Mostly Plants

Kombucha

The cranberry kombucha is all gone.  It was lovely, but it tasted so unlike tea that I tended to foget there was caffeine in it.  I think next time I will not use black tea for this.

Meanwhile, I have a new 3-quart batch of rose hips kombucha that’s looking close to ready!

Below the cut, Weinkraut and Sourdough

Weinkraut

My parents got me a Harsch Crock for Christmas, so Adrienne and I put it to work last week.  I bought 15 pounds of cabbage for 10 liters of kraut, that was about 2.5 times as much as I needed.  We packed about 6 pounds of shredded cabbage into the crock with a head of lightly-smashed garlic and a few caraway seeds.  The cabbage was apparently quite dry, it took about 3 litres of bugundy wine to fill all of the interstices and cover the weights.  It has been fermenting for four days now; the Gospel According to Katz suggests it should be done in about a week.

I have never had weinkraut before, but I hear it is a German tradition and I look forward to trying it.  Then again, all of the (non-fermented) recipes I’ve seen online use white sauerkraut and white wine; I’m using Rotkohl (red cabbage) and red wine.

Sourdough

I had about a cup of leftover cooked rice getting stale on my kitchen counter, so I took a suggestion from Katz and mixed it up with a cup of whole wheat flour and two cups of water to make a sourdough starter.  He quite correctly points out that the yeasties will eat the rice carbs just as happily as the flour carbs, and by the time I go to make a loaf out of it, the original grains that I put in the starter will be fermented beyond recognition.  What a fabulous way to recyle stale rice!

*This post is tagged “locavoracious” even though none of the food involved was locally-sourced, because next season I hope to be fermenting my very own home-grown cabbages.  Eventually I’d like to be gowing my own wheat, too.

Tags:   bread · kombucha · kraut · locavoracious · process oriented · recipe · Refusa the goddess of food recycling · sourdough · symbiosis · vegan · vegetarian · weinkrautNo Comments