You wait and you wait and you wait and you wait

The ginger beer is coming along beautifully - bizarrely so. I kept a jar apart from the main bottlage to test as it goes along. My only concern is that it was already delicious and delicately effervescent on Monday night after bottling it Monday morning, and it's not supposed to be ready for two weeks. But it's hard to see how it can get any nicer, although it's still a little too sweet, which I guess will go away as the ginger bug works its magic. I'm concerned that it'll taste yeasty instead. We'll see. The waiting is the hardest thing.

Anyways, it's still in progress and so is the second round of kim chi, but I think I can start to go out on a limb and say Wild Fermentation is ace.

Crack chi

Wow. The kim chi, which I thought went so badly, actually went really, really well. How well exactly I have a hard time saying because it's been a good four years since I had kim chi prepared by a Korean, and because I have another couple of days to go before the first symptoms of botulism would be due to appear, but it is damn good and I can't stop eating it. I think at the point where I'd tasted this batch before it just hadn't aged enough; it's still crunchier than I remember kim chi being but no longer burningly, insufferably hot - the right amount of hot now. I think for the next batch I'll make it less hot because the F-word isn't into super-chili anymore but still, for me it's ace.

So ace has it been, in fact, that on Saturday when I realized how much I'd eaten in such a short space of time, I had the kissing cousin of a panic attack upon realizing there was a risk of me being once more without kimchi. So I decided to blow off the hammam and run to the grocery store to get the ingredients for a new batch instead, which is currently stinking up our kitchen with goodness.

For the current batch I used this recipe, and for the batch that's aging now I'm using a recipe from a book Sam recommended, Wild Fermentation. I'm making ginger beer from a recipe in the same book. It's a good read - God, I love gay hippies, I wish there were more of them - and it's totally firing me up to ferment everything. I'm putting the F-word on the case today to make some peach vinegar while I'm at work, and I'm going to order kombucha gunk, and kefir grains, all of which home-raising of live food is starting to suggest to me that I'm insufferably broody (did have a dream last night about being five minutes away from going into labour). Anyways, I'll wait to second the Wild Fermentation recommendation as cookbook until I manage to prepare a few of the dishes all the way to the end, but it's a nice little read in the meantime if you find it.

Also wanted to flag up to you something I found when looking for more kim chi recipes: pay particular attention to the "shit needle" entry. Koreans, man. Holy fuck. The way the blogger breaks it down makes it seem like there's something, somehow, kind of awesome about that. In the abstract. I'm happy enough to not be subject to it here.