A Solid Ground To Root In

Welcome back to this sixth installment in my essay series about fermentation – and what it has to offer you…

I hope you have been able to stretch your back after our travel back to the Middle Ages in that cramped time capsule! (I also hope you’ve gotten over any potential hangover from the beer we enjoyed in medieval Nürnberg… 😉 ).

During said time travel, we explored some of the roots of brewing (i.e. fermenting) beer, of its traditions and of the culture of drinking beer. And one thing which stood out to us (well, to me, but as you were along for the ride…) is just how much the tradition of brewing beer has changed over time – but then on the other hand, just how amazingly stable it has been.

Just the fact that nowadays, people still share a beer with their friends, just like people did in the early Middle Ages, and people (presumably) did way back in the Stone Age, gives proof of a stable core in this tradition – of a firm and unshakeable basis on which it is built.

This solid ground is one expression of yet another element which plays a crucial role in fermentation.

For as you might remember, we already dove into the elements of Fire and Air in an earlier essay (and will get back to them at a later point again), but they aren’t the only elements which play an important role in fermentation!

Solid, unchangeable ground… I’m sure by now you’ve easily figured out which element we’re talking about today: Earth. 🙂

This solid basis, the unmoveable fundament on which traditions of fermentation have been built for millenia, is one of the important ties between fermentation and the element of Earth.

Today, though, we’re going to explore yet another one of these ties…

In order to ferment something, anything really, you need something to ferment.

While this sentence might sound trivial to the point of being silly, it contains some important kernels of wisdom. If you want to change or influence something through fermentation processes, you need to have a base material to work upon – and it needs to be a base material which can successfully be fermented.

For example, a rose quarz is a very nice object. But no amount of added sugar and water will turn it into a fermented drink, just as no amount of added water and salt will turn it into a fermented foodstuffs.

You need a raw material as working basis for (any kind of!) fermentation, and it needs to be a material which is fermentable.

(Why am I stressing “any kind of fermentation here”? Well, we’ll get to that in the Inner Fermentation section below… 😉 )

Again, this probably sounds trivial and self-evident, but it very much isn’t! Let’s consider some examples:

For starters, let’s pick the herbal beer we enjoyed in medieval Nürnberg together last time. In order to brew something like it, you’ll need selected herbs, and maybe some spices. Without them, you don’t get this kind of beer – as evidenced by the fact that a beer brewed solely with hops has a very different taste (and very different effects!) from beer brewed with other ingredients.

Of course, presuming you want to not just enjoy the product of your fermentation, but also live to tell the tale, the herbs and other ingredients which form the base for it need to be at least edible (and preferably well-tasting!). And if you want to achieve specific effects, e.g. medicinal ones, you’d better pick a base material which is well suited for them.

Besides this mixture of base material, in order to brew such a herbal drink, you’ll also need malted barley or some other kind of sugar or starch, like honey for mead. But while they, too, add flavour and uniqueness to your drink, the sugars and carbohydrates in them aren’t a defining part of the base material. Rather, they are “food” to the process, something we’ll explore in-depth soon.

So what about the sourdough bread you have baked as part of your Hands-On Homework?

Here, the situation is a bit more muddled. The flour which forms the “raw material” of your soon-to-be bread does, at the same time, also provide the food for the fermentation critters. Still, if you only added starch as food, but not the rest of the flour, you’d get something weird, but certainly no bread…

Things are quite similar for sauerkraut, strange as that might sound. There, shredded cabbage is your base material which is going to be fermented, while the sugars and carbohydrates in it function as food.

So clearly, in the real world, there is some considerable overlap between your raw to-be-fermented material and that which feeds the fermentative processes. But these two things can also be split apart, and I think it’s worth considering them separately.

(And yes, we’ll explore examples of both base materials which inherently contain the food for fermentation and of base materials which don’t and to which food has to be added in future Hands-On Homeworks!)

