Kishk

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Kishk

Postby Rootdigger on Thu Feb 04, 2021 3:26 pm

Hi, I am trying to make Kishk from the recipe in Wild Fermentation. I am on day 14 with no results and have a lot of time and money invested, wanted to see if anyone has some pointers. I am pasting an email to a fermentation guru I sent out but she has never made it before, her suggestion was that my house is too cold, the kishk is averaging between 61-64 degrees. Also, I have had it covered with a dish towel to avoid contamination if that is a problem.

"I was raised on Kishk, just 1 way, we take the dried powder, add water with fried lamb and onions and make a porridge that you add bread balls too, it traditionally eaten for breakfast. That is all I ever knew and have ordered the powder for winter, but after the war in Syria it got REALLY hard to find, very expensive, we just paid $36 for half a pound, and the quality varies greatly. I found 2* recipes online both based on the same recipe from a book called Wild Ferment sold on Mother Earth. They both cite the same recipe but the proportions are different and one says to add the salt at the end of the ferment and the other at the beginning. I went with the proportions of the one on Mother Earth because that is all I read when I got the ingredients but I held the salt till the end per the other recipe because I didn't know if it would inhibit fermentation. The problem with both recipes is that they list the ingredients as yogurt, bulger and salt. How many yogurts are there? To a middle easterner, saying "Bulger" is like saying "Meat", if you don't know english and want to make chicken noodle soup and the recipe asks just for "Meat", you could end up with something horrible by just guessing. It was easy because Eureka Natural foods also just had "Bulger", to a middle easterner it is course bulger of unknown wheat. I had to guess for the yogurt and went instinctively with a Mediterranean, Zoi Greek cow milk and also a separate batch of goat milk Yogurt that was full cream and thick. I mixed to the proportions they asked and let it set overnight and they said the next day the bulger would absorb all the yogurt it would be like kneading dough, it wasn't, the bulger was still hard and separate from the yogurt. I should also add that at this point I added some real Kishk powder from Lebanon as a starter, just a bit. If yogurt meant Keifer which is closer to laban which is served with a lot of dishes then the thick yogurt was wrong, anyway I added milk over days till I got it too wet and had to sop it up but I still never got anything resembling dough and even after using an immersion blender on day 4 the yogurt and bulger are separate.

Back to the ferment, no mold, it smelled like they described during the beginning of ferment, like coconut. It is starting to turn musty but just barely, not even close to where it should be at day 9. The temp has been kept probably at 65. I added the salt last night and will continue for a few more days. If you have any comments I would love to hear them. First are the links to the 2 variants of the same recipe I melded and the 3rd link is to the Lebanese Food Heritage Foundation which you would probably love to look at anyway, I have learned so much! Do a search for Kishk and lots of very interesting articles pop up!"

https://www.motherearthnews.com/real-fo ... rz1608zfol

https://experiencelife.com/recipe/kishk/

https://food-heritage.org/
Rootdigger
 
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Re: Kishk

Postby Rootdigger on Wed Feb 17, 2021 8:31 pm

If anyone was interested, the ferment took 20 days, not the 9 in the book. It is fantastic!
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Re: Kishk

Postby Christopher Weeks on Thu Feb 18, 2021 1:50 pm

Awesome!

You mentioned elsewhere not expecting any replies here, but I do want you to know that I read stuff like this with interest even when I don't know anything about it. I'm sure many of us do.
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Re: Kishk

Postby Rootdigger on Tue Mar 02, 2021 7:53 pm

Cool. Loving the stuff!
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