Set up

I’ve got a fermentation cooler with a heating mat, but no humidifier and fan. I lift the corners of my cooler and keep a water tray on top of the heating mat. I’ve used a perforated pan and wrapped the barley in damp tea towels. My hygrometer says it stayed consistently +80%.

Process

- Soaked the pearl barley in water for 7h. Dried weight was 500g and after soaking it was 831g. That’s a gain of +331g (~66%).
- Steamed the barley for 15 min in a cheesecloth. I thought shortening the steaming would be best considered the amount of water it absorbed soaking.
- Spread and cool the barley to 25-30C
- Inoculated the barley with my tea strainer using potato starch + spores (from fermentationculture.eu)
- Put barley in a damp towel and onto the tray.
- Put another damp towel on top to increase humidity
- Sprayed distilled water on the towel every few hours.

Every time I looked at my temperature probe the temperature was pretty consistently 29-32C and so I haven’t stirred this batch at all. The first 24h I did not see much mycelium activity and thought I messed it up.

At 36h it was definitely fuzzy and started matting lightly. The pictures above are at 40h. The smell is incredible it smells sweet and very much like apricots.

EDIT: I think the temperature is rising now, first time it goes past 32C. This is at 41h.

Questions

1. How can I improve my process?
2. Should I keep pushing it a little more to “maximize the enzyme activity”? If so, when do I know when to stop it?
3. Is this ok to use in a miso?

While researching this subreddit on how to make these lacto-plums, we often saw that people had no idea how to use them so I thought I’d share how we used ours.

We followed the instructions from Noma’s book and fermented for 5 days in a jar with a ziplock on top. When we drained them, they were just starting to be fizzy and alcoholic as it’s been hot for the past few days. We decided to keep different forms of the lacto-plums, whole, puréed, brine, powder.

Puréed : (probably the most versatile and easy to make. Blend some plum with just a bit of their brine) we made a a salad vinaigrette with the purée, brine, Dijon, maple syrup and olive oil. We also did a dipping sauce with butter and honey (we had it with steak, pictured). Personally, we found that adding sugar made the plums really stand out. Highly recommend this, as it can feel light or rich depending on how you use the puree as the base.

Brine : we soaked our onions for a few minutes and garnished our salad. Noma recommends to use it as a garnish. It helped tie our plum butter sauce with the accompanying salad.

Powder : (not sure I’d bother making this again with my home equipment or we’d revisit our technique) skinned the plums as per the Noma book. We don’t have a dehydrator so we used our oven. Took 48h to dehydrate, blended in our blender on the mill setting. Sprinkled on tomatoes (pictured), which brought out the tang in the cottage cheese and acidity in the tomatoes.