What, then, are suitable base materials for fermentation?

In order to answer this question, let’s consider another example: cheese. To make cheese, you need milk. Every schoolkid knows this, right?

Well, yes and no. You need milk indeed. But the raw material, the starting basis for cheese making isn’t milk – it’s coagulated milk. If you went and bought some cheese cultures (i.e. fermentation critters selected to produce a specific kind of cheese, like camembert) and then dumped them into liquid milk, even with the right conditions like temperature etc, you wouldn’t get camembert, but something else entirely.

(In fact, I can only imagine what would happen, but in my imagination, the result is rather gross. Some kind of milky liquid-ish thingy, somehow fermented, with some camembert rind-like white mold on top… urgh!)

For your camembert culture to do its magic, you need a suitable base material. And this base material isn’t milk, but coagulated milk. While the difference might sound trivial, it quite clearly isn’t! 😉

We’ll go into some practical details about cheese’s base material in today’s Hands-On Homework. For now, let’s recap what we have learned so far:

Any fermentation needs to happen on some suitable raw material.

This base material needs to be fermentable. (More on that in a second.)

It needs to have the properties you seek to attain with your ferment, e.g. edibility in general, or the specific healing properties you want to achieve.

It might already contain food for the fermentation process in the form of sugar or carbohydrates, or it can well be mixed with such food, e.g. by adding sugar.

And it needs to be in a suitable form or condition in order to be used as base material.

Quite an interesting list, with a lot of depth, for something we initially considered to be trivial, isn’t it?

So what constitutes a “fermentable” material?

For the purpose of this essay, I’m not going to go into the chemical and biological depths of this question. Instead, we’ll consider this question from the practical end – and with an eye towards insights and Inner Fermentation. To this effect, I’m only going to answer this question with two “conditions”, and will leave the rest for you to work out with your common sense when you try fermenting new foodstuffs. 😉

First, and quite clearly, whatever you want to ferment needs to be something organic. Neither stones nor plastics make for a promising fermentation base!

Secondly, and this might come as a surprise, while your raw material might already contain the necessary food for the fermentation critters, it’s not exactly helpful if it contains too much of it. In fact, this is a case of “more isn’t necessarily better”.

For example, if you attempt to ferment starchy vegetables like potatoes all on their own, they are likely to go bad on you.

(I’ve read of people mixing them in with other things, e.g. among their sauerkraut, to which I say: To each their own! 😀 But note that in this case, the amount of starch in the overall raw material is considerably less than if you use only potatoes.)

Fermenting fruit which is very high in sugar content, e.g. overripe bananas, can be done – but you need to have an eagle eye on the fermentation process, as it’ll go from “pleasant country wine” to “yucky vinegar-like thing” in the blink of an eye.

Thus, while it is ok for your raw material to contain some food for the fermentation process in the form or sugar or carbohydrates, too much of it doesn’t make for a solid basis.

We’ll look at the process of fermentation again in a later essay, and also more in-depth at the specific role which “food” like sugar plays in it. For today, though, we’ll leave it at this, as I want to focus on the base material for fermentation for the remainder of this essay.

So far, we have identified quite a few important aspects of this base material – and we’ll make copious use of them in the Inner Fermentation Homework further below.

I’d also encourage you to keep them in mind whenever you ferment anything. Knowing some of the features and constraints of suitable raw materials for fermentation can help you to make better choices, or to trouble-shoot in case something goes wrong. If nothing else, I hope the work we have done in this essay so far will benefit you in your practical fermentation work!

But while these practical benefits are all nice and well, what I promised you above was an exploration of one aspect of the close relationship between fermentation and the element of Earth…

And in fact, we have done just that, even if it might not have been obvious so far. The raw material to be fermented, the base – they are, in some way, a representation of Earth.

(In the form of nature’s products they are also a product of the earth in a quite literal sense!)

This is true on more than one level:

As basis, they are the solid ground on which fermentation is built.

