fermenting Fermentation - Source of lactobacillus affects on flavor?

[Flamecycle]

I stumbled accross this interesting paper abstract:

http://124.205.222.100/Jwk_spkx/EN/abstract/abstract24332.shtml

tldr: They tested the effect on chili flavor after fermentation of 4 different strains of lactobacillus, and found a significant difference between them.

I have only made a fermented sauce once so I don't have much personal experience with fermenting - most of what I know is from reading posts from RocketMan and others here. I had been under the impression that use of whey or hooch or doing a wild ferment did not result in a very drastic change in final flavor of a sauce. This paper seems to suggest that may not be the case.

So I am curious: What are all your experiences with the use of different starters in your fermented sauces? Do you find some to produce more sourness, others to produce more bitterness etc? I'd love to hear a discussion about how you think the final flavor is affected by your starting methods and what your favorites are.

 

[landracer]

Cool topic! I am very curious if folks here have done ferms with pure cultures.

The abstract is pretty interesting. I couldn't get the full article, unfortunately.

Most of my experience with these comes from cheese and sourdough. But LABs (lactic acid bacteria) are ubiquitous and incredibly diverse. If they did not produce a wide range of interesting metabolites, there would be a lot less kinds of cheese out there.

My one criticism of the abstract is that they seem to treat spontaneous fermentation as a single point, when it can obviously span the entire continuum - and almost universally involves a succession and/or microbial community. By definition, no two spontaneous ferments follow the same course or even involve precisely the same organisms. So, ranking a single incidence of spontaneous fermentation against 4 controlled innocula is probably... misleading.

To your question, I am planning to do innoculated and wild ferments of pickles (including peppers), sauces, and kim chi this year. There are source LAB cultures for cheesemaking, yogurt, and winemaking (malolactic conversion) which should all produce a safe outcome. Obviously it is good to verify that with a pH meter.

I think you can expect a more predictable and reproducible result with pure cultures.

 

[stickman]

I couldn't speak to the differences in taste resulting from inoculating with different strains of lacto-bacilli... I make kimchi and use the brine from that to get my mashes started. All of my kimchis have at least some Napa cabbage in them, and I believe that the strain(s) found there are the ones that inoculate the kimchi. I also add garlic, ginger, chiles, mustard greens, Korean radishes and seafood like salted shrimp and chopped oysters to the kimchi, so the brine is already strongly flavored to begin with and carries over to the pepper mash.

 

[Calamityville]

In winemaking and beer brewing the yeasts have a huge effect on the flavor.

Yogurt producers all have proprietary cultures that they maintain to get a clean ferment and a consistent flavor in their product. I'm sure that different cultures will produce different qualities in your finished product. If you're into using whey as a starter it would be fairly easy to get whey from straining two or more brands of yogurt and inoculating a batch of mash divided into as many batches to ferment.

Landracer brings up several valid points about wild versus cultured ferments. In the case of peppers and a cultured ferment, you're counting on the pure culture to overwhelm any native bacteria. In a wild ferment you'd get whichever native bacteria in the mash is best suited to the conditions of the fruit, salt, temperature during the ferment.

This should be a fun topic to watch.

 

[RocketMan]

I want to preface this by saying that this is only my opinion based on my experience working with fermented peppers. I am not a biologist nor a Food Scientist though I did play one in my kitchen the other morning


Let’s start with deciding what is a Wild Ferment. Is it a ferment that is like an Open Fermentation with Beer where the wild lacto is allowed to come in on the air? I hope not because that would allow for bad and good bacteria to get in. I would call a wild ferment one that is done with only the wild bacteria that is on the skin of the peppers and other ingredients. Also in order to do one all ingredients must not have been parboiled or put through a process that will kill off these wild bacteria.

Most of my ferments have been started using either Yogurt Whey or Sourdough Hooch and the last 2 that I have done have been natural ferments. What I found interesting was that their finding was that the ferments that were inoculated were better tasting than the natural, wild ferments were. It sounds like, and this is just my opinion, while the wild fermentations had all the different flavor compounds from many different groups there were some flavor compounds that clashed with others. Brings to mind a vision of Asparagus covered with chocolate and caramel then hit with some Kim chi and a good dose of garlic with Whipped Cream and a Cherry on top.

