Fermented Food: Pickles

I haven't written about fermented food since this kimchi post, but with the abundance of vegetables at the farmer's market over the last few months I've been fermenting things all summer long.  One of my favourite things to make at this time of year are lacto-fermented sour pickles.  If you get it right, they are crisp and sour, but with a much softer acidity than cucumbers pickled in vinegar.  A cold pickle from the fridge goes great with a beer on a hot summer day.  In fact, one of the highlights of my recent trip to Toronto was buying sour pickles-on-a-stick from this store in Kensington Market (you can take them next door and get a beer at Thirsty and Miserable)---I went back more than once!

The trouble with fermenting cucumbers is that they come into season just as the weather gets hot, and a warm start to fermentation is a sure way to end up with a mushy pickle.  Home brewers with fermentation fridges are at an advantage here: if you don't mind the small risk of cross-contamination, a fermentation fridge set at ale temperatures is a perfect place to get these going during the summer.

The process is fairly simple (I've included a recipe below): make a 5% brine solution ( i.e. 5g salt for every 100g water), add whatever spices and herbs you care for, then submerge the cucumbers (I weigh them down with a plastic bag full of brine) and allow them to ferment until you like how they taste. You have to be sure to trim the blossom end from the cucumbers, as this contains enzymes that will cause the cucumbers to begin to break down and become mushy.  Skimming the scum from the top of the brine can also help prevent molds from forming on top (I usually get a pellicle if I forget to skim every day, but I don't worry about it as long as its white).  I usually let my first batch sour fully before refrigerating it, which takes two to three weeks; for subsequent batches, when I already have pickles available, I'll often move them to the fridge after just a few days to let them ferment more slowly.  This way I have batches maturing all summer long.

The tricky thing is getting pickles that are fermented and sour, but not mushy and soft.  At first I tried to make pickles with cucumbers from a super market, but these almost always ended up soft.  I haven't had this problem since I started using cucumbers from the farmer's market, though this means I can only make pickles for a few weeks each summer.

Another trick people use to ensure crisp pickles is adding some source of tannins to the fermenting pickle.  Traditional sources include sour cherry leaves and oak leaves; the recipe below includes tea leaves for the same purpose.  One idea I didn't get to test this summer was using the oak cubes home brewers use to flavour beers.  This would surely add tannins to the brine, and perhaps provide an interesting flavour dimension to the pickles.  It might also be interesting to reuse the cubes in a beer afterwards---they'd be inoculated with the yeasts and lactic-acid bacteria from the ferment, so you'd have a semi-spontaneously inoculated beer!  I'll definitely try this at some point in the future.

Here's a recipe for something a little different from the typical dill-flavoured sours---the Lapsang Souchong gives the pickles a nice smoky flavour that I rather like.  It's from The Joy of Pickling:

Ingredients1 small fresh hot pepper (e.g. serrano) halved lengthwise
6 garlic cloves, sliced
2 teaspoons Sichuan peppercorns, crushed
2 teaspoons Lapsang Souchong tea leaves
2 quarts 3-to-5 ince pickling cucumbers, blossom ends removed
3 tablespoons pickling salt
1 quart water
Instructions:1. Put the hot pepper, garlic, peppercorns, and tea into a 2-quart jar.  Pack the cucumbers into the jar. Dissolve the salt in the water and cover the cucumbers with brine, leaving at least 1 1/2 inches head-space.  Push a quart-size freezer bag into the mouth of the ja, pour the remaining brine into the bag, and seal the bag. keep the jar at about room temperature, with a dish underneath if seeping brine might do some damage.
2. Within 3 days you should see tiny bubbles rising in the jar; this shows that fermentation is under way.  If scum appears at the top of the jar, skim it off and rinse the brine bag.  If so much brine bubbles out that the pickles aren't well covered, add some more brine in the same proportions of salt to water.
3. The pickles should be ready in 2 to 3 weeks; they will be sour and olive-green throughout.  If you plan to eat them within a few weeks, simply remove the brine bag, cap the jar, and store it in the refrigerator.  If you want the pickles to keep longer, strain off the brine into a saucepan, bring it to a boil, simmer it for 5 minutes, and let it cool.  Rinse the pickles in cold water, pack them into a clean jar (with fresh spices if you like), and cover them with the boiled and cooled brine before refrigerating them.

