I don’t discriminate. I love all pizzas.
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I just meant that none of the pizza joints here make Detroit style pizza. New Jersey is all New York style pizza. I like most kinds of pizza, but I’m not a fan of Chicago deep dish. It’s just too much for me.
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Leftover pizza (if there is any) doesn’t need to be reheated.
Cold tuna pizza is a fantastic breakfast.
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Breakfast pizza may be cold. This was dinner pizza. We’re not animals.
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just finished putting up a couple of pints of fermented green habanero sauce:
going to use some to make a version of @Grey_Devil 's aji de leche picante casero and will report back on that trial.
meanwhile, a call for thoughts from our cider-makers out there : @mspie500 , @DukeTrout , @NukeML , and any others, what are some ideas for making a starfruit cider? the fruit is very juicy, tastes like a mashup of apples and white grapes with a bit of plum. not going to press any apples, but would a raw, unfiltered apple juice work as a “base” to add the pulp of about 4kg of starfruit? do i need to add sugar? what type of yeast would you recommend (thinking of a Belgian type)?
i have brewed ales before and know my way around a fermentaion set up, but never made a fruit cider. is it true that in order to be a proper cider, it must have apple in it?
any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as i am about to be overwhelmed (again!) with carambola from our tree. this will be a second crop in this year! a very prolific fruit tree!
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For the hot sauce recipe i gave you it should be good to use immediately but it should get better with time. Either way i hope it turns out good
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I’ll try to tackle the questions I can. But I would not claim to be an expert on cider making. I primarily make mead, which is by far the laziest home brewing. You can quite literally mix up a batch, leave it under a desk and forget about it for a year, and end up with great mead.
Second, if we’re talking about “exotic” fruit, we’ve got to loop @docosc into the convo. He’s an expert.
You can totally use juice or non-alcoholic apple cider as a base. Just make sure it doesn’t have any preservatives to block fermentation like sulfites.
4kg is a LOT of fruit. Make sure you have a big enough fermentation vessel for your juice, the fruit (I recommend a brew bag to make removal easier), and a whole lotta foam because apple ferments very strongly. Be prepared for a blow-off tube rather than just an airlock unless you have a lot of headroom in your fermenter.
I recommend freezing the fruit and defrosting it before adding it to the ferment. Freezing breaks the cell walls and helps the yeast access all the fruit cells.
How tart do you want your cider? There are yeasts that help with mallo-lactic fermentation, converting 20-30% of the mallic acid (apple tartness) into lactic acid for a more mellow, buttery-creamy mouth feel. The one I use for anything apple is Lalvin 71B yeast.
You shouldn’t need to add sugar unless you dilute the juice. The apple cider/juice I’ve used in the past has had a original gravity of 1.050-1.065, which alone would yield an ABV of around 6-9% if it goes completely dry. Then factor in the contribution of the star fruit if it goes in “dry”, which will make it’s sugar contribution tough to calculate. But it will contribute some sugar. You would only need to add sugar if you want to do a natural ferment without stopping the yeast early with chemicals or pasteurization. To hit even “beer” yeast’s max ABV, you will probably need to add enough sugar to hit 12-15% ABV. I’ve had Lalvin 71B hit 18%. I shoot for a little residual sugar for apple meads, say final gravity of 1.005 for dry, 1.010 for semi-dry, and 1.015 for sweet. The juice contains plenty of tannins from the peels and your starfruit will probably contribute more. You will want at least a little residual sugar to balance the tannins.
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thank you! that is all very helpful, especially about themallo-lactic ferment. i a. hoping for a tart, crusp cider with a dry finish.
i thought i remembered @docosc also made quaffable beverages from various fruits. hello, doc! got anything to add?
