Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
At Wednesday’s talk Katz held forth for two hours on the wonderful world of fermented foods: wine, beer, mead, sourdough, cheese, kefir, kombucha, kraut, pickles, and fermented veggies of all ranks. (In other words, all the good stuff.) I wish I had taken notes so I could accurately recount tales of such creatures as the probiotic culture so strong that, when added to a full bowl of milk, it grows furiously enough to pull the liquid over the lip of the bowl, emptying it onto the counter overnight.
Thursday’s cidering workshop was less structured, thanks to the backyard setting and the DELISHOUS cardamom-infused mead being passed around. About ten people showed up to baptize Nance Klehm’s press, which she’d acquired from a friend whose father had recently passed away and had just gotten up and working that afternoon. Cidering’s pretty basic: toss quartered apples into the maw of the press, grind to a pulp, then press out the juice; let it sit a week or so if you want it to have an alcoholic kick. Her press (now named “Larry,” after its former owner) has some leak issues, so the entire enterprise was pretty comic. But we stood gamely in the yard in the dark, slipping bowls and jars under the base plate to catch the juice by the blue LED glow of a bike light and swatting away at platoons of voracious mosquitos, who attacked all exposed flesh in an apple-juice-fueled frenzy. Photos of the good times are below.
