Ginger Bounty Part Three: the beer

Once you have an active ginger bug (see part two below) you’re ready to make the beer.  

Ingredients (makes 1 gallon):

4-5 inches fresh ginger root

1 ½ cups sugar

2 lemons

water

Boil two quarts of water and add ½ cup – ¾ cup grated ginger (depending on how strong you want the ginger flavor) and 1 ½ cups sugar. Boil the mixture for 15 minutes. Turn off heat and add two additional quarts of water (preferable cold, to quicken the cooling of the mixture). Let cool to body temperature.

Add juice of two lemons and the strained ginger bug. Stir well and pour the entire mixture through a strainer.

Bottle in sealable bottles (using a funnel!); you can reuse soda bottles with screw tops, juice jugs, or the fancy ‘ball-top’ bottles with rubber seals. Leave to ferment in a warm place for about two weeks. We checked ours after a week and it was ready! The time it takes to become optimally carbonated depends on the climate and the strength of your bug. Open with caution, or at least have an empty glass handy – several of our bottles overflowed when we cracked the seal.

Variations:

We’ve been experimenting with adding different flavors and juices to our ginger beers. The batch we made using a lime in place of one of the lemons was particularly successful. We also added fruit juice to several bottles, about two tablespoons per ½ quart. I recommend pineapple or Surinam cherry, but experiment with whatever fruits or juices you have on hand. Note that the added fruit juice will actually quicken fermentation, so check those bottles sooner.

For the next batch I’m going to try adding spices – I’m thinking cinnamon, cloves and cardamom – and a bit of honey. The possibilities are endless!

Happy soda-making.

A baby pineapple!

Loquat and Blood Orange for experimenting

Note: These instructions were inspired by Sandor Katz’s amazing book, ‘Wild Fermentation’ which we used as our guide through the process.

Ginger Bounty Part Two: the bug

Ming Wei grating ginger 

            Making homemade soda is exciting. Period. It’s a novelty to be able to make your own carbonated beverage! Kudos SodaStream.

But even more exciting than shooting CO2 into a flavored liquid is creating a culture of living microscopic organisms and bacteria that carbonate a beverage for you. Sound gross? These tiny communities are necessary for making beer, wine, bread, cheese and so many other foods and drinks we enjoy. Besides the most familiar source to most Americans – a packet or ‘dry active’ yeast – there are countless other forms in which these cultures can be found.

Which leads me to the first step for making ginger beer: starting a ‘ginger bug’. An active bug is necessary to achieve the optimal, fizzy beverage. To make the bug, add two teaspoons of sugar and two teaspoons of grated fresh ginger into a cup of water and mix well. The container (I used a jar) should be left in a warm place and covered with something breathable - to keep bugs and other debris out while letting air in. We used cloth-napkin/hair-tie configuration.

Feed the ginger bug a teaspoon each of sugar and grated ginger every day and stir vigorously. The natural yeast in the ginger will feed on the sugar and produce CO2. It should take anywhere from two to seven days for the bug to become active, depending on the freshness of your ginger (fresher=less time) and climate (warmer=less time). When small bubbles form on the surface and begin to collect into a layer about the thickness of a dime, the bug is ready. Here in Hawaii, our bug sits in a sunny windowsill and the ginger is no more than a week out of the soil before being grated into the jar – it’s ready in about a day.

Bubbles in the turmeric bug!

We’ve experimented with turmeric and galangal (a root similar to ginger, used in southeast Asian cooking) bugs, and it is apparent that each root has slightly different yeast contents. The turmeric will start bubbling overnight, while the galangal takes close to four days. [We have yet to taste the soda made with these bugs – these batches still need another week to ferment]

If you don’t plan to make the ginger beer right away, you can keep the bug around, feeding it every other day, for about a week. It starts to become like a pet…and it’s so fun to peek under the cloth napkin and check for bubbles.

Note: These instructions were inspired by Sandor Katz’s amazing book, ‘Wild Fermentation’ which we used as our guide through the process.

Ginger Bounty: the bug, the beer and the booch

I’m a bit of a ginger beer connoisseur, and I just tasted the best ginger beer I’ve ever had. And the best part? I made it myself.

A few weeks ago, Ming Wei pointed to a bed in the garden with a few wilted stalks of what looked like grass. “Dig around in there, the ginger is definitely ready to come out.” I took a digging fork to the bed hesitantly, not knowing exactly where to look for the spicy root. After a few minutes clearing away soil, I found that the base of each nearly lifeless stem led to an underground treasure trove. The top of each bulbous root was about 10 inches below the soil and extended at least eight more inches into the ground

            This particular bed of ginger was planted last March, so it had been in the ground for 10 months. Ideally, the ginger would have been harvested in December - after 8 months and before the rainy season – but Ming Wei had a particularly busy winter, so in the ground it stayed for a couple extra months. And it got HUGE.

