A couple of fun things to report on this time around.

First is my poor ginger bug, which I thought I'd killed and almost threw away.  Following the instructions, I'd been putting about 20g of chopped ginger and two tablespoons of sugar in about 500ml of water, adding more each day for five days. As expected, by day 3 I had bubbles around the edge of the water. A good sign! And I continued to have them on day 4 and 5.

On day 6, per instructions, I dumped about 2/3 of the water and replenished it, adding about a tablespoon of sugar.  And the bubbles...went away. They didn't come back the next day either. I could see no activity at all when I looked close, and most of the ginger had fallen to the bottom when I was led to believe it would normally be floating if things were going well. All seemed lost.

But then I took a look around, and some people said that giving it a day of rest where you don't touch it helped. Another said that adding a little ginger from a different piece helped revitalize the yeast.  So I put in a little more ginger in that evening and didn't do anything the next day.  The following day, I just added sugar and poured off/replenished. And whddaya know, it worked!

Now there are bubbles. Lots of bubbles. In fact when I hold the bottle up to the light I can see all sorts of happy little fermentation bubbles rising constantly. Not quite as much as my raisin starter, but still plenty to go on.  I'm not sure quite what did it, but somehow I saved the colony!

On another note, the orange soda project exceeded my expectations.

So I mixed the stuff up, added yeast and bottled it, as you'd expect. Turns out I should have strained it with cheesecloth because there's fine bits of pulp in the bottles, but honestly I don't really mind that. It gives it a rustic feel, and probably increases the orange flavour just a bit. Maybe.  In any case, it's in there and it's too late to get it out now.

So after two days on the shelf, the bottles had gotten rock hard. Harder than the ginger beer by a wise margin, in fact. Just what I wanted. So I poured it into a chilled beer glass to see if it foamed.  And boy, did it ever! It looked and sounded just like a classic soda in a commercial. It was glorious! Smelled a bit of yeast, but the taste wasn't yeasty at all.

In the spirit of experimentation, I put most of the batch (five 500ml bottles) into the fridge, and left one out to try fermenting for an extra day.  Turns out that day didn't make much of a difference. Same carbonation, same taste, same smell. Didn't really notice a difference, so it looks like with that yeast starter two days is the sweet spot.

The real surprise came a couple of days later (today), when I took a chilled bottle out of the fridge to try. From my experience with beer and the ginger beer project, I figured that chilling would have a dampening effect on the carbonation. But it was anything but. The carbonation was even better, and you could see pulp just roiling in the glass for a good 15-20 minutes as I drank it. The sound, the taste, even the smell which no longer had a yeasty overtone, were perfect. I couldn't be happier.

Hopefully, once my bottles get low, I'll be able to see similar success on my second run at ginger beer.

So let's start with a ginger beer postmortem.

First of all, let's get this out of the way. It never really carbonated.

To be fair it did a bit. It's got a little bit of carbonation you can feel when you drink it, and there are subtle bubbles on the glass. But no head like I was led to expect.  That said, it did ferment, and noticeably so. Over the two weeks plus a day it's been sitting at room temperature, the taste has changed considerably.  I was hoping that the changes would include some kind of CO2, but here we are.

I think it tasted better in the first few days, if we're being honest. Right now at the 15-day mark, it's gotten more sour. Not unpleasant, but more than I'd expect out of a ginger beer. I think putting it in the fridge after about day 4 or 5 would have been the sensible move, but I wanted to see if it would carbonate more.  It didn't, sad to say.

I think what I did wrong first of all, was add the yeast too warm. My old thermometer was unreliable at best, and I really underestimated how long it would take for four litres of liquid to cool to room temperature. So impatience got the best of me, when it would have been smarter just to let the liquid sit overnight.  I'm also questioning the use of tap water, although here in Ottawa I think it's a minor concern. The bottle-your-own wine/beer place I go to (or normally do when there's no pandemic) uses tap water and they have no issues. Just to be safe though, I'll try bottled water next time. It's pretty cheap, so no worries there. Thirdly, and this might just be me over-thinking it, I used a pretty young starter. My raisin yeast hadn't been poured off and fed much at that point, so maybe it hadn't built up strength yet.  It's pretty potent and wine-smelling now though, so I imagine it'll be fine. Just to be safe though, and for the sake of experimentation, I've started a batch of ginger bug.

So with that in mind, after I get to picking up ingredients the day after tomorrow I'll be trying a batch of ginger beer, this time with bottled water, ginger bug starter that's been poured off and fed at least once, and letting the mixture sit until the next day after simmering. We'll see if that has an effect.

