Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Where do I learn the special techniques from? HOw do I validate them? How do I accept/reject them? * add carrots, * add the bubbler, * add whey protein, * use kefir to carbonate, * kefir cheese * so many flavors * red rice yeast

Special Techniques and Discoveries in My Fermentation.

I have been exploring a lot of new or different ways to do things, applying techniques for one kind of fermentation to different products, and so forth. I often get ideas for those experiments and tests from various sources. Sometimes I will go on YouTube, watch a lot of similar videos, and see if I can use any of the processes that I see for my totally unrelated ferments.

The other place I go is food science journals, where there are sometimes interesting techniques that can be applied at the home kitchen level that YouTubers usually don’t experiment around with. For example, adding whey protein to milk and using an aquarium air bubbler to encourage milk kefir growth was an idea that I learned from one of the food science journals.

The third way I learn interesting techniques and ideas is through historical books and research books. For example, there is a book on fermentation in Eastern cultures, um, particularly in China, called Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 6, Part 5, Fermentation and Food Science by H.T. Hu. Um. It’s really good and quite comprehensive and detailed, with very meticulous and detailed techniques used in China and Southeast Asia. So that is another source of different techniques. I also, um, refer to a bunch of other books on fermentation and food science. They’re really, really useful; they are way, way, way more useful than YouTube videos, truth be told. Um, but YouTube videos are great for quick reference.

So, a bunch of discoveries I’ve found as I went on. Number one: Adding carrots. My water kefir ferments sometimes come to a slow halt in the winters, and I was out of ideas on how to get the fermentation back on track. I went online and saw folks adding pieces of potatoes or carrots to their ferments to speed them up. I bought a bunch of baby carrots from Trader Joe’s and added them to my water kefir ferment, and that really sped things up. Water kefir added to my kombucha has also been helpful, though often that risks over-fermentation.

Adding a bubbler. Often when a new culture is adjusting to its new environment or re-acclimatizing from the winter, it can have trouble multiplying at a good rate to compensate for the culture that is dying off. To assist with that, I repurposed a bubbler stone and an aquarium air pump to bubble air into my milk kefir, water kefir, and kombucha on separate occasions. That extra dose of oxygen for a couple of days definitely helped kick-start the slowing cultures. I also added whey protein to my kefir culture, to my milk kefir, because my milk kefir grains weren’t multiplying too fast. I looked, I searched online for papers explaining the industrial production of kefir grains and basically replicated their steps at home, and it was really a wondrous discovery.

I have also made cheese out of milk kefir, basically by straining out all the liquid and then pressing down the resulting solids and letting it age for a couple of months. I’ve been able to get various textures, from a cream cheese-like texture to something that felt like hard cheese. Additionally, I have on a couple of occasions gone a step further, dehydrated that cheese product, turned that into a powder, and added it as a homemade cheese powder, and that was fantastic. It had a tangy, fermented, um, and also the milky creaminess. It was, um, really good. I haven’t done that in more recent times because that was so much effort.

The other opportunity to experiment and play around with ferments is adding flavors, and there are so many different ways to add flavors. So, for example, after I remove the milk kefir grains out of my kefir, I often steep different kinds of tea bags or loose-leaf tea into the kefir container and create a tea-flavored kefir. People have pretended to really appreciate that. I want to especially mention the chai tea flavor from Trader Joe’s that people seem to enjoy quite a bit for milk kefir. My latest small procedural experiment has been with red rice yeast. I have used regular rice yeast for a couple of dozen batches, but only two batches for red rice yeast. I still can’t figure out a good way to use them because often they will end up over-fermenting the red rice I’m using. So, there must be a right level of fermentation that I haven’t been able to achieve.

I’ve looked up the book on Chinese fermentation that, um, I mentioned earlier, and they mentioned using red rice yeast—they call it chu q-i-u versus qu q-u for regular rice yeast—and they recommend three weeks. I have often, my ferments will go for longer than three weeks, so that’s probably one of the reasons. But the risk with using just the red rice yeast is, I am not confident that the rice is fully inoculated. Um, so there’s a bunch of different variables I want to play around with red rice yeast.