skud

Bob is our ginger beer plant. He’s a living, breathing organism. We started him a month or so back, and after one false start, tonight we had our first taste of him.

I had a lot of trouble finding and understanding ginger beer recipes online, so I thought I’d write up our process here, in case it’s useful to others.

Step 1: the plant

Combine:

• 8 sultanas/raisins (our recipe said exactly 8, but I suspect you could just use a random small number — they provide the yeast)
• juice of 2 lemons
• 1 tsp lemon pulp
• 4 tsp sugar
• 2 tsp powdered ginger
• 500mL water

Put them all in a large jar, and cover loosely with a cloth (we use a napkin and a rubber band). Keep it in a warmish place — ours just sits on the kitchen bench and is fine, but I guess my point here is not to keep it anywhere that’s uncomfortably cold or hot by human standards. We put Bob outside on a hot day, once, and killed him. Oops. So don’t do that.

Step 2: feeding

Daily, add 2 tsp sugar and 1 tsp ginger, and give it a good stir. After about 3 days you should start to notice it’s fizzing a little bit when you stir it.

Keep doing this for 7-10 days (probably more like 10 days the first time, because it took a little while to get going). It can skip a day, but don’t skip too many or it’ll die. I recommend making a chart and putting it on the fridge or somewhere handy to track when you’ve fed your plant. Ours has seven boxes where we note the date and add a checkmark for each feeding.

Step 3: splitting

This is where we got awfully confused early on, so I’ll try and explain it clearly. By this point you should have about 600mL of stuff in your jar: 500mL of liquid and a layer of sludge at the bottom. Your goal is to split this evenly in half, making sure you get about half the sludge and half the liquid into each resulting batch.

To do this, we have a big 1L pyrex jug and a smaller 500mL one. We put a sieve over the large jug, and line it with the cloth that was covering Bob’s jar. Then we strain Bob through it. You can gather yours up and give it a gentle squeeze to hurry it along (wash your hands first!), but don’t wring it completely dry.

Now you should have about 600mL of liquid in the large jub, and a napkin covered in ginger sludge. Halve the liquid by pouring half of it into the smaller jug. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you should wind up with about 300mL. Top this up from the tap to bring it to 500mL.

Now get a spoon and scrape out about half the sludge from the napkin. Again, doesn’t have to be perfect, and there’s no need to actually count the raisins or anything. For us, it’s just about a spoonful. Whatevs! Dump your spoonful of sludge into the smaller jug and give it a stir. This is your new plant.

Rinse out the jar you were using for the plant, pour the new plant into it, and cover with a fresh cloth. Give it some sugar and ginger to get it started, and continue to feed it as per step 2. As you can see, you have set up an endless cycle of ginger plant feeding and splitting.

Step 4: make the beer

Now you should have around 300mL of gingery liquid in a jug, a sieve, and a napkin with ginger sludge on it.

In a large saucepan (and seriously, I mean large — our big pasta pot isn’t really big enough, and we need to fudge things using a large mixing bowl as well) put 1L water, 1kg sugar, and the juice of 4 lemons. Heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves.

Now you’re going to add 6L more water, along with your gingery liquid. In theory you’re meant to wait for the sugar syrup to cool down first, but if you’re impatient like me just add a couple of litres of cold water to it and continue with the rest.

Put your sieve over the big pot with your gingery sludgy cloth still in it. Now pour all that water through it — 6L in total, or like 4L if you dumped 2L in at the start like I did. This can be kind of slow as it strains through the cloth, depending on how thick and tight-woven it is and how much sludge you have, so again, you can gather up the corners of the cloth and give it a gentle squeeze if you want. This will also push more ginger through, which I personally think is a good thing.

Finally — or really, at any point during these proceedings, as long as it won’t get frightened by the hot sugar syrup — add your ginger liquid back in.

You should now have between 7L and 8L of ginger beer. If there’s any sediment or pulpy lemon bits, give it a stir so it’s all evenly distributed.

Step 5: bottling

Clean your bottles thoroughly with hot water and dish soap, then rinse them well. We just use recycled 1.25L soda bottles and find that 6 bottles is a pretty good fit for one batch of ginger beer.

Pour the ginger beer into the bottles. A funnel and a smallish jug are good for this. Don’t fill them all the way to the top — leave about 5cm headspace. This air gap is compressible and will help prevent your bottles from exploding under pressure.

Screw the caps on tightly, then store the bottles somewhere dark, laid on their sides, for 2 weeks. We keep ours in the cupboard under the laundry sink. From the second batch onward, you will probably find it useful — indeed, necessary — to label them with the date they went in.

