheese unveil. This is a washed-rind aged ricotta, which isn't really a thing, just something I made. Ricotta isn't usually aged due to the fact that most of the bugs and enzymes are killed due to it being nearly boiled. However, I wanted to try it, and added some back in after the curds had cooled down. I also ended up washing with some brined whey, basically brushing some on during the early ageing process.

Another amino post, this time koji/soy. Not a super glamorous pic I'm afraid! My first time attempting a koji culture for ages, and while it started off fine, it started sporulating quite quickly, within 36 hrs. See the green colour in the third pic. This happens for a variety of reasons, but in this case it was either too dry or too hot.

This is the follow up to the Caerphilly cheese. Looks and tastes pretty delicious: rich, a little funky, creamy. Super happy with it!

Nice natto idea from @nattodad. Toast rubbed with garlic after toasting with some rapeseed oil. Natto mixed with a tbsp of home fermented whole grain mustard, a tsp each of cider vinegar and soy. Yum! The home made batch wasn't at all slimey after a few days in the fridge.

My recent foray into cheesemaking. From top left in the cover photo: Bel Paese, Caerphilly, Marcellin. There's a nice book called The Art of Natural Cheesemaking that I started with. His approach is very much avoiding the sterile modern approach, also found in modern beer making, and using diverse microbial cultures found in raw milk and kefir to produce interesting and characterful cheese. I used my "house" amasi culture which I've had for 18 months or so now, a South African lacto ferment that has seemed to have survived better than any other I've used.