Week 10 - Fermented

When I hear fermented, my first thought is usually kimchi, but for the week 10 fermented challenge, kimchi was out since it would be too spicy for B. I didn't want to actually ferment anything myself, since I didn't want to unintentionally land us all in the hospital, so I decided I would use a recipe with a fermented product, but what? I considered pickles, but figuring out fermentation versus brining and which pickles were which was too much for my sleepy brain to figure out at the time, so pickles were also out. Tempeh was the next thing on the list, something I'd never cooked with before, and after finding a recipe for a marinated peanut tempeh on Minimalist Baker, I decided to go for it. Although the original recipe baked the peanut tempeh, I just used that as our starting point and made our very first peanut tempeh stir-fry!

The ingredients for our adapted recipe were:

for the marinade:
- 1.5 tbsp sesame oil ($0.45)
- 2 tbsp peanut butter (used pb2) ($0.50)
- 3 tbsp soy sauce ($0.60)
- juice of 1 lime ($0.29)
- 2 tbsp agave ($0.15)


everything else:
- 8 oz tempeh ($1.99)
- 3 zucchini, chopped ($2.29)
- 12 oz of white mushrooms, chopped ($2.25)
- 1 yellow onion, chopped ($0.50)
- 3 bell peppers, chopped ($3.99)
- 4 scallions, chopped ($0.65)
- 1 can of cut green beans ($0.69)
- freshly ground black pepper ($0.05)
- garlic powder ($0.05)

The total for dinner was about $14.45 (really surprised at just how consistently we're coming in at family meals for $15 with these challenges, making me think I should also price our non-challenge meals), which made enough for dinner for three plus a tiny portion that I ate for snack another day. We probably could have dropped the price a little bit with cheaper bell peppers (or less vegetables, like the second time we made this), but the quality of the peppers at Costco was amazing, so we splurged a little.

Since this was the first time I had ever worked with tempeh, I was a little intimidated! First, the package stated outright, "Occasionally dark areas on tempeh are a result of the natural culturing process and do not indicate spoilage." What if the entire thing has gray dots all over it? Also, if it says occasionally, are the dark spots supposed to be rare? Thanks to the internet, I learned that if it's slimy, if it's not firm, or if it smells terrible, you should be concerned, but otherwise the dark spots are just the spores as a result of the fermentation. Ours was very firm, had a best by date over three months away, smelled fine, and didn't seem slimy (just a little wet from the packaging), so I kept going.


Apparently, tempeh has a bitter taste, which I vaguely remember from trying it in a dish one time (don't remember what kind or where) and thinking it had a strange aftertaste. According to the recipe I was following, steaming or boiling the tempeh would get rid of that bitterness. I followed along, filling a pan with an inch of water, bringing it to a low boil, adding the tempeh, and boiling it for 6 minutes per side. The instructions then said to rinse it (not sure why, but I did it), pat it dry, and then cut it up. I intended to cut it into cubes, but it seemed easy enough to crumble so I just tore it up with my hands rather than creating more to wash with another knife and cutting board. Once it started crumbling, it just kept crumbling though, so instead of cubes, I really just had crumbled tempeh. That probably worked out better for B anyway, but it wasn't my intention at the time.


As I tore the tempeh apart with my hands, I added it to the bowl of marinade, and then stirred it up well. The recipe said to refrigerate for 2-24 hours, stirring occasionally, so that was what I did. It ended up being refrigerated for about 18-19 hours.


Outside of the preparation of the tempeh, the rest of the dish was a relatively straightforward stir-fry. Prep the vegetables, cook them with a little black pepper and garlic powder, add the tempeh with all of the marinade, and then let it cook covered until everything is soft (or not so soft if you want some bite to your vegetables, but we lean toward the softer side for B). We were originally going to eat this on its own without any grains, but we had a little bit of leftover rice from the moqueca, so we each ate this with a scoop of rice but otherwise on its own.


This was pretty good. It tasted really healthy with all the vegetables, and I really liked the marinade. None of us had very strong feelings on the tempeh itself, but I will say that that boiling method did take away any bitterness that might have been in the original product, so it did work. After the challenge meal, we weren't in love with tempeh, but definitely open to trying it again.

Considering all the meat shortages that have happened since then during the pandemic, we've been eating more and more plant-based foods and gave both tempeh and this sauce another try. This time though, I didn't crumble it and instead sliced the tempeh into chunks, which worked so much better. We had it in a stir-fry with a yellow pepper, green beans, and onions over rice, and it was a really tasty dinner. Although we've been gravitating more towards vegan meat substitutes lately, the tempeh was good as a nuttier, firmer, chewier alternative to tofu, so I could definitely see us using it (and this sauce) again!