Beer Food: Limburger Sandwich

Here’s one for fans of funkier flavours: classic, working-class beer food that’s now probably an acquired taste.  Limburger starts off as a crumbly, salty cheese a lot like feta, but as it ages bacteria on its rind turn it into a pungent and creamy soft cheese.    The smell can be a bit of a shock if you’re not prepared for it: body odour, cheesy feet, that sort of thing. But the taste is actually fairly mild, at least at around 5 months which is when I prefer it.  After that it gets more savoury and tangy and can be a bit much for some people.

I didn’t know what I was buying the first time I picked some up: it was on sale, and I vaguely recalled hearing about it in some connection with beer.  Here’s what Wikipedia told me when I got home:

“In the early 20th century, Limburger sandwiches became a popular lunch for working people due to their affordability and nutritious qualities. They were frequently accompanied with a glass of beer.”

Apparently the sandwiches are traditionally made on dark rye bread.  I’ve never baked anything quite that dark, so when I’ve had these sandwiches in the past few months I’ve used slightly lighter rye breads.  One is Nancy Silverton’s Normandy Rye---something I started making to use up a bad batch of dry cider (pictured at start of post).  The other is a 20% rye loaf from the new Tartine Bread book (pictured right).

Besides slices of Limburger, the filling I use consists of sweet vidalia onions and spicy brown mustard, which play really well with the creamy cheese.  Other people include pickles, anchovies, and similar flavours. Finish it off with a glass of Table Beer I, and you have the perfect brew day lunch!

Next thing I want to try: boterham met plattekaas en radijzen and gueuze.

Bread

As I've said before, the first fermented food I ever made was bread, and I still bake 2-4 times a week.  In this post I'll document the loaf I make most frequently: Chad Robertson's Tartine Country Loaf.  I'm not sure exactly what the purpose of this is!  Even if someone could somehow make the bread based on this post, there are much more informative resources out there (including the Tartine Book).  I suppose, as with the brew day post, I'm just detailing my own process.

 

The Tartine Basic Country Bread is fairly easy to make, especially once you're comfortable handling wet dough.  What's more, the process is easy to incorporate into your schedule, and the results are consistently excellent.  Even when I mess this bread up (and I have, many times) its still delicious.

 

 

As I said in my earlier post, I keep this starter in the fridge until I bake.  On the first day of making a new dough, I take the it out of the fridge, allow it to warm up, and discard all but a tablespoon.  I then feed it with 100g of mixed flour (50g whole wheat, 50g bread) and filtered tap water.  I do not measure the temperature of the tap water, but if it's cold I try to make sure its on the warmer side, and in summer I make sure it is cool.

 

Since we're both graduate students, and live near our campus, one of us is usually home to feed the starter around midday at least once or twice a week.  In about six hours, it is bubbly and has risen to almost twice its previous volume.  When it's cold, I let it rise in the oven with the light on, which keeps it around 80°F; when its hot, I sometimes keep it in my fermentation chamber.  The same happens with the dough as it rises. (Obviously you have to be careful with any clean beers fermenting in there, since the dough is teeming with lactobacillus and wild yeast!)

 

Our basic recipe is very easy to remember: 350g water, 450g bread flour, 50g wholewheat flour, 100g starter; 10g salt, 25g water.  I usually add the water first, then mix in the starter so that the yeast is evenly distributed.  Then I add the flour, mix it all together roughly until is forms a ball, and leave it to autolyse on the counter for between 20 and 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes is up, the flour is fully hydrated and the dough is relaxed and slightly smooth.  At this point I add the salt and 25g of water, incorporating it into the dough by squeezing it through my fingers.  When most of it has been absorbed, I transfer to a translucent plastic container, and let the bulk fermentation begin.

 

At first, I stretch and fold the dough every twenty minutes to develop the gluten.  This replaces kneading, and is an easier way to handle wet doughs like this.  You can definitely knead dough like this by hand, and I often do with some other breads I make less frequently: but the technique for wetter dough can be loud, and my downstairs neighbour has complained about the noise a few times!

 

After about two hours of this (i.e. six stretches and folds), I leave the dough to rise untouched for another two or three hours.  By the end it is soft, smooth, and slightly billowy, but certainly not doubled in size.  Unfortunately I started to remove the dough pictured here before remembering to take a photo, so it looks slightly deflated; but you can get some sense of how much the volume has increased.

