Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

A discussion of my experiments with tempeh, my successes and failures, and future plans.

I bought the tempeh starter two or three years ago. It’s possible I bought it before I moved to Seattle, and I moved here four years ago. So, it’s been a while. I made a bar of tempeh about two years ago, but it wasn’t great. I froze it for the longest time and I wasn’t really impressed. I think I tried it one more time, and for some reason, it didn’t really work as I expected. So, the whole thing remained untested.

I talked to a guy from Tufts last month (by which I mean, five months ago) during the alumni meeting. He said he was working on quinoa and almond tempeh in business. That was the provocation I needed to get back into working with tempeh. I set my warmer, cooked a rice cooker full of quinoa and a bunch of almond, and put them in a large baking tray. Set the temperature and left it at that. I realized one day later the way I set the thermostat was wrong, and the temperature was actually about 20 Fahrenheit above what it should have been. So, I fixed that, and the heating setup is running.

My hope is that in two days of regular temperature setting, I’ll get a nice big bar of quinoa and almond tempeh that I can eat regularly, put it on my sandwiches. If this works, or even if this doesn’t work, I’m going to cook half a rice cooker full of jasmine rice and try to multiply the tempeh starter. I have three or four small tiny bags of tempeh starter that won’t last a very long time. My understanding is most semi-serious tempeh fermenters start by making their own batch with rice in the first round and use that spawn for their experiments. Once they run out of their homemade batch, then they use the second or third or fourth packet to create further rounds of spawn.

The thing with these creatures is genetic Brownian motion kind of screws up the fermentation starter, so you don’t want your starter cultures to have multiple generations. You want to maintain the base stock’s children. That has to be the theory, because otherwise nobody would be paying 14 bucks for four tiny bags of tempeh spawn. After I get my proper spawn in rice made, I am going to use that to create proper soybean tempeh and then other beans and nuts tempeh eventually. I know the first round didn’t taste so great, but I didn’t know what I was doing. Now I know a lot better and have a lot better expectation of what the taste should be.