The Tempehcubator!

So, to make tempeh, you need to keep it at 85-90 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 to 30 hours.  This can be done in a warm place in summer, in your oven with the pilot light on (if you have a gas oven), in a greenhouse, etc. But, if you live in cooler climes and/or want to know your temperature is being maintained properly, you definitely want an incubator.

For my incubator, I used a small fridge that I knew I no longer needed as a refrigerator.  It had been sitting around for about three years, and so, I was ready to upcycle it into something fantastic...

The Tempehcubator!

Here is the eerily lit Tempehcubator in it's temporary home.

You can also use a cheap, easily purchased, styrofoam cooler! Lay it down on its side, with the opening facing you, then the lid can become the "door" just like the fridge.  Cut a hole in the back just like you see here with the fridge, and proceed.  Or, come up with your own design, or hunt around for various designs that are around on the internet.

Most fridges apparently already have a hole (to release condensate) through which you can thread your thermostat wire without hassel, but alas, mine did not.  So, to reveal a hole in the back of the fridge, I needed to remove all the hardware from the refrigerator part of the refrigerator.  My dad helped with this!  We removed a TON of stuff, basically a plastic grocery bag full of screws, plates, wires, the fan, etc. etc.  I never got a picture of that bag of stuff (it's in my basement, I think), but here it is, the hole in back finally unadorned!

We were a little giddy when we finally got to look through the hole :-)

So, then we tried to wire a baseboard thermostat directly to the existing wiring of the refrigerator.  We had stripped wires, and were trying to decode the fridge vs. thermostat wiring situation, but were tired and didn't feel like being clever anymore.  Do you see ALL THOSE LITTLE HOLES in the back of the fridge? Well, each one had something attached to it and something attached to that, and we had removed all that stuff already :-)

Yeah, so, we gave up on wiring the baseboard heater and I ordered a plug-in thermostat on amazon.

Anyway, my dad, who can pretty much do anything, also quickly put together the lamp repair kit, which was awesome because I was tired.

Then, the holidays came, we went away, came back, and then I ordered my starter and had to wait for it.

Once I got my Powdered Tempeh Starter, I set to work at finishing the assembly of the incubator, so, back to work!

So, the wire that runs from the thermostat must fit out some kind of hole in the fridge. The hole in the back of my fridge was a pretty big square, so I had to make some adjustments to re-close the hole.

 I covered the rest of the hole up with a piece of a brown paper grocery bag.  I just used scotch tape on the inside of the fridge to tape it in there.  I also simply used scotch tape to secure the thermostat in it's place.  Easy.  I used a three prong converter with the thermostat so I could plug it into a regular two-prong extension cord.  The temperature probe (attached to the thermostat, sticks up from the top) should be on the inside of the fridge with the rest of the thermostat unit.

Anyway, so, here's the inside of the Tempehcubator again:

So, tape the paper bag over half the hole, stick thermostat on the other side and tape it (don't tape over the flap-door because you need to open that to set the temp).  Don't worry about those wires (yellow & blue) near the thermostat, those were to the fridge and I didn't cut them off, they aren't live.  Also, the fridge dial set to "4" isn't live, obviously, it was the fridge's.  So, set up your lamp kit, cover the base with a simple piece of tinfoil and smash the tinfoil into a lamp base :-).  I wanted to do that because it just fit a little better that way.  Don't lay down the light bulb on the floor of the fridge without aluminum foil under it, IT WILL MELT THE PLASTIC ON THE BOTTOM OF YOUR FRIDGE :-)  If you do want it to lie down, put some aluminum foil under and around  it so it doesn't melt the plastic of the fridge.  Anyway, so, I wanted it to stand up, so, that's what I did.  If you have a metal shelf, you can put it on that.  

I made removable shelves with chopsticks :-) I just measured the length I needed them to reach across into the shelving tracks, and then glued them together with a hot glue gun.  It took two chopsticks, overlapped by about two inches, to reach across.  You can also cut dowels to fit, but I didn't have any and I didn't feel like going to Home Depot.  I placed the removable shelves around the lamp, and I was done with the set up.  

