Makgeolli update - Day 17

Wow, what a difference a week makes! It's now about 8 days post-bottling, and the makgeolli has been sitting in the fridge in that time. I'm now pretty certain that I bottled it early, as the makgeolli is fully carbonated - I decided to release the pressure this morning to prevent the bottles from exploding in the fridge, and the full bottle was a heck of a lot more carbonated than fizzy drinks bought from the shop!

Whereas the makgeolli tasted ridiculously, unpleasantly sour when it was first bottled, it has mellowed quite a lot in the last week. It's still distinctly sour, and has developed a bit of a bitterness too, but there's now flavour beyond the sourness. It definitely tastes like makgeolli now, and I'd even go as far as to say that it's pleasant - not exactly a drink that I'd order, but one that I'd be happy to drink if it was there. I think we can declare this a success now! I think it might be improved with a bit of sweetness, so I might give adding a little sugar to it a go next time I drink it - but I'm pretty happy with it as a first attempt. I'll have to do a bit of reading to see if I can figure out how to make it naturally sweeter for next time - and yes, I think there will be a next time! 

My First Makgeolli Experiment - Day 9

Okay, so I forgot to do an update last night, but that's okay, because I decided that it was time to filter and bottle. It had about 7 1/2 days to ferment before bottling - I have no idea if I'm bottling late or early really; it's been pretty warm over the fermentation period (sitting in the 20-25C range for the most part).

For comparison, here's what the jar looked like just before I filtered it out. You could still hear some bubbling when disturbed, so I might have bottled it relatively early.

Filtering the brew was a right faff. I strained it through four layers of cheesecloth into a mixing bowl, and kept squirting it through gaps in the top where I drew the edges together, so I ended up having to strain it all twice. I think I might need to go and buy a proper filtering bag...

After all that, it made about 1 1/4 litres of makgeolli concentrate.

Right now, it tastes very sour, and it's room temperature so it's really hard to assess the taste properly - but it's definitely pretty alcoholic! I'll chill it down in the fridge and give it a proper taste tonight when it's cold. I'm hoping that the taste will mature over the next couple of days too, and maybe pick up a bit of carbonation - but we will see!

[Edit] Quick update at the end of the day, after the makgeolli extract had had time to chill: It's a heck of a lot better when cold! It's still very, very sour - so much so that I suspect that I might need to add a bit of sugar to make it palatable - but it definitely has some of the taste/texture that I expect from makgeolli. I still haven't given it a proper go yet (I just had the tiniest little taste), and I'm hoping that it might mellow a bit and gain a bit of carbonation over the next few days. I wouldn't say that the tiny taste I had of it was nice, but it's not too bad either, and I think it's recognisable as makgeolli, so that's a definite success at least. I'm cautiously optimistic at least. We'll see how it turns out in a few days' time!

My First Makgeolli Experiment - Day 7

I think we're nearly there! There's very little change compared with yesterday, and it's smelling rather alcoholic. It's been fermenting for 6 days now, so we'll see how it is tomorrow, but we might be nearly ready to filter and bottle it very soon!

My First Makgeolli Experiment - Day 6

The changes are now pretty subtle - the layer of floating rice on the top is definitely thinning out, and there is less in the way of trapped bubbles now. It looks like the fermentation is slowing down. There's also now a distinct smell of alcohol - not strong, but it definitely smells alcoholic. It looks like we're getting there!

My First Makgeolli Experiment - Day 5

After 4 days and a couple of hours of fermenting (I really should have started on day 0; that would have been much less confusing), there are no huge changes from yesterday. I think the upper layer of rice is thinning out a little, and perhaps there aren't so many bubbles in it, but it does look pretty similar to yesterday. I cracked the lid open to have a smell - it definitely seems to be developing a little bit of sweetness to the aroma now, but I wouldn't say that that was the main scent. It still mostly smells of fermentation, but not quite the same scent as with bread or beer.

My First Makgeolli Experiment - Day 4

I gave it one last (extra) stir this morning, at about the 64 hour mark, which will be the last until it gets decanted and filtered! The three layers are beginning to become a little more prominent again this evening - the murky liquid layer is definitely thicker than before. Lots of bubbles still visible, particularly in the floating rice layer on top. I didn't open the jar to smell it this evening - I thought I ought to leave it undisturbed for a little. 

My First Makgeolli Experiment - Day 3

Around 51 hours in, there's just a little hint of three layers forming now. It was actually clearer a couple of hours ago, but the bottom layer of sediment has grown a bit since then. The earthiness has pretty much vanished from the smell; I wouldn't say that it smells like the normal yeasty smell, but it's more like that than it was before. There's maybe a slight hint of sweetness to the smell, but I'm not certain that I'm not just imagining it.