Step 6: drinking

The bottles are under pressure. While they’ve been napping in the cupboard, the yeast has been converting some of that sugar into CO2, and you’ll find that there’s a pretty exciting whoosh-fizz as you unscrew the cap. Do it over the sink, unless you want to be wiping up spills. You might think you’re good at opening soda bottles, but seriously, we made a mess because ours was so fizzy.

We found that our ginger beer made to this recipe was lightly gingery, somewhat lemony, and had a mild fizz in the glass. We definitely would have liked it to be gingerier (if that’s a word), so we’ll be experimenting with that a bit more in future, adding more ginger powder to Bob each day, or maybe trying out some grated ginger in the sugar syrup at beer-making time. If we bugger it up, it’ll only take 7-10 days to get it going again.

We don’t think we can drink 7L of ginger beer a week, so if anyone wants to take some off our hands, we’re happy to swap for other things: empty 1.25L bottles and lemons would both be nice, actually, as we’re going through a lot of them. We’re always up for a produce or preserves swap too. So if you’re local and would like some ginger beer, let us know and we can set up a handoff.

Mirrored from Chez Skud. You can comment there or here.

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

More pears! We had two big bags of pears this week, so I used one bag of them — adorable little green pears with a red blush on them — to make these poached pears when some friends came round for dinner.

The pears are simply peeled then poached, whole, in a liquid made of half red wine and half water, with some sliced ginger root and other spices added. Once the pears are cooked (about 15-20 minutes at a gentle simmer) they’re taken out of the liquid and put aside.

Poached in wine and put aside — they’re a beautiful pale pink colour!

After that, the poaching liquid is vigorously boiled til it thickens to a syrup — about a cup or so in volume — which you can then pour over the pears when you serve them.

Served simply with a syrup reduced from the poaching liquid.

We had them by themselves but they would’ve been tasty with some good vanilla icecream or whipped cream.

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

This was a bit of an experiment, but I think it worked out pretty well. In winter I really enjoy baking things in the oven, so I decided to do that with these vegies instead of the more obvious stir-frying option.

All quantities are wildly approximate, and are what I used to make three parcels. Adjust as you see fit!

• 18 small brussels sprouts, cleaned and halved
• small packet of fried tofu, sliced
• 6 shiitake mushrooms, sliced (I used dry ones that I’d soaked beforehand)
• 1″ piece of ginger, cut into thin slices or matchsticks
• 3 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced

If you’re soaking your mushrooms like I did, make sure you give them long enough, and there’s no need to squeeze them too hard to get the excess juice out; a bit of liquid won’t hurt at all and might help. (My version was a bit too dry from getting this wrong.)

I divided the ingredients into three little parchment-paper parcels. Then to each one I added a slosh each of:

• oyster sauce
• light soy sauce
• sesame oil

I folded the parchment parcels closed and bunged them in the oven at about 200C for half an hour.

Parcels, folded and ready to bake. Crimp lengthwise, then fold in the ends.

They’re done when you can stick a fork in the brussels sprouts. To serve, just up-end the parcel over some rice — we used black (“forbidden”) rice because we’re really into that lately.

Served over black rice.

It was great to have almost no cleanup (except the rice cooker, which isn’t as non-stick as it used to be and needed a good soak). I’ll definitely be doing this again, if I can think of other good combinations to go in the parcels.

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

Tonight we had this sweet potato and black bean chili, which was amazing, and I made a coleslaw to go with it that I wanted to record. Sorry, no pix, because I wasn’t organised enough before we ate and then shoved the leftovers in the fridge. ETA: I took a photo of leftovers the next day. Not bad looking for leftovers, huh?

• 1/4 cabbage, shredded
• 1 green bell pepper, cut into thin slivers
• 1/2 red bell pepper, cut into thin slivers
• 1/4 red onion, finely diced
• 1/2 to 1 hottish green pepper (jalapeno or similar), finely diced
• 1.5 oranges, peel removed and diced into 1/2″ chunks
• juice of remaining 1/2 orange
• 2-3 tblsp lime juice (I used bottled, but you could juice 2 limes if you preferred)
• salt and pepper

Throw it all together, mix, and leave to stand for about 10 minutes before serving. Give it another mix before you serve, and adjust flavours (most likely salt, pepper, or lime juice) as you see fit.

The sweet/sour crunchiness went really well with the smoky, dark flavours of the chilli and the red rice we served it with.

