I found out through discussion the week prior that one of the things that I’d wanted to make was a living sauce, Mole. A sauce made from chocolate and pumpkin seeds. I’ve ended up in hindsight with a “living sauce” in the buttermilk I have from making cultured butter as long as I keep making more butter to replenish it, and, indeed I am finally going to use a key concept brought up in both Sandor Katz’s Art of Fermentation and the Noma Guide to Fermentation, backslopping (wherein I have a previously made living culture and use it as the basis of a new one), to make a third batch. And, indeed, I may well become some kind of weird one-human butter production factory as long as I can keep adding to my buttermilk such that it never spoils and keep making butter.
Another thing that technically falls into this category is sourdough starter. Normally, I would break and set my lines different, but there are only really two ingredients you need to make a sourdough starter. Flour and water. And a seal-able glass jar. Three ingredients.
I’m following closely a scaled down version of the methodology detailed in Mouthfeel. Also keeping in mind what Sandor has written on the subject. Basically I combined equal parts flour and water, stirred it up with a stick and sealed it. A little bit more complexly, I used an unbleached rice flour to which I added a bit of my milled barley flour and have been adding the same rice flour rounded out with the unhulled portion of my barley since then. The water added is to be temperature controlled a bit when you add it to match the conditions of the workspace you’re using, my home is a bit cold, so I cut some hot water with cold. Mouthfeel recommends that we wait 3-5 days before we begin the regular process of removing half of the material and adding back in the original proportions to both feed the growing microbes and control the acidity of the internal environment.
All Pictures Benjamin Reynolds, 2018
Round 1
Development before round two, which honestly looks super the same to this. Round three looks a bit different, however:
Post choco fest:
oh, and by the way, if you’re working in a colder space like mine, always cover it:
BONUS REVISITATION and preparation:
I had a second go at the tomatoes oven drying.
a whole peck a tomatoes courtesy of Evergreen’s Organic Farm
roughly equal amounts of:
avocado oil
olive oil
grapefruit white balsamic vinegar
about 1&1/2 teaspoons Grimm Bros spicy sea salt taken to the mortar and pestle
Preheat oven to 205 degrees Fahrenheit.
Slice the smalls in halves and the larger ones into quarters.
Mix oil, vinegar and salt into a not quite emulsion.
Dress the tomatoes, use all the mixture.
Get interrupted during the process and then someone finishes it off and has some while you’re out at the Northwest Chocolate Festival
Corn for nixtamalizing.