My jeruselum chokes are growing steadily. Should be able to try this soon. Except that all I can find on "Topinambur" which seems to be a German spirit and all in the German language. BUGGER. Can anyone translate as my german is very rusty.
blanik
This might work. It comes from a wine making site.
* 5-6 lbs Jerusalem artichoke tubers
* 2 lbs dark or light brown sugar
* 2 lemons
* 2 oranges
* 1/2 oz ginger root
* 1/2 tsp pectic enzyme
* water to one gallon
* 1 tsp yeast nutrient
* wine yeast
Scrub Jerusalem artichoke tubers, do not peel. Boil tubers in about 7 pints of water until tender. Remove the Jerusalem artichokes for other uses and retain the water for the wine. Put sugar in the water, along with the thinly peeled rinds (no pith, please) of the lemons and oranges and their juice. Thinly slice the ginger root and add to water. Bring to boil, reduce heat, and simmer 15-20 minutes while stirring to dissolve sugar. Remove from heat and strain water into primary. Cover with sterile cloth and allow to cool to room temperature. Add pectic enzyme and yeast nutrient, stir, recover and set aside for 12 hours. Add activated wine yeast and ferment 7 days, stirring daily. Siphon into secondary, affix airlock and set aside to ferment out. Rack after 60 days, top up and reattach airlock. When wine clears, rack again, top up and reattach airlock. Rack again after 2 months and again 2 months later. Stabilize, sweeten if desired, allow to set 14 days to ensure fermentation does not restart, and rack into bottles. [Author's own recipe]
Ignoring all the racking of course.
Simple potstiller. Slow, single run.
(50 litre, propane heated pot still. Coil in bucket condenser - No thermometer, No carbon) The Reading Lounge AND the Rules We Live By should be compulsory reading
If Your Pugilla is half as good as your Pugirum recipe, it should be a winner! I have a full sheet restaurant stove and oven and I think I will try baking them long and slow to bring out the sugars. I am lucky though, My Wife and I both love the smell of onions cooking
Chokes aren't ready yet, so my answer is no, but I will report on it later.
blanik
Simple potstiller. Slow, single run.
(50 litre, propane heated pot still. Coil in bucket condenser - No thermometer, No carbon) The Reading Lounge AND the Rules We Live By should be compulsory reading
Blanikdog If Your Jerusalem Artichokes work good, that would be great They are the easiest things to grow that I know of, just like a weed they multiply like crazy and are just as hard to get rid of
how mucha onion to a basic neutral..40%..? i 's only got one type a onion and they aint yellow types. but could should would try placin' abit a onion on em.
yer too kind with yer favours..and i like da flavours...buah
I currently have a blue agave beer (mash) working in the fermenter. It will take about three weeks to ferment and should end up around 10% ABV. I use blue agave nectar. It can be picked up at most health food stores; it is a great sugar substitute for diabetics. I buy it in 17 oz bottles and use one bottle for 5 gallons of (beer) mash. I have been making my own beer for a while; it just seemed to me that my blue agave beer should make decent tequila. I am just starting to expand into the distilled side. I have not distilled this yet, was wondering if anyone on here had ever tried the blue agave nectar and how it turned out.
ndustrial use
Nonhydrolyzed inulin can also be directly converted to ethanol in a simultaneous saccharification and fermentation process which may have great potential for converting crops high in inulin into ethanol for fuel.[6]
and the ref is:
^ Kazuyoshi Ohta, Shigeyuki Hamada, Toyohiko Nakamura (1992). "Production of High Concentrations of Ethanol from Inulin by Simultaneous Saccharification and Fermentation Using Aspergillus niger and Saccharomyces cerevisiae". Applied and Environmental Microbiology 59 (3): 729–733. PMID 8481000.
Interesting.. I haven't read the paper, but I am guessing that Inulin is being broken down into simpler sugars and fermented at a controlled rate. I'm sure the flavor has yet to be investigated
Looks like I'm getting behind in my 'sperimentin. I've been meaning to try this out for a couple years now (prompted by the same conversation that Pugi mentioned way back).
