Kamut and chana dal tempeh

Above is the mix of chana dal (split baby chickpeas) and Kamut® (a trademark for organic khorasan wheat — see this entry in Wikipedia) cooked, vinegared, cultured, and bagged, done in accordance with my usual method. This is a 3-cup batch: 1.5 cups chana dal and 1.5 cups Kamut, measured before being cooked (separately). 

The bag is now on a raised rack in my tempeh incubator, where it will rest for the next 24 hours, after which it will finish out in the open, at room temperature. It’s Friday morning.

After 27 hours

After 27 hours: early Saturday afternoon

The mycelium is starting to show — the hazy areas are where it is surfacing — but given the amount of time, this seems a slow start.

No problem, though. The fungus is clearly alive and well, and it will progress overnight. However, I think I’ll leave this batch in the incubator until I go to bed, 7 or 8 hours from now. 

Update: I took it out of the incubator 6 hours after the photo. It had more mycelium and the batch was also quite warm, starting to generate its own heat.

After 44 hours

After 44 hours: very early Sunday morning

At the left, what it looks like first thing (6:00am) Sunday morning. This is after starting it around 10:00am Friday morning. It clearly has at least another day to go, and I imagine I’ll let the mycelium continue at room temperature until Monday evening.

I’ve noticed before that Kamut is a bit challenging for Rhizopus oligosporus. The fungus seems to take hold slowly on kamut. 

At any rate, the tempeh is progressing satisfactorily. I think this will be a good batch. Right now I would say that rye and kamut work better than hulled barley, and I bet oat groats would work poorly (hard to dry, and would tend to stick together into a solid mass), and I bet the same would be true of white rice. Millets are also a little challenging in terms of getting them dry, but they work well enough, though I think they work better with a larger legume than lentils.

Someday soon I’m going to try wild rice (truly wild, from Minnesota or northern Canada, not cultivated “wild” rice, which has a much tougher bran shell). 

4 days and done

At right is the finished tempeh in cross section. This batch I took to almost 100 hours because the mycelium was struggling at the top (see this post). However, even that top strip is good — at the link, I have the recipe with which I tried it — and the rest of the slab is in fine shape.

This batch turned out very well indeed. Kamut imparts a good chewiness. Details at the link.