Recently, I was discussing the vegetarian ramen offered at a local restaurant with one of my friends who had quite enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I was less enthusiastic about it since, while it was a very tasty, the broth largely just seemed to be miso soup with a bit of sesame oil added to enrich it a touch. In my opinion, while this made a tasty soup (and is quite similar to something I often make, although usually with soba or udon noodles), it doesn’t really capture the level of heartiness that I want out of a ramen broth.

I really enjoyed exploring the idea of acaraje last week, so, this week, I decided to try making a baked loaf in my mini-cake pan out of the batter. Baked Acaraje Miniloaf Version 1 Ingredients 75g dry red lentils 60g onion 0.5 tsp tomato paste 0.5 tsp miso additional fermentation cultures (for this iteration: 1tsp of gingerbug) dechlorinated water 1/8tsp baking soda Process Soaked lentils for 12 hours then discarded water Blended together with onion, cultures, miso, and enough water to make a blendable batter Left, covered, at room temperature to ferment for 24 hours Preheated oven to 450F Whipped air into batter Mixed in baking soda Put in mini cake tin and baked for 25mns Let cool for 10 minutes then turned out onto cooling rack to further cool Discussion Last week, I noticed that the batter foamed up quite a bit during fermentation and once again when the baking soda was added.

There’s a section in The Art of Fermentation where Sandor Katz describes a fried fritter found in Africa and Brazil called acarajé that was made out of a batter formed by fermenting a paste of black-eyed peas and onions. For whatever reason, the dish caught my fancy, so I decided to try riffing on the concept. Iteration 1: Pancake of fermented canned black-eyed beans Since I decided to try this a little last minute, I didn’t have enough time to do a proper soak, so I decided to start from canned black-eyed beans and only fermenting for a few hours.