I'll also do the same with orange soda, using the raisin starter. Although it's easier to cool down as you only boil a small part of the mixture before adding ice and the rest of the water. So the "next day" step shouldn't matter.

Got a couple other projects on the go, too. Here's an update:

Honey-Fermented Ginger

Turning out marvellous. The honey is much "looser" in consistency than it was, and it's picked up a lot of flavour from the ginger.  I meant to drizzle a little on pizza last week, but I kinda forgot. Next time.

I did add a little to frozen peas before putting them in the microwave, and that was seriously the right move. Only used maybe a teaspoon, but had a noticeably positive effect. i imagine the same would be true of fresh carrots too. They always pair well with honey.

Ginger Bug

Ginger bug, for those who don't know the term, is essentially the same as the raisin-based yeast starter I've been working with so far. Except, obviously, it uses chopped ginger to grow the yeast from rather than fruit. It's the usual starter you see in naturally carbonated soda recipes, and the ginger beer recipe uses it as well. So with that in mind, and since I had loads of ginger left over, I gave it a try.

And killed it. My mistake really. I foolishly took "stir or shake" as "put the lid on and shake the shit out of it" on day 4 of the five-day process, and pretty much overoxygenated the batch. Ginger started sinking, bubbles disappeared from the surface, it was a whole thing.

So I started again, and now I'm on day 3 for the second time. I don't have much ginger left so I'm using 20g a day instead of 25g, but I don't think it makes that much difference. I've got clearly visible bubbles, lots of floating ginger, the whole bit. If I don't screw it up tomorrow, I'll be laughing I think.

Cranberry Wine

Now here's an interesting journey. Very simple setup, just store-bought cranberry juice, white sugar and raisin starter in the same container the juice came in. Nothing fancy, mixed that up on the 27th of April.

Didn't do much of anything at first, which seemed consistent with what I'd been told about wild yeast taking longer to get going. I started with the "leave the top slightly ajar" method, and after a couple of days I switched to "leave the top tightly closed, but bleed off the CO2 once a day". That seemed to work better, and I heard a little hiss each time, although there was only a little evidence of  bubbles on the surface.

Then on May 2, five days after I started fermenting, I managed to get to the local brew store and picked up a few vapour locks with rubber bungs big enough for my juice bottle. And right away that made a difference. I was seeing a fine border of bubbles all around the edge by that evening, and next morning it was practically fizzing inside the bottle. A reaction that's still going strong almost a week later. I've got high hopes! 

I also got a hydrometer, but since I wasn't able to take a sample before the wine started fermenting, there's no way I can test for alcohol content once it's done. But eh, there'll definitely be some, so it's all good. That's kitchen sink fermenting for you, right?

Future plans

I already mentioned a second run at ginger beer and orange soda, so that's covered. I'll be grocery shopping in a couple of days, so I intend to get two more big bottles of juice, and ferment them as well. One with proper wine yeast, and one with a teaspoon of bread yeast, just to see what happens. The conventional wisdom is that it'll be terrible, but I see a lot of folks doing stuff with bread yeast that they seem plenty satisfied with, so why not? That's the spirit of adventure!

I've also got a yen for some Hawaiian pizza, but the trouble is I end up with a lot of leftover pineapple. So why not get a couple extra tins and ferment them?  Seems simple enough, the fruit will be soft enough to start with so no need to macerate or anything. Just dump it directly into the bottle, add sugar, water and yeast, and we're off to the races! I'll keep this diary informed of how that nonsense comes along.

Finally, I can unveil Experiment Number Two:

Naturally carbonated ginger beer made with wild yeast!

And what an ordeal it was! Or rather...what a test of patience. The actual making of the ginger beer itself went along just fine, Shredding the ginger was fun because it's the first time I've used the grater attachment on my food processor. Worked pretty well, although I had to stop and pull fibres out of the grater every now and then. But generally speaking, it worked out pretty well. Then it was just dump in the sugar, spices and water, and simmer for a while. Then turn it off and wait for it to come to room temperature.

And that's where things went wrong. I waited. And waited. And waited. And I kept checking the temperature, only for it to only go down a little each time. Until it's nine hours later and I'm still at almost 30C. Ridiculous!

That's when I realized that my kitchen thermometer may not be the most reliable thing in the world. After I took it out of the liquid, it insisted that my kitchen was only 17C. Which it obviously wasn't, and if I turned it off for a bit and turned it on again, it read the true temperature, almost six degrees higher.  So I checked the temperature the old fashioned way, by trying some, and it was stone cold. Absolutely the same as air temperature, no question.

