Beetroot Rhubarb-Kimchi Salad

Invite me to your sunny picnic, this is what I’ll make to bring!  Fresh and spicy, sweet and sour, savoury, crunchy, moreish, yum!

You all know I would never be strictly prescriptive in these salads that combine fermented elements with fresh fruit and vegetables. This one is simply

• grated beetroot,
• chopped apples,
• a few tablespoons  of  Rhubarb Kimchi, pureed, mixed in with:
• a vinaigrette of olive oil and orange juice
• dash of toasted sesame oil
• a sprinkle of toasted pecans

Add anything else– goats cheese, feta, other nuts and seeds, carrots, fennel, cabbage, herbs, wild greens, lettuces or leaves….  Whatevah!

You can always use cabbage kimchi in salad dressings too.

The rhubarb kimchi, pureed, is also a wonderful salsa / raw chutney with goat’s cheese and crackers.

And of course, scraps from the beetroot, apple, and orange, and a new stalk of rhubarb from the raised bed in the garden, make a wonderful kvass!  And nothing’s been wasted.

Snippled Beans: Pennsylvania Dutch Stringbean Sauerkraut

 

Not the prettiest pictures; actually they are so unappealing to look at, I take a certain contrarian pleasure posting them on a food blog where there’s the expectation that food needs to be beautiful.  (The reality is ferments often lose a lot of their initial vivid colour.)

Even if visually not so lovely, fermented Snippled Beans are an easy and delicious side dish.

Welsh Fermentation Festival 27th August, 2016

Welsh Fermentation Festival

We are excited to anounce our first ever Welsh Fermentation Festival, a day to explore all things fermented.  Come along for a fun day of tasting, drinking, workshops, music and more.   Stallholders and workshops to be anounced soon!

Festival will be held at Welsh Mountain Cider, Prospect Orchard, Llanidloes SY186JY

View original post

Recycled Pumpernickel: Fermenting Kvass, Gateau, Bread

  

Fortunate am I to receive occasional parcels of unsold bread from a friend who runs a really top quality bakery here in mid-Wales, Andy’s Bread. A few months back he gave me several loaves of pumpernickel, a dark, dense and sweet rye bread.  His version includes whole rye grain, rye chops, rye, sourdough, molasses,  and old pumpernickel. The loaf is coated in rye chops (and baked in a hot oven which is then turned off overnight); a “lid” is placed on top of the tins to “steam” the loaves and prevent their drying out.  Andy’s pumpernickel is something special– and not so dissimilar from his Borodinski breads which contain coriander seeds and powder, malt extract and molasses.  These are true artisan breads in that they come from long and varied traditions and are expertly crafted in particular, local conditions.

Andy’s pumpernickel makes great croutons for leek and potato, and split pea soup; I will be using some from another batch tomorrow for chocolate Christmas bark as per Claire Ptak’s wonderful recipe here.

Being gifted with food that is “surplus” or “waste” anyway is really freeing, and allowed me to feel I could experiment.  I’d long been curious to try Bread Kvass, so in the absence of any planned trips to Russia or Russian communities elsewhere, I knew I’d have to try to make it. I also wanted to reproduce an effort from a while earlier in which I made a sourdough cake from recycled bread.  And I sadly found out that the friend who taught me her resourceful and roughshod approach to bread had died– so I was of a rare mind to bake bread.

Lacto-Fermented Celeriac Remoulade

Beautiful in its knobby hairy tentacled-rootletted glory, the celeriac is an autumn root with the flavour of a spring leaf.  Ish.

Perhaps you find yourself in its company (a veg box, a farmer’s market) and are unsure what direction to take the conversation? It’s wonderful roasted, in soups and gratins, and alone or mixed with potatoes or other roots in mash.  Or, if you’ve read about the collapse of ocean eco-systems, you might want to bookmark the delicious vegetarian kedgeree Anna Jones calls Vegeree.

And of course there’s the famous French salad Celeri Remoulade, which has been inspiring me.

Fairfood International and the Moroccan Tomato Industry

Fairfood International and a Moroccan Tomato Salad

————————

Fairfood International is an Amsterdam-based organisation that campaigns “to improve the socio-economic conditions of vulnerable people in our food system, such as smallholder farmers, workers (especially women) and consumers, and to ensure the sustainable production and consumption of food,” as they explain on their website.  You can learn a lot on their site about global commodity foods and workers’ lives in industries like pineapples from the Philippines, Shrimp from Asia, Vanilla from Madagascar and Central American Sugarcane.

I’ve been impressed with their efforts against poor working conditions, low wages, job insecurity, and pesticide exposure among people working in the really huge tomato industry in Morocco.

Green Goddess Dip and Dressings: Fermenting Classics

After that success of a dip with the fermented gooseberries, I began to ponder party dips and the social and gustatory joys of standing, chatting and especially gesturing with crudités of carrot and celery decorated in blobs of creamy green.

I’d remembered the pleasure in the days of yore eating dips made from packets of dried onion soup mixed with sour cream, and others in a Green Goddess family in which herbs like parsley, dill, even tarragon, are mixed with garlic and chives and sour cream, and often mayonnaise or an egg yolk too (to emulsify), and perhaps anchovies, for a little secret umami.

And there saying hello on my kitchen counter were the herbs I began to ferment nearly two months ago according to traditions of Ukraine and France and most certainly other places as well.

So I made Green Goddess Dip with:

Pear Kvass: DIY Pear Soda

Pear Kvass: bubbly, light, perhaps the slightest bit alcoholic, totally refreshing– not perry, not pear juice, more like a “Pear Appletiser®”, with cheerful pro-biotic bacteria.  Very natural tasting, not over-sweet but hits the spot that is delighted with sweetness.

Fermenting Gooseberries in July: Salsa, Party Dip, Kvass

I had the good luck to pop into a charity shop at the end of a day when these two bags cost £1 each, together weighing 3.25kg,

If you are able to grow gooseberries, you’ll know they are very prolific if protected from berry-loving birds.

Natural Fizzy Drinks: Rhubarb Kvass, Apricot Nectar, Lemon Barley Water, Elderflower Champagne

Lately I’ve been having fun with simple, quick, refreshing and naturally bubbly drinks. These “pops” or “sodas” are inspired by fruit and vegetable versions of  Kvass as a kind of fermented infusion, traditional to Eastern Europe and Russia, which uses rye bread as its most basic component. But the name has come to be inclusive of many delicious home-made soft-drinks.