Now, it's time to see if it works.  Plug the lamp into the thermostat, and make sure the thermostat is plugged into the wall.  Turn on the thermostat (switch for this one is on the right side) and turn on your lamp with its switch.  Set the thermostat dial to "heat" and the digital setting to 88 degrees (or anywhere between 85 and 90 that you like) just by using the up arrow.  Then, press the "hold" button.  This seems to override the default heat setting (which will go down to 62 degrees from 10 pm to 6am, I found that out the hard way!).  You can also fiddle with the time, and setting that if to correspond with the temp if you want, but I think pressing the "hold" button after setting the temp works to keep the temp at 88 for as long as you have the thing on.  If not, I'll learn again the hard way next round :-)

If the air temperature is lower than 88 degrees (your thermostat will give you the reading for air temperature in your unit right next to your set temperature) then your light bulb should turn on within a few seconds to heat things up for a while until the temp reaches 88 degrees.  Then the thermostat will tell your light bulb to turn off, it's hot enough.  When the temp starts to go back down again, the thermostat will tell your light bulb to turn back on, and so on and so on, as long as you have the system turned on (which will be 20-30 hours for tempeh).  After the first 12 hours, crack the door to allow some more air flow and to reduce the temp just a tiny bit (your tempeh will be producing its own heat at this point).  Check your tempeh pretty frequently to see if it is done, plus it's really fun to watch it develop!  My batch was done in 20 hours.

A styrofoam cooler would work nicely, and many people have used them successfully as tempeh incubators.  Turn it on it's side so the open side (which will be the "door") faces you, just like the fridge door, and it would be oriented the same way for set up.  You could just cut/push a hole in the back/side of it for the thermostat, and probably use a baking rack from a toaster oven or a baker's cooling rack or something else for a tray.  Heat source and thermometer could the the light bulb and thermostat set up (like here), or a heating pad, hot water bottle, or warm room, space heater even (?) aimed into the box, and you can use a plain old thermometer to check the temp.  Poke some holes in it to allow for air flow, or keep one side open, etc. Styrofoam is a great insulator, it's cheap, and it's easy to cut through/malleable, so perfect for the requirements of an incubator!  There are other designs out there on the internet for styrofoam incubators, just google "styrofoam tempeh incubator." Some just use a hot water bottle on the bottom of the box as the heat source, with a thermometer inside, and leave the lid cracked, etc.

Happy Tempeh Making!

Homemade Tempeh: An Illustrated Guide

After waiting for about three weeks, I got a little package in the mail.  

 Return address: Gem Cultures, OH YES.

It’s my Powdered Tempeh Starter (P.T.S.)!! 

And I love the packaging and the graphics of a tiny tempeh burger and two tiny tempeh skewers, OH YES. 

I also found this note of apology inside the package and thought it a very nice touch since I was about to email them to check on my order. But, instead, I followed the directions on their website.  They clearly tell you to wait THREE weeks and if AFTER three weeks you haven’t received your order, then you may contact them. I got my order exactly three weeks after I figured they received it.  Even though it was still within their time frame, I really liked the note.  Nice touch.  

 And some cheesecloth for more, upcoming fermenting adventures.

OK, should we get started making this tempeh or what?? I'm going to do this pretty much like a picture based tutorial, because there are so few online resources available on actually MAKING tempeh.  Lagusta's wonderful post is the only detailed, online tempeh making guide I know of, and thank goodness for it (and for her help with my tempeh questions in the last few months to prepare myself for this day!).  She also details making the incubator I replicated, but I'll put my notes about making that here (or in a separate post) as well.  I had to make some minor modifications to my incubator, so it isn't exactly like Lagusta's but I'll explain that later.  The recipe I used is the same recipe the PTS kit gives you in their booklet, and the same recipe as Sandor uses in Wild Fermentation (a great book!), and 1/3 the size of Lagusta's recipe.

What you need: 

An incubator to keep your tempeh between 85 and 90 degrees F for 20-30 hours 

Dry beans (soybeans or chickpeas, I'm sure other kinds work, too)

Vinegar

Powdered Tempeh Starter 

That's it.  The incubator is the real bear, then, doing the process for the first time is a bear, too :-) But now after doing it once, I can see it will flow quite easily.

First, the recipe.  It's 2.5 cups of whole, dry soybeans (I used soybeans this time since they are cheap and I didn't want to mess up organic chickpeas on my first tempeh attempt.  Next time, organic chickpeas!)