And as raw material, they are the “hard” and solid aspects which, through fermentation, are softened and refined (as will become more obvious when we start fermenting veggies later in the series).

Just like any tradition needs a firm and stable core, and any culture needs a solid basis to build upon, so does the process of fermentation need a solid basis to ferment upon.

And just like the roots of grapevines, of wheat and of cabbage plants need an (earthen) basis to grow in, so do their fruit and products offer the solid basis for fermentation to “grow” and expand in.

Fermentation, in turn, offers us as individual humans, but also our communities, our cultures and societies, a solid ground to root in and a basis to grow (and to ferment) upon…

As you can see, there are loads of avenues for us to expore here – and in fact, we are going to explore quite a few of them in later essays. Culture(s), for example. Or the role of sugar and “food” for fermentation.

(Ever wondered why we call certain things “food for thought”? 😉 )

We will also meet the element of Earth again later on. In fact, we’ll meet all of the elements again later on!

For today, though, I want to leave you with one last insight before we dive (head-first and with a lot of enthusiasm, I should hope!) into the Homeworks:

As we have seen in an earlier essay, our language can be a very revealing thing.

For example, there is a German expression which says that “something is brewing in somebody” (“etwas gärt in jemandem”). In English, a storm can be brewing, as could be trouble. Somebody could be brewing something up. A ferment in politics or society can bring about rapid change or social upheaval.

And of course, if the process of fermentation goes awry or can’t take hold in the first place, feelings or problems will fester inside a person…

All the more reason to do some Inner Fermentation then, isn’t it? 🙂

Inner Fermentation Homework

Just like hands-on fermentation, Inner Fermentation also requires a suitable base material to work with. And just as it’s not possible to create something out of thin air with (inner or hands-on) fermentation, it’s also not possible to ferment things which aren’t fermentable.

Thus your Homework for the next two weeks is to identify things which you could ferment inside of you. (Whether you do ferment them is up to you, this Homework only requires you to identify some!)

So what are things and issues which are inner-fermentable? Not surprisingly, the rules we identified above apply here, too:

1. You need something to work with.

   This could be thoughts or feelings, for example, situations or experiences. Something else maybe not as obvious, but very well suited for Inner Fermentation, are habits.

2. It needs to be something organic.

   Fixed structures imposed on you from the outside, for example, are not a good choice – simply put, they aren’t fermentable for you as they haven’t “grown” on your own soil. Your reactions to them or your way of dealing with them, on the other hand, are very organic to you.

3. It needs to have the properties you seek to attain.

   Whatever you pick as raw material for Inner Fermentation has to be suited to the purpose you want to achieve. This is obvious in some regards (you’ll hardly be able to ferment the relationship you have with your mother-in-law by working on something completely unrelated). In other regards, it’s not quite as straightforward, but even more relevant: For example, if you want to achieve healing, you’ll need to ferment from a basis which contains healing properties.

4. Your fermentation will need food.

   If your base material doesn’t contain any, or not enough, you’ll need to add some. What could be (outside or inside) sources of inspiration or insights, for example? Similarly, if your process of Inner Fermentation gets stuck, you’ll need to give it more food. How can you add some fuel to it, in order to make it boil and bubble again?

5. Your raw material shouldn’t contain too much “food” for fermentation.

   If you choose things which are highly emotionally charged, for example, your fermentation process is likely to boil over very rapidly – and will be a lot more likely to go sour. Pick something with a moderate amount of fuel for starters, at least until you get the hang of the process and can gauge how and when to stoke it, and how and when to cool it down.

6. And finally, your raw material for Inner Fermentation will need to be in a suitable state.

   For example, if your issues are still very vague to you, you might have to coagulate and to solidify them in order to ferment them productively. If you have bitten off more than you can chew at once, shred it like cabbage in order to increase the surface and to help the fermentation process. If it’s too hard or dry and your fermentation can’t get any traction, add some “water” to make it more soft and malleable, just as you add water to flour in order to ferment it into sourdough bread.

