I was cleaning up the kitchen over the weekend and realized that there were quite a number of things (intentionally!) fermenting on the counter. Zach has been using sourdough for all of our bread baking, pancake making, etc. He has a white starter and a whole wheat starter. They are great. Anyway, they were both out ready to use, along side the yogurt that I make every couple of weeks or so. I love making our yogurt and am excited to try a custard style yogurt soon if I can find some good guidance in that direction. Presently I just heat milk, sometimes add dry milk powder (but more often do not), let milk cool a bit and add a tablespoon or so of yogurt from the last batch and then let it sit for several hours. It’s good. I like plain yogurt, partly because it does not have added sugar but also because it is versatile and can be used instead of sour cream or mayonnaise. Judah loves it as well, as you can see.
Also fermenting in our kitchen, is a new batch of mead that I spontaneously decided to mix up. I buy raw honey in bulk from the natural food store in Homer and it comes in a one gallon container. That is lot of honey…which is good, because we use alot of honey, but it was starting to crystallize, and while that is no problem really, it was a good excuse to make a (hopefully) delicious cinnamon mead. Mead is also so very easy to concoct. I heated some water and stirred about 1/3 of a gallon into it to melt, and then poured that into a one gallon cider jug with a couple of cinnamon sticks, a packet of champagne yeast and filled the jug to the top with water. There was also some sterilizing of the equipment, but that is very boring to write about. It’s also a little boring to have to wait like, a month before I can taste the mead and then probably two months before it is really ready for drinking. It’s a simple process, but is definitely an exercise in delayed gratification.
Disclaimer: I’m very nonchalant in my following of recipes. By nonchalant I mean, I don’t follow them at all. So, if one were to set about making mead or yogurt for the first time, they might want to obtain a few more details about the specifications involved. I feel like I have the hang of the process and no longer bother with reading temperatures and such. It works well for me, but it is not exactly good directions to give someone else.
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