JANUARY JUICE BOX
Welcome Friends! Thank you for joining us on our FIRST EVER Juice Box Box as we explore & share this big, bad, beautiful world of fermentation! In this Box you will find an array of fermented foods alongside one of our Juices, using processes and ingredients we are falling in love with & diving into. Below are some notes on our ingredients & the fermentation of each product in your Box, so you can feel free to explore particular products or processes yourself and try em out! Thank you for your support and curiosity! Enjoy!
THE FOOD
BLACK APPLE BUTTER
One of our FAVORITE techniques we’ve been exploring over here. Similar to the process of making black garlic, here we have taken whole apples and held them at 140* F for 12 weeks. This process enables the sugars in the apples to caramelize over a long period of time, creating quite the umami bomb of an apple. From here we turn it into a super traditional apple butter, holding true that it’s only ingredients are apples & salt.
*how to use: we love this black apple butter with roasted pork, spread on bread, on pancakes, or with latkes!
KIMCHI
Kimchi is happy food. And we love making it. This here batch is made of organic Napa & Savoy cabbages, which are given a 1 hour salt massage (by the loving hands of Chef Jay himself) before being mixed with a homemade fish sauce and gochujang from Rhei Maid. (If you don't know Rhei Made, go try her stuff out A.S.A.P.) This gorgeous salty water veggie bath is known as lacto-fermentation, which allows for already existing lactobacillus organisms to begin
converting the lactose and other sugars in the veggies into lactic acid, while killing off bad bacterias, and creating an environment that preserves the vegetables and gives them their badass flavors. Our secret step here is that we strained off some of the brine (to use for future Box products) and mixed in some leftover skin-contact Grecanico to add a little more depth and mouthfeel.
*how to use: scoop some over warm rice, or eat it any way you damn please. Jay puts it on his pancakes with maple syrup. get freaky.
DUCK RIND CHILI CRISP
Our homemade Szechuan style chili crisp with lacto-fermented garlic & shallots gets re-mixed with a one year fermented duck honey! BUT WHAT IS DUCK HONEY?! Well, for one it’s a great way to use those duck scraps! We salted and fried duck rinds and tossed ‘em in some local wild honey with thyme & minced shallots and aged the whole thing in the fridge. As the honey does its natural little fermentation that honey does, that gorgeous duck flavor seeps on in there and.. DAMN is it good! We then mixed it up with our chili crisp ’til we loved it!
*how to use: again, we love this stuff on everything - noodles, eggs, bread, salad, who cares.
3 YEAR NDUJA
A spicy spreadable pork sausage made from an entire rear leg of a Dogpatch Farm’s Pig, aged for 3 years in a top secret location. This aging process concentrates the natural flavors of the meat, while tenderizing the texture, by evaporating moisture from the muscle and promoting natural enzymes to break down connective tissues. From here we took some lacto-fermented long peppers stewed with garlic, and ground them right in with the broken down prosciutto. We aged the whole thing for another 6 weeks, and then jarred it up just for you!
*how to use: eat on bread or crackers, spread on a bagel and make a breakfast sandwich, eat from the jar.
MISO BUTTER
Here we whipped up some local cream and buttermilk to make creme fraiche (cuz thats how you make it) and then held it at 100* F for 48 hours. We then aged it in the fridge for 10 days, allowing it to set, before whipping it back up until the buttermilk separated, to make our butter. We then took a beautiful 18 month Shiro Miso (aka a sweet white miso made of soybeans, koji & salt) and some fermented chili paste and whipped that right into our homemade butter to make this wildly delicious miso butter!
*how to use: spread on bread, use on noodles, use in a sauce!
*GUEST PRODUCT - NATURALLY LEAVENED BREAD FROM FOUND BREADS*
This month we were proud to work with Sarah of Found Breads, a micro bakery located right here in Jamaica Plain! Sarah uses local ingredients from as close to home as she can get, and all her breads are naturally leavened & mixed and shaped by hand. For this bread, flour was freshly milled at Ground Up Grain in Hadley, MA. Give her a follow at @foundbread !
P.S. We snuck our secret fermented hot sauce in your box this month too! More info on that one next month!
THE JUICE
FOR THE BIRDS
A super small batch Juice made from locally foraged cherry plums & rosemary!
The cherry plums were coated in a light layer of brown sugar, hand-pressed, and given 24 hours in an open container covered in cheesecloth, before being transferred into a glass fermentation vessel. A rosemary yeast starter made of homegrown rosemary, brown sugar, and water was pitched in, alongside fresh rosemary, a week later to assist in fermentation and add flavor. After another 10 days the juice was strained through a metal strainer, and all the seeds, skins, and musts, were placed in a separate container and covered with water to create our piquette. (a low a.b.v. byproduct of wine making where you add water to your leftovers just like we did!) Both ferments were left to age for 5 months, before being blended together and canned up JUST FOR THIS RELEASE. Art by local lovely collage artist Sam Stillman (@missmishhmash)
10.5% ABV - 53 cans made.
P.S. This can is equal to half a bottle of wine! Don’t be fooled and chug-a-lug just ‘cuz she’s in a can!
Thanks for joining us! Tag us with your creations at @juiceboxferments on Instagram! We wanna see what you make & maybe you’ll even get a secret discount code for a future purchase! Cheers!