Your Inner Fermentation Homework for today, then, is to identify as many topics and issues inside yourself and in your life which would be suitable for Inner Fermentation as you can.

Use the points above to find suitable base materials for fermentation – and to adapt them and make them more suitable if they aren’t quite suitable enough yet.

Note that you don’t need to act on any of them – no fermentation is required of you at this stage, although you can certainly start any processes of Inner Fermentation which you are inclined to start! But the sole purpose of this Homework is to show you how you could get started, and to give you material to work with in later steps.

Hands-On Fermentation Homework: Cream Cheese

In all honesty, instead of “Hands-On Fermentation Homework”, this homework should actually be called “Hands-On Non-Fermentation Adventure”.

“Non-fermentation” because it actually doesn’t involve fermentation (duh!).

And “adventure” because I’ve only ever done it once myself, and I don’t feel comfortable teaching it to others yet (still got some more mistakes to make for myself first…). So we’re in this adventure together – ain’t that exciting!? 😀

What you’re going to do in this Homework is to produce something which is actually the raw material for fermentation to come, namely some kind of cream cheese.

Why is this a raw material? Well, if you wanted to make actual cheese, you’d let such “cream cheese” (aka coagulated, drained milk) ferment with your cheese cultures of choice.

The actual process of cheese making is a bit more involved and also requires certain tools, cheese cultures, etc. It’s very much doable at home, though, and in fact a relative of mine has been doing it for years, with outstanding results.

Soft cheeses in particular, like camembert or brie or the like, are comparably easy to do, at least with the right equipment and experience. Hard cheeses are a bit more of a challenge, as they need considerable time to ripen, under the right conditions, plus ongoing attention. Still, they, too, are doable if you should set your heart to it. (Although I’d recommend starting out with soft cheeses first to get the hang of it.)

But for the purpose of our essay series, making cheeses is a bit much. As I said before, I aim for these homeworks to be accessible and fun for everybody involved – me very much included, and as I’ve never made cheese before myself… 😀

And besides, the topic of today’s essay is the raw material for fermentation, and thus it’s rather fitting for us to produce coagulated milk cream cheese as the raw material which could be fermented into cheese!

So on we go – and remember it’s an adventure for me as much as for you. 😉

(I have taken the following recipe from Sandor Ellix Katz’ excellent book “The Art of Fermentation”. If you have any serious interest in fermentation at all, i.e. of the hands-on sort, I can highly recomment this book. It’s a treasure trove of knowledge, of recipes, and of his decades-long practical experience.)

Stuff you need

What you’ll need for a tasty homemade cream cheese is

• 1 litre of full-fat milk (see notes below)
• 14 grams of fresh nettle leaves (or 7 grams of dried) (see notes below)
• 125 ml of boiling water
• a flat bowl or pot which can hold a litre
• a kitchen knife
• a fine sieve
• a cheesecloth or clean tea towel
• a second pot, large enough to hang the sieve into it and still have room to spare at the bottom
• salt and herbs to taste (see notes)
• a storage container for your cream cheese (any type will do, whatever you have at home)

This recipe will give you a decent-sized batch of cream cheese. However, it won’t last as long as store-bought cream cheese and (at least in my experience) will have to be eaten rather soon. If you’re not sure how much you can eat in a short time, start out with half a batch, i.e. half a litre of milk (about a pint), and half the nettle and water.

Milk

Full-fat milk is best for this.

In theory, you could make cream cheese from raw milk, but this is probably not easily available for most of you. Plus, it would be more involved, as you’d have to juggle both the coagulation process and the spontaneously starting fermentation process at once.

Luckily, cream cheese can just as well be made from commercially sold milk which has been heated before, i.e. long-life or UHT milk. Most commercially available cheese isn’t made from raw milk either!

