Fermenting

Let’s talk about things that make my heart sing at Boodaville. For example fermenting. I love fermenting stuff.

A volunteer from Cyprus, Olivia, came in May this year to Boodaville and introduced us to sourdough. She taught us how to create our own “sourdough baby” as we call it (during the season our baby literally grew up and we called it “masa madre”) and make the most delicious pita bread. Olivia moved on to pursue her sourdough career and we bake sourdough pita’s regularly. Sourdough is incredibly simple and tasty. Every day we feed our masa madre and “harvest” some already fermented sourdough to kick start today’s bread. If we want to pause it for a few days we put our sourdough baby in the fridge, if we want to pause it for a few weeks we put her in the freezer. As simple as that.

Kombucha is fermented tea, also introduced by Olivia. We have one big jar of kombucha and since that one is going really well and tastes great we split it up in several smaller jars and have experiments. All volunteers on site have at least one little jar to do weird experiments with. At the moment we have kombucha in an airtight container, apple-kombucha and tea-free kombucha. We taste and compare. Fail and try again. It’s fun. It’s also interesting to see how kombucha responds to outdoor temperatures. In summertime it fermented super fast. Winter has arrived and the kombucha is very very slooooowww…

Least favourite under the Boodavillians but the most fascinating to me are the lactobacteria. Lactobacteria are airborne, present everywhere and all they need is a nice home (which I created in a jar with starchy water and no lid) and it grows in a beautiful sour smelling substance. It is very effective to speed up the composting process, for example if our -usually odourless- compost toilet goes smelly. It produces a lot of gas during that process and when we once added lactobacteria to closed buckets of humanure permaculture teacher, Marc, almost freaked out. The pressure in the buckets could build up and the lid would explode off-sending our poo flying. That’s called learning from experience, isn’t it?

During a permaculture conference I learned how to multiply microorganisms for the compost toilet so that one is definitely on my to do list. And I’m still looking for a neighbour with some goats so I can start making cheese… hmmm… I love fermenting stuff.