Freaky Ferments

Welcome to my fermentation page! This page will track my past, current, and upcoming fermentation projects as well as log thoughts, recipes, and recommendations!

Background

My story begins around 2019-or-so, when my then-roommate-now-partner wanted to get really into kombucha, and more specifically, the continuous-brewing method. Being a serial-dabbler when it comes to hobbies, and being someone who always likes to do things a little different, I ended up brewing Jun.

I grew up in an eastern European family, and have fond memories of my great grandfather's pickled vegetables, especially asparagus. Cracking into one of the jars in his secret stash was always one of the best days - they were perfect, always tender, mouthwateringly salty, with just the right balance of acid to keep you reaching for more.

Brewing Jun was going very well! I had a tasty "soda" that I could make at home, and the exciting prospect of getting to teach everyone who was curious about the differences between Jun and Kombucha. From there, my next thought was... "Well, I'm already fermenting... surely it couldn't be that hard to make alcohol, right?"

Turns out, no! It's not that hard to make alcohol. What is hard is making alcohol that literally anyone on earth would want to drink. My first batch of hard Jun was... Ultimately motivating in how disgusting it was. It turned out to be one of those projects where you just get mad and go, "I know I can do better than this!" Not too long after this informative disaster of an experiment, my roommate-now-partner got tired of me talking about how much I wanted to try making mead, so they got me a kit and told me to stop wanting to do it and start doing it.

So I stubbornly began my fermentation journey, off of a fascination with fermentation and a stubborn refusal to believe that I could have made something so disgusting.

Projects

Here you'll find write-ups on various projects I've worked on, and brief write-ups on them! Click through if you're interested in more detail, pictures, and project logs!

• Jun is a variation on the more well-known kombucha, and is also a fermented tea made using a SCOBY(symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast). The big difference between Jun and kombucha is that traditional kombucha wisdom is to use only black tea and more refined sugar, like white sugar. Meanwhile, jun is a ferment that uses green tea and honey for its base.
• Mead is a type of wine made with honey, water, and yeast at its most simple. From there, you can add all sorts of fruits, spices, and other botanicals to change the flavor of the wine. Mead was a natural progression from my jun brewing, as I was already working with fermenting honey!
• Fruit Wine is, well, exactly what it sounds like! Where "wine" without any qualifiers is generally understood to mean "grape wine", fruit wine helps to both specify and broaden the category! While grapes are both traditional and popular in wine-drinking circles, all you really need is fruit, sugar, water, and yeast. I have actually never made grape wine!
• Hot Sauce is exactly what it sounds like, of course! There tend to be two kinds of hot sauces: Vinegar sauces and fermented sauces. Think about your typical table sauces: Tobasco, Cholula, Tapatio... These are all vinegared sauces - sauces made by boiling peppers, vinegar, spices, salt, and other things. Fermented hot sauce gets its acidity from lactic acid fermentation and, frankly, is way more funky, flavorful, and addicting.
• Pickles are one of the reasons I first started playing with food fermentation! By far my favorite commercial pickles are Bubbies Pickles, a strong, garlicky kosher pickle in a cloudy brine. So, when my local store was out of them for an extended period, I looked up what made them tick. Not vinegar, like Vlasic or other shelf-stable pickles, but lactic fermentation! I never looked back.
• Shio Koji
• Miso
• Shoyu