Made Salvadorian Chicha, although not quite like how mother made to avoid the chance of getting vinegar haha. It’s made with a brown cane sugar processed in an old fashioned way - a company sells the cones of sugar called mi costeñita - and pineapple.
Usually you use fresh pineapple and ferment it using the skins and hopefully you get the right yeasts. However, the pineapple sold in Finland is probably not as fresh as one harvested on the spot in El Salvador.
Thanks to Alzymologist@sopuli.xyz here on Lemmy tho (rip Alzymologist Oy), I got an excellent yeast that gave me the smoothest Chicha I’ve ever had. Perfectly sweet, with no sourness. It came out to around 12% alcohol in only 4 days too, even though a traditional Chicha takes at least 8.
I saved some of the raw Chicha with yeast in it and am now in the process of making an apple-hibscus drink with it next.
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Haha, great to see success! Looks inviting to drink.
Be careful with propagation, without the 1-cell steps occasionally, it’s certain to get contaminated eventually. This particular strain does not even seem to have a killing feature to suppress other microbiota other than by starvation.
Yeah, the company is over and this was the last shipment. Actually the Posti lost the shipment and this was some informal sample I just made at home as a replacement long after operations stopped (so no fancy labels anymore!). Such an adventure.
But if someone needs the yeast, I still keep the library as a personal project, so DM.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by “1-cell” steps?
I didn’t realise yeasts have “killing features” either… I thought the whole idea with fermentation was to create the right conditions for your favoured micro-organism to out compete the rest!
The pure culture process (pretty much all the stuff invented by Pasteur) is based on isolating a single living cell of yeast and then growing a culture of its genetic clones by natural budding (our brewer yeast lost ability to reproduce by other means some centuries ago). This ensures that chances of mutation are small and there are no other organisms in the culture. It also rejuvenates yeast, as growth conditions in this process are much more favorable and pleasant, so that cells generation can build large energy reserves inside. This is surprisingly low tech, could be done at home (lol that’s what I do), but it takes certain discipline, even more cleaning than brewing.
As of killing feature, I’m not sure exactly what it is, but for some lines they report an ability to efficiently inhibit the activity of competing organisms by means others than just outcompeting them in multiplication and consumption of nutrients. These lines should be better for introducing uncooked stuff to fermentation (fruits, berries, spices, maybe raw honey), although I’d say that really vigorous yeast can outcompete almost anything under common conditions, maybe save for really high pitch rate of acetobacter. I don’t pay much attention to this feature really, but it’s a curiosity IMO.
I’ve always heard this drink called Tepache.
My understanding of Chicha is that it is a corn/maize based fermented beverage and the starches in the corn are traditionally converted to sugars by chewing the corn and spitting it out, human saliva contains amylase enzymes which converts the starch. Modern versions of the beverage can be made with malted corn if you don’t wanna drink fermented spit.
Welcome to the world of spanish. OP’s recipe is the Salvadoran version. There is at least one variety of chicha per country. Most use maize and chew the corn but el salvador uses maize, pineapple, and panela. Looking on wikipedia it looks like tepache originally was made the same way as el salvadoran chicha. Nowadays it’s different.
It’s easy to make too, but especially so with that yeast I got from Alzymologist. This is Jar 1 of 2, but you just dissolve the brown sugar cone in boiling water, then let that fully cool down. Then add half a pineapple for this size jar, the yeast, stir, and leave it in a dark place. I manually released the extra gas from it throughout the day, but if you have the money you can get a proper fermenting jar / bucket / lid. You can either strain and filter it fresh to get a bubbly, more sour Chicha, or if you really want to make sure you don’t get vinegar and have it for longer term storage / have it taste sweeter and smoother without the bubbles and no sourness, you put it in a big metal pot with a fully sealed lid, boil it for like a minute, then turn off the heat and leave it in the pot without opening the lid until it’s fully cooled down the next day. That’s why I made 2 jars, to have one of each.
