Fermented Pickles (Half-Sours)

Somewhere along the line, some brilliant hunter-gathered figured out that if he took the seeds from a wild vegetable and stuck them in the ground, they would produce more of that plant.  He hurried to tell his tribe of the discovery, who rejoiced in the bounty.  And one night about a week after his first harvest, he came home from chasing gazelles all day to find a bunch of rotten vegetables sitting around.  That night, he was beaten with reeds by the village chieftain, because the tribe would go hungry.  So the next, smarter person came along and thought, "we need a way to keep all of these things longer", and hurriedly set about the task of preserving food.  And so, because he did not know the location of the nearest supermarket and his internet was out, he learned through experiment that if the vegetables were packed in a salt water brine, they would soon become pickled, lasting through until the next season in a bacteria-thwarting environment.  This man was revered by all, and lived a happy life until being eaten by a bear at the ripe old age of 28.  This was a long time ago, after all.

That's probably not the exact history of pickling - it was apparently worked out in India about 4,000 years ago with cucumbers.  Since then, many different cultures figured this out this trick, bringing us the Korean kimchi, Japanese tsukemono, German sauerkraut, Eastern European beets, Italian giardiniera, and American pickled okra and watermelon, to name just a small handful of what's out there.  Not to mention Scandinavian pickled herring, American pickled pig's feet, and a slew of other pickled protein parts that the world has come to love, or at least tolerate.

Pickling magic is actually quite simple, and you can play it one of two ways:

1. A 'chemical' pickling can be accomplished with an acid, by soaking the vegetables in a mixture of vinegar and spices, then putting them in sterilized jars with some form of preservative if a longer shelf life is desired.  This preservative used to be alum, but since it probably gives you brain damage, commercial shops tend to use sodium benzoate.  This process can be accomplished in a matter of hours, as with quick-pickled American watermelon or Sichuan bamboo shoots.
2. A 'natural' pickling is accomplished by leaving the vegetables in a brine of salt water and spices, where natural yeasts and bacteria ferment the pickles over a longer period.  This process can take days, weeks, or even months, depending on the desired result.  This would include kimchi, sauerkraut (buried in the yard for months), most refrigerated cucumber pickles, and of course the Chinese Thousand Year Eggs, which is a bit of a special case.

I have tried quick pickling with vinegar before, but it just didn't do it for me.  It's the difference between the non-refrigerated pickles that are yellow-ish green inside, and the refrigerated ones that are still a pale white green inside.  This, to me, not only looks more like food, but I find that it also tastes more 'pickley' - crisp, tangy, salty, not sweet, and not sharp unless it's your own choosing.  So here I present to you my first experiment in naturally pickled cucumbers, fermented in brine rather than steeped in vinegar.

Naturally Fermented Half-Sour Pickles
Modified from multiple sources

• 2 lbs Kirby cucumber, unwaxed
• 8 cloves of garlic, peeled
• 1 tbsp black peppercorns
• 1/4 cup (4 tbsp) non-iodized salt, ideally pickling salt
• 6 cups of water

For equipment, you will also need:

• 1 adequately large, non-reactive, food safe container, with a lid
• 1 plate or bowl which is slightly smaller than the size of the container
• Small finger / prep bowl

Let's start with the ingredients.  Why Kirby cucumbers?  Because they are perfect for pickling - right size, right moisture content, VERY crunchy.  There's a reason they're also known as 'pickling cucumbers'.  Next, the salt.  I would go with pickling salt, which is much more fine than table salt.  It also contains no iodine, which supposedly avoids the white haze my liquid had (although this doesn't affect the product).  If you can't find pickling salt, go with non-iodized table salt.  I omit dill because I wanted to try the dill-free version, and I'm upping the garlic I actually used by 100% because I thought it needed more, and will plan to add more in the next round.

Scrub your cucumbers to remove any residues, and trim off the blossom end if it's still on there (it will rot).  In a large saucepan, warm the water and dissolve in the salt, allowing to come completely back to room temperature before using.  Once done, add the garlic and peppercorns, and pack in the cucumbers densely.  Weight these down by placing the small bowl / plate / whatever over the tops, then put the prep bowl on top of that, and fill with water.  This needs to keep all cucumbers fully submerged, so make sure you get things right.

The submerged pickles, trapped by a small prep bowl.  I later added a plasticware lid to keep the pickles better submerged

Put the container in a warm-ish place (I'll make up a number and say 60-75 F), and let them sit, undisturbed, for 3 days.  After this time, you may see some foam starting to collect on the top of the container.  If so, skim it off.  If not, do not despair - I didn't see any, and I lived to tell the tale.  Regardless, let your cucumbers rest in the brine for 7-14 days, checking on them periodically.  You can open up the container and have a look if you like.  Make sure to skim any 'white foam' off the surface of the liquid, which is a perfectly normal occurrence that looks suspiciously like mold, which is probably natural bacteria eating away happily at the cucumber.