IIRC - aspergillus niger is where Beano is derived, no? It would be convenient if it's as simple as dropping some beano and yeast into a vat of crushed onions.
My biggest obstacle is that I have neither an oven nor heat in my house (that'll teach me to buy the handyman special of DOOM). So baking up a batch of onions isn't in the cards yet, much less fermenting it (woke up to 50f in the living room this morning).
From the sound of things, perhaps 50 lb might be sufficient for a 5 gallon all-onion batch that starts at a sufficient potential. I have a feeling it might take a lot of boiling down though. The one question that comes to mind is the temperature of the inulin conversion. Is boiling hot enough, or should it be hotter? Does it make a difference, or is it like mashing where the right temperature is simply the most efficient?
I could not resist trying a test batch of this. I thought that maybe I would treat the onions like agave plants, cook, press, ferment, distill.
I took 25 lbs of sweet onions (walla walla sweet are cheap here) and put them in 6 gallon SS pot with a perforated SS basket. I did not cut or peel them. I then injected low pressure steam until water filled over the top of the onions which took about 7 hours with my steamer. To this liquid I added a pinch of acid blend. During this cooking, all of the onions burst open and fell apart. After cooking I pulled out all of the onion solids using the basket then pressed out as much liquid from them as I could using a big spoon and a potato masher.
I was left with about 2.5-3 gallons of liquid. I chilled some and measured the gravity, only about 3% potential. I added 3 pounds of corn sugar to the liquid and chilled it using a wort chiller. It then read 8% potential. I pitched in Red Star yeast (the red color package type) and a crushed B-vitamin complex. It fermented vigorously and appeared done in about 3 days. I have racked it and am now waiting for it to clear before running it. I haven't checked final gravity yet.
Observations: While cooking it smelled like onion soup. When it first started fermenting it smelled like a mix of onions and what I would call 'normal fermentation smells'. Now it barely smells like onions at all. I think that it smells like tequila? But it might just be some wishful smelling.
I think that I will just double distill it using a pot still like I normally would for a whiskey, and just let it air out instead of triple distilling. I am only going to get about about one 750ml bottles worth at 40% anyway with this batch. And I think that the fermented product smells pleasant as is.
I will keep you all posted when I run this. Should be within the next few days.
-Loneswinger
It's better to learn from other people's mistakes than your own.
Ok, I double pot stilled this last night. The original still charge was only about 9 liters of 8%. I stripped it to get about 2 L of 35%. I added a liter of water and recharged the pot still. The spirit run took 35 minutes total including heat up time. I made cuts by taste, and ended up with about a 3/4 full 750 ml bottle of onion booze. I currently do not have means to check ABV on this small of a volume so I do not know what it is, probably in the mid 50% range.
Smell, taste, and after taste: onion, onion, and onion. I mean this is powerful, by far the most strongly flavored spirit I have ever obtained. The onion may have gone away in the fermenter, but it is back in the spirit. Mouth feel is nice and there is a good balance of sweet and bitter. I have convinced myself that most of that onion smell is dissolved gasses, so I am going to let it air out a couple weeks and check it again.
I remain optimistic, if there is one thing I learned from this hobby is that age does amazing things to spirits. I plan to leave it white for at least a couple of months. If it has not mellowed, I will add some oak cubes. Even if it remains like this, it isn't bad if you like onions, just a unique drink.
-Loneswinger
It's better to learn from other people's mistakes than your own.
I little update. Only been five days since I stilled. I capped the bottle after day two.
Just had a dram after dinner. As I was hoping, it seems the onion smells were mostly dissolved gasses because the onion smell and taste has mostly subsided. Its got some flavor. Not bad. Would not immediately think tequila when tasting, but we will see.
-Loneswinger
It's better to learn from other people's mistakes than your own.
