Author: doodledweller
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The Sake Way

Mashed fruits, left alone for some time, ferment themselves. Natural yeast already present in their juices consume readily available sugar to make alcohol and gas. Grains, unlike fruit juices however, lock their sugars in starches. In order to ferment grains, their starch chains need to be unpacked and then digested into sugars by enzymes. The…
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Pomegranate Wine

To have a pomegranate tree in the garden is to be delighted in its beauty all year. Among the first to bloom for summertime, the tree lades itself in bright red blossoms, as eye-catching as a fiery goblet upon the mantelpiece of the garden. By midsummer, flowers slowly swell into green orbs fattening up atop…
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Mead

Mead is fermented honey water. Because honey is mostly constituted of a supersaturated solution of sugar glucose and fructose, mead can have as much alcohol as wine or more. Unlike cider, mead already carries an overt honey tone. Fermentation coaxes out its other floral and fruity aromas, reminiscing the flower nectar that bees feed upon. …
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Grape Cider

One of the fascinating aspects about fermentation is how it transforms food. For certain food such as wine and cider, their flavors after fermentation represent even more of their essence than before. While grape juice tastes generically fruity, wine pushes floral and fruity aromas directly at the nose, exudes honey and caramel notes, and recalls…
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Candied & Brandied

Among the most popular methods to preserve fruits is candied, which is to cook them in sugar. Cooked fruits loosen their natural juice into the sugar to become syrupy and release their own pectin to thicken it. Fruit preserves are typically organized into jam, jelly, and marmalade. Jam is fruit bits and sugar stewed into…
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Learn A Language

In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, learning French helped transform Lula Mae, a farm girl from rural Texas, into Holly Golightly, a New York café society girl. It’s a tall order, but I can verify that learning French improves English pronunciation, as it certainly did for me. Not only for the accent however, it also advanced my…
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Culturally Verbal

It is well accepted that the environment influences culture and language. We develop words for objects, build habits and beliefs based on the phenomena observed around us. The brain learns and forms its understanding of the world upon this information. Speech and language are so interwoven into our mind that it feels impossible to separate…
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Bilingual

I once met a girl who spoke four languages. I asked her how she kept them all straight in her head. Smoke puffing out from her lips, she admitted that it was getting very full, and that she didn’t think she could hold any more words in there. I told her that I didn’t know…
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Pickles

Pickling is among the simplest and quickest approaches to fermentation. It is mostly utilized for vegetables, where they are submerged in a brine along with herbs and spices of choice. As they are left to ferment, existing lactic acid cultures develop to give the vegetables and the brine a pleasantly sour taste. They are ready…
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Salt Cured, III

Like fermentation, curing is a method to preserve food without the need for heat. However, whereas fermentation takes advantage of good microbes to keep food safe for eating, curing prevents bacteria from entering it at all. Both methods result in food’s physical and chemical transformation – fermentation with the aid of external microbes, and curing…