I had to be careful to keep each root intact so that we could replant segments of the healthiest-looking ones for the next crop (Ginger can’t be planted by seed because, due to over-breeding, it won’t actually produce a flower with viable seeds. It must be propagated manually by using root-stalk cuttings). This entailed some serious digging. I ended up excavating at least a 1-foot radius hole around each plant in order to expose the entire root and then carefully unearth it. It was a bit like digging for buried treasure (except even more fun than pretending on the beach as a kid…because there actually was treasure!) and we ended up with an over-flowing bucket of the knobby roots.

What to do with all that ginger? Candied ginger, ginger liqueur, ginger-kraut…we tried them all. But the most successful of our experiments by far was the ginger beer. Crisp and fizzy with a nice bite, we’re convinced our homemade beverage would go for top dollar. 

Stay tuned for part two – the process.   

Building with Bamboo

At one point we did have to get out the really
heavy duty machinery... 

            Before I came to Hawaii, the word bamboo made me think of East Asian ink paintings or high-end cutting boards. Through Bobby’s hobby/passion/trade, I have a whole new understanding of the versatile building material.

            Bamboo is the fastest growing plant in the world with record growth rates at 24 inches per day. A time-lapse camera would almost be overkill! The huge grass grows in two distinct ways. There's temperate running bamboo, that can quickly take over a yard if not managed properly, and clumping bamboo. An established plant – at least four years old – can send up 10-25 shoots per year. A healthy clump should have 20-40 poles, meaning that the clumps require constant thinning.

Unfortunately, thinning bamboo is no simple task. Heavy-duty tools and several hours of intense physical labor are required, plus the knowledge of the proper way to harvest the material.

Many islanders have overgrown clumps of bamboo in their yards left by the last home-owner – who may not have considered what 24 inches per day would add up to over the years - and need guidance in maintaining it. When it comes to finding someone to help maintain a bamboo clump, word of mouth on this small Big Island leads to Bobby.

Last week we drove down the coast to Ed and Edi’s beautiful home and small-scale fruit and coffee farm. The couple’s 10-acre property contains upwards of 50 bamboo clumps desperately needing attention. Edi met Bobby at a bamboo workshop last year and requested his advice and assistance in evaluating the giant grasses on their property. Bobby needs bamboo for a new project – building an outdoor bamboo classroom at a high school on the island – and Ed and Edi were willing to trade the service of evaluation and expertise for some of the poles for the project.

We started with a ‘latiflorus', or Taiwan Giant, clump. Very overgrown clumps require pulling the poles out rather than attempting to push them over (timber-style) because the cluster of branches at the top hold the poles in place even after they’re cut at the base. Bobby cut the poles at their base with an electric saw and then I grabbed the base and ran away from the clump, tugging hard to detangle the top from the rest of the branches. Once the pole came free I ran and let go just as the top of the pole was about to hit the ground. We went through this process over and over and over. And over.

The poles are roughly 40-60 feet long, depending on the age. We kept the thickest, straightest poles to be used for the classroom, and dragged the rest into a pile to be chipped. Ed and Edi plan to put in 750 pineapple plants in the next few weeks and will need all the mulch they can get.

We worked all morning (with a break for Edi’s freshly squeezed orange/tangerine juice) and pulled about 40 poles from the clump. We had 15 usable poles for the project and minor scrapes and cuts – some varieties of bamboo have wicked thorns.

Before the poles can be used for building, they are pressurized in a tank containing boric acid for three and a half hours at 130 psi. This process essentially sucks out the sap and replaces it with salts to ‘petrify’ the bamboo. The poles have to dry for three to four weeks in a preferably breezy location after they are removed from the tank.

Ed's method of drying coffee beans in his greenhouse

Bobby will be working with a class of 20 high-schoolers to construct the outdoor structure over the semester. The kids have made scale models and some have had the opportunity to help Bobby with the harvesting. It’s pretty amazing to be able to see the raw building material actually alive, in the ground, and then follow the process all the way through to the construction of your own classroom. Experiential learning – for me and the students!

Back on the Big Island

I'm back! On the Big Island. It's been just over a year since my first  working vacation at Bobby and Ming Wei's, and I am happy to say that I fulfilled my promise of returning. I arrived early January (yes, I was a bit slow starting the blog back up…) and will be here until mid-March, working on the farm, making strange creations involving tropical fruits, and exploring the Big Island.
I hope to share my adventures with somewhat consistent delivery - enjoy!