Fermentation Experimentation

This weekend, I learned to make sauerkraut from my good friend & fellow fermentation hobbyist Susie.

Here we are at her house, chopping & salting the cabbage, & packing it into a big jar:

The salt draws out the water in the cabbage, & makes a big delicious briny solution for the fermentation. It gets weighed down beneath the surface of the brine by a bottle that fits into the jar:

It needs a little attention each day, but basically that's all there is to it. In one week, we will have a ton of delicious sauerkraut!

Susie also lent me a very good fermentation technique book that has a recipe for hard cider, which we may make later in the summer. While looking at the instructions for that, a recipe for flower wine caught my eye. My grandmother had a coworker who used to make dandelion wine; apparently you can make wine with just about any flowers, including roses. The rose bushes in the back are full of blooms past their prime, so I thought, why not? What else am I doing today?

To make one gallon of wine, you need one gallon of flower petals.  I wasn't sure I would actually have enough, but as it turned out, I had plenty:

Step 1 --Take all the petals off:

If you were making dandelion wine, you would have to take all the tiny yellow petals off the dandelions. Picture how many of those tiny petals you would need to pluck to get a gallon. Sounds horrible & tedious.


Step 2 -- Gather all the stuff:

2 lemons for flavor

2 oranges for flavor

1 lb raisins for astringency

1/2 cup berries to introduce/attract wild yeast

2 lbs of sugar to feed the yeast

big container thing (this is an enamel roasting pan)

fermenter jugs, corks, & airlocks

(later: another fermenter, bottles)

Step 3 -- Put the petals (less 1/2 c), raisins, sugar, and the rinds & juice of the lemons & oranges in the  big container thing:

Step 4 -- Pour 1 gallon of boiling water over everything, & stir until sugar is dissolved:

Step 5 -- Cover & let cool to around 100 degrees:

Step 6 -- While waiting for it to cool, go have a sandwich & give the dog a bath. Also get ahead for later in the week by drilling holes for the airlocks in some old champagne corks that you are going to repurpose for this project:

Step 7 -- Pour the 1/2 c of reserved petals & the berries into the cooled mixture, & stir:

Step 8 -- Cover & set aside.

And that was it for today. Next, I will stir it every now & again for 3 or 4 days, then strain it & put it into the jugs, where it will ferment for 3 months. Then, it will into another jug or set of jugs for 6 more months. And then, after all that, I will bottle it & age it for at least 3 more months. It should be ready next summer!

In other news, the garden is doing well. The first fava pods are emerging as the blossoms are starting to drop off:

There are about a dozen pea pods fattening up already:

Some arugula I managed to lose track of has flowered:

And overall, everything is just getting bigger & bigger, & more abundant. The red line in the picture below is the 5-foot mark:

The fava plants are now taller than I am, & it's getting hard to keep up with the collards & spinach. And it's only May!