Fermentation!

I'm a big fan of fermentation. Yeast eat sugar and produce alcohol and carbon dioxide.

Here is a photo of some whole wheat seven grain bread that I made a few weeks ago:

Here is a photo of the 23 or so litres of beer that I made in my kitchen. This photo is of the beer in the glass carboy for secondary fermentation. I bottled the beer a few weeks ago. It's not bad; I'm having some right now.

I've also made yogurt, which is much easier to do than either bread or beer. No photo, though. The way I make yogurt is:

Materials

• Glass mason jar
• Candy thermometer
• Small cooler
• Two sauce pans
• Small container of commercial yogurt which has Active Bacterial Cultures
• Milk

Method

• Slowly bring one mason jar's worth of milk to a boil
• At the same time, bring a quantity of water up to around 125 degrees Fahrenheit.
• When the milk just reaches a boil, take it off the heat and let it cool down to around 122 degrees Fahrenheit. For a 950mL mason jar this should take around 25 minutes
• Put 3 or 4 tablespoons of yogurt into the mason jar
• When the milk reaches 122 (or so) degrees, pour some of it into the mason jar. Put the lid on the mason jar and shake it. Now put the rest of the milk in and shake the jar again. Be careful not to drop the jar.
• Put the lid on the mason jar and put the jar into the cooler
• Pour the heated water into the cooler; enough water to cover the jar.
• Close the cooler and let it sit for around twelve hours. A few hours longer won't hurt it, though.
• Take the jar out of the cooler and dump the water out.
• Open the jar and give the yogurt a stir. Yes, all of the milk has turned into yogurt. It amazes me every time.
• Put the jar in the fridge. This will set the yogurt and make it a less runny. If you like warm runny yogurt you can skip this step.

I've never gone to any great effort to sanitize the mason jars that I use to make yogurt. I think that 12 hours of fermentation is not long enough for anything bad to develop. Also, the resulting yogurt is generally eaten within a week.

Contrast that with beer brewing. The beer is in primary fermentation for around a week, followed by two weeks of secondary fermentation, followed by three weeks of carbonation/conditioning in bottles. Only then is the beer even marginally ready to be consumed. And those bottles can stay in storage for months. You have to be pretty careful about sanitation when making beer. I use diversol, and I still worry.

My bread recipe is both easy and foolproof. If you follow it, it's totally impossible to avoid making incredible bread. But this rambling post is already too long so I'll leave the bread recipe for another day.

Baking Season

I'm tired of writing about cycling etc so I'll geek out about baking instead.

This time of year (autumn) always makes me feel like baking and making soup and watching the 1972 Canada-Russia series DVDs. I did all three this weekend.

I did quite a bit of baking. On Saturday I made raisin-bran muffins. As usual, I deviated from the recipe with at least one substitution. For these muffins I used oat bran instead of wheat bran. It didn't seem to make any difference. The end result was undeniably identifiable as a bran muffin. Freshly baked muffins with butter, along with a pot of tea made according to the ISO Standard. Mmmmm...

On Sunday morning I made a loaf of bread which was made up of half white flour and half whole-wheat flour. I have been trying to get a sour dough starter going but this may be the wrong time of year. So I used some of my current starter (which is probably insufficiently active to actually raise a loaf of bread) for flavour and used a small amunt of baker's yeast in the dough. I added some wheat gluten because the loaf I made last week was weak and was torn during rising. I also added some lemon juice as a "dough conditioner". I didn't want the bread to be too "cakey". This bread took two hours to rise before I punched it down. Then it took another two hours to rise in the loaf pan before baking. It had some nice oven spring and turned out pretty well.

For lunch on Sunday I made split-pea soup. I wanted some biscuits to go with it but I was nearly out of milk. I looked through the cookbook until I found a recipe for something biscuit-like that didn't require one cup or more of milk. I ended up with a scone recipe that called for one third of a cup of milk. I made strange scone-biscuit "fingers". They were pretty good.

While I ate the soup I watched game three of the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series, which took place in Winnipeg. Stan Mikita seemed to take another dive, and Gary Bergman continued to look useless out there. The game ended in a four-four tie.