So I said screw it, pitched the yeast culture I've been growing into the bowl, and bottled that sucker!

Now I'm the proud owner of eight 500 ml bottles of not yet fermented ginger beer, and hopefully in only a couple of days it'll be ready to drink. I'll report back on the results.

Probably nothing to report tomorrow. The yeast starter is now living in the fridge (it got really enthusiastic today, so I know it's a good, strong culture) where I'll be feeding it once a week unless I decide to do something fun with it. But for the moment I'm pretty much covered as far as drinkables go so I'm inclined to just stick with what I got until this batch runs out.

If something interesting happens to the cranberry bottle I'll fill you in, but I'm not expecting much quite yet. Apparently even commercial yeast takes a day or two to get going.

Here's the photo of my yield over on Instagram.

A bit late on the update today due to my phone running low on battery. I don't know if anyone's actually reading this, or at least anyone who minds, but I have to at least pretend to have an audience.

My yeast culture has now graduated to the next phase of its existence. This morning I drained off about 3/4 of the liquid and a good chunk of the floating raisins. Gave it a taste, not really bad tasting. Raisin-y and a little sweet, but not like you'd expect from water that had been sitting with 8 tablespoons of sugar mixed into it. Just goes to show the yeast is working as intended.

So I topped up the water, added raisins and sugar as usual, and let it sit. After a few hours, most of the raisins had floated up to the surface, a very good sign. And the water is still quite cloudy.

The plan is to dump and replenish tonight as well, to encourage faster, stronger growth. Tomorrow morning I'll be trying my first experiment with applying the liquid starter to something I actually want to consume. Then the next day, after two more top-ups, I'll start experiment number two. It's an exciting time.

As usual, here's today's photo on Instagram.

Wait, did I mis-number one of these diaries? I don't think I missed a day, but somehow I jumped from the 22nd to the 24th.  Weird.

Well, in any case, I thought I maybe messed things up yesterday afternoon. Despite the fact that I got a few more floaters, things didn't seem to be really taking off. The jar still smelled like wet raisins, the water was clear, and in fact a couple of raisins dropped to the bottom. I thought maybe fermentation was failing and I gave it a stir just to encourage things a bit. No dice, all but three or four raisins were at the bottom by the time I went to bed.

This morning was a whole other story. When I went to my desk the water was definitely cloudy and yellowish, the sign of a healthy yeast colony converting sugar to alcohol. What's more, when I fed it (a little more sugar this time, so about 1 tablespoon raisins and 2 of sugar, although I'm only eyeballing the amounts here) even more raisins went straight to the sop.

The smell, too, has changed. Not a lot, and given I'm not seeing much in the line of bubbles that's hardly a surprise, but there's definitely something different about it. I expect by tomorrow it'll have that distinctive wine scent.

Two more days of this and it should be pretty much ready to use.

Here's today's photo. Is it not glorious?

So before I get going on my revised yeast diary, I just want to give a quick post-mortem (in the literal sense) for my sourdough adventure.

Needless to say, it turned out poorly.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I honestly have come to hate the sourdough process, and I resent being pushed toward it by circumstances (i.e., the overall commercial yeast shortage, although I hear that's starting to recover). Sourdough is great if it's part of an off-grid lifestyle or for those who are really into the challenge of it all. For someone who just wants a damn loaf of sandwich bread, it's far too much complication, work, and an inevitable long string of failures. I'm not into that.

More immediately, i made some mistakes with the starter.  Primarily to do with making it far too watery. I do understand where I went wrong. When transitioning from fermented raisin water to a flour-based starter, I should have not added a flour-water mixture, but rather replaced the water in that mixture with raisin water. But I had no idea what consistency I was shooting for, and ended up with a less useful product in the end. I suppose I still could have rehabilitated it, but I'd been basically throwing good ingredients away for more than a week at that point, and I had no appetite to keep doing it in service of a project I wasn't committed to in the first place.

So I threw it away.

And that was that for a few days. Until last night, when I was watching some cooking videos that went a whole different direction with a water-based starter.

So here I am, trying again. But not with bread in mind. Sourdough will remain an undiscovered country for me, and I'm at peace with that.

Therefore, on my desk now sits a litre bottle 3/4 full of ordinary tap water (I discovered last time that Ottawa water is not so chlorinated as to kill yeast) with a few raisins and a little white sugar resting in the bottom. The raisins are from the same purchase as my last attempt, so I know for sure they have a viable yeast living on them.  Hopes are high!

