You taste the batch and it is aggressive. Hot, raw, garlicky, the kind of burn that stays with you for an hour. Maybe you misread the recipe, maybe the cloves were enormous, maybe you simply like garlic more than the…
Had grains going happily for eight months. Switched to coconut sugar about three weeks ago because I had a bag to use up, and now every batch smells like vomit. Rancid butter at best, baby sick at worst. The grains look…
I eat natto most mornings and I know what it is supposed to smell like. Opened a pack from the back of the fridge today and it was a sharp chemical ammonia smell, the sort you get off a cleaning product, rather than the…
Three weeks of a beautifully behaved ferment, smelled great the whole way, blended it up last night and it is bitter. Not hot bitter, properly bitter, the kind that sits at the back of your throat. Mash was green…
I make a two litre jar about once a month. It ferments on the counter for a day or two, then goes in the fridge. Week one out of the fridge it is exactly what I want. By week two it has gone noticeably further. By week…
Bought it from a market stall in spring and kept it in a kitchen cupboard above the kettle. Last week the lid popped when I opened it, there is a pale foam on top, and it tastes faintly sour with a cidery smell. No…
First attempt at rice koji. Soaked overnight, steamed 45 minutes, cooled to about 35C, inoculated with spores, wrapped in a cloth in a cooler with a warm water bottle. Bed temperature has been drifting between 30 and…
A neighbour dumped about six kilos of small pickling cucumbers on me and I have no cellar, no garage, just one fridge shelf I can clear. I have already ruled out water bath canning because I do not own a canner and am…
Blended red jalapenos and a bit of garlic, weighed the mash and added 3 percent salt by weight, airlock lid, ambient 20C. It bubbled hard on days two and three and by day four it has gone completely still. pH strip…
Every recipe assumes a 21C kitchen and mine is a 15C basement, which is the only place I have room for jars. I am running pint jars at two percent salt, one of shredded cabbage and one of carrot sticks with garlic. I…
Two kilos of cabbage at 2 percent salt, glass weight, jar with a loose lid, sitting at about 21C. Day five there is a thin white film across the whole surface of the brine, flat and slightly wrinkled, no fuzz that I can…
Had these grains for about eight months and they were reliable at roughly 24 hours to a thick tangy kefir. Over the past fortnight the grains have got stringy and slippery to handle, and the milk now splits into curds…
Making small batches, about 400g of cabbage at a time, in wide mouth pint jars with normal metal lids. I can spend around 20 on either a set of glass fermentation weights or a set of airlock lids, not both this month.…