Trying to add something here to the onion discussion: caramelizing onions. I found this article in a European language and translated it with Google Translate, hence the hodgy
dodginess. But you get the point. Caramelizing is probably the answer to both removing the sulphers and converting the sugar. IPerhaps adding amylase could help converting, anyone have a clue? I would say first caramelize and then boil (with amylase?) to convert sugars and get rid of the oil and remaining sulpher.
CARAMELISED ONIONS
June 21, 2008
In the heart of the matter is cooking just chemistry and if you are aware, is all that complicated stuff with pots, herbs and fonds nearly as mysterious as you might think when you professional restaurant chefs and avid amateur cooks conjure see using various tools and techniques that you even aware of its existence never have known. What exactly they are doing, you can just look up on the Internet or the unsurpassed "On Food And Cooking" by Harold McGee.
A particularly fine example chemistry occurs when you are going to make so-called caramelized onions. Onions are the red version after then, somewhat sharp taste. That sharpness is caused by a group of four sulfur-containing chemicals that are used the onion as a defense against animals in their head to get him to eat. It is these four chemicals that make you cry rivers of tears when you cut open an onion.
Unfortunately for the onion, people have learned the taste from sharp sulfur-containing chemicals to like. Provided applied in moderation, they help all kinds of food a pleasant spicy taste.
Besides sulfur compounds (which, when in your eyes, break-in known nasties as sulfuric acid, hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide, stuff you previously expected in the exhaust of a dilapidated Russian truck than the food you eat) include onions too much sugar or, rather, long chains fruit sugar (fructose). Raw in those chains fruit sugar for people not digestible (but for the bacteria in your intestines life - this means that your raw onions windy is) but when you're the onions cooked, they fall apart into smaller sugar molecules which people can properly digested and we like the taste pleasantly sweet taste that is characteristic of sautéed onions.
Now we have learned chemist you know, we started in the kitchen. In order to prepare onions really good, we'll have heat. We have to slowly do to prevent them burning, and we have to do to the long sharp sulfur compounds it contains the chance to dissipate. Is there a recipe from the internet that we have picked that onions should be fried, it means that we know now that they have a low heat for five minutes to bake.
However, there is a chemical you know that we can benefit. Sugar (table sugar or fruit sugar) tends to fall apart when heated further and all extremely complex and rich flavor compounds to enter: the famous caramelize.
We add these two facts together, then we come to the conclusion that it should be a kind of onion caramel by starting with the sulfur compounds from the onion to boil and long sugar chains apart to drop and the resulting sugars by further heat to caramelize.
More on that later. First we caramelize onions. Cut a pound of onions (no, that's no joke - we're going long because they heat so most of the volume of onions, which after all consists of water, lost) in rings. Kwak with some olive oil in a pan that you are at the lowest possible heat off (you own a hot plate, this is a good opportunity "to once again to bring out). Let the whole thing with the lid of the pot simmer a few hours. Stir occasionally.
Remember you still around when doing this. From experience, Mr. Rommelhok say that between the time they are almost ready and when they are burned is a margin of about five minutes.
Exactly when they are ready, it is hard to say. You'll have to taste.
I think someone should experiment with more onions again
Any volunteers?
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A while ago I saw a Youtube Video about the Fat Duck restaurant where they make an onion gel by cooking the onions sousvide at 85ºC for 96 hours. I've just tried to look for the video but it's been taken down. It's mentioned on this food blog though - http://morten-moen.blogspot.co.uk/2014/ ... d-gel.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow - so that might be something to look into at some point in the future.
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If you have used this site to save money by making your own top quality booze at home then please consider donating a couple of dollars to help keep this site running. Cheers!
I have a full sheet restaurant stove and oven and I think I will try baking them long and slow to bring out the sugars. I am lucky though, My Wife and I both love the smell of onions cooking 
They are the easiest things to grow that I know of, just like a weed they multiply like crazy and are just as hard to get rid of 
