I've been fermenting tons of different things for years. I'll make one post here and link threads like beer, mushrooms, etc. The beauty of fermentation is that essentially every food on earth can be fermented one way or another.
When it comes to
alcohol, I almost always make liminal brews like metheglin (mead with tea) and braggot (beer with mead) because you will almost never find these at the store. I've found straight beer to be too finicky, wasteful, and boring, though now that I have space, I may make beer just to compost the waste. Honey stores easier in bulk than grains and you can use the same cheap champagne yeast,
Saccharomyces bayanus, for everything. My favorite recipe is a metheglin with chaga mushroom tea, which gives the mead a mellow earthy flavor. I bottle referment my brews similar to Unibroue's technique and like to let them age a few years at room temp before drinking them. I've made
applejack before, which uses ice to distill apple cider.
Some fermented staples that are great to keep around the kitchen are apple cider vinegar, kombucha,
salsa,
hot sauce,
mustard, and
other condiments. The liquids are great for a variety of reasons and easy to make, and the condiments are significantly better than storebought products. Salsa only takes about two days to ferment.
I've done a lot of fermented dairy and found most of it useless except
skyr, which is essentially a soft cheese. Hard cheeses are in a class of their own. Kefir or buttermilk could be useful if you make quick breads, but I'd rather keep a
sourdough starter, which also qualifies as fermentation. I've only recently found success with sourdough and it's clear that the best way to get funky bread is to feed the starter yoghurt, skyr, or whey.
Editing to mention
Carl's starter from 1847, which has its own
Wikipedia page; you can obtain a copy for a SASE and a recommended donation. Carl Griffith distributed his great-grandmother's starter from the Oregon Trail for return postage only on Usenet, and when he died in 2000, people from that group volunteered to distribute his excellent 150+ year old starter along the same lines.
I'll mention
mushrooms to the extent that fermenting nutrient broth, and using that to directly inoculate small containers of sterilized and highly nutritious substrate, is the way to go (
bottle tek). This is especially true if dumping pounds of moldy horse shit into your yard would be suspicious.
Speaking of more advanced ferments, I'd like to explore things that break the substrate down to raw amino acids over a period of years such as
miso and
soy sauce. I've made one or two abortive attempts at
chickpea tempeh. I have not attempted to ferment meat and have so far been disgusted by fermented shark and herring, but I may prepare some jars of pre-browned canned meat.
I knew a goat cheese farmer whose cheese cave had some 20 years of beneficial mold and bacteria in it, who showed me pictures of her goats and granddaughter, and told me that dreams in color come from god and dreams in black-and-white come from the devil. This anecdote's lesson is that you develop a relationship with your microbes over time and they evolve more complex flavors the longer you keep them around, e.g., if you have an old starter or reuse your brine and whey.
I wish I could say that I have an actual recipe, but I can share technique.
That's the tl;dr version of it, and carrots are an essential ingredient in fermented hot sauce.
There's an old beer brand, Grolsch, that's what I recommend. Can sometimes find lots of 50 or 60 on ebay for $20. $5 to replace all the little rubber seals.
Those 355 mL swing top Grolsch bottles are the best for gifts. I just wish they sold them in liters and that the beer itself wasn't shit. It's like buying a jug of Carlo Rossi only to dump the wine and keep the jug.
Here's a great video for the thread.
