Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease

Success! It took a few politely persistent email requests, but I've now got the long coveted recipe for the lacto-fermented ketchup I sampled at 2010's PASA conference. The recipe comes from Maureen who blogs at Nourishing Traditional Cook.  I know more than one reader has asked for this, and I very much wanted it myself. I'm posting the recipe now so that anyone who wants to try it out with canned tomatoes can do so. Perhaps some of you Aussie readers have fresh tomatoes still to play around with. I'll probably wait until our own tomatoes come in and then smoke a few to mimic the fire-roasted flavor of the Muir Glen tomatoes called for in this recipe.

Lacto-fermented Ketchup

1, 20 oz Muir Glen Fire Roasted Tomato Puree
2 Tbsp. raw cider vinegar
2 Tbsp. whey (liquid, unpasteurized)
1/4 cup fermented fish sauce or 1/2 can anchovies in oil
1/4 large green pepper, sliced
1-2 Tbsp. raw honey
2 cloves garlic
2 tsp. basil
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp ground mace
1 tsp dry mustard
2 pinches ea. ground cinnamon and nutmeg

Puree in blender or VitaMix. Let sit on counter for 12-24 hours, refrigerate. You may also substitute balsamic vinegar for the whey. It won't be as much fermented, but is truly delicious!

By the way, I can attest to the high quality of the canned tomatoes called for in this recipe. They're what I relied on before we became self-sufficient in tomatoes. I don't know how many vegetarians or vegans are going to be put off by this recipe. All I can say is that this ketchup rocked my world. I'd eat this stuff on eggs, beans, or as a side dish to just about anything. It was that delicious.

I will definitely be playing around with this recipe this summer, and may post an update on any successful tweaks that I find especially pleasing. I'm curious to see whether I can incorporate a bit of onion without overwhelming the other flavors. My fumbling experimentation with lacto-fermented ketchup last year definitely taught me that any addition of onion should be tiny in comparison to the rest of the ingredients. If any of you experiment with the recipe - either using canned tomatoes or homegrown - I would really love to hear back from you about any tweaks you make, or just what you think of the recipe. Please let me know!

NOTE: If you entered the drawing for the homesteading books with an anonymous sign in and no identifying details (first name + city, or email address in the body of the comment), I can't verify your identity if you win. If this applies to you, leave another comment with some details to be sure you get a chance at the books. Anonymous entries with no details will be discarded. It's great to hear about so many small scale homesteads from all of you. Keep up the good work!

Very Devious Am I

I like hacking things together, coming up with my own ways of getting things done, and generally making things work without resorting to purchased solutions.  But sometimes I'm not above paying for a partial fix.

Though it didn't make my formal list of goals for 2010, this was meant to be the year of experimentation with lacto-fermentation.  I actually started last year, trying to make some sauerkraut in a half-gallon glass canning jar.  It probably would have worked, except that I had trouble keeping the top of the kraut submerged below the surface of the liquid.  So the part sticking up above the liquid got funkier than I was comfortable with.  I tossed the whole batch, which really disappointed me.  I later learned I could have just scraped off the funky part, and the kraut underneath probably would have been fine.  More disappointment.

Now, there exists a brilliantly designed, patented, and well-marketed solution to this problem of top spoilage with sauerkraut.  Which is to say: an expensive product.  Like $100+ expensive, and that for the smallest model in the product line.  They're ceramic fermentation crocks and they're made in Germany.  They have a neat fix to hold whatever vegetables you put in there below the liquid, and a neat-o liquid airlock as well, which allows gas to escape the fermentation chamber but not get in, supposedly preventing contamination.  Since they're patented, they can't legally be copied here.  And since they're made in Germany and very heavy, they have a very high carbon footprint when brought to the area I live.  But here's the thing - I don't care about the airlock, because from what I've read, the lacto-bacillus will outcompete just about any other organism if you give it suitable conditions.  I don't really care about the aesthetics of glazed ceramic either.  All I want is something to keep my vegetables submerged while they ferment.

So a while back I went to a local potter with a one-gallon glass jar and asked him to make me simple, unglazed, half-moon weights that fit snugly inside the glass jar.  I have several of these glass jars, bought cheaply at our local bulk foods store.  These will be my new fermentation crocks.  The ceramic pieces will hold my vegetables down below the waterline, where airborne stuff won't have a chance to spoil it.  At less than $3 for the glass jar and $16 per pair of weights (tax included in both cases), that's less than $20 per gallon-sized crock.  That's a huge savings over what I'd pay for the ready-made crock.  Not only that, but since I have several of the glass jars, my weights can be moved from jar to jar as each batch finishes.  I couldn't do that with the weights from a purchased set.  If I were still a student with access to a pottery class, I probably would have tried making these for myself.  You could certainly do that if you have access to a wheel and the use of a kiln.