Oh man, you're going to eat that?  Are you crazy?!  It's fine - this is just a sign of the bacterial / fungal activity going on in the brine, and is a sign of a healthy fermentation.  So long as the pickles are under the level of the water and not rotting above the surface, you're good.  Just skim this off every few days.  FYI, mine are floating only because I had just moved the bowl

When done, place the container in the fridge for 3 days to stop the fermentation process, and then keep in there for a few weeks while you eat them.  Ah, but how do you know when they are done?  Well, follow your nose.  If the cucumbers smell like pickles and you've had to remove some foam, you're probably done. If it smells like nothing, give it some more time.  This isn't a science, and nobody's going to give you a score.  You eat them when you're damned good and ready to.

I call my pickles 'half sours' because I put in less salt than other recipes, although more than some I saw online.  If you want to go crazy, add more salt, but do so at your own risk - they're going to be mighty sour.  You could also add a full bunch of dill to the pickles to make the more common dill half-sours, and you could also add something spicy to kick up the punch a bit.  I didn't think mine needed any tweaking, but will keep experimenting and will post the results in updates.

Update 8/5/13: made these again with pickling salt - 7 c. tap water, 4 tbsp pickling salt.  Way too salty, and then they turned mushy.  Need to experiment further.

30-Minute Mozzarella

If you're like me, you tend to let a good amount of food spoil and then experience "first-world guilt", described as a pang somewhere near your overly plump stomach that makes you feel terrible about wasting food while others are starving.  Well, here's an interesting way to prevent that, which (it turns out) has been what Europeans have been doing for centuries - make cheese out of your milk.  There are plenty of reasons to do this:

• It's cost-effective
• You have control over exactly what goes into the finished product
• Homemade cheese is guaranteed to separate out the lactose-containing elements and trap them in the whey, while mass-produced cheeses don't always do this
• It tastes amazing if you do it right
• It's really freaking cool to see this happen

I got this recipe out of the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, who in turn got it from the "Cheese Queen", Ricki Carroll (www.cheesemaking.com).  It's basically verbatim, although presented as something in between the two recipes they each list.  I made this twice in two days - the first time to learn what NOT to do, the second time to get a good product.  FYI, things not to do here: don't use cheesecloth just because you think cheesecloth is used in the manufacture of all cheese.  Don't overstir after adding rennet.  Don't overheat on the stove.  Don't forget to buy gloves before kneading.  And definitely don't rush the cutting of the curd before it has set - that's the #1 most important tip here.  Patience is a virtue, and it was only about 2 minutes of patience.

The ingredient list is incredibly short, and the equipment list is similar.  All you will need for hardware is a large (1.5+ gallon) pot, an instant thermometer, and a microwave-safe bowl.  Ironically, cheesecloth was not necessary for this, despite my having bought some expressly for this purpose.  And the ingredients require just four things: milk, salt, rennet, and citric acid.  To find those last two, I suggest a homebrew store or health food store / co-op for the rennet, and, surprisingly, a hardware store or craft store for the citric acid.  Look in the canning section, citric acid is used in jam- and jelly-making as well as canning a number of other products, so it's not impossible to find.  And by the way, if you see rennet's lesser cousin, junket, don't even bother - just keep searching until you find the real deal, which is much more powerful.

And now, a history on cheese.  Turns out that long ago, people used to carry around their beverages not in Nalgenes and Siggs, but in cow stomachs.  Well, folks noticed that when they put their liquids into these stomachs, for some strange reason the milk kept turning solid, separating the liquid whey from the more solid curds.  The reason was not apparent until later, but it had to do with enzymes found in the cow's stomach lining, which eventually were discovered, named "rennet", and sold to cheesemakers the world around.  If you are daring, feel free to look up how they acquire rennet from a cow's stomach, but you should probably just take my word and be grateful that now you can buy this ready-made, and note that these days you are much more likely to find a rennet derived from vegetables or even microbes than you are from cow's stomach.

The cut curd, sitting in whey, waiting to be made into deliciousness.  There's some old nursery rhyme about this.  Something about muppets and spiders.

I learned an interesting fact about the name "mozzarella".  Turns out that it comes from the Italian verb "mozzare", meaning "to cut".  This is because of how they form the cheese into balls when everything is working perfectly, where they fold the cheese over itself a few times, form into a tight ball, and then pinch the cheese ball from the main strand before storing.  The cheese is closely related to scamorza cheese, which is derived from "scamozzata", which translates as "without a shirt".  Love it.

