Yes, the fermentation bug bit me hard. It’s not like I’d not explored local ferments before–there’s ragi koozh, kambu koozh, morkali of course, and even a mountain knotgrass-mediated local Nepali rice beer already blogged, and a dozen other unblogged pickles (yes, but for the cooked ones, Indian pickles are invariably lactofermented) going at any given moment. But these days somehow being in the fermentation game has come to mean making gingerbugs, kombuchas, lactofermented hot sauces, vinegars, and, during all our various lockdowns, also sourdough breads. If you’re doing those things and not just making idli and dosa batters, then you’re in the game. I wasn’t.
Curiosity and cashew apples got the better of me this year. Cashew apple vinegar materialized, less by design than by inattention, having so much of that fruit around and just letting it do its thing. Tepache happened–an off-shoot of more unblogged experiments with home-grown corn, nixtamalization, making atole, champurrado, tejuino and the like. Then the naaval pazham arrived and the njara/ naga naatu variety and clafoutis was fait accompli and then it was more like: why not?
My good friend and fermentation goddess Payal over at Kōbo Fermentary often likens her explorations with going down weird and wonderful rabbit holes and quite happily getting a bit lost in them. It’s an apt metaphor which resonates, and for me the jamun was just that: a familiar but still weird and certainly wonderful rabbit hole.
So I started three batches of jamun ferments: one with ginger, one without, and one with no water but just sugar macerating the fruit pulp–in that order. How much jamun to how much ginger-sugar-water you’re asking? Roughly:
- 1/2 kg fruit (with stones, which will need removing),
- 1 cup of sugar,
- 1 tablespoon or 20g so minced ginger,
- 1/2 liter or a little more water
I’ve let these sit on the kitchen counter for a little over 2 weeks now. Meantime, I’ve been working on this project to understand stone quarrying operations and the whole dirt-moving man-machine relationship mostly in the United States while sitting in an Auroville forest because “work from home” is suddenly the new gold, right? {giant eye-roll} All my cooking has been on weekends and all I can do most days is feed the various fermenting jars going on the kitchen table like so many bubbling maws.
[“Amma this place is getting too full!”—“Well you sure don’t complain when I give you things to taste!”].
Then yesterday I decided it was time to decant batch #1 of the jamun ferment because the French brother-in-law said: “This is like a cassis!” (that brilliant Burgundy blackcurrant liqueur) and that was success plenty for me. That left me with a mass of fermented jamun pulp, which had some ginger added for the ferment & it was still nice and purple and jamoony. I blended it with jaggery, a little worried that it would change color on me, but it remained a bright, beautiful purple.
The story might have ended there but for the fact that the kids were up in their various online dens and the husband was somewhere and the best time to bake a cake is when you are quiet and alone in the kitchen, right? Work calls be damned. Quick-quick now—I toyed with the idea of chocolate, it felt right somehow to combine jamuns and chocolate. But no, that had been a disaster before and I’d need to think it through. In this pinch, needed a better risk-to-success ratio.
This was the ginger-based ferment, so it screamed “spice cake” and that felt right, too, because the cumini of the jamoony melds well with spice, yes? I used the wrong flour because that’s all I had, marbled it because I felt like it—into the oven in 15, out in 40. & it could have risen a little higher, but it was moist and spiced and quite delicious. An absolutely perfect, local, zero-waste tea cake.
The boys tumbled down: “Why does this place smell like heaven?” and of course I capitalized shamelessly on that teachable moment: “Now you’ll not complain about my jars!” {wild grin}
An anthropologist and Indianist rather better known and more highly placed than I, Anne Grodzins Gold, once rather unkindly called me “Alice in Wonderland” for my curious, explorative and, to her, random research methodology. I got her back a bit via a book review I was asked to do once, fully returning the “compliment” (I assure you, it was well-deserved). Popping out of my present rabbit hole just now, I’m tempted to leave her a piece of this beautiful swirly spiced jamun tea cake, accompanied by the note: “EAT ME.”
Jamun Ginger Spice Cake
Ingredients
Wet ingredients
- 1.5 cups jamun pulp
- 1 tablespoon minced ginger
- ½ cup jaggery or brown sugar
- ¼ cup yoghurt or buttermilk
- ½ stick unsalted butter, soft but still cool
- ½ cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- ½ teaspoon pure vanilla essence
- ½ cup milk
Dry Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups all purpose flour
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- ¼ teaspoon allspice
- ¼ teaspoon powdered cloves
- ¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg
- ½ teaspoon salt
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 180F/350C
- Line a 9” round or 8” square baking tin with parchment; butter the parchment.
- Sift together all the dry ingredients and set aside.
- Blend the jamun pulp, ginger, jaggery and yogurt. Set aside.
- In the bowl of a stand-mixer, beat together the sugar and butter until creamy and fluffy—a couple of minutes.
- Add the eggs one at a time, and combine well after each addition. Mix in the vanilla, followed by the pureed jamun mixture. (See note about marbling below.)
- Now mix in a portion of the flour/ dry ingredient mixture by hand, gently, until just moistened. Add a little of the milk, then another portion of the dry flour mixture and alternate till both are mixed, ending with the flour. Adjust (either decrease or increase) the milk if the batter is too runny or too dry.
- Pour into the prepared baking pan.
- Note: If you are going to marble this cake, then you’ll want to add the flour+milk to the wet ingredients after the addition of vanilla first, then divide the batter in two and add the jamun puree only to one half. Pour the purple colored batter into the prepared baking pan first. Dot with the uncolored batter, and use a knife to gently swirl until you have the effect you wish.
- Bake for 40-50 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.
- Cool, invert to peel off the parchment, and cut into squares to serve.
[…] pulp to become a lighter vinegar. You could use the fermented fruit pulp, too, in some other way: a jamun ginger spice cake perhaps, or a kelakkai chutney to give Major Grey a run for his […]