the doings of my tiny acid-excreting friends

[corvi]

Juli and I have been enlisting tiny acid-excreting friends to make pickles! I wanted to note What I Did and How It All Went So Wrong here, for future planning and improvement.

Oi Kimchi (based on David Chang's recipe, substituting for what I didn't have on hand)

• Two and a half large English-style (soft seeds) cucumbers, quartered and cut into 5-cm long batons
• 2 Tbs sugar
• 1.5 tsp kosher salt
• 1 Tbs kochukaru (Korean dried chile powder)
• .5 tsp powdered ginger
• 2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
• 1 Tbs soy sauce

Toss all ingredients together. Put in mason jar and put lid on loosely s gas can escape. Can be stored on counter. This is a lactic-fermented pickle, so the general idea is to make a brine that noboy except lactobacillus will enjoy, and let the acid-excreting friends make everything sour and tasty.
What went wrong: Delicious for five days. On the sixth day, the brine was muscilagenous and slimy and made huge disgusting strings between jar and spoon and starting threatening to engulf New York City.
Diagnosis: Not enough salt, the party acquired cheerful yeast friends in addition to helpful lactobacillus friends, yeasts were all, "you wanted slime, right? Like, lots of slime?" Likely because I left out the fish sauce and salt-dried shrimp the original recipe called for, without increasing the salt to make up for it.

Pao Cai (Based on Martin Yan's recipe)

• 2 and a half large English-style (soft-seed) cucumbers, cut in half and then cut into .5-cm thick half-moons
• 1 Tbs sichuan peppercorns
• pinch fennel
• 1 black cardamom pod
• 4 dried red chiles
• 1 tsp kochukaru. Can't ever have enough kochukaru, even in pickle recipes from totally different cuisines
• 1 clove garlic, peeled
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tbs salt
• .5 cup kvass
• enough water to fill the mason jar

Toss all non-liquid ingredients together. Put in a mason jar with the lid on loosely to let gasses escape.
What Went Wrong Oh no, is this too much sichuan peppercorn? I can't feel my tongue. I can taste time. I no longer have a birthday, I have always been in a world of tongueless time-flavour, I have always been the tongueless time-flavour. Can you hear the singing?
Diagnosis: Too much sichuan peppercorn.





More successful fermentation experiments, which totally coincidentally happen to be juli 's experiments, not that that means anything, what are you implying:

• Ukrainian-style kvass, a very mildly alcoholic drink made from water in which stale rye bread has been soaked and apple juice. Sold in parks by vendors who have 50 gallon drums on big carts. Tastes like sunlight and summer. Russian kvass, at least the bottled stuff made by soda manufacturers for export, is made of molasses and tastes like lies.
• Delicious curry leaf-flavoured carrot pickle

Comments

[juli]

I'm also having good results with kefir; results with kimchis and sauerkrauts that were sabotaged by heat but seemed promising; and one really fucking bad cabbage kimchi fail. I believe in the last case the issue was lack of ventilation, so high-humidity warm air allowed stray mold spores to do well at the upper surface. I'll actually vent the bucket properly next time :( It's also given me pause about using the Indian jars for my miso; will they breathe enough? I think so, but.

[ivy]

I would totally try that second recipe in its too much sichuan peppercorn form, just for the description.

[corvi]

It was definitely An Experience. Smelled great, and had an entirely normal pickled cucumber texture, which made the fact that it tasted like metal or ozone or some other industrial byproduct and put your tongue to sleep that much harder to comprehend.

[juli]

It's worth noting that we were using green sichuan peppercorn (because it's what I prefer and therefore what we have an abundance of), which in addition to typically being a bit more waxy and broadly numbing, also has a sort of heavy, piney flavour. I have overdosed on them before, and it's... It's like having one of those wax tongues in your mouth, just pine sol and weed flavoured.

[sistawendy]

I can taste time. I no longer have a birthday, I have always been in a world of tongueless time-flavour, I have always been the tongueless time-flavour. Can you hear the singing?

Sichuan peppercorn, or as they call it on the street, China black.

[pie]

I once had this glorious plan to make "American-style kvass" out of stale donuts, but the nearest Top Pot ~coincidentally~ started locking their dumpster before I could act on it. Ukrainian-style sounds much better.

[corvi]

That's ~~wonderful~~ ~~terrifying~~ ~~incredible~~ a thing someone could think of!

Finally, definitive proof that sending information into the past is doable. Someone came back in time to stop you.

[juli]

Our local bakery do a mixed-day-old bag for $5 which is like a giant paper grocery bag filled with whatever. It's what I used for my kvass base, and while there were donuts in it, I ran out of room to use them. I overfilled my bucket with just a small amount of loaf bread.

I'd love to get like a 30 gallon drum and fill it with bread products and water for $5, y'know? Doesn't take much.

[juli]

Replying just so you can't fix your markup. This is what true love looks like. #strife