Yeast: Friends and food!
Mar. 28th, 2010 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
infryqA few weeks ago we found some very very young ginger in large quantities at Sam's produce down at the strip. I turned a pound of it into crystallised ginger by peeling and slicing it, cooking it in 5c water until tender, adding its drained weight in sugar and 1/4c of the ginger liquid, and cooking the syruppy mass dry. Totally tasty.
But it left me with about 4 1/2 cups of ginger tea, for lack of another word. So I made soda. Stirred in 1/3 c sugar and a little honey, juice of a lemon, pinch of cayenne, and the ginger peelings, and waited for it to cool to 105F. Stirred in a pinch of yeast and put the whole thing in a spare plastic soda bottle (well-washed) at room temperature until the bottle became hard with CO2 pressure. This took about three days. Carefully decanted and strained the liquid (it wanted to gush everywhere from all the nucleation sites provided by the must) and put it back in the bottle, with a little more sugar, after tasting.
It's turned out to be a very light lemon soda with a not-so-subtle "oh god it burns" ginger after-effect, which is stimulating if not refreshing. Quaffing this stuff by the glassful would probably do injury to the quaffer. Hence I have dubbed it "ginger tonic" rather than ginger soda, and consumed in very small cups it's delightful.
But it left me with about 4 1/2 cups of ginger tea, for lack of another word. So I made soda. Stirred in 1/3 c sugar and a little honey, juice of a lemon, pinch of cayenne, and the ginger peelings, and waited for it to cool to 105F. Stirred in a pinch of yeast and put the whole thing in a spare plastic soda bottle (well-washed) at room temperature until the bottle became hard with CO2 pressure. This took about three days. Carefully decanted and strained the liquid (it wanted to gush everywhere from all the nucleation sites provided by the must) and put it back in the bottle, with a little more sugar, after tasting.
It's turned out to be a very light lemon soda with a not-so-subtle "oh god it burns" ginger after-effect, which is stimulating if not refreshing. Quaffing this stuff by the glassful would probably do injury to the quaffer. Hence I have dubbed it "ginger tonic" rather than ginger soda, and consumed in very small cups it's delightful.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-29 04:46 am (UTC)I'm impressed by your ability to just.... do this....
no subject
Date: 2010-04-06 03:47 pm (UTC)Also the internet.
And doing this sort of thing repeatedly. Practice at any one thing makes perfect. Practice at a group of similar things makes for a generalized understanding of that sort of thing. Practice at practice makes perfect practice. One you meticulously follow a recipe, then half-assedly follow three recipes on average... you can pretty much learn to make stuff up with abandon. Also "If you want to succeed, increase your failure rate" was a good quote I heard recently.