malt

Jun. 16th, 2022 12:58 pm
asakiyume: (shaft of light)
This entry repeats some of the stuff I said about brewing chicha in this entry, but consider this the revised, improved, and expanded version ;-)

In the rhyme "this is the house that jack built," there are these lines:

This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
(etc.)

The picture always is of a sack. For example...


(Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections)

I never actually knew what malt was.

Fast-forward to my project with my tutee to make El Salvadoran chicha. The first step involved sprouting corn--keeping it warm and moist so it would put out a root and a little shoot... at which point, so my tutee told me (receiving instructions from her mother), we were supposed to wash the corn and... take off the root and the shoot. Well then WHY are we growing them? I wondered.

The answer is that when the corn starts sprouting, it makes an enzyme that turns starch into sugar, and we want this in the brewing process. I discovered this after my first attempt at getting the corn to sprout resulted in a moldy mess. I searched "sprouted corn brewing" on the interwebs and discovered this fact... and that sprouted grain is called malt. And that it keeps. So after you have sprouted it and taken the root and shoot off (this feels so cruel--poor corn just wants to make a corn plant, and you're stymying it), you can put it in a sack in your attic to feed a rat ... or for future brewing.

(Photo I sent to my tutee, in distress about my mold problem. You can see all the white roots, but also the strong yellow shoots, e.g. in the kernel directly above the red circle)

concerned about mold

Take two was more successful. (This photo is earlier in the sprouting process--showing just roots, no shoots)

roots developing


After washing, derooting, and desprouting the corn, you put it in a big old container with a tight lid and feed it water and--if you're making El Salvadoran chicha--panela (sugarcane juice that's been boiled down and thickened) each day. And for the first three days, you throw the liquid away each new day, but from the fourth day on you keep it and keep adding to it: more water, more panela, and, for flavor, you put in the rind of a pineapple.

during the first three days
brewing prior to pineapple rind

from the fourth day
fermenting w/pineapple rind

I decanted on day six or seven. It is only very mildly alcoholic--it would have gotten more alcoholic if I let it sit--but it did have a yeasty bite and a definite flavor of the panela and pineapple, very rich and sweet. I have NO IDEA if it tasted right, and how's this for humor: my tutee is very strict about no drugs, no alcohol, so she had never had it, so she wasn't sure if it was either. But her roommate is also from El Salvador and promised us it tasted just right. Maybe she was just humoring us? But maybe it really was right! La chicha salvadoreña de Lorena, mamá de S, my tutee :-)

finished chicha

total produced
total chicha

The moldy malt I dumped into the compost bin, and it flourished:

corn sprouting in compost

I've transplanted it and now have some good-looking corn plants. In my experience, corn never does well with me--I get tiny ears with a couple of weird monster kernels and nothing else, but maybe this year will be different! We'll see.
asakiyume: (glowing grass)
There's a meadow near me that I love, especially in May and June. Yesterday I was driving home, and there was a couple standing in the pink mist of ragged robin, her looking like she had stepped out of a fantasy story, him looking enchanted. I turned the car around, pulled over, jumped out, and went plowing through the long grass toward them like some kind of zombie on the attack.

"You guys look so romantic, standing here in the long grass!" I said. They both looked understandably flustered, me accosting them like that, but they were good natured about it.

"Oh--" said the guy. "Well she needed some photos, so I was just helping her out."

I imagine now that she's an up-and-coming singer who sings fantasy-style songs à la Within Temptation or something. He was taking photos for her album cover, or her website. Or maybe she's a writer ... and he's taking photos for her author photo, or her website.

So it wasn't romance after all--no rings of woven grass exchanged as the breeze ruffles hair and wildflowers. But it still looked romantic, so I asked if I could take a picture.

"Sure--how do you want us to pose?"

"Just ... like you were ... like you're talking."



In other news, my first-time brewing experiment, El Salvadoran-style chicha as taught to me by my tutee's mother, via my tutee, is beginning to actually smell alcoholic. (I had to start over once as my first attempt to malt the corn--that was what I was doing, though I didn't know it--got too moldy. This is take two.) Wohoo!



asakiyume: (good time)
Two exciting things!

First, Strange Horizons is doing a special issue featuring Southeast Asian writers, and on Twitter they mentioned especially that they'd love to get someone from Timor-Leste. So on Facebook I posted about that and one of my acquaintances from when I went there in 2013 messaged me! He wanted details, and he said he'd try writing something if I could help him translate it. I said yes! And the other day he sent me a 3,500 word story. And now I'm working on translating it!

I can't convey sufficiently how exciting this is for me. I daydreamed, when I was over there, about how great it would be to hear local stories and tales--or even to read them. But it seemed worlds away, requiring so much study, and was I likely to do all that work for a place I might never go back to? But I did it! And now I can help someone share his stories with the world! So there's that thrill, but then there's the thrill of the tale itself. It seems very folktale-esque so far (I'm not quite a third of the way through it), but all the little details! Details about how to clear a patch of forest to make a field (bring your axe and your machete--which, amusingly, in Tetun is called a katana), put little stones around the perimeter, cut all the grass, weeds, and other plants, let them dry, then burn them. It was the tools and the little stones that I was especially excited about. And then details about what they eat for lunch, and bathing in a stream... all of it. Now maybe these are just folktale elements, but they're new-to-me folktale elements. I love them.

Now I'm waiting for a promised magical eel to appear.

Second, my ESL tutee and I are going to experiment with making Salvadoran chicha! She was telling me her mother sometimes makes this alcoholic drink to sell to people, and I was asking how she did it, and I thought... why don't we try it? So we're going to. Ingredients are seed corn, panela (unrefined sugarcane juice, condensed into a brick), a pineapple rind, and water. And time ;-)

I'll let you know how it turns out.

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