Things I have learned

Autumn is a super time to make cabbage kimchi. Most of the necessary ingredients are available fresh at the local organic farmers market: Napa cabbage, Korean radishes, garlic, onions, and carrots. And all of the remaining ingredients are in my pantry anyways: Ginger, green onions, rice flour, sugar, fish sauce, Korean red pepper flakes and pickling salt. So, lets get started. This is the coarse pickling salt brand I use. It took me a while to realize that what I really needed for all my ferments was a plain pickling salt without add-ons (like anti-caking additions or iodine health-additions that are typical for table salts) and where to find it. I also use pickling salt whenever a recipe suggests to use kosher salt (I think kosher salts are also add-on free, but I don't know for sure). Pickling salt is also called canning salt or preservation salt. Korean red pepper flakes on the left and fish sauce on the right. Korean red pepper flakes are not very spicy and I also us...

Something I make quite frequent in recent times is the Japanese dish kinpira gobo. In a nutshell this is a burdock-carrot stir-fry (burdock is called "Klette" in German). I peeled the burdock root (about 1.5m long) and cut it into flakes and then threw the flakes immediately into a water bath to prevent further discoloring. To flake the burdock I used a knife and cut on a bias while turning the root around. I have also seen YouTube folks that used a peeler to shave of somewhat smaller flakes compared to mine. I then cut 3 smallish carrots into match sticks. And that is it pretty much on the vegetable side.  Pending which recipes you look at, people use more carrots or less compared to the amount of burdock being used. I have come across a cooking book whose author claimed the basic recipe I am making here is a bit "boring". She recommended to add things like seaweed and different spices to the whole thing. I haven't made that recipe yet, so there might be ...

I made some miso today. And since Steve asked to document it, and prior to this Daniella asked a while ago in a more generic way to record some of the stuff I find interesting, I created a new blog to capture some of the things I have learned or I am learning. This is the first post in that series. Lets talk about making miso. I have never done this, but I read a bunch of books on fermentation and even entered some notes how to make miso into my Raspberry Pi Rails database. To be specific, this is going to be a red miso which needs minimum 1 year of fermentation. I am roughly following a recipe from the book "Wild Fermentation (2nd edition)" by Sandor Katz (available in the Ottawa library). One of the reasons, I haven't made miso earlier, despite having an active interest in fermentation, was that I could not find koji rice in any of the local Ottawa stores. And I had no clue where to look elsewhere. Things changed, somebody made me aware of J-Town in Toronto and ...