I have my own sake brew in my refrigerator all year round.
Cold and cool, sweet, bad mood, too hot weather, hungry at night ... I scooped a small bowl and ate it silently with a small spoon, and the slight drunkenness brought by the low alcohol level was pleasant, which was a rare moment of relaxation.
On a time-filled morning, I would boil 250 ml of milk in a milk pot, drizzle in a circle with crushed eggs, bring to a boil over low heat, scoop in a large spoonful of juice, stir, turn off the heat and out of the pan. Friends who travel to the northwest line up to punch the local internet red food milk and egg mash, after eating told me "no mash taste, not delicious."
Mash milk eggs on Lanzhou night market. © zhihu.con
I don't know that the northwestern people are also called "mash", the same as the Sichuan people; Hubei people are used to call it "wine brewing", Henan people call it "sweet rice wine", the name is different from place to place, it is said that the same thing: glutinous rice (or rice) steamed or cooked, after the fermentation of koji - root mold (and a small amount of mucormycetes and yeast), starch is converted into small molecule sugars, protein is decomposed into amino acids and peptides, lipids, vitamins, minerals and other substances are combined, and the state changes ... Ordinary steamed rice thus becomes a sweet and sticky food with a wine flavor.
No one knows when and where sake originated, but rice wine is the first wine that our ancestors began to brew: "There is no end to the rice, there is no end to the mulberry, the accumulation of flavor, the long-term accumulation of gas"; the Book of Poetry also has "peeling the dates in August, harvesting rice in October." With this spring wine, in order to introduce eyebrow life". A thing that can be passed down for thousands of years shows that the taste is good, it can withstand the taste of ancestors, and it also shows that the process is not complicated, and there is no problem of "technical discontinuity" like the artworks on the temple.
However, as a woman with extremely strong hands-on ability, I did it twenty or thirty times and wasted more than twenty pounds of glutinous rice before I found the doorway.
Rice wine is turbid.
After the Spring Festival last year, I did nothing at home and made all kinds of delicacies one by one: sauce meat buns, plum dried vegetable cakes, Sichuan cold noodles, ice powder, pot stickers, bean blossoms, strange peanuts, bell dumplings... Before the home stopped heating, a bowl of wine was fermented with a glass lunch box on a whim, and there was no psychological burden, so it was done according to the instructions of the wine song and placed next to the heating, and it was a great success two days later. Fragrant and sweet, my mother also expressed her admiration.
The second time was a complete failure: the rice had no trace of fermentation at all. After two or three times, I bought a new fresh-keeping lunch box, but still failed, and I can't help but suspect that the first success was a jackpot luck.
According to my mother's recollection, when my grandmother was young, she made a large vat of wine brewing once, wrapped in a quilt, so that the koji could be fermented at a warm and suitable temperature, and every few days the wooden lid was uncovered, and the wine was fragrant, and my grandmother had to eat a large bowl of rice wine every day to come home from the commune farmland to relieve her fatigue, and then go to clean up the housework. A large vat can eat for half a year.
Homemade sake brews usually dig a round pit in the middle, from which sweet rice wine will emerge.
I had to "rush to the doctor" and called my grandmother, who said it very simply: steam the rice, spread it quickly, pour cold water and mix it into the koji, mix it well, and put it in a jar, wrapped in a thick cotton quilt.
I cooked the rice in Beijing, steamed and spread quickly, sprinkled with cold water and koji against the hot air, packed in a glass lunch box, and stuffed into a folded layer of quilts.
Two days later, the surface of the glutinous rice grew a layer of white mold, the soup was not clear, the taste smelled a little sour; again, there was no soup directly, the wine koji on the rice did not melt, and there were some black mold spots common in the Sichuan thunderstorm season... After successive failures, I was devastated and confused, I couldn't remember what special steps I took the first time, my mother as a bystander advised me to give up, I did not accept to lose - a pound of glutinous rice 3 pieces 5, even if I use 100 pounds, I can afford it financially, and I must do it until it is successful!
The main raw material for sake brewing is glutinous rice. © lightorangebean.com
Brewing is not a "stunt", but when I consulted a merchant who sold sake koji and a friend who sold mash, they all seemed to be dancing gods and could not give accurate advice. One said "the water is added more, the temperature is uneven", the water added before the sake is absorbed by the hot rice, not evenly; the other says "the rice is caused by the raw", but the rice I steamed and tried it!
In those months, a lot of failed sake was discarded, and there was no better way to deal with it, so it had to be packed in food bags and put into the column of "kitchen waste" in the community to sort garbage. I guess the garbage collector must be wondering: Who is this, and the good raw rice has been thrown away? Pour one pot at a time.
