Assignment:
Start a microbial culture that you will keep as a companion for the rest of the semester.
Idea:
Nukazuke are Japanese rice-bran ferments. They’re made by first preparing a bed of rice bran, salt, water and additional ingredients like mustard powder, kombu, dried red chili flakes and garlic. Other add-ons can be used instead of these. After mixing together the ingredients, bury a vegetable, chopped if necessary but with skin-on, in the rice bran bed. The salt in the rice bran bed functions just like salt in a lacto-ferment; it promotes healthy lactobacilus growth and inhibits other pathogenic bacteria that can’t survive in higher-salt concentrations. The rice bran supplies sugar for the naturally occurring bacteria in the air, and the buried vegetable (especially its skin) often carries a lactobacilus biome that will help begin culturing the rice bran bed.
Each day until mature, swap out the vegetable in the bed. This helps promote a more diverse microbiome in the rice bran bed. I’ve been tasting the pickles each of the last two days; they are noticeably transformed from their normal state, slightly sweeter and saltier, but still very young for a nukazuke. I expect that within a week I will have a mature bed.
Once the bed is mature, I’ll be burying vegetables or ~12 hours or more to get the fermented final product. I’ll try different vegetables, and eventually I may take some of the mature culture to
I followed this recipe, and also learned a lot from The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz.