July 10 -- Brinery tasting

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On the 10th, my daughter and I went to a tasting of fermented vegetables.  Until that evening, I had not understood that sauerkraut did not have vinegar in it.

The sourness comes from fermenting the cabbage.  Salt, and cabbage, and a bit of help from our friends, the good bacteria -- that's sauerkraut.

As far as I can remember, I have always liked sauerkraut.  I can remember snitching bites out of the can, as a kid.  I can't remember how it was actually used, or served, but I remember eating it out of the can.  Odd.  Mom?  What did we do with the sauerkraut I didn't eat plain?

The Brinery has been selling sauerkraut, kim chee, and various other versions of fermented vegetables at our farmers' market for a while.  I hadn't tried their sauerkraut until the 10th.

This is four different sauerkrauts.  The darkest one has beets (hence the color), and ginger.  The one that looks like it has carrots does have carrots, and also parsnips (this one has Tantré in its name, as David-who-started-the-Brinery began as a farmer at Tantré Farms).  The dark pink one is made with red cabbage, and has a bit of horseradish.  The one with seeds has caraway seeds.

These were all tasty, but the pink horseradish one was my favorite.  I would definitely be eating that one right out of the jar.....



One of the topics for the evening was that people have preserved foods by fermenting them, since forever, all over the globe.

Given we've been eating these foods, since before we had the capacity to make them on purpose, and in much greater quantities since we learned how to make them, I'm betting that evolution and Mama Nature think they are pretty good for us.

I mean to eat more of them............



My picture-taking fell apart, alas.  You'll just have to imagine the rest of our tasting adventure.

The next thing we tasted was pasta salad made with two Brinery pickles.  I am not a fan of pasta salad.  I've never understood the concept, and I've never really found the execution to be interesting, let alone yummy.  This was definitely the best pasta salad I've ever tried, and the pickles were a big part of that.  There was a thinly-sliced turnip pickle (with beets, again, but not so many -- it was pinkish, but not dark dark red), and a cucumber pickle.

We had a sample of the turnip pickle by itself, and I liked it.

The Brinery makes tempeh.  I had heard that word, but didn't know what it was.  It turns out it is dried soybeans which have been cracked, soaked, and inoculated with a friendly fungus (kind of like growing mushrooms on purpose, but without the fruiting body we call mushrooms).  The fungus grows through and around the soybeans, and makes a solid cake of fungus and soybeans.  I would have liked to taste it plain, just to see what it was like.  I have eaten roasted soybeans (dried, soaked, roasted), and I could recognize the soybean in the tempeh....

(Note to people planning tastings -- I don't know if everyone feels this way, but I would very much like to taste the components, and then taste a final dish, so I have a better idea which aspects of what I am tasting came from which components.  This is especially true when the components are new to me and different from anything I've ever eaten, like tempeh.....)

We had tempeh Reubens, made just as one would make a corned-beef Reuben (only with tempeh instead of corned beef), and we also had corned-beef Reubens.  (Little open-faced mini-Reubens.....)  The tempeh one was good, and was interesting.  The corned-beef one was delicious.  Wow.  Yum.

My personal feeling about the pair was that a Reuben has been built, over the decades, because the flavors complement each other perfectly.

I think, rather than making a tempeh Reuben, it would be good to make a new sandwich which is totally meant to build on the tasty qualities of tempeh.  I am sure one could make an absolutely delicious sandwich with tempeh.  I don't think a tempeh Reuben is that sandwich.....

Digression -- I was looking for our sauerkraut dessert.  I guess I've watched too many episodes of Iron Chef.  They make dessert out of EVERYTHING.  It's probably just as well we weren't offered sauerkraut ice cream, or sauerkraut pudding, or sauerkraut-carrot cake...........  But who knows, I bet an Iron Chef could make a tasty dessert with fermented vegetables.  I should probably suggest to them that need a sauerkraut battle!  End of Digression.



We tasted many excellent things on the 10th.  I think we should eat more pickles.  I mean to buy pink sauerkraut, and some kim chee, the next time I see The Brinery at the farmers' market!

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