Polish · Drink
Zakwas Buraczany
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with an earthy, grounding base, warm spice humming through the middle, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 1 kg raw beetroot, firm and unblemished
- 1.2 litres water, boiled and cooled
- 24 g fine sea salt, about 2 percent of the water
- 6 garlic cloves, peeled
- 2 bay leaves
- 5 allspice berries
- 1 slice of rye bread, optional starter
The skills inside
Brining & curingFermentationStraining & passing through a sieve
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten
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
- Scrub the beetroot hard but do not peel it; the skin carries the lactobacilli that start the ferment. Trim the tops and any soft patches.
- Cut into 1 cm slabs and pack into a scalded 2 litre jar with the garlic, bay and allspice.
- Dissolve the salt in the cooled water, pour it over until the beetroot sits 2 cm under, and weight it down with a saucer or a brine filled bag.
- Cover with a cloth at 20 to 22C (68 to 72F). By day four or five it should foam gently, smell earthy and sour, and taste like a savoury drink rather than raw beet.
- Strain into bottles and refrigerate. The colour holds about three weeks, then slides towards brown.
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.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
At the Table
- The Pour
- It is the pour
- Also Right
- Serve alongside something salty and fried
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Already zero-proof unless you made it otherwise
This is the glass, not the plate: judge it on temperature, dilution, and balance, and let the food do the answering.
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