HANGING OUT AT THE PENNSYLVANIA FARM SHOW
In my second year at the Pennsylvania Farm Show, I spent two great days chatting about fermentation with people from all over Pennsylvania. I LOVE the Farm Show. I really love it. First, Fillmore Container sponsored my attendance, and the Fillmore people are pretty much the nicest folks you could ever imagine, so spending time with them is just fun.
Fillmore has seriously beefed up their fermentation product line, so if you were at the booth, coveting the new Pickle Pipe or jar weights, for instance, you can get them over on the Fillmore site any time you’d like!
Second, I love it there because I have the opportunity to talk to so many people about fermentation. And many of them have different fermenting goals (aka feeding a family of 11 on a budget, something I rarely encounter in my city-based classes and events) than the people I normally teach in Philly. While I do love writing about fermentation, writing doesn’t afford me to opportunity to see people’s faces when they get excited and realize they can do this or when they finally understand the issue that has been plaguing their yogurt production for all these years. At the Farm Show, I get to see that all day long. It’s fun. It’s joyful and it gives me energy and excites me to teach and write more.
This year I had a busy schedule that included making kombucha, sauerkraut, kefir, yogurt, pickles and so much more when people strolled up to the Fillmore booth with their excellent questions. In short, it was a dream trip for a fermenter who loves talking to people about fermentation.
Finally, it’s just a wild ride. There are horses running down the hallways, every imaginable type of fried food, the talents of Pennsylvanians on display in competitions from greeting card-making to jar decorating to serious quilting. For the curious of mind, it is really a fun way to wander the day away. Thanks for the opportunity, Fillmore Container!
KOMBUCHA RECIPE
One thing I always love to do for big events and classes is to test out a new recipe for something that I can enjoy for the first time with people taking the class, and this trip to the Farm Show was no exception. I made an Apple Spice Kombucha and a Molasses Kombucha for a recent kombucha class and they were both tasty, but when I put them together to free up one of my handy carbonation tools (aka recycled plastic seltzer bottles), I found that I liked them even better combined.
So here you have the newly tweaked product of this happy accident. Although molasses is definitely a sugar, it doesn’t seem like the kombucha microbes have the easiest time digesting it, which results in two things: this isn’t a super-speedy carbonator and you’ll still be getting a decent dose of sugar when you drink this after secondary fermentation. So feel free to cut the molasses a bit if you don’t do well with carbs.