So, how do we get a pure culture without the proper lad equipment like would be found in a brewery it would be extremely hard to select the once Lacto cell we want and culture it into a thriving community of that pure strain. Using the Whey and Hooch starter I would not say that we have pure cultures but rather that we have cultures that have proven to work in harmony with each other. Does this mean that if you start a ferment with Whey from Dannon and one from Yoplait or evern one from Hooch that they will come out different? Well, while it makes sense as they each have their own proprietary blend of Lacto, I can say that I have done fermentations of the same set of ingredients using all three and there were no notable differences in taste. That’s not to say there weren’t differences but the human tongue could not pick them out.

Possibly if you bought a vile of lacto from White Labs you might get a pure strain of Lacto and it would be interesting to see if the results were as good as using one of our standard starters.

This is indeed going to be a good topic to follow. Actually, I’m going to invite my buddy wheebz in to give his view as a professional brewer who has worked with lacto strains professionally.

Cheers,

 

[wheebz]

I am actually getting into this problem as we are talking about this topic

3 weeks ago I brewed a berliner weiss using a very nontraditional method.

There are a couple of ways to use bacteria in beer brewing, which is very similar to fermenting peppers.

One way to do it is to go through your primary fermentation, and then pitch a LAB/wild yeast and let it sit and sour for months on end until desired result is achieved.

Another way is to make a sour mash by allowing the bacteria naturally occuring in the grain and in the air lower the pH of your mash, and then running off your wort, boiling, and pitching a regular yeast strain. This unfortunately results in a varied end product, and most likely requires blending to achieve your desired outcome.

The way that I did it was mashed in and ran off into my kettle, and inoculated with a lactobacillus Delbreuki strain and let it work for 42 hours until i reached a pH of 3.5. I then boiled to kill it all, ran it into the fermenter, and pitched our house ale strain and let it finish out.

Pros - I didnt infect the rest of my brewery by isolating the bacteria to the kettle, and it came out tart and tasty just like a berliner should.
cons - its cheesy, and not in the good kind of way like you would get in a geuze or lambic. The Lacto Del strain was not suitable in a full on inoculation and overtaking of my entire wort to give me the outcome that I would have gotten from a blended LAB pitch.

To answer the question, or to at least give my input on the question, yes, using different cultures/LAB's/yeast will absolutely affect flavors in your finished product, and heres why.

We all know that during a bacterial fermentation, lactic acid is the biggest bi-product, hence the reason we use it for a pepper ferment. But that is no where near ALL of the things that are producted during fermentation.

During fermentation, you have acetylaldehides, phenols, chlorophenols, polyphenols, other esters, diacetyl, isoamyl acetate, hexanes, fusel alcohols, so on and so forth.

ALL OF THESE THINGS will affect your finished product, whether they are desired or not. Using different cultures from a finished product, such as a whey or sourdough culture, will give you different results than using specific strains, or even blends of strains.

hell even varying the temperature of your ferment by a couple of degrees has a significant role on final product, whether its bacteria or yeast doing the job

ide like to see a side by side comparison of 4 different pepper mashes, all pitched with different strains/blends/starters, and see how they turn out

I can almost guarantee they will taste similar, but not the same

 

[RocketMan]

wheebz, I know how good your pallet is, would you say that the difference would be enough that the ordinary Joe would be able to tell or would it be subtle enough so that it might take a trained pallet to tell the differences?

 

[wheebz]

I dont know about how trained a pallet has to be for a fermented sauce, because of the obvious heat levels overtaking much of the flavors after a couple of seconds for people that dont eat hot food on a regular basis, but i would think that you would taste a difference

I mean it would be like eating a caesar salad with and without pepper, that kind of difference

referencing beer, if you would taste a lacto fermented beer and a pedio fermented beer, they would absolutely taste different, and significantly

 

[landracer]

To build on what Wheebz said: not only will each organism contribute unique flavor and aroma compounds, but the specific compounds may change depending on what raw materials are available (e.g. carrots in a pepper mash), conditions such as temperature/oxygen/pH, and what other organisms are active. Classically, most wild fermented foods overcome the unpredictability that accompanies this complexity by blending batches which were fermented separately (wine, lambic, vinegar, and tabasco sauce come to mind). But sourdough mother might be an interesting case - you cannot blend baked bread, so a good mother must provide some degree of reproducibility in a stable system. Here is an interesting read: http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-07122005-142543/unrestricted/Koh_thesis.pdf They are focused on the impact of the oak barrel in pepper ferms, but because it is a thesis, there is quite a lot of useful background information.