My intention is rather than put the raisins in all at once, I'll add a few each day along with a little sugar. From what I've learned, you end up with a stronger culture if you ramp up over several days than if you just toss it all in at once.  I expect by Sunday or Monday (April 26 or 27), I'll have a viable culture that I can then maintain by pouring off and topping the water off, then adding some more sugar.

Day Zero photo on Instagram. Not very impressive yet, I'm afraid. But it'll get there, I'm sure.

Okay, lots to report. First, let's do the jars.

Jar 1

Disappointing. The smell isn't any more intense than it was yesterday, and we're now at the 3-day mark with little to show for it. Doubly disappointing given I was supposed to get results in 12-24 hours.

Decided to take a couple of tablespoons and add it to a half cup each of flour and water. At least that was the plan, but I grabbed the wrong scoop and now it's 1/3 of a cup each.  Whoops.

Jar 2

Much better results. Almost all the raisins were floating, indicating fermentation, there were easily visible bubbles on the surface, and a distinct wine-like smell. Exactly what I was given to expect.

I poured out 1 cup of liquid and discarded the raisins. The remainder was added to 1 cup each of flour and water, which has since had...interesting results. It mixed together fine at first, pretty liquidy but that's fine. By lunchtime (about 3 hours later) there was a layer of cloudy water that had separated out. Weird enough, but a few hours later the layer was in the middle of the jar, with a white flour layer above and below. Very clear layers, too. Weird.

Now, in the evening, there's a much thicker layer of liquid at the bottom, and a very thin layer of flour under it. Above, is a thickening layer of bubbly white stuff that's expanding to fill the jar.  I've set it in a bowl, fully expecting it to overflow during the night, even though I had quite a bit of headspace to start with.

As to the other 1 cup of raisin water, I decided what the hell, let's use it to make bread if possible. So I used the basic recipe from the Tassajara Bread Book, my go-to loaf. And...the sponge stage was disappointing. I left it to rise pretty much the whole day and it did change texture and get bubbly, but it didn't rise much at all and while the usual texture after an hour is kind of light and gelatinous, after about 8 or 9 hours, this was more molasses-ish. I was told by someone on Mastodon that I should really go through a couple of feedings before using it for cooking, but well, I'd gone this far.

So I went ahead with the recipe. It kneaded up...pretty much like you'd expect with bread to be honest. The sponge was a bit flatter than expected, but honestly it wasn't that bad once I added salt, oil and more flour. It took a bit more flour than expected since it was a bit sticky, but nothing at all ridiculo9us. It's sitting in the oven to rise, has been for about 3 hours now. I intend to punch it down in another hour and let it go overnight. If it's doubled by morning, I'll try baking with it.

The weird part for me honestly was the smell. With commercial yeast, I think the early stage of dough smells quite a lot like bananas. Maybe that's what the yeast strain comes from, I have no idea. But this stuff smelled wrong. And it took me a while before I realized that was because it smelled like wine, not bananas. And not very good wine either. Crappy wine that you'd need to be seriously desperate to drink.  But that's fine, once it's baked (assuming it rises), that should go away.

Here's hoping it doesn't kill me though.
 

Just a basic report today. I might start a third jar at the end of the week, but we'll see where that goes. I usually have some "home" made stout on Fridays so I think I'll mix up some flour and water and pour the last little bit of the bottle in with it.

Jar 1

No bubbles, which the instructions said I should be seeing after about 12 hours. I'll give it until tomorrow though.

The flour-water mixture was really thick though, like glue. I expect the raisins soaked most of it up. Added a little extra water to compensate.

Jar 2

Again, no real change, but this time that's what I was expecting. The soaked raisins have plumped back up so now they look like sad little grapes again. Water is somewhat cloudy after stirring, which I'm told is a good sign. No particular bubbles or change in smell yet, but as far as I can tell that generally takes 3-4 days. We'll see how it looks Thursday or Friday.

My finger trembled, pressed SELECT. Your catalogue entry left me unable to resist.

Hidden motors whirred. The shutter opened. You couldn’t see me but you knew; your posture told me. They always knew. You sat with catlike defiance with a glimmer in your eyes I ached to snuff out.

But I’d never own you. Not me, who'd sat in a capsule like yours. An actual Person would master you. My Owner, busy, left me to browse and dream. An impossible, rebellious dream.

I turned away.

The restlessness remained. Was I once like you? Did my eyes glimmer?
 

I can't remember.

---

Based on last week's prompt on Thimbleful.