 

Next I give it a rough shape and allow it to rest on the bench for twenty minutes.  If the dough has over-fermented, especially in the summer, it can be difficult to handle at this point, so I have to add a lot of flour.  But in general I keep bench flour to a minimum, and use my bench scraper to handle and shape the dough.  I'm fairly good at this now, but I think I still handle it too much: ideally you'd shape it in as few moves as possible.  If I handle it too much, I often drive air bubbles up to the surface, deflating the bread and potentially creating large air pockets in the final loaf.

 

After the bench rest, the dough gets a final shaping and is inverted into a cloth-lined wicker basket.  Chad Robertson tells you to put it in the fridge at this point, but (following Nancy Silverton) I like to give it another hour to rise in the basket before retarding fermentation.  Part of my thinking here is that home fridges tend to be a lot cooler than the fridges that bakers use, so I want to let the yeast restart the final fermentation before slowing them in the fridge.  After an hour is up, I layer some plastic wrap on top of the dough, place the basket in a food-grade plastic bag, and leave it in the fridge over night.

 

Next morning, as soon as I wake up, I put my combo cooker in the oven and set the heat to 500°F.  While the oven heats, I take the dough out of the fridge and dust what will be the bottom of the loaf with some rice flour.  After twenty minutes, I pull the smaller part of the combo cooker out of the oven and invert the dough from the basket directly onto it.  It took some practice to get this right, but now I usually avoid hitting the sides (the trick is to go in further than you think you need to).  At this point I score the top of the dough with a make-shift lame (i.e. a razor blade attached to a stick), place it in the oven, and put the top of the combo cooker back on. This is one of the big improvements I made after reading Chad Yakobson's book.  The cooker traps steam from the dough around the baking loaf, which keeps the outside moist and allows the loaf to increase in volume rapidly as fermentation gases and steam expand in the first half of the bake.  It also ensures a shiny, crisp crust, as the starches gelatinize in the moist hot environment.  If you are baking on a stone (which I still do with loaves that won't fit in the cooker), you can get a similar effect by pitching water into a hot saucepan in the bottom of the oven, creating plenty of steam.

 

The heat is turned down to 450°F, and the loaf bakes for twenty minutes.  At this point, I come back and take the top off the combo cooker, releasing a billow of steam.  The dough has risen, opening up a seam where I scored it.  This Tartine bread expands dramatically in the oven, and the scores turn it to deep, pronounced "ears".  In other breads, this would be a fault; Nancy Silverton identifies it as a sign that the bread is under-fermented, and encourages you to let the bread warm to room temperature before baking.  Yakobson has you bake it straight from the fridge, which increases the oven spring since the dough takes slightly longer to reach temperatures that kill the yeast, prolonging the burst of fermentation activity when the dough first hits the oven. He scores a rough square on top of the bread, resulting in a crown on top of the finished loaf; I prefer a rough C shape, which opens along one side but keeps the spirals from my basket in place.  Anyway, after removing the lid I leave it for another 28 minutes for a total baking time of 48 minutes.  Then I take it out of the oven and head to work while the bread crackles and cools on a wire rack.

 

Its essential to let it cool at least an hour or so: the bread is still baking when it comes out of the oven, and it will be too soft and moist if you cut into it right away.  The first warm slice will be wonderful, but unless you're going to devour it all its really not worth it.  In fact, I've found that the longer I leave it at this point, the longer the loaf stays fresh once I cut into it.  This is particularly true of the crust, which can otherwise go from crisp to leathery in as little as 20 hours.

As you can see below, the bread has an open crumb with some holes; you can imitate the large, gaping holes in the Tartine photographs by making a wetter dough and letting it ferment longer: I prefer this crumb because its better for sandwiches.

Sourdough Starters

Nancy and Chad

I baked bread occasionally before I moved to the US, but I started in earnest about five years ago when I bought a copy of Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice and some friends gave me baking stone as a birthday present.  I made many recipes from that book over the next few years, gradually gaining a better understanding of the process and becoming more comfortable manipulating and fermenting the dough.  I bought Tartine Bread on the suggestion of a friend, and although I have some criticisms of the book as a whole, the techniques laid out in the core chapter improved my bread tremendously.  But I think I learnt the most from picking up Nancy Silverton's book.  Even though it can be frustrating in many ways (people complain that the recipes weren't sufficiently adapted for home bakers), I think any intermediate to advanced baker could pick up a lot from reading it through carefully and trying to bake her breads.

