Fermented Eats: Easy Sauerkraut

So far this blog has focused on beverages, and admittedly will probably continue to do so. That is because I am just beginning to venture into making my own fermented foods, and have a long road of experimentation ahead of me. I do love fermented food of all sorts, and am looking forward to my adventures in this realm as our garden beds start producing some fresh veggies to experiment with. In the meantime I thought I'd get started by making a basic sauerkraut.

In this post I will walk you through the very basic process I followed to make sauerkraut, show you a (very) few pictures of the process, and then link to a video by the king of all foods that are fermented, Sandor Katz. Again, this was my first time making sauerkraut so I am no expert (and Sandor really is!), but I am very pleased with the results, even though it is not as pretty as some of the store-bought stuff.

Glüten-Tag! - Malting Buckwheat

In an attempt to design a more "beery" gluten-free beer, the Special Lady-Friend (SLF) and I turned to buckwheat. I first heard about brewing with buckwheat on a Sunday Session podcast on The Brewing Network (an excellent resource for all things brewing), and then followed the directions for malting the buckwheat found on Jon Plise's website. This post is meant to document my process, while providing a redacted step-by-step how-to. Be sure to check out Jon's site for more extensive (and aesthetically pleasing) instructions.

Glüten-Tag!: The Gluten-Free Beer Project

With a recent revelation in my Special Lady-Friend's (hereafter SLF) dietary regimen, I have been provided with another brewing related challenge -- to find and capture the ever elusive tasty gluten-free beer!

You can learn a lot more about gluten sensitivities from websites and blogs by people with far more relevant PhDs after their surnames (see links below), so I will spare you from this pedant's attempt to explain SLF's situation . Just know it sucks, and this dietary limitation is not by her choosing. I'm sure it must be even more torturous living with an obsessed brewer and borderline alcoholic while such a ban is in place. Pause and reflect on a fallen drinking homette next time you are sipping a nice malty brown or IPA -- she would appreciate.

All hail our kombucha overlords!

Kombucha is pretty easy and inexpensive to make, and is supposedly pretty dang healthy. I prefer my homemade kombucha to any of the commercial examples that I have tasted -- it just seems much more flavorful and tart. There are a lot of different recipes and ratios out there in internet land to match different preferences in intensity and balance of flavor. I like mine with a nice acidic tang, and slight carbonation to add a bit of a bittering sensation to the sweeter backdrop of sugars. It can certainly put a pep in my step, even when coffee won't do the trick.