My First Makgeolli Experiment - Day 2

After about 27 hours, there are noticeable changes! There's now a thin layer of liquid evident at the bottom with some bubbling, which I guess is a good sign. The rice has really started to break down now - the texture is much more like watery, cooked porridge (whereas yesterday it felt pretty dry and firm). It smells similar to how it did yesterday - a relatively faint smell of the nuruk, which smells a bit earthy like dried mushrooms - no obvious smell of alcohol or yeast yet.

My First Makgeolli Experiment - Day 1

This isn't even remotely baking, but it does involve yeast, so maybe it's relevant enough anyway. I really like makgeolli, but it's really expensive to buy in the UK. But it also looks really easy to brew a basic makgeolli, as long as you can get hold of nuruk - which was where the snag was for quite a long time. But eventually, I discovered that there is a single brand of nuruk that is imported into the UK by HMart (and this is the only brand and only supplier I've managed to find after quite extensive searching). Unhelpfully, it's not labelled as "nuruk" but rather Choripdong Enzyme Powder, which explains why I had such a hard time finding it. But now that I've found it, I've bought some together with a couple of kilos of sweet rice (chapssal), and it's time to try making my first makgeolli! I'm following the basic recipe in the Primer on Brewing Makgeolli produced by the Korean government, but I've been surprised to discover that pretty much all of the basic starter danyangju recipes that I've seen agree incredibly closely on the ratio of about 1:1:0.1 for rice:water:nuruk.

First Makgeolli

Ingredients

• 750g Sweet rice (chapssal)
• 750ml Water
• 70g Nuruk

Method

1. Wash the rice until the water runs clear.
2. Soak the rice for 2-6 hours.
3. Drain the rice well.
4. Steam the rice in a steamer lined with damp cheesecloth for 40 minutes.
5. Remove the rice from the steamer and spread out to cool until it reaches ~25C.
6. Put the cooled mixed rice in the fermentation jar with the water and nuruk, and mix thoroughly until the rice absorbs all of the water.
7. Wipe down the insides of the jar, and cover loosely with the lid. I used a paper towel underneath the jar lid with the rubber gasket removed.
8. Leave in a warm place (ideally ~20-25C) to ferment.
9. Stir thoroughly every 12 hours for the first 48 hours, wiping down the sides of the jar after each stir.
10. Leave to ferment for a total of ~7-10 days.
11. Once fermentation is complete, stir the mixture together and filter through cheesecloth.
12. Bottle the liquid and store refrigerated. Mix and dilute with water to drink.

Lots of the blogs I read and videos I watched really emphasised washing the rice until the water ran completely clear. I washed the rice continuously for around 15 minutes and the water still wasn't completely clear, so I gave up and decided that was good enough. I can't see it making any tangible difference given how washed the rice was - but at least all of our houseplants got well watered!

This is the rice just before steaming - it turns out that 750g is quite a lot of rice!

This is how it looks at the end of step 7. It's taken a surprisingly long time in total - I started washing rice a little before 11am this morning, and it was 6pm by the time it reached this stage. Admittedly, the first 5 hours was essentially just letting the rice soak, but it still feels like it's been a long process!

Are bananas the fastest fruit?

I dunno, but we got overtaken by the bananas this week. In warm weather, bananas seem to ripen a bit like pears, and I ended up with a whole load of very mushy bananas that weren't great for eating - so time to do a traditional banana bread! The recipe is just the same one that I used before (that was eight years ago - eek!), where the only changes were that the bananas I used were very, very ripe and a little larger, giving ~450g of peeled bananas - I didn't scale any of the other ingredients though.

Here it is, ready for the oven:

Looks good straight out of the oven!

I'm a little concerned by how soft and wibbly it is, but I'm hoping that it'll firm up once it cools. I stabbed it multiple times with a skewer, which came out clean, so I think it's done - I guess there was an awful lot of banana in it, which might be contributing to the wibbling.

And the verdict? Yes, it was definitely quite under done - the texture is a bit mushy and rather soft (not altogether unlike extremely ripe bananas, unsurprisingly). But the flavour is absolutely wonderful - I'm amazed at how banana-y it is, and it's got just the right sweetness to it. It's got a really, really lovely flavour to it - and actually, the texture is rather nice once you've got used to it - it's just that this one is more banana than bread (which might not actually be a bad thing overall!).

A well-baked tart?

I saw this post on Reddit last week, and decided that baking a bakewell tart sounded like an excellent idea. And so now I'm doing just that. Sometimes there's no more backstory to my bakes than that!

