String tying and tempeh making

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Today I made tempeh! When I got out to the vineyard, Cliff was splitting soy beans in a grinder/splitter device, so I helped crank the whole batch of through. Then we put them in a huge metal pot and boiled them, stirring them and skimming off the foam and husks that rose to the surface. Then we left it covered simmering while we went out into the yard to do a bit of maintenance work. Cliff took some pictures of the beautiful foliage and peach, apple, and pear trees that had started flowering already. We’re supposed to get freezing temperatures for the next few nights, so we covered the potato plants in a thin layer of dirt to insulate them. A few vines were beginning to sprout as well forming miniscule flower/grape clusters near the nodes. We took down some firewood from the shed and then headed out to the vineyard where we added strings to the newly transplanted vines. We tied the orange string to long staples that we stuck into the ground next to the baby vines and tied them onto the first wire to give the vines something to attach to as they grow. The wind was quite frigid today. The poor sprouting vines are going to die! Cliff said that most vines will re-bud two more times if the first ones don’t survive, but that typically only the first ones actually produce fruit. So certain varieties that bud early have a risk of being more susceptible to early spring freezes. It makes me glad that he has so many different varieties, so he’ll have a better chance of some surviving. Hopefully the buds on most of his vines will survive the next few days.



Then we came inside and I poked a grid of holes in plastic sandwich bags while he drained the soybeans and added vinegar and the special tempeh-making powder and mixed it all up. Then he added around 10-11 oz of the mixture in each plastic bag (we weighed and recorded them for fun-to see how much money he was saving by making his own instead of buying it in a store) and placed them in the drying rack (the holes in the bags were for aeration) to mould (or allow fungal fermentation) over a 24 hour period. While we were making it, Cliff gave me a nice speal about soybeans being a miracle food. Did you know that the U.S. is the world’s top producer of soybeans? They are a great nutritional substitute for beef; they are high in protein and other essential nutrients and low in fat and cholesterol, very cheap, and you don’t have to refrigerate them. We ended up making about 12 pounds of tempeh total! Then in the last few minutes, we worked out some milky spore calculations using the new milky spore powder formula to determine how many bugs we need to collect and infect in the lab in order to produce enough milky spore to cover his fields.