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

So this is basically just ratatouille, but it takes less attention (because you roast the vegies in the oven) and it tastes better (because you roast the vegies in the oven). The perfect day for this would be a cool day during the summer, just after you’ve been to the farmer’s market and got a pile of really gorgeous high summer vegies. Uh huh. Or you could do like I did, and make it on a pretty warm day and totally overheat your kitchen. Whatevs, it’s good enough to be worth it.

So, here’s how it goes. First, chop the following into bite-sized chunks:

• 1 large eggplant
• 2 medium zucchini
• 2 capsicums (1 red, 1 green)
• 1 large or 2 small onions

Put them in a big roasting pan, then add:

• a whole head of garlic, broken into cloves and skinned
• about a tablespoon of dried oregano
• a teaspoon of dried pepper flakes
• pepper and salt
• lots of olive oil

Mix it all up with your hands. It’ll look like this:

Bung it in the oven at around 180C/350F. Leave it there for, oh, and hour or so. Check it every so often and turn everything over with a spatula once or twice. Basically you want everything to be soft right through, and browning in places.

When it gets to that point, throw in a jar of passata (Italian tomato sauce), or a can of crushed or diced tomatoes, whatever you’ve got. I added a punnet of fresh cherry tomatoes, too, because I had them handy. Basically, a pile of tomatoey goodness is what you want here, and then back in the oven it goes.

This is the point where I put a pot of water on to boil and cooked some linguine, so I guess it was about another fifteen minutes til we called it done. I strained the linguine and tossed it with some olive oil, then took the ratatouille out of the oven and tasted it. It needed more salt, and the secret ingredient: a good slosh of balsamic vinegar, mixed through it all with a bit more olive oil right at the end.

Yup, there’s olive oil all through this thing. That’s what makes it amazing. That and the roasted oven-y goodness. And the parmesan cheese on top.

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

This fried rice was very much inspired by Heidi Swanson at 101 Cookbooks, and a little bit by the Asian (especially Indonesian) food that I’ve been enjoying since coming back to Melbourne. It was also a way to use up a partial bunch of kale (cavalo nero, specifically) that had been sitting in the fridge a few days and needed using.

My photography is not really up to Heidi's standards. Check out her poached eggs over rice for a similar recipe with a gorgeous photo, and pretend mine looks like that.

Red rice is available in good Asian grocery stores. It’s a whole-grain rice with the brick-red husk left on. It cooks faster than most brown rices, though — only about 20 minutes — and has a great flavour.

• 1 cup Thai red rice
• 1.5 cups water

Dump these in a rice cooker and cook til done. If you prefer to cook on the stovetop, put them in a small lidded pan, bring to the boil, then simmer gently with the lid on til almost all the water’s absorbed, then turn the heat off and allow the rest of the water to absorb by itself.

You can also use leftover rice. Of course, leftover rice is best for fried rice when it comes to texture, but when working with non-glutinous wholegrain rice I find this is less important.

Meanwhile:

• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 spring onions, cut thinly on the diagonal
• 1 tsp chillis in oil
• slosh of grapeseed oil (or other high smoke point oil)

If you don’t have or can’t find the chillis in oil, you can substitute any other kind of chilli you like: sambal oelek, fresh chopped chilli, red pepper flakes, etc. I like the chillis in oil for this recipe, though, because of their dark toasty flavour which goes well with the red rice and kale.

Quickly stir-fry the onions, garlic, and chilli in oil in a wok. Once all that’s fragrant and before the garlic browns, toss in the cooked rice and rapidly stir-fry, breaking up chunks as you go. Add:

• 3 cups chopped kale or other sturdy greens (eg. chard)
• light soy sauce, to taste

I gave it a few good shakes of the soy sauce bottle. Don’t bother measuring, just shake some in, stir fry, taste, and add more if you want. Keep stir-frying and heating everything through til the kale wilts.

I served my fried rice with a fried egg on top and a dollop of sambal oelek for extra kick. If you didn’t want to do the egg thing, you could stir-fry some cubed tofu or add in some nuts (raw cashews, maybe?) after the onions and garlic and before the rice.

Previously, in Asian cooking:

• Spicy Asian greens with tofu

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

This is just one of my many variations on onion-tomato-legumes-greens. The base recipe is just those four ingredients, and you can vary the beans (chickpeas, lentils, cannellini, borlotti) and the greens (spinach, chard, silverbeet, kale), not to mention the texture and what it’s served with, to make endless variations on a meal that is almost — apart from the necessary bunch of greens — entirely made from pantry supplies.

