Greetings, friends. It’s been a while. Those of you who know me — and let’s face it, you all know me — probably are aware that my emotional health waxes and wanes over time. One key sign of depression for me is a tendency to fall off of maintaining habits that require sustained investment without providing an immediate dopamine reward, in favor of ones that do, like playing video games.
Contrariwise, one can tell that I’m doing well, mentally and emotionally, if one can answer yes to the following three questions:
Is Schuyler writing?
Is he running?
Is there something fermenting in his kitchen?
No joke. For the last couple months, the answers have respectively been, (1.) no, (2.) not really, and, (3.) actually, yes.
This last bit — is there something fermenting in my kitchen? — is probably the first sign that I’m shaking off what was a truly weird and difficult last year, and maybe also coming to grips with the normal PNW winter blues which everyone warned me about and which are sadly all too real.
I love lactobacilli. To quote Gerald Tannock from the June 2004 issue of Practical and Applied Microbiology, “It is no wonder: these are fascinating and useful bacteria.”
These lil’ guys are great. I love the fact that you can boil some milk in an Instant Pot, wait for it to cool below 110ºF, add a bit of yogurt, set the IP to yogurt mode, wait 16 hours, and, presto, all the yogurt you can eat. I make a half gallon every week or so, which turns into a little less than a quart of Greek-style product, once you strain off the whey. I save the whey in a second Mason jar and put it in soup or smoothies or use it as the culture for the next batch of yogurt.
Everything is Mason jars in this house. Too much cabbage or collard greens in the produce delivery this week? Slice into strips, bung them in a Mason jar, add some sea salt, a few peppercorns, and a bay leaf, then fill it up with filtered water, drop a glass weight on top, add an airlock lid, throw it in the back of the cabinet. You don’t even need to add lacto culture — the cabbage brought its own. Bam, a couple weeks later, you have sauerkraut.
Good thing about that cabinet, too. I had still been using some cheap swing-top bottles I got from Daiso awhile back to do secondary fermentation of kombucha, right up until the week before last, when one of them exploded in the cabinet above the kitchen counter one evening while Besha and I were watching TV.
The mess was so well contained that we didn’t even notice, until she went to feed the dog the next morning and noticed that the floor by the dog’s bowl was wet. Sure, I had to mop up a quart of half-fermented sugar tea and sweep a pile of broken glass out of the cabinet, but it definitely beat having to pick razor-sharp slivers of glass out of every corner of the kitchen, like last time!
Needless to say, I got right on the Internets and ordered new, more robust glassware, through the simple expedient of searching Amazon until I found a brand of swing-top bottles that had extensive reviews containing no mention of explosions.
So far the new bottles are holding up great. They retain carbonation much better, and, what is more, they are only 16 ounces, so the gallon of sweet kombucha tea I brew every week now comes in a different flavor each day. Hibiscus is an obvious favorite around here, but the tartness of kombucha really brings out the bergamot in Earl Grey, and you’d be surprised how that same tartness is also balanced quite wonderfully by a fir tip tisane.
As you can see by my fondness for kombucha, I am not strictly a lacto partisan — I will employ any microorganism that can be counted upon to produce alcohol, carbon dioxide, or both. I don’t eat a lot of baked goods because, honestly, I am trying to lose some weight, but I did recently go so far as to try to assemble two Mason jars and some drip irrigation tubing into a CO₂ reactor for my aquarium, featuring baker’s yeast as the star of the operation. I am fairly certain that it was indeed bubbling CO₂ into the aquarium for a while, but, at some point, something backfired and the reactor started siphoning water out of the tank instead, and, when that overflowed, it started slowly spilling out on to the wood floor. I quickly disassembled the whole thing in order to re-evaluate my engineering choices. The yeast was not to blame.
So, when the produce box fetched up too many pears about three weeks ago… it was yeast to the rescue once more! I pureed the pears and also an apple that was about to go off, put them in a Mason jar of course, added a tsp. of baker’s yeast and an obscene amount of sugar because that is apparently how you make wine, and let it ferment under some cheesecloth for a few days. Then I put an airlock top on the jar, and stuck it on the shelf for a couple weeks to finish fermenting.
Today I decanted it for a taste. Actually, I tried pouring it through a coffee filter first, to get rid of the puree, and when that didn’t work, I put the cheesecloth to work again.
So getting at the drinkable product was a bit of a to-do, but the result was, if I may be candid, pretty dang good. Still sweet, but with that little kick that says 5 or 6% ABV, and a delightful floral note suggestive of pear blossoms. Besha’s tastes are much more refined than mine, and even she pronounced it “eminently drinkable”.
I put a small bottle in the fridge, put the rest back into a quart Mason jar, replaced the airlock lid, and in a week we shall see if it has become a little more dry, or if I’ve just made vinegar by letting it aerate. We shall see.
The small bottle in the fridge will supply us with (albeit non-traditional) wine for a Shabbos kiddush tomorrow night. That same fridge already contains a jar of yogurt and a jar of sauerkraut and, tomorrow, I will move another bottle of kombucha down from the cabinet, because we have to drink this stuff or I will run out of bottles.
Aquarium? Yes, we got an aquarium. That is a whole nother story which I will tell soon. Besha is also raising chicks in an incubator in the mud room, to replace the two chickens we lost last year. Which is why I am growing mushrooms in the office, because there is no room for the grow box in the mud room at the moment. Yes, we are a couple of Portland hipsters, what makes you ask?
Anyway, the practical upshot of all of this is: Fermentation is not an activity that provides immediate gratification. The rewards are substantial, if you like tangy or fizzy the way I love tangy and fizzy, but they only come after labeling something with the date, and the ingredients, and then putting it in a cabinet and forgetting about it for a week or more. Fermentation is an activity that makes sense only if tomorrow feels like it matters today.
Am I writing? Am I running? Is there something fermenting in my kitchen? Today is the first day in a long time where I can comfortably answer yes. Yes, yes, and yes.
I will let you know how the pear wine works out.
If you are reading this, I send you my love. I miss you. Yes, you. Also, yes, I know I have to move this journal off of Substack. Ceterum censeo imperdiet vigilum cessandam est. More soon. Maybe even tomorrow?