The embodied energy of these simple pieces of ceramic is still quite high.  After all, the clay was almost certainly not local, so it was probably transported in a wet state, and clay is heavy.  Pottery kilns consume an enormous amount of energy.  But at least my money went to support a local craftsman practicing an important skill.  And these are tools that will help me with the lowest energy method of food preservation for years or decades to come if I'm careful with them.  Indeed, the ceramic will never wear out, though they could break.  Potentially, these could still be in use centuries from now.  Ask an archaeologist what the most common artifact is worldwide.  Even if the weights should break, chances are very good that I could simply continue using them in a broken state.  I think that qualifies as appropriate technology.

I put three types of cabbage in the garden for a fall crop, two dozen plants all together.  Though I'm eager to get started, waiting isn't such a bad thing in this case.  Lacto-fermentation is best done at cooler temperatures.  I plan to try at least a few different recipes, including one with caraway and cranberry.  I'll let you know what my favorites turn out to be.  In the meantime, if you have favorite lacto-fermented recipes, I'd love to hear about them.

Taking a Crack at Lacto-Fermented Ketchup

Back in February I sampled an astounding fermented ketchup at the PASA conference.  Although I was told by the woman who made it that she was willing to share the recipe, she never came through.  So I've been left to my own devices to experiment as I see fit.  The only thing I know for sure about that mind-blowing ketchup was that it contained smoked chili peppers.  That's probably half the reason I loved it so much.  Smoked foods are some of my favorites.

So, I'm going to play around with lacto-fermented ketchup. After all, I'm pretty DIY oriented, and professional culinary training ought to qualify me to perfect my own ketchup recipe.  Actually, recipe development is exciting enough that I'm sort of glad I wasn't given a recipe. Below are a double handful of variables I came up with after reading a few different recipes online and asking what sounded good to me.  Perhaps some of you would like to run your own experiments concurrently, and share the results either on your own blogs or in the comments section here.  Of course, in developing this recipe, we'll be relying on our own infallible but entirely subjective taste buds to produce something we like.  You might prefer something else.  So experimenting for yourself would be the best option for everyone.

Lacto-fermented ketchup - recipe development variables

tomato - roasted? simmered/reduced? concassé?
minced onion vs. scallion vs. shallot
ratio of tomato to onion?
tomato paste - yes/no?
smoked chili pepper - ancho vs. chipotle vs. others
cumin vs. allspice vs. both
white pepper vs. black pepper
molasses vs. maple syrup vs. no sweetener added
fish sauce - yes/no?
garlic - yes/no, roasted vs. raw, how much?
vinegar - balsamic, cider, none?
salt - how much?

Given these multiple variables, I estimate that I'll make upwards of 28 different batches of ketchup to find what we like best, just within these parameters.  Obviously, they'll be small batches.  The one constant in this recipe testing process will be the use of yogurt "juice" from live culture yogurt for the inoculant.  That's the liquid that shows up when you take a scoop of yogurt out of the container, leaving a little well.  The best I can do there is organic store bought yogurt.  I may eventually be able to track down a supply of local raw whey from a goat dairy.  If so, I may try working with that instead.

The basic method for the recipe is to combine all ingredients and let them sit in a covered jar at room temperature for a few days, then refrigerate.  I can't really be sure, but I suspect that the ketchup I had in February had been happily fermenting away since late summer.  Lacto-fermentation is an active and evolving process.  So it's possible that the depth of flavor I found in that sample was a product of aging, like you'd see in fine cheese.  It may be that my recipe testing will fail to produce anything remotely like what I tasted, unless I allow my ketchup to hang out for several months.  All I can do is run my trials and see what combinations appeal most to us, and then see what the aging process contributes.

I've started with this process well ahead of our own tomato harvest, so that when the absolute best tomatoes are available, I'll have a pretty good idea of what I want to do with them.  Of course, this means buying local hothouse tomatoes.  These are not great tomatoes, by any stretch of the imagination.  I don't usually bother buying any sort of fresh tomatoes, at any time of year.  But in the interest of developing this recipe, and maximizing the value of my own crop this summer, I'll make that sacrifice. As proper tomato season approaches, the quality of tomatoes available should only improve.  So I'll have to remind myself that some of the quality that develops in the ketchup batches is due to better tomatoes rather than my own skill.

The first batch is to test the method of preparing the tomatoes themselves, while holding all other ingredients constant.  I expect the ways of dealing with the tomatoes will have slight effects on taste and texture.  Concaséed tomatoes are certainly the simplest, lowest-energy, and closest to raw of the three methods I'm trialing.  So I'd prefer it if that one produced the best flavor.  Sampling the batches in the pre-fermented state showed that even very mediocre tomatoes can taste pretty good after all the other ingredients are added.  Now the lacto-bacillus get to work their magic.

Will keep you posted.  In the meantime, if you have a favored ketchup recipe, especially if it's lacto-fermented, please share!

Update:  Got the original recipe from the source.