tropit

I just completed my first batch of soybean tempeh...!!! It turned out beautiful! I haven't tasted it yet, but it smells divine.

I invested in making a water bath, fermentation box out of an inexpensive ice chest, an aquarium pump and bubbler and an aquarium heater. I spent a total of $36 on the set up, which I thought was well worth it, since I plan to make a lot of tempeh and other fungi inoculated foods.

I was worried because the heater is not adjustable and is just a couple of degrees cooler than what is recommended in the recipe, but it worked out fine. We did have a scare when the heater came unplugged somehow in the middle of the inoculation. The water bath became cold and I thought that we lost the entire batch. I was bummed. But, we plugged it back in and I woke up this morning to a beautiful, snowy carpet of white fungi growing all over and through my soybeans.

The recipe made 8 blocks of tempeh. The grocery store sells blocks about the same size, (on sale, mind you,) for $2.99, so that works out to around $24 worth of tofu. My beans cost around $5 and the culture was about $0.50 worth of an $11 bag. Not a bad deal!

My next try at it will be all soybeans again, but the batch will be about 50% bigger, so that I have thicker blocks in the end. (Mine came out a little thin.) After that, I'm going to try some more exotic tempehs s/a garbanzo bean tempeh, farro/quinoa tempeh, corn tempeh and the craziest one...coconut, cocoa nib tempeh.

I'm now moving on to koji. I'll let you know how I fare.

~ C