Store-bought (i.e. heat-treated) milk is also what I used for my test batch. Or, to be more precise, I did my test batch with a bag of lactose-free UHT milk, since this is what I happened to have at hand – and it worked.

Nettles

Raw milk, if left outside at room temperature (and left to its own devices), will coagulate on its own. It will also ferment during this process, i.e. you’ll end up with curdled or clabbered milk (which is pefectly well drinkable, although the taste can vary depending on your raw milk and the environment etc).

When using heat-treated milk, though, all the fermentation critters which are present in raw milk have been (deliberately) killed in order to increase its shelf life. Which is fine and well, but then how do you induce coagulation, i.e. the thickening of the milk? After all, we want spreadable cream cheese, not liquid milk!

A standard way is to use rennet from calves. However, I strongly suspect that most of you don’t just have that lying around already. And while it’s easily available for purchase, there are other, simpler and more accessible methods using plant-based coagulants.

There are different kinds of plants which can be used for this. One commonly used one is cleaver (from the Galium family), which is, quite fittingly, called “Labkraut” (= rennet herb) in German.

However, there are others, and one plant which helps to coagulate milk is a very widespread “weed”. In fact, it’s so widespread that most of you could probably just pick it in your garden or on a short walk, no matter where you live: stinging nettle.

There are different kinds of nettles, but the most common one (well, at least where I live) is Urtica dioica. Your mileage may, of course, vary depending on your location. Still, Urtical dioica is the only one I can comment on, and it worked fine as coagulant for my test batch of milk.

Nettle is easy to obtain. If it grows in your location, it most likely grows abundantly. It’s also easy to identify (unless you are one of the very few people who don’t react to its sting!). Still, the usual caveats apply: Make sure you know what you are picking, and that it’s indeed edible. If in doubt, go nettle hunting with somebody who knows their herbs!

(Which, incidentally, is a great way to learn more about the herbs in your area… 😉 )

When picking nettle for this Homework, it doesn’t have to be the fresh, young shoots at the top. Older leaves will also work, but make sure they look healthy and strong. And yep, you can leave the stems on, although then you’ll have to use more material by weight.

Anyway, nettle might not grow in your region (if you live in the desert or the arctic, that is). Or you might live in the middle of a large city and have absolutely no chance to pick wild herbs which haven’t been peed on by dogs. Or you don’t know how to identify nettle, and have nobody you could ask.

In this case, fortunately, dried nettle is your friend. As nettle is a commonly used herb for healing and for teas, it’s easy to obtain in dried form (and should, I hope, be affordable, too) – but before you go that route, seriously consider whether you don’t have the chance of picking it fresh!

As for measurements, drying removes water from herbs (surprise!), which means they lose weight. How much exactly this is depends, of course. But a good rule of thumb is to use twice the amount of fresh herb as you would use dried. I.e. if the recipe says “7 g dried nettle”, this would amount roughly to “14 g fresh nettle” and vice versa.

If you have to buy nettle tea for this Homework, don’t throw the rest out! You’ll be able to use some of it in a couple of later homeworks (although it’s not mandatory there to use nettle, i.e. you could just as well simply brew tea and drink it up…).

Other herbs

Once your cream cheese is done, it will taste rather bland. (Store-bought cream cheese has a hint of sourness to it which ours hasn’t, as there was no fermentation involved.)

At this stage, it pays to add some salt, and also herbs or spices of your choice. I pimped mine with salt and chopped fresh chives, just to give you an example.

Step 1: Nettle tea

Crush the dried leaves, or losely tear/cut the fresh leaves (including stems if you leave them in). Brew a strong nettle tea: Pour the boiling water over the leaves, and let it infuse overnight. Then drain the leaves.

Step 2: Prepare the milk and let it rest

Mix the milk and nettle tea in a pot or bowl. The vessel should be wide enough to give you a large surface area to work with, but not so wide that the liquid only reaches a few millimetres of height.

