We gonna have our annual AoF meetup next week - Association of Foragers catch up to have fun, and share knowledge and everything else from Alpha to Omega. I offered a fermentation and foodwaste talk/workshop (i think these 2 topics are pretty much not disconnectable) just like i do this second year at the Wild Food Festival this summertime. I was thinking a lot about what do i wanted to share, teach, or show. Heh, it’s like 5 minutes 'of fame' right when you need to take your chances and use it well otherwise you never get a second one. Okay okay fairly said it’s not that serious here - for some wonderful reasons people like me talk about moulds and bubbles and for some even more unknown reason i like to share all my indescribable passion toward moulds and bubbles.
I am also a huge fan of sustainability and fair trade and zero emission, zero kilometres and seasonality with all similar 'good stuff'. So i pretty much believe that all our sustainable future food will highly rely on fermentation as a way of preservation and also as a huge aid to unlock nutrients for better/ easier use for our body. I could talk about this for hours and hours but this isn’t the topic i wanted to share here now. I found the very perfect example of a fermentation/food waste project i will going to showcase in my AoF workshop (apart from talking about all sorts of different fermentation categories and the main happenings in your jars/bottles from simple Mr Sauerkraut to some more complicated miso ageing etc.
ARONIA PROJECT. (chokeberry)
Cutting the 'once upon a time story' short, i ve got a few kilos of local Aronia berries from my gorgeous friend and Kraut Queen - Emma. They had a very successful harvest on their farm last year so their freezer were packed with these superfood berries and she thought i might be the right person to give a go with some experimentations to see what the other potentials apart from freshly squeezing the berries and selling the juice itself. What an honour to me....
I was playing with the ideas one after one building on top of each other. First project: ARONIA WINE. Yes. Not much to talk about, you can google all the rest. It makes a delicious wine. Its main sugars are: mostly glucose (simple) then some sorbitol (slowly fermentable) then some little fructose (simple). It is worth keeping this in mind when you calculate your Original Gravity/BRIX that sorbitol might mess up your formula a bit. Anyways.
"Finished aronia berry wine is crisp and dry with a beautiful dark maroon colour. It retains the flavour of the berry." so yes.
5000 berries (frozen)
2000 golden sugar
1000 malt liquid extract
350 brown sugar
tonka beans
yeast nutrients
71B yeast.
So i made a wine with 11% ABV. First round great success. No rocket science.
Second project: distill the wine. Just to be clear, in the UK u can only distil from scratch if you have a proper licence. In Hungary, you can distil a small amount of spirits for strictly home use so i am practising some proper Palinka making (Hungarian national spirit) with my dad when i’m on holiday at home. So let’s say you can distil your wine into a spirit, call it chokePalinka or AroniaGin when you climb up to a safe and secure 40-50%ABV. In theory only of course. But since i told my dad about my Aronia wine project obviously he started his choke project and he managed to create something pretty tasty for sure. Even dropped some tonka bean pieces to 'after age' in the spirit.
footnote: originally i added my tonka beans simply cause of my curiosity to see how much tonka flavour the vino can retain, im always obsessed with learning and experiencing more about the volatile compounds and their limits
After we finished with the wine (and the spirit, theoretically), we had a bunch of Aronia solid left. I just call my leftover bits 'lees' (from sake lees). There are millions of ways you can use your lees, but let me give you only a few samples.
Third project. Gather some aronia berry lees and turn it into a BBQ sauce/ketchup/chutney/jam. Pretty fucking delicious things. Just get a few cheap ketchup bottles or reduced-priced fruits, some chillies and sugar and voila - you are ready to go. I rather cook with that Coca-Cola so that can go in as well with some smoky elements and peppery bits. Just make it nice and not make it twice LOL
Fourth project. Still, got some lees? No problem. I was using 5kg of berries so maybe you dont need 10 litres of Aronia ketchup. Who knows. But here is another thing you can do: make a kasu-doko. It’s a marinating bed originally made with sake lees (rice wine solids) for pickling vegetables. It’s a winner. I like to use other lees just like sake kasu - although my simple aronia lees never met koji and its enzymes in its life (like with sake) but this does not mean i can not add some koji rice with its full enzymatic potential to make sure it will do the job just right. I also add salt and sugar to my kasu doko for extra flavours and an extra safety net towards unwanted bacteria. To be fair the alcohol content of the lees is pretty much enough to keep away anything not pretty. But i just got the habit. Oh, and i press all my vegetables with salt before they are going to turn to kasuzuke - getting rid of the extra water content helps to keep your microbial balance and enzymatic strength of your marinating bed. Of course, you can marinate other things than carrots in there as well short term, like pieces of meat or fish. One step further and we are diving into the land of shio koji :) LOL
I’m just making some mango&apple wine right now, i can see that mango lees working wonderfully with some white fish or prawns. NomNom. And no rocket science to buy a bag of dry koji rice and just mix the bits together. Winner.
Do you still have lees left? No problem.
Fifth project: dehydrate it to a seasoning. I love to dehydrate and blend my wine lees into crumbs or powder. Adding some salt turns it into another dimension. Do you know all those posh salts from the supermarket's posh section with things like smoke, charcoal and sh*t? Selling it for a fortune? Well, you blend your wine lees with a good quality salt and you will amaze all your neighbours at your next garden party. Because everything is better with more flavour. I actually cured some mallard and wild pigeon ham with my wild blackberry lees salt and they turned out absolutely fantastic.
Or just blend it with sugar and sprinkle it in your granola or in your morning smoothie. Or mix it into your chocolate crumb and serve your Sunday roast chocolate pudding with it. There are no limits but JOY.
See? i dont think that there is literally anything left from that 10 litres of Aronia wine from the very beginning. Not a single crumb or drop.
THAT IS WHAT I CALL MULTI-LAYERED BRAIN/WASTE USE.
thx for reading