Thank you! I made many batches this summer & keep them in a soda stream bottle in the fridge. They're low ABV and the yeast make them fizzy, taste like a sweet soft drink
Theoretically you should be able to propagate the rhyzopus fungi like with any other mycelium. In practice it'd be closer to growing mushroom grain spawns than say, sourdough or yogurt. For reliability reasons, each batch is usually made with fresh new starters. Since the end product is often consumed without being pasteurized or boiled, it is worth being a little more careful than bread starters, which would be baked at high temperature. If you want to experiment with it, don't waste the bottle, the lees would have more starter in it. (the lees also make great marinade if you simply don't want to waste any)
I've got all the ingredients, but instead of the short grain sticky rice I have thai sticky rice, and "glutinous black rice" from taiwan. will this turn out fine?
Yes you can mix the rice, and purple rice will work well. The flavor should be mostly sweet, with a little acidity, not too different from the regular type.
I tried making wine from a Gobindobhog rice, which is semi sticky short grain white rice from Bengal where I live. It tastes good, but there are little hard spots in the centre of the rice grains. Am I undercooking the rice? It absorbed over 3x weight of the dry grain while cooking and felt springy but soft, so I don't know what is going wrong. Please help, and thanks in advance!
Sounds like starch retrogradation to me. Think how rice tends to harden up in the fridge. If it didn't taste undercooked warm and only have hard spots cooled, you didn't undercook the rice. Hard refrigerated rice is still perfectly safe to consume. The amylopectin in sticky rice is what keeps sticky rice from hardening. In lieu of sticky rice, try use a little more yeast/fungi and start the rice in a warmer place. A kick start for glucose production early on can help prevent/reduce starch retrogradation later on.
@@workdaygourmet Thanks for the good advice. I'll try using more starter in the next batch, or maybe making a sort of sponge with rice flour before adding the cooked rice.
To enjoy it sweet, I would keep it in the fridge and finish within a week. You can ferment longer to raise the ABV. Heat pasteurization will make it last longer, but also changes the taste, personally I prefer to just make a small portion and finish it quickly.