I used a yogurt machine and failed; I bought back a simple fermentation vat, but still failed, so I had to go to the person who sold the koji again: "The temperature of the three-year-old child's meal written in the instructions, is it cold to the touch?" I measured the temperature, and 35 °C was a cool feel." The other person replied: "I said that the fermentation should be 35 °C, and the next song you said, all cold can be."
I think of the koji that I put down when the rice was still hot, and it turned out that they were burned to death.
Traditional koji is made by picking a variety of plants.
Fortunately, I have not wasted 100 pounds of glutinous rice, I found the problem, adjusted the method, steamed the rice and added cold water, and covered it evenly, waited until it was almost cold, and then put it into a bowl and mixed it with koji powder, and since then it has been a great success.
After the technology stabilized, I began to make my own rice wine: add pure water to the fermented mash, let the koji continue to ferment, wait until the rice grains are empty, floating, filtered out, and get a bottle of bubble-filled, fragrant and sweet turbid rice wine! Further, I began to try koji from different origins: at present, there are two kinds of koji that are made in China, one is like Angel, Huaxi and other brands, factory production, the main ingredients are root mold and yeast; the other is the traditional koji, using indica rice flour as raw material, adding Chinese herbs such as spicy indigo, licorice, mountain gardenia, baizhi and so on, so that the sake made from it has more special flavors. For example, the sour taste of wine made of herb koji in Xiaogan, Hubei Province, is more prominent, it will not make people feel sweet, and the taste is more exciting after freezing; the wine made of sweet wine koji in Neijiang, Sichuan has no miscellaneous taste, the honey flavor is very strong, and people who are not fond of sweetness are estimated to be unable to bear it; the herbal song of Sichuan Dazhu (known as the "hometown of rice wine") is relatively peaceful, the sour taste is not obvious, and as the fermentation time is extended, the alcohol taste is stronger than the wine koji in Neijiang.
This is a koji made from the petals of a red lotus flower, and the brew is even sweeter.
No matter which one, give it to friends from all walks of life, everyone has said that it is too fragrant! The fragrance of that grain, mixed with the sweet aroma of honey, with the slight drunken smell of wine, makes the person who lifts the lid feel full of happiness. Every time the newly made sake is "unboxed", my son will also be attracted by the aroma, I allow him to lick a little, the newly made wine is relatively light, the rice grains are also very full, and the children will feel very much like desserts.
Why do I have to work tirelessly and never give up on making sake?
Because most of the sake sold in supermarkets is no longer really "sake".
As mentioned in the opening chapter, sake brewing is the product of fermentation, and its nutritional function is also based on various chemical and physical changes. Some of the flavor substances produced during the fermentation process contribute to the improvement of the taste. However, once you enter the supermarket, the most basic requirement is food safety, so that the wine in the jar continues to ferment is dangerous - on the one hand, under the continuous action of microorganisms, the wine will become more and more sour (unless frozen all the time), displayed on the shelf at room temperature will gradually deteriorate; on the other hand, a large amount of carbon dioxide produced by fermentation accumulates in the container, it is easy to "explode" at the moment of opening the bottle, endangering consumer safety.
Homemade sake is fermented continuously. © google.com
This is also the "choice" that we must make in the process of social progress. Sake brewing was originally made by many rural women in the south, similar to watercress sauce and kimchi, fermented in a clay pot, placed in a damp and dark corner of the earthen house, and whenever you want to eat, take a bowl to scoop. When I was a child in the countryside, my cousin and I stole wine made by my grandmother, which was sweet and sour, and after eating it, it was a bit on the top, and the uncle who smelled the taste also came over and drank a big mouthful. There is no cold chain, no logistics, only when the market is rushed on even-numbered days, you can see the big bride who sells the wine in iron barrels.
If you want to store for a long time, ensure the stability of wine quality, and send it to other places, you can only sterilize and inactivate, and the bacteria that are active in wine are killed, which meets the requirements of modern food and loses its original flavor. More commonly, in order to control the cost, add water to the wine, let the rice grains disperse in the liquid one by one (the initial state is plated into pieces), and then add sugar and other flavoring agents (common such as agar, carrageenan, sodium citrate, potassium sorbate, flavor, etc.), the wine becomes a cheap drink, the alcohol is negligible, and only a little of the aftertaste of the wine evokes people's memories.
The homemade sake bought in the market is completely different from the live sake brewed in the supermarket. © Mu Chun Shan
This may not be worth complaining about, just as Sichuan kimchi is also vacuum bagged after sterilization and inactivation, and it can be sold all over the country. This is an improvement that traditional food must accept in order to "go out". But I prefer to understand it as a kind of "fairness": if you are not willing to do it yourself, nor are you willing to find a handmade person, and try to seek convenience, your choice can only be a tasteless "road goods".
The best food is in the place where the ingredients grow; the freshest cooking is always in the "scene", in the "present", in the hometown where many people can't go back.