 

Most bread I bake these days is leavened by a sourdough starter. I have two that I bake with fairly regularly: Chad, which I keep at 100% hydration (i.e. with an equal amount of water and flour) and feed with a 50/50 blend of bread and wholewheat flour; and Nancy, which I keep at 140% hydration (i.e. with 40% more water than flour) and feed solely with bread flour. Both starters are named after the bakers whose recipes I use them in: Chad Robertson from Tartine and Nancy Silverton, formerly from La Brea. 

 

In fact, Chad has a bit of a history.  It is the son of Peter, the first starter I made using the instructions in Peter Reinhart's book.  As I remember, it involved a series of feedings and discards over about a week, with some pineapple juice added at the start, probably to lower the pH and increase available sugars. 

 

I baked with Peter a few times, never with any great success (the starter was fine, I just wasn't a good baker then), and eventually gave some to a friend who kept it going and transformed it into the Tartine starter, passing on discards to several other bakers along the way.  It makes me happy to think that several people in Chicago are using off-shoots of that original starter.  Meanwhile I neglected and eventually threw out Peter. A couple of months later, when I started baking again, I got some back from my friend and it was at that point that she recommended the Tartine book.  I picked up a copy of the book, christened my new starter Chad, and kept it at the same proportions my friend had it at. 

 

I was very happy with the Tartine loaf, and its still the bread I bake most frequently (I'll have a separate post up about it shortly).  But as my interest in baking continued to grow, I wanted to try some other kinds of dough, so I picked up a book that had been recommended to me by a professional baker some time ago: Nancy Silverton's Breads of La Brea Bakery.  Rather than converting Chad to her proportions, I decided to make a new starter with her instructions.  This involved harvesting yeast from the skins of grapes, by immersing the fruit in the mixed flour and water using a cheesecloth bag.  Silverton's process is famously wasteful, require large amounts of flour and regular feedings and discards.  I don't know that I would recommend it, but Nancy made some lovely bread when I first started using it.  It may be pure suggestion, but the starter and bread both seemed to have an almost wine-like aroma to them.

 

These days I use Chad more than Nancy, but I keep Chad in the fridge between bakes, where as Nancy lives out on the counter.  This is partly because I have been trying to bring Nancy back from a 6+ month neglect.  It worked to some extent---the starter is active again---but I haven't had time to get back to a regular cycle of feedings and bakes yet, so it is not at its best.  What's more, with the starter out on the counter its much more important to feed it regularly so that the bacterial population doesn't get out of control, and I often forget or simply don't have time to do this.

 

Chad lives in the fridge, but I pull it out to bake with at least 2 or 3 times a week.  As a result it remains very active, and I don't need to feed it more than once before baking.  At any rate, I like the bread it produces and it rises without difficulty.  I've been wondering lately if I couldn't improve it further by taking Chad out of the fridge and feeding it regularly on the counter.

 

I should say a little bit about the differences between the starters.  My understanding here is fairly limited, but here's what I know.  Drier starters like Chad (100% hydration---so not that dry!) tend to end up with a higher proportion of acetic acid than lactic acid; the drier condition also favour yeast over bacteria, so the resulting bread is often less tangy and sour.  This is especially true of the Tartine loaf, which uses a relatively small proportion of young starter.  Wetter starters like Nancy favour the growth of lactobacillus and other souring bacteria, and often produce a higher proportion of lactic acid.  This is actually a smoother, more pleasant tasting acid than acetic (for brewers, its the difference between a crisp sour berlinerweisse, and a vinegary one), and perhaps accounts for the wine-like aromas I associate with Nancy.  The resulting bread is often more tangy and sour, both because of the higher bacterial population of the starter and because you tend to use more of it to leaven the dough since the yeast numbers are lower (at least, I think that's why---you can find out more about these things by finding posts from Debra Wink on The Fresh Loaf).

 

Since conditions in wetter starters tend to favour bacteria, you have to keep up with regular feedings to keep their numbers in check, especially if baking in a hotter climate.  The initial feeding favours yeast slightly over bacteria, so by feeding regularly you give the yeast an advantage.  This is very important if you are trying to rescue a starter that has been neglected or just become too sour over time.  Regular feedings and discards will help to change the population back to something that will produce a pleasant loaf.

