I'm Making Fermented Foods Sexy Again - Tempeh

Tempeh is one of my favourite fermented foods. I started my love affair with tempeh when I was strictly vegan and was looking for a protein substitute. Which is a great option because soy based tempeh is classed as a whole plant protein, containing all the essential amino acids. It differs from tofu in that it contains the whole bean, rather than the coagulated soy liquid extracted from soy beans that becomes tofu.

Tempeh is a traditional Indonesian food, where they ferment the inoculated soy beans in banana leaves. This works well in the tropical climate of Indonesia.

As someone who is passionated about reducing my plastic waste, and you know, my money waste, I decided to research what went into making tempeh, and was it something that I could do myself. I'm fascinated by the fermentation process and working with strains bacteria and fungi to enhance our food making them even more nutritious.

Tempeh: The Recipe

I can't stand blogs that make you scroll for 5 minutes to actually get to the recipe, so I'll try to be super brief in my preamble and rather will leave notes after the recipe.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups dry organic soy beans

• Tempeh culture (Rhizopus oligosporus or Rhizopus oryzae)

• White vinegar

Method:

1. Soak soy beans over night in filtered water.

2. Once soaked, discard soaked water and cook in fresh water for at least 1 hr. Test the beans. We're looking for soft enough so that it will squish between your fingers, but still holds its shape.

3. Strain off boiled water and allow to cool down to room temperature. Try to remove as much liquid as possible.

4. In a clean bowl, pour in 1 tablespoon of white vinegar and mix around vigorously, to coat all the beans!

5. Mix in 1 tablespoon of tempeh culture, again, vigorously to ensure that everything is coated.

6. Now the tricky part... Transfer mixture into a shallow vessel that allows for airflow (see notes A).

7. Place in a climate steady environment to allow the culture to grow. This needs to be around 29 degrees celsius consistently for the rest of the process (see notes B).

8. BE PATIENT. This process can take up to 36hrs.

9. You can check on your tempeh after about 12-15 hrs and you'll notice some of them are beginning to look a bit fluffy! This means it's working. After about 24 hrs the whole mixture should be covered in fluffy white mould that sort of looks like the rind of Camembert cheese.

10. Once the tempeh is covered in mould, it will have become a solid cake like mass. You can cook with this. Or cut up and freeze for later use. In the fridge it will only last about 3 days and will actually keep going through it's life cycle and will begin to look a dark grey/black colour. This means that it's actually produced spores and is ready to start its process again (see notes C)

Notes:

A-

I trialled a few different vessels for this. When I originally got my first kit, it came with plastic zip lock bags that had little holes pierced in them for airflow...My whole reason for making it myself was to reduce plastic waste. So I started reusing plastic ziplock bags that I'd previously used. And this worked for a while. But eventually the bags would get a big manky and would need to replaced. The best vessel I've used is actually a Decor 'microwavable bacon tray' (oh the irony) that I got from an my local supermarket. I originally had one that I drilled holes in and this worked well for air flow reasons. However, this container suffered a quick death when someone in my house hold melted it along with my batch of tempeh...To say I was ticked off was an understatement! I ended up getting another one from an op shop, so I felt like less of a planet jerk! This time I didn't bother drilling holes in it and just used it as is, and it worked perfectly.

B-

This is honestly the hardest part of the process. If you've got a food dehydrator that will go down to 29 degrees, then you're good to go. I don't. So I used my oven. I turn it on for literally a minute just to get some warmth in there. I'm not technical and do not measure. I just make sure nothing is hot, just a little bit warm. I'll then wrap my container in a tea towel and pop it in. I usually start this process in the night before I go to bed. So if you're in a really cold area, you can pop a hot water bottle or heat pack in the bottom of the oven so that it stays warm. Make sure you let everyone know not to turn on the oven (this is how my first container was murdered). Other options I've seen is using an Eski and putting a hot water bottle/heat pack in and replacing as needed. We're trying to maintain that temperature. The cool thing about tempeh is that once the mould starts to grow, it creates its own heat, so you won't need to keep heating the oven or whatever.

C-

To keep your culture going for life, you need to harvest some of the tempeh spores. Otherwise you'll have to just keep buying the culture, which is okay too! To harvest the spores, you need to wait until the tempeh is ready and then cut off a sacrificial chunk and allow it to stay in that warm environment until it starts to turn grey/black. From here, you will need to dehydrate this (with a dehydrator) at a low temperature so that you're not killing the microorganisms (let's say about 45 degrees C). From there, blend up your dried tempeh chunk into a powder using a high powered blender. You also need a substrate for the tempeh culture. So you can add about 1:1 parts rice flower. My blender is amazing, so I actually just put rice into the dried tempeh and turn the whole lot into powder. I just keep updating my culture reserves, adding in the latest batch. This needs to be stored in the fridge or freezer.

White fluffy mould has grown over the soy beans. It's done!

The tempeh block is all done and ready to be eaten or stored in the freezer.

The tempeh spores have begun to develop on this red kidney bean tempeh.