2 Tablespoons of vinegar (I used unfiltered apple cider vinegar) 

1 tsp of Powdered Tempeh Starter (P.T.S.) for each pound of dried beans

This recipe yielded me four blocks of tempeh (that fill a small "snack" sized zip lock bag).  I'm sure I lost some bean volume in the "skimming" process as you will soon see :-)

First, soak your 2.5 cups of beans (I used soybeans, but next time I am using chickpeas) in unsalted water 6-8 hours or overnight.  Next, "dehull" the beans by chopping the soaked (and still uncooked) beans up in a few batches in your food processor until the beans are broken up "in three to four pieces."  The soaked beans started to shred on me, so I got some teen tiny pieces and some whole beans, but I guess on average, it was correct.  

 This is what my soaked and then chopped up soybeans looked like after coming out of the food processor.

Now, you are going to cook the chopped up beans for about an hour, until barely cooked (you will be able to bite or cut through them but you wouldn't want to eat them).  This is probably about 30% of the normal cooking time.  During that time, you are going to do some serious foam skimming, OH YES.

 As you cook the chopped beans, tons of foam will rise to the top, loaded with, you guessed it!  Hulls. Skim them off.  I used a spoon with holes in it.

 After you skim quite a few batches of foam off, a skin will start to form (because now, essentially, you are making soy milk!). Skim that skin off, too.

 Here is that "skin" with my skimmer spoon.  You can see I accidentally got some beans in my skim.  I think I lost some tempeh volume this way, but wanted to be safe rather than sorry.

 Once hulls, foam and skins stop rising to the top of the pot and you have nice looking soy milk with beans in it, you are done. This took me about an hour of cooking time.

Now, strain your beans, and save the milk if you want to (it's soy milk!).

 This was my system.  

 Here's the milk you are left with!

Add some sugar or agave, a little salt, some vanilla or other flavoring and you got yourself fresh soy milk! P.S. Don't you love this glass pitcher? It's hermetically sealed.  The Italians really know what they are doing.

Now, take those cooked, well-drained beans, and spread them out on a baking sheet.

 We are going to let them air dry vs. towel drying them (no, thanks).  

Despite Lagusta's sage advice to only leave your beans on the trays for "a few hours," I ended up having to leave my beans to dry for like 24 hours! I covered them loosely with AL foil at the 8 hour mark on Saturday night when I realized I wasn't going to make tempeh after getting home from a friend's house at like 9pm (I have a four year old, so tempeh wasn't happening until Sunday!).  The beans were drier than I would have liked on Sunday, but still seemed to have enough moisture to go forward.  

Onward!  

 Mix your beans, vinegar and half the spores thoroughly.  Add the other half teaspoon of spores 

and mix again.

Pack into containers (I love these snack sized zip locks for nice portions).  These bags were poked through with a fork every few inches to make air holes for circulation.  You'll see the fork marks later in the finished product.

Now, you are ready to load up your incubator!  Here's mine!

 You might notice that the incubator station is in the same location as the Triops growing station (RIP, T!).

 I had to make a freestanding lamp out of my lamp-kit bulb because I couldn't lay it down on the floor of the fridge where it would have fit best (the plastic floor started melting when I tried).  I also couldn't use the rack that came with the fridge because of the height of the bulb, so I measured and then hot-glue gunned some chopsticks together to make movable racks for the tempeh. Success! 

  

 Load it up with your tempeh.  Try to give enough room for plenty of air circulation.

Incubate at 85-90F (I did 88 degrees) for about 24 hours.  Crack the door of the fridge at the 12 hour mark (this is when the tempeh starts generating its own heat from fermentation and you need to accommodate for that).  Here's what happened to me, though:

I set my (new, untried and untested, obviously!) thermostat to 88 degrees starting the tempeh at 1pm yesterday (on Sunday).  I didn't bother setting the time or anything because I figured not setting the clock and setting a single temp would override any default functions. WRONG.  I last checked the tempeh around 9:30 pm Sunday night (last night) and it was going along fine at 88 degrees.  Fine, I'll go to bed and get up later to check it (around 1am), well around 1am, I didn't get up because I had a toddler in the bed with me :-) So, I couldn't sleep anyway this morning and got up at like  5:15 a.m. When I checked it at 5:30 a.m., it seemed to have turned totally OFF and was 62 degrees.  Hmmm...so, I re-set it to 88 and pressed the "hold" button.  Then, I checked the manual that came with the thermostat I am using and it apparently has a default setting when turned to "heat" that goes down to 62 degrees at 10:00 p.m. Oh, perfect, yeah, great.  Anyway, I just figured that I could tell if the tempeh were badly affected in the end product.  The tempeh got 9 hours of incubation at 88 degrees (1pm to 10pm) and needed about 11 more hours, so, I turned it right back to 88 degrees at 5:30 this morning and let it chug along all day until about 5pm tonight.  I checked it regularly, and cracked the door at about 12pm when I thought it would be hot enough to do so (and I saw signs of fermentation happening, so I knew it had internal heat at that point).  At 5pm (about 20 hours of fermentation) I got THIS!!!

