Fermentation Atlas · Starter
Fresh Soybean Tempeh
- Advanced
- 60 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light.
Ingredients
- 500 g dried soybeans
- 3 litres cold water, for soaking
- 30 ml white vinegar (5 percent acidity)
- 2 g tempeh starter (Rhizopus oligosporus)
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
FermentationSoaking dried goods back to life
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: soy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Soak the beans in the cold water for 12 hours, then rub handfuls between your palms under water until the hulls float free; skim and repeat until fewer than one bean in ten still wears a skin. 600 min
- Boil the dehulled beans in fresh water with the vinegar for 30 minutes, until a bean crushes to paste between finger and thumb but still holds its shape, then drain hard. 30 min
- Spread on towels and dry under a fan until the surface is matte and the beans squeak against the cloth, and they have cooled below 35C (95F).
- Toss the starter through, pack 2 cm deep into bags or a tray pricked every 2 cm, and incubate at 30C (86F).
- At 24 to 36 hours the cake is bound solid, white as felt and warm to the hand. Grey or black patches at the holes are spores and harmless; a slimy surface or a smell of ammonia means bacteria won, and it goes out. 600 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through it.
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The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
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