Bakewell Tart

Ingredients

For the pastry

• 140g Plain flour
• 7g (~1tbsp) Caster sugar
• 2g Salt
• 70g Butter
• ~2tbsp Cold water

For the filling

• 125g Caster sugar
• 125g Butter
• 1 Egg
• 30g Plain flour
• 125g Ground almonds
• 90g (~3tbsp) Black cherry jam*
• 25g Flaked almonds

Method

1. Rub the flour, sugar, salt and butter for the pastry together until it resembles breadcrumbs.
2. Add just enough water to form a dough.
3. Roll out and line a greased pie dish**.
4. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.
5. Prick the base with a fork, fill with baking beans.
6. Bake blind at 180C for ~15 minutes, remove the baking beans and bake for a further ~5 mins.
7. Cream the butter and sugar for the filling together.
8. Beat in the egg.
9. Mix in the flour and ground almonds.
10. Spread the jam generously over the base of the pie dish, then fill with almond mixture.
11. Sprinkle the flaked almonds over the top.
12. Bake at 160C for ~40mins, then increase temperature to 200C for ~5 minutes to brown.
13. Leave to cool for 5 minutes before removing from the pie dish and leaving to cool fully.

*Yes, I know raspberry is probably most traditional, but (a) it's what I had in the fridge and (b) cherry jam is tastier than raspberry jam anyway.

**For reference, my pie dish is around 16cm diameter (quite small) - but could easily be anywhere between 15cm and 18cm depending on how you choose to measure it.

I can hardly believe it - for once, I actually got the quantities of both pastry and filling right! Here's the tart about to go into the oven.

Gosh it looks good fresh from the oven! It wobbles rather a lot more than I had expected though - I'm hoping that it sets properly when it cools. I'm a little concerned that there might not be enough egg and/or flour in the frangipane.

I don't think I needed to worry. By the time I turned it out from the dish, it had firmed up nicely. It released incredibly easily too!

And obviously, I didn't have the patience to wait for it to cool, so I dived straight in while it was still hot. Which is a terrible mistake actually - you can see that the jam started leaking out and warm frangipane isn't actually as nice as it is once it's cold. But just look at it!

First impressions are pretty good on the whole. The pastry could have been a bit shorter, but it's not tough either. I definitely oversalted it slightly though - not horrendously so, but you can taste the salt which isn't ideal. For the filling, it's hard to tell while the frangipane is still warm, but I think there might be a little too much butter in the filling, and I'm also not quite sure I got the jam:frangipane ratio right. We will have to wait and see once it's actually cooled!

Edit: The verdict once it cooled was pretty similar to what I thought beforehand. The oversalted pastry was less noticeable, but the frangipane definitely seemed too buttery - perhaps a little less butter and maybe a little more flour would have helped. Fiona and I both agreed that it could have done with a bit more jam too. I think perhaps a slightly thicker pastry would have been nice as well, and would have helped offset the softness of the frangipane. But overall, it's pretty good!

Other spices are available

Today's Fiona's official birthday. She doesn't usually have an official birthday, but her real birthday is inconveniently close to the start of her new job, so she's decided that this year she's having an official birthday. In celebration, I'm making cinnamon rolls, but in the spirit of experimentation, I decided to try out some other spices too. Half of the batch (6 rolls) is just straight up, classic cinnamon, but we're trying out nutmeg, cardamom, mixed spice and chilli powder (separately). But of course I'm lazy, so rather than making four different butter-sugar-spice pastes, I did it as normal for cinnamon, but just made plain spiceless butter-sugar paste for all of the experimental rolls and then sprinkled the spice over the top.

Left: cinnamon. Right, top-to-bottom: nutmeg, cardamom, mixed spice and chilli powder.

...And I've already forgotten which was which. The right hand 6 are definitely cinnamon, and the one in the very top-left corner is chilli, but I absolutely can't remember the rest. I'm sure we'll figure it out when we eat them!

I had a bit of a nightmare getting these to prove, as it was so cold in the house for most of the day. In the end, they had about 6 hours to rise, and still only really got going in the final hour when I threw in the towel and put them in the oven set to about the lowest setting I could (well below the lowest marked temperature). Certainly not an ideal rise - you can see some of the butter paste has melted out from me having to whack it into the oven...

And this is as close to a finished picture as you get this time around - the glaze is still in the saucepan that you can see behind, but I got a bit too excited once the buns were glazed and forgot to take a final finished photo. But really, can you blame me? Cinnamon rolls fresh from the oven are really hard to resist! They came out alright in the end - I had thought I'd let them brown too much initially and ended up turning the oven all the way down to 160C instead of 180C, but I got away with it.

The cinnamon rolls were lovely as always- but what about the experimental ones? Well, the chilli powder was very meh in the end - you could feel the heat and it gave a pleasant warmth, but really it wasn't worth the effort. It was still nice, but honestly I'd say it was a waste of what could have become a cinnamon roll. The cardamom was actually really quite good - for once I managed to make a cardamom flavoured pastry without overdoing it - but definitely still not as nice as cinnamon. Good as a change though! Sadly though, both the nutmeg and mixed spice ones were vastly underspiced, and were incredibly subtle. From what you could taste, I think both seemed promising, but it was rather hard to tell!