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I can echo everything @DukeTrout said. 71-B will ferment pretty much anything. If you are using apple juice as the base, make sure to allow plenty of time for the malo-lactic fermentation to take place. If you haven’t done it yet, a hydrometer and a pH indicator of some kind are really useful. Biggest lessons I have learned are to make sure everything is very clean and sanitized, and don’t rush things. Be prepared to adjust later on if you are flying without a recipe, fruit will taste entirely different after fermentation, and often will require some back-sweetening. Then you have to decide if you want to pasteurize to stop fermentation or keep step-feeding until to get past the tolerance of your yeast and reach the desired sweetness. This is my usual approach, but be warned, it can result in some seriously potent brews! I have never tried starfruit before, pretty pricey up here, but I have used a lot of weird fruit from my gardens. Jujube, goumi, kiwi, blackberry all make great mead or wine. Experiment! That is the great joy of homebrewing, you make it to your taste, not some “expert.” Play with other flavors as well. Spices, herbs, woods, extracts. They are all fair game.
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Good point. If we were talking about just apple, I would recommend one cinnamon stick and exactly two cloves in the initial ferment and a spiral of medium-toast French oak in secondary, but the starfruit is a variable. The spices would probably work well with it but I’m not sure about the oak.
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Yeah, I would have to play with it. Tough to predict what the final flavor would be, fermentation changes so much. Starfruit is a pretty mild flavor to begin with, would have to be careful not to overwhelm it. Yeah, I think I would say do the experiment and see what happens! Oh, and to add to previous list of lessons, Keep Notes! Especially when you are experimenting, you will absolutely not remember what you added when it’s all done and you start figuring out where to tweak it.
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i have oak chips that i age some of my hot sauces on, after the initial ferment. that is a good thought. like i said, i want something crisp and dry, not too sweet.
should i “prime” the bottles with a bit of sugar to get a good carbonation when i bottle? (i don’t ever want to repeat the summer of exploding beer bottles that one time!)
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That’s a dangerous game. City Steading Brews did a nice instructional on priming and pasteurizing, worth a watch. They suggest priming the bulk, rather than each bottle, just to avoid the bottle bomb effect.
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Just be aware that oaking will typically mellow out the tartness and give a more vanilla flavor that could clash with the starfruit.
Bottle carbonation is not my forte. For that to work properly, your brew has to go completely dry, consuming all of the fermentable sugars first, but still have active yeast below it’s ABV threshold. Then you bottle and wait a few days before pasteurizing.
I let the yeast do their thing until they’re done and reached the ABV max. I’ve tried sweetening with unfermentable sugars, but they taste off to me. When I carbonate, I have a small CO2 pressurized growler that I do forced carbonation with.
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ok y’all, before i wear out my welcome here…
i have been busy all day in the kitchen with the hot sauce bottling, a lovely chicken curry with rice (that will be breakfast!)i have also made good on another threat - the banana ketchup that @kentkb put me up to.
i went through both freezers and pulled out about 4 cups of my frozen, homegrown bananas, thawed, mashed and set aside. diced two whole yellow onions and sauteed in olive oil with chopped garlic and fresh ginger. add to that 2 cups vinegar (half/half rice and white vinegars) a cup of water and 1/4 c tomato paste. simmer, reduce heat and add the banana mash, some of the green habanero sauce from earlier and 1/4 c brown sugar. simmer 20 minutes until thick. whizz it up in the processor and put into sterilized jars. made six pints.
oh, yeah…ETA: it’s really good! very much like tomato ketchup, sweet and tangy with that chili pepper bite that i like.
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@FloridaManJefe Bottle carbonation I do do. For beers I use 1oz of priming sugar for every gallon of beer. For ciders I go a little richer because you dont have gluten holding the bubbles together. I’d put your fermented micture into the fridge for about two weeks before bottling to allow all the muck to precipitate out so you don’t end up with a murky drink.
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good info, thanks!
to everyone: thank you for your input. i can see i have some youtubing to do, but i thank you all for entertaining my questions while i was being a Very Busy Boy in the kitchen today! i think there will be goodness coming in the months ahead and holiday spirits to share!
my cider-sense is tingling!
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Which made me think: what about star anise in the apple?
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