Put the bowl or pot into a place where it can rest undisturbed for up to a day or even a bit more. Leaving it in peace is important, as moving and sloshing around can disturb the coagulation process.

Step 3: Cutting

Depending on the environment (temperature etc), it will take a day or so for your milk to coagulate. Since you’re not supposed to move the pot, this is a bit hard to tell – especially as coagulation leaves you with a firmer mass on bottom, and whey (i.e. the milk liquid) on top.

In order to determine when you can proceed to this step, somewhere in his book Sandor Katz suggests to “slightly wiggle the bowl” in order to see if the mass has become more solid, in which case you can move on to the cutting step. (Note that it won’t become as solid as cheese, more like a custard and somewhat gelatinous.)

Now, my wiggles might have been a bit too slight, as I got the impression the milk mass hadn’t coagulated yet and thus left it standing for two days or so until I finally gave it a tentative cut, which quickly showed that it was solid enough (and, as I later realized, also that I had left it resting for too long and it had thus acquired a slightly bitter taste).

Thus what I can recommend from my measly experience is to forego the wiggling (although you’re welcome to do that just for fun), and instead to do a test cut: Use a sharp knife, and cut across your bowl, not just on the surface, but down to the bottom. Come back after an hour or so, and if the cut is still visible, voilà, you’ve got a solid mass!

To be on the safe side, for my next batch I’d do a first test cut after half a day or so (which is probably too early), and then proceed from there with common sense with any further test cuts.

Once your milk has reached this stage, you need to cut the mass in order to increase its surface, and thus help to draw the whey out:

Using a kitchen knife, make somewhat evenly spaced cuts, cutting it into slices in one direction. Turn by 90 degrees, and make the same set of cuts along this other direction. Then turn diagonally, and make a third set of cuts.

Cuttinrg your cheese mass doesn’t disrupt the coagulation, but it increases the surface, making it easier for the whey to separate from the more solid mass.

As a result of the cuts, the curd will shrink. Make more cuts as needed to increase the surface. (I went back for just one more round of cuts, which, in hindsight, might not have been enough.)

Step 4: Dripping

Finally, you need to let your cheese drip until it has reached the desired consistency. Hang your sieve over a suitably sized pot or bowl, and line it with the cheesecloth or tea towel. (If you use a heavily scented detergent, you might have to rinse the cloth thoroughly beforehand.)

The dripping process will take a while. You can speed it up to some extent by (gently!) wringing the cloth a bit. The goal is not to press more liquid out of the cheese, but to wring out the liquid which has soaked into the cloth.

Step 5: Finishing touches and use

Once the cheese mass has reached your desired consistency (or once you lose patience and accept that it’s not quite as solid as you would like it to be… 😉 ), scrape it into a suitable vessel. At this stage, you can add salt, and any herbs or spices to taste.

Make sure to eat the cream cheese soon, as it won’t store well. And I hope this goes without saying, but now that it’s done, you should store it in the fridge!

The whey (i.e. the liquid you collected) can be used, too, either as drink, or by adding it to a bath or to your washing water. Note that it, too, needs to be used up soon, and stored in the fridge!

Conclusions and Outlook

Well. As I said above, I don’t really feel comfy teaching the cream cheese at this stage, but since the essay was due and I didn’t have time to do a few more trials first… So here’s to hoping yours will turn out perfect. 😀

(If not, at least we’ve had some adventure together!)

Next time, we’ll approach the process of fermentation from the other end – while this essay has all been about the start product (the raw material to be fermented), in the next essay we will focus on the end product (the ferment). And on top of that, I’ve got a delicious Hands-On Homework in store for you, too! Plus, Inner Fermentation – we’re not just here for the fun and the drinks, after all… 😛

The next essay will go up on on Sunday, April 26th. And as usual, I’m looking forward to your thoughts, questions and comments below! 🙂

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Image: Michael McKay on Unsplash