Sapodillas (Manilkara zapote) are in season again and this year we have a bumper harvest. The fruit has a very sweet caramel-honey taste. We have been picking them every morning. For an inexperienced picker, the ripe fruit forms a taut and shiny appearance. At first it is difficult to spot but after picking hundreds of them you can get the hang of it. Here is a picture of Gnome ready for action on the farm!
Gnome Armed With Fruit Picker.Picking Sapodilla.Picking Sapodilla!
This year, we are going to sun-dry some of them. We like to eat them with beef jerky!
Dried Sapodilla.
Some more sapodilla melomel would go down nicely!
Sapodilla Melomel.
Oooooh, so many to pick and so much to make!! We will of course eat some of them too…
The days are getting sunnier and drier and so we are able to get up at 4am and finish all our work by 10am. Gnome has been cleaning up the coconuts and brush-mowing all the tall grass and small trees in that area. We have managed to use up all the fallen coconuts so presently, we are unable to process any coconuts until Gnome procures a big stick (20 feet or 6 metres) to knock them down. Gnomes do not possess the character trait of scaling heights (unless in emergency situations) so anyone waiting for our coconut products needs to wait for the big stick. He would rather have his feet firmly planted on the ground…Gnomes are kinda earthy creatures.
During the midday heat, we are (romantically) reading the Chinese Herbal Medicine: Materia Medica textbook together (thank-you Ted Berlin for your generosity in sharing such wonderful works). I read out loud whilst Gnome makes occasional comments on the specific herbal monographs that we read about. Interestingly enough, it takes him less time to understand the Traditional Chinese Medicine model. I still have my feet firmly (somewhat) entrenched in “anglo-thinking” whilst Gnome understands Chinese concepts better since he grew up in Asia. To put it in his terms: I am a “banana”; yellow on the outside and white on the inside and he is an “egg”; white on the outside and yellow on the inside. It is so funny because he thinks he is more Chinese than I am and I am Chinese but happen to have been brought up in Scotland.
Yes, you have guessed it…we are closet encyclopaedia readers and we are “coming out” with it. Well, I suppose that is how we became doctors…by reading copiously.
Anyway, enough about us. I am sure that you just wanted to know about the Passion fruit melomel! Well today, I sieved out the pulp and juice of 10 passion fruit:
Passionfruit seeds and pulp.
I added water to the pulp (an extra 2 litres or 2 quarts). We then added about 750mls (3 cups) of honey to get a specific gravity of about 1.09 to 1.1 which translates to a 12.5% alcohol content. I then sterilised the solution by boiling it up. Next, I poured it all into a 1 gallon carboy and sealed it with an air-lock.
Passionfruit Melomel.
The last step is to “pitch the yeast” which just means adding the yeast once the mead has cooled down. And then you wait for the bubbling (fermentation) to commence…Blub Blub Blub!! Wait a while, wait a little longer and when you can not possibly wait any longer, you drink it! How easy is that? Munckin Magical Melomel!! Try to wait out at least 3 months!!
Hello There!! I will try to catch-up with this post and bring you up to date. On Tuesday night we had a scary, gusty storm that resulted in a power-cut for most of the night and of course, the Internet went down with it. The storm has brought cooler weather with grey clouds and it even rained heavily this morning. The Internet started up again today…yay…it is so insidious how we feel that “we need Internet” and life just isn’t the same without it. When I down-loaded my bunch of late emails, they weren’t all that exciting and most of them were spam, anyway!
Well, since it was a Rainy Day, we made Pineapple Melomel (mead with fruit). Yesterday, I had bought 20 ripe pineapples from the market for BZD 30.00 (USD 15.00) in an attempt to excite Gnome into making some more booze (nice, sparkling, champagne-like stuff) for me. After I got the pineapples loaded onto the truck, he gave me a whiny look and said that he was hoping that I had bought the plantains instead of the pineapples. That remark got him a “Chinese Woman Look” and stopped the complaints quick smart.
This is what we did.
We removed the heads and scrubbed them in the sink:
Washing Pineapples.
I then started chopping up the pineapples. Whilst I was doing this, I kindly asked Gnome to take some pictures of this process. All the pictures were soooo baaaad!! They were out of focus and made my hands look stumpy and small…or, are they really like that? I had to re-take some photos:
Chopping Pineapples…Look No Hands!!Pineapple, Chopped.
Gnome put the pineapple chunks through the juicer to get the juice and the pulp:
Juicing Pineapple.
We ended up processing 10 pineapples in all because it was actually a lot of work and the juicer was over-heating and complaining with the work-load. So, we managed to get about 6 litres (1 and 1/2 gallons) of juice from it all.
Frothy Pineapple Juice.