30-Minute Mozzarella

by Ricki Carroll, by way of Barbara Kingsolver

• 1 gallon milk.  This can be whole, part skim, whatever, just so long as it isn't ultra-pasteurized.  Go with raw if you're daring, but if you get sick and die, it's totally not my fault.  Learn from Louis Pasteur, they didn't name the process after him for nothing.
• 1.5 tsp citric acid, dissolved in 1/4 cup cool distilled water
• Rennet (liquid is best, tablets work if that's all you can find), dissolved in another 1/4 cup cool distilled water.  1/4 tsp for liquid, or 1/2 tablet for pellets.
• Salt, to taste

Just four ingredients, all shown here.  And if you couldn't guess that 'milk' was one, you should  probably search for other hobbies, like bricklaying or popping bubble wrap.

Add the milk to the pot and place over medium-low heat.  Add citric acid once milk gets to 55 deg. F and stir.  The mixture will begin to curdle as it gets warmer, which is really cool to watch.

When the mixture gets to 88 deg F, add the rennet dissolved in water, and stir in with a spoon in a gentle up-down motion.  Remove from the heat, and let sit for 5 minutes to set up.  Do NOT stir during this period.

Add the dissolved rennet at 88-90 deg F, then kill heat and leave alone.  Better to pour this over a slotted spoon to distribute quickly and evenly, then stir with an up-and-down motion.  This photo is from my first attempt, not the better second attempt shown below.

Now, a question you might have is this:

"I can see the cheese curdling with just the citric acid - why should I bother adding rennet as well?"

Well, Mr. Know-It-All, it turns out you're right, but only partially.  If you just add citric acid, you will be making an 'acid-set cheese', which is what cream cheese, ricotta, and paneer are.  But adding rennet will give you much more complexity of flavor, so don't skip it or your cheese will be bland, and will take quite a while to set up.

Once the curd (solid portion) has set, the whey (liquid portion) will become mostly clear.  If it's not yet clear, allow the mixture to sit a few minutes longer.  Most soft cheeses are actually made by allowing the enzyme in the rennet to work overnight, so don't worry about letting this sit for a few minutes extra.  But once you're satisfied, cut the cheese into 1" curd squares with a big knife.  Place the pot with the sliced curd back on the stove and heat to 105 deg F.  Once heated, remove with a slotted spoon, or a spider if you have one, to a large collander.

Grab a large knife that can reach to the bottom of the pan and cut into medium cubes.  This will allow more whey to be released, and promote even heating

Remove to a bowl with a slotted spoon.  The curd will have the consistency of a runny custard.

Allow the curds to drain off as much of the whey as they're prepared to give off.  Once curds are all removed from the pot and drained, place the bowl in the microwave and heat for 60 seconds on high.  This will wring out more of the whey, which you can pour off before kneading the curd slightly.  Discard any remaining whey that forms, then heat again for 35 seconds.  Knead again, pour off whey again.  Do this one last time for 35 seconds, kneading and pouring off any whey.  This is going to be knuckle-searing hot when you're done, so be prepared.

Drain off the whey as you continue heating.  Note: this cheese is for friends and family, who can handle arm hair in their cheese.

Continue kneading to release more whey and get to a shiny ball state.  This isn't ready yet.

Now the next fun part - stretching and kneading the curd.  First, add salt to taste (I added about 1 tbsp to a gallon's worth of milk after I saw a video from BelGioioso that called for 1 tbsp per pound of curd), and knead the curd a few times.  It should be around 135 deg F for this to work.  As you stretch the dough, it should easily elongate, rather than snap apart.  If it stretches, keep forming into a ball and stretching a few times to align the protein strands.  If it doesn't, give it a bit more kneading until you get that firm skin and shiny surface to the ball, then try stretching again.

Almost there...

...nope.  Needs more kneading.

Getting pretty close...

Bingo!  This is the look you want for the cheese.

Only do this a few times - the longer you do it, the more of a string cheese consistency you will have.  If the curd isn't stretching, reheat again and try after warmed up again.  After you've stretched the curd a number of times, it should begin to look shiny and elastic, and will stretch easily, like taffy.  Pull this into a long rope, and  shape however you like.  This time I spun it around itself and then just folded it up, like a pretzel.

Once the cheese looks shiny and is at the right temperature (135 F or so), you should be able to do this.  Bring people in to watch.

You can braid it, or form back into a ball.  If you  really want traditional "mozza"-rella,  you have to make a long ribbon, then form into balls and pinch them from the ribbon.

Or form into whatever shape you like.  I don't care.

Once you're satisfied with the shape, drop the finished cheese into a bath of cold water.  This will stop the cooking process.  You can now slice and eat immediately (best option), or wrap in plastic wrap and store for up to a week in the fridge.

Drop in cold water to stop the cooking.

Slice and serve, or store in plastic wrap for a week.  If it's around that long.

And here's something you could do with your mozzarella, if you were so inclined.

Here's another: Italian sausage sandwich melts

And a classic: insalata caprese di tomate e mozzarella