Perfect looking (and really amazing and delicious smelling) tempeh.  I know because I had Lagusta's homemade tempeh and this looks and smells exactly like it.  OH YES.

So, there is an important lesson here: I had two potentially problematic issues: drying the beans for 24 hours instead of a few hours and losing eight hours of fermenting time overnight, but with adjustments, the process still worked just fine.  I remained calm and had faith in my cooking experience and my knowledge of biology and chemistry.  It worked.  Horay!  I wanted to share this with you guys in case you try it and it doesn't go perfectly.  It doesn't have to.  You can make adjustments and figure it out and IT WILL WORK.

Had my tempeh been pink or orange or smelled bad or I had ANY question about it, I would have started over.  But, I persevered, and here it is, all worked out and fine.  

I'm so excited to try my homemade tempeh! 

And the first recipe will be...

Something with three fermented foods, together in one recipe.  

Any guesses??

Santa Plunder and The Jan Plan

It's that time of year again, time to finish all the unpacking, de-decorating and putting away from the holidays.  It is also time to look at what we did over our winter vacations and to really examine our awesome pressies AND to plan some fun projects for the next three months of winter, aka, The Jan(uary) Plan.

So, what did I get from Santa this year?

What IS that big blue box, Santa??

Oh My Goodness! It's the SoyaPower Plus Soy Milk (or any bean milk, grain milk or nut milk) Maker!

Looks like I got me Jan Plan Project#1: Home Made Soy (and Almond and Oat!) Milk!

But, wait! What did Santa Dad get me for Christmas?

A ton of his time and effort, that's what! Sheesh! What the hell? It took about forever to disassemble my little refrigerator, and it took both my dad and me to figure it out.  Look at all those holes in the back of it, hardware was screwed into every one of them, I ended up with a HUGE bag of stuff, the fans, main board, on and on, all the electrical bits and pieces of a small refrigerator were really something to behold!  We were going to wire up a baseboard thermostat to the existing wiring as the thermostat for my desired project, but it just got too complicated, so we ended up getting a plug in thermostat instead.  Anyway, we did this all to turn my now empty and unobstructed mini fridge into...drum roll please...a TEMPEH INCUBATOR!  Huzzah! 

Jan Plan Project #2: I'm going to MAKE MY OWN TEMPEH.  Oh, yes.

Once I get me some tempeh spores, I'll be in business. (You actually have to write to this company to order them, how quaint!) It pains me to add tempeh to my grocery list at this point, but I'll only have to be buying it from the store for just a little while longer...

And, the pièce de résistance, a Griswold #10 Cast Iron Fry Pan given to me by my Mom B. The pan is from my husband's great grandmother! Oh, momma!!

Here is the original Griswold marking on the back of the pan.  Below it, you can just make out the mark, "Erie," which, along with the Griswold "cross" design, indicates the pan was manufactured between 1906 and 1912, which makes perfect sense given that it was my husband's great grandmother's pan, reportedly used for making some kind of delicious, old-fashioned maple candy...mmmmmm!

Jan Plan Project #3: Recondition heirloom cast iron pan.  Oh joy!! So excited.  I have never done a reconditioning project with cast iron, since I use modern, Lodge cast iron, pictured here (and in many of my on-the-stove shots all throughout my blog! It gets a lot of use):

You can see the subtle differences in the styling between the modern Lodge pan here and the heirloom Griswold pan above.  I really, really want to get that Griswold up and running on my stove top!  I think The Pan Man can help me! 

Oh, and of course, some of you may be familiar with my last post which involves...

Jan Plan Project #4: Grow a disgusting pet for my son (T. longicaudatis, aka, "Triops"). I already have three hatchlings this time around, and no, I don't plan to cook them, though some people want to! Check out the "fan mail" on the Triops site, scroll about 14 Fan Letters down, it's the one in the large font. Exotic, indeed! They probably taste like shrimp, lady, but don't do it! ;-)

I have to plan my garden, too, Jan Plan #5: Gardening Stuff.  More to come on that one.  In the meantime, start seed shopping!

What do you all have planned for the winter months??