We got an extra 2 litres (2 quarts) of juice from the squeezing of the pulp:
Squeezed Pineapple Fibre.
We waste nothing!! We gave this and some pineapple peel to the duckies this morning. It was a Pineapple Feast…look closely at silly white duck…he even has a bit of pineapple stuck to his head.
Pineapple Fest For Duckies!
We have noticed that our duckies are totally neophobic with food unless it is yellow in colour. So, I was received by joyful and frenzied quackings today when I brought out the basin of pineapple waste.
Duckie Eating Pineapple.
While I was out playing with the duckies, Gnome proceeded with the making of his pineapple melomel; honey and fresh Toledo rainwater (very fresh!) was added to make the batch up to 5 gallons. Gnome will be posting up the recipe in Bored-in-Belize over the next few days.
Heating Melomel:
Heating Melomel.
Yes, I know…it all looks very yellow (just like all the other pictures) but believe me, this will taste great! Tomorrow, we will be processing the rest of the pineapples and adding honey and fresh ginger. In the words of Gnome, “Make it a Metheglin.”
Good Friday to all and a Good Fermentation Friday too! We just got our first active blub from the melomel…this is when it starts bubbling through the air lock. It is a very important milestone in childhood…oh no, I mean fermentation development (another Doctor joke)! With experience, the Blub Blub comes in different pitches and this one is rather tinkling, melodic and rather loquacious. Gnome says it sounds like it wants another sibling…oh no, he means another fermenting bucket for company!
Anyway, let us get give you an update on our fermentation adventures: Firstly, we had to sadly dump the two gallons of coconut shiro miso, which we had so joyfully made up last week. This was on account of the dreaded Bongkrek. Last week, we read an article on Tempeh Bongkrek which is a variety of tempeh prepared with coconut. This food has now been banned because it can get contaminated with Burkholderia gladioli which leads to the release of bongkrek acid which is lethal to humans. Being doctors, we started thinking about this a whole lot and wondered if we had made Bongkrek Miso! And Gnome said that it would be really embarrassing for the demise of two doctors in Belize to be attributed to coconut miso (death by coconut)! After that comment, I decided to use the coconut miso as compost around the farm!
Gnome wants to ask a question to any microbiologist out there: is there any risk of bongkrek with miso (made with coconut) which has already been innoculated with Aspergillus oryzae?
To make up for this unfortunate mishap, we made some shiro miso today…just with regular black beans…nothing too exotic.
Mixing Shiro Miso.Shiro Miso Ready in 8 Weeks!
We had a look at our bucket of soya sauce which was started in July 2014 and gave it a whizz with the paint stirrer:
Paint Stirring Soya Sauce.
We felt that the soya sauce was rather thick and paste-like in texture and therefore we made an executive decision to just use it as miso. It tastes similar to miso, a bit more acidic and fruity but nonetheless palatable. This solves the problem with the miso shortage until the new shiro miso is ready in June.
Another jam-packed day of fermentation!! This is really a Gnome post but I will make a serious attempt to chronicle the day in the same enthused manner as Gnome.
Well, we started the day off by bottling the mead, which never cleared. Gnome gave me a glass to sample and I promptly scoffed it all down and told him that it was very palatable.
Next, Gnome attended to his Rice Koji in between all the bottling and brewing. He is trying to develop a new system of inoculating cooked rice with previously made rice koji. That way he doesn’t need to use up Koji starter and he can feel assured that he can keep on making rice koji without the headache of bringing in the starter from overseas. This experimental batch is going really well and the Aspergillus oryzae seems to have colonised well and formed a lattice network. This new system is called: Special Care Koji Unit (SCKU)…this is a bit of a Doctor joke so please bear with our awful sense of humour! As you can see from the picture, Gnome has fashioned incubators for his koji babies:
Koji Incubators.
And yes, we are making melomel which is mead which contains fruit; in this case sapodilla and carrot were added.
Sapodilla Fruit, Ready To Eat.
I won’t go into the technical parts of making melomel because this is going to be a Bored-in-Belize project (Gnome: I’ve added the recipe right HERE) so I will just give you a brief run-down of what we did. Firstly, sapodilla fruit was placed in a heated pot of water and allowed to partially breakdown. Next, the mixture was filtered and the pulp was squeezed through muslin.
Sapodilla Wort.Straining Sapodilla Pulp (Gnome feet prove that this really happened!)..
This part was a Munchkin job:
Squeezing Sapodilla Pulp.
After the liquid was procured, Gnome measured the specific gravity and added 6 quarts of honey to make up the alcohol content to about 12%. As we speak, Gnome is re-heating the whole mixture including the added honey; he will allow it to cool down overnight and then add yeast in the morning. More fermenting tomorrow…