One more note on high hydration starters: they make excellent pancake batter!  The resulting pancakes are fluffy, light, and tangy. Nancy Silverton includes a recipe in her book for use with her starter: 2.2 lbs starter, 1 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt, 2 eggs. 2 tbsp maple syrup; whisk together and cook.  Easy.  But I'm sure you could make also use a 100% hydration starter if you added more liquid to the batter (although the resulting pancakes might be less tangy).

Kimchi

Kimchi

As well a brewing beer, I also enjoy making various fermented foods.  I'll do a post about sourdough bread soon, but I also like ferment and pickle vegetables, and make jams and other preserves.

Recently J and I have made a few batches of kimchi: a Korean staple of sour, spicy, fermented cabbage and other vegetables.  For our most recent batch we made a special trip up to a Korean supermarket on the other side of Chicago: Joong Boo near the Belmont Blue Line stop.  (We also stopped in at The Beer Temple and the Half Acre tap room.)  This was our first visit, and it was exciting to find such a wide array of Korean ingredients, all much cheaper than the things we'd been purchasing online.  Specific to kimchi, we got some hot pepper flakes, anchovy sauce, and fermented salted shrimp.  This last is very pungent and can easily stink out your whole fridge if your not careful.  Ours is safely stashed in a sealed plastic bag, which seems to have done the trick.

Ingredients

In the past we've used David Chang's recipe, which turned out rather well.  The sauce maintained its thickness, whereas our more recent attempts have ended up with a lot more juice at the end of fermentation.  I wonder if this isn't in part because he adds more sugar, which absorbs the water that continues to be drawn out of the cabbage over the course of fermentation.  Regardless, we wanted to try a more traditional recipe, so the last few times we amalgamated this recipe with things we picked up from Maangchi's excellent videos.

Salted Cabbage

The process is fairly simple (again, see this for proper step-by-step instructions) and doesn't take too long if you have two people.  First you have to separate the cabbage leaves out slightly,  salt them for a few hours to draw out some water.  Last time we did this in brine, but this week I just added salt to the cabbage directly and let it sit for a few hours.

Ingredients for paste

While the salt drew out moisture from the cabbage, we chopped up the onion, garlic, ginger, chillies, and asian pear, and blended them all together to make a rough,spicy paste.  The pear was fairly firm with a slightly mealy texture and a sweet but almost savoury taste.  I assume its mainly there to add a bit of sweetness in the final product, as this recipe uses no sugar at all (we added a little later on though, following Maangchi's technique).

Sweet rice porridge

After this, J made a porridge out of water, sweet rice flour, and sugar, heating it until we saw occasional bubbles break the surface, and then stirring it gently until it turned slightly translucent.  She cooled this in the sink while I chopped up the rest of the vegetables and gathered them all together in one bowl.  Last time we just used daikon, carrot, mustard greens, and spring onion, but this time we had proper Korean radish and Asian chives from the store.

Vegetables, fish, and porridge

At this point, we added a generous cup of the deep-red hot-pepper flakes to the porridge, along with a quarter cup of anchovy sauce and a scant two teaspoons of fermented shrimp.  This is far less than the recipe called for (although in line with Chang's version).  I was cautious because I've been a vegetarian all my life, and while I'm OK with trying to use these products in a recipe like this, the flavours are often too much for me; and this shrimp smelt very fishy.

Stuffing the cabbage

Finally, we stirred the cool porridge mixture in with the vegetables, mixed it all together, and donned rubber gloves to stuff the washed cabbage.  When each piece was done, I wrapped it over itself and pushed it down into a mason jar (making an enormous mess in the process).  With the jars a little over 3/4 full, we closed them up and wiped down the sides.  One jar was left out for 24 hours to encourage a quicker fermentation, but the others will sit in the fridge for a few weeks before we touch them to build their sour, fizzy, flavour.  Luckily we still have some of our last batch left in the fridge to eat while we wait.

All in all, a very easy fermentation, and well worth the effort.  I think one large jar of kimchi cost about $10 at the store, so this is certainly more than we could ever afford if we were buying it.  Besides, it makes for a really quick and easy week night (or post-pub) meal, along with a bowl of short grain rice and some tofu.  Yum.