Saturday, May 19, 2012

Home-made Nigari-ish

Well, since I last posted I turned 32. In our group of friends everyone gets together (virtually since we live in multiple states and countries) and pools some money so that people can get something nice for their birthday, a tradition that I inhereted inadvertantly through my wife. Well, I'm a difficult person to get things for, I get obsessive about certain things and activities which can change without warning. So for my birthday I got a moderately large chunk of money which I spent on Spices for my wonderful spice rack, a book on making Miso by Aoyagi/Shurtleff, a tofu press, a book on foraging for native australian foods, and Andrea Nguyen's book Asian Tofu.

You might notice a theme and guess that my current obsession is the soy bean, I love soy, I love pretty much every thing about it, It is one of the most versatile of ingredients that you can cook with, from use as a thickening agent in custards to tofu and miso it really is an amazing food.

While waiting for Andrea Nguyen's book to arrive I decided to get my hand back in at tofu making something I had done previously with varying degrees of success (I remember a much earlier time where I deliberately discarded my freshly made soymilk down the drain in the mistaken idea that the soybean solids (or okara) was what gave the tofu its firm texture.

I have used both Nigari, and epsom salts before as coagulants and found the nigari to be much better at the job, giving the tofu both a sweeter taste and smoother (less crumbly) texture.

Now when I lived in sydney, I stumbled upon a small bottle of nigari in an independant grocer which though I didn't know it at the time was an incredibly lucky find as I can not find it for supply in retail quantities online in australia at all.

So, not being a very patient man, I decided to make my own.......

Using a 15 liter water bottle we went to a semi-isolated beach in hervey bay where I didn't see any boat traffic (not wanting to ingest diesel) and filled my bottle with slightly yellow seawater with lots of sediment.

I was just going to boil down the seawater as is but VeganChickie was a little worried about the color and sediment so she (thankfully) convinced me to filter the water through an old "Brita" filter first which got rid of all the sediment and yellow color.

I then put all the water into a large pot and cooked out the water (in stages) until i could hear the steam erupting from the last of the water (by the way it is very cool to watch salt form crystals from the saline as it oversaturates) at which point I pulled the pot off the heat and put the slightly damp "natural sea salt" on a piece of muslin cloth hung over a bowl.

Now, natural sea salt is made up of quite a lot of chemicals and not just the sodium-chloride (table salt part) and according to Aoyagi/Shurtleff in their Book of Tofu is made up of;
- 77.8% Sodium Chloride
- 9.5% Magnesium Chloride
- 6.6% Magnesium Sulfate (Epsom salts)
- 3.4% Calcium Sulfate (Gypsum)
- 2.1% Potassium Chloride
- 0.2% Magnesium Bromide

When you hang the natural sea salt over a container in a very humid environment what happens is the moisture from the air condenses on the salt crystals and drips (very slowly) through the salt to the bowl below resulting in both refined salt and nigari (you can use this salt plus any wasted okara in making your own shoyu by the way).

The final chemical makeup of natural nigari is (Aoyagi/Shurtleff);
- 31% Magnesium Chloride
- 2% Magnesium Sulfate
- 2% Potassium Chloride
- 1% Sodium Chloride

Well....... I think I mentioned before, I am an impatient man..... I got to thinking that perhaps it wasn't humid enough and that the process wouldn't happen (note; the process of refining the nigari out of sea salt takes weeks-months),
so I just used the natural sea salt to make my tofu.

The result, the curds was smooth like nigari tofu, but the flavor was quite a lot saltier (for obvoius reasons), however I think I could have gotten away with half the amount of natural salt as I used.

You could make a version of nigari from mixing your own salts and there are people who have done so, although I'm not sure about using non food-grade chemicals, but if you don't have access to fresh/clean seawater then this would definately be a good option, although if this was the case you could go the chinese tofu method and just use Calcium Sulfate and I really want to stress you should probably only use food grade chemicals in cooking (and not just do a trip to whatever chemical companies that come to mind).

2 comments:

  1. Uhm... your percentages for the "final chemical nigari" don't add up to 100% - what is missing?

    ReplyDelete

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