Fermentation Support Forum

Dear all,

Me and my wife have been making chickpea tempeh for quite some time now.
We are really concerned on waste and plastic effect on health and would like to get rid of it completely.We did several tests with stainless steel or glass racks (without lids) and we were getting some really poor and dry tempeh. Still using plastics bags in parallel and it's working really well.
How can we get rid of the plastics bags/boxes ? I was thinking of stainless steel racks with holes on bottom, sides and lid but did not tried yet.
Anyone has experience with that ?

Thank you for your help

Brice

I never used plastic bags for tempeh , use trays covered loosely in newspaper

The traditional wrap, as I understand it, is banana leaves. I imagine any large, non-toxic leaf would work if you have something local. (Maybe burdock would be my local best-bet.)

Thanks guys for the fast answer. Reading from @cerbu just gave me the idea of trying cheesecloth. I'm guessing this be a good alternative to leaves.

I use glass Pyrex bread pans. For the lids I have bought throw away party trays that are firm enough to bend and cut into the shape of lids and I drilled little holes- maybe a 16th of an inch- in a 3/4 inch grid across the whole top and sanded it a bit to remove the burs. They wash up real nice and I used them for years. No waste and easy to sterilize.My tempeh came out perfect. Also with a glass container you could see what is going on and make sure you see a little sweat inside on the walls of the bread pan.you want some moisture and if it's dry then it means your holes are too many or too large.It took a bit of trial and error to balance the heat and the ventilation. I believe that cheese cloth may be too much ventilation.Good luck.

rest a paper sheet on top of the moist cheese cloth and it will be ok

@Tibor, thanks for the input. Any chances you could send some pictures of your setup ? I would be interested to see it.

Exactly as planned, result tempeh is too dry.

I did three tests :
1 - glass pan cover with two layers of cheesecloth as lid
2 - stainless still with tempeh wrapped all around by 2 layer cheesecloth
3 - legumes directly wrapped with cheesecloth

Results :
1 - Bottom: nice and wet, top: too dry..
2 - Bottom: okay but still too dry, top : way too dry
3 - Bottom and top: Both way to dry without the typical taste and smell from tempeh.

See enclosed pictures of the test nb2.

Brice, I am sending a few pictures in separate posts. I couldn't figure out how to do it in one
It took me awhile to get the right amount and size of holes for the depth of my bread pan to have the right amount of moisture retention. After that it was a breeze to make wonderful tempeh.



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One tray can make 2 lids. There's one more picture on the next page.