I’ll mention a few other variations below, but for now, here’s the soup I most recently made. In terms of flavour, I was aiming for somewhere around North Africa, but this is by no means an authentic recipe, hence the generic “Mediterranean” in the title. You can adjust the spices if you prefer to take it more Italian, Spanish, or whatever.

• olive oil
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 bulb fennel, quartered and thinly sliced
• 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• pinch of red pepper flakes
• 1 can diced or crushed tomatoes
• 1 can chickpeas
• 1/2 cup red lentils
• 500mL good vegetable stock
• 1L water
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 bunch greens (kale or silverbeet would be best, I think; I used cavalo nero), chopped
• salt and pepper
• pita bread and plain yoghurt, to serve

In a large soup pot, saute the onions and fennel in olive oil until translucent. Add the garlic and red pepper flakes and stir until fragrant, but don’t let the garlic brown.

Add the tomatoes, stock, chickpeas, lentils, turmeric, cinnamon, and about half of the water. Bring to the boil then simmer until the lentils are cooked (about 15 minutes). Add the greens and cook a further 10 minutes (assuming sturdy greens like kale or chard), or less if using less sturdy greens (eg. spinach). Add more water if soup seems too thick.

Adjust seasonings to taste. Serve with a dollop of yoghurt or, if you prefer, a squeeze of lemon juice.

I mentioned some variations, so here are some of my other onion-tomatoes-legumes-greens recipes. Generally these start by sauteing onions and/or garlic, adding a can of tomatoes, throwing in beans and greens, and serving with some kind of grain.

• Cannelini beans and kale, and optionally add mushrooms, served over cheesey polenta.
• Chickpeas, diced tomatoes (or use fresh if you’ve got them), arugula/rocket or parsley, cooked quite dry and tossed with linguini. You can shave some parmesan over the top if you like.
• Saute an onion and add some curry powder, then add canned tomatoes, red kidney beans, and turnip or mustard greens. Serve over rice.
• Leek and bacon, sauted, then tossed with cooked green lentils, fresh or oven-roasted tomatoes, fresh baby spinach, and a mustard vinaigrette to make a salad. (Onion works fine instead of leek, of course.)
• A wet, wintery, soupy version of the above: leek and bacon, canned tomatoes, stock, lentils, and greens of your choice. Season with thyme and serve with crusty bread.

Chickpeas, previously:

• Chickpea, pumpkin and Israeli couscous stew
• Herbed couscous with chickpeas and sweet potato
• Chickpea, pumpkin and spinach curry

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

Here’s my recipe for pickled beetroot/beets. In Australia we call it beetroot, and in the US they say beets, but it’s the same thing.

• 1 bunch beets (about 3 medium sized ones)
• about 750mL apple cider vinegar
• about 1/2 cup sugar
• a couple of teaspoons of salt
• 1 bay leaf, broken in half
• a few allspice berries

Peel and slice the beets. I like doing them in some shape other than round slices, perhaps wedges or matchsticks, just to make them different from the bought ones.

Throw everything in a pan of appropriate size. You want enough vinegar to just cover the beets. Apply heat. You can adjust the flavour of your pickle juice by tasting. I basically tend to taste it and go “yeah, that tastes like pickle juice” and maybe adjust if I feel the urge. It’s not an exact science.

Simmer the beets until they’re “al dente”. You want a fork to go into them but they shouldn’t be soggy.

Pour the results into clean jars. Seal and keep for a few weeks before opening. After opening, refrigerate.

A note for Americans in particular: YOU DO NOT NEED TO DO ALL THAT CANNING RIGMAROLE WITH THE HOT WATER. Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that they have to do this hot water thing with all kinds of preserves. This is untrue. You only need to do it for preserves which are not intensely a) sugary, b) vinegary, or c) salty. Any of those preserving agents will prevent bacteria from setting up shop in your preserves. You only need to use the heat-canning technique for things like Italian-style tomato sauce or plain canned veggies. For sugary/vinegary/salty stuff, all you need are clean jars (a run through the dishwasher or even just really hot tap water will suffice, or you can put them in an oven at around 100C for 10 mins or so while the preserves are on the stovetop) and a bit of common sense. A small number of your preserves will go manky, but you can usually spot it. If you have a jar that’s cloudy, furry, or unexpectedly green, then don’t eat it. My forebears and I, going back at least 500 years, have been doing likewise and we’ve made it this far. Australian and English cookery books also talk about preserves using the no-hot-water-bath technique, so it’s not just me.