Recipe #2: Wild Apple Makkoli (사과 마걸리)

Ingredients:

1.5 cups uncooked rice

1 cup uncooked black wild rice

5 apples (add a couple more if you really like apples)

1 sq inch (approx) of Nuruk

1/2 teaspoon of yeast (optional)

Step 1: Cooking - Mixing

In a rice cooker cook the wild and standard rice together with enough water for 2.5 cups of rice.  The wild rice requires more water so it will leave the whole batch properly cooked and a little firm. Let it cool until it is warm to the touch, but not hot.

Peel and chop the apples very fine.  The size really doesn’t matter, as long as you can fit the apple chunks into your fermenter you are fine.  I use old water bottles, so I need to make little tiny pieces.

Mix the rice, apples, yeast and Nuruk with some water so it can be poured into the fermenter(s) easily.  I recommend that you use some yeast if you have it for this recipe as the apples are sweet and more susceptible to infection.  Divide the mix equally if necessary, and then fill the fermenters to full.  This batch was also enough for 4 liters.

Note: Fermenting Apples

Apple seeds do contain a small amount of poison, amygdaline which changes into cyanide when digested, so make sure you keep the seeds out of the mash.  It would be a very small amount of poison and the seeds are only dangerous if the coating broken, but better safe than sorry. (it is possible to swallow the seeds safely when they have no damage to the coating, but who wants to anyway?)

Apple skins and the tougher parts near the core give a bitter taste when fermented as well, so it’s best to peel them and cut the apples as if you would eat them.

Step 2: Fermenting

Follow the standard fermenting procedure as seen in recipe #1.  This mash should start fermenting faster because the fruit has simple fermentable sugars in it naturally.

With many fruit based fermenting mashes the overall fermenting time is quite varied.  Different fruits have different amounts of fermentable sugars, and all fruit will have more sugar the riper it is.  Therefore the ferment time to alcohol content estimates are not going to be as useful.

However as the apple is mainly for taste in this recipe it is not much of a concern.  Just leave a little more time in your estimates.

In my batch I am getting a very sweet apple, rice smell from the fermentation after only 6 hours so I hope your batch is as happy as mine.

Step 3: Filtering – Enjoying

When using fruit as a fermentation base I usually recommend a good filtering for the finished product.  In my experience the fruit degrades into many pectin compounds leaving bitter chunks when fully fermented out.  Different fruits will give different results, but I always filter the leftovers out as if I’m making a beer.

So I recommend you treat it as a standard Makkoli and filter out the big chunks, just don’t recommend mashing them up and adding back to give the thick consistency.

Very purple, and this was the unclean batch as you can imagine.

Update:  Bottled and finished it.
One bottle turned out more sour than I had thought, but that was my fault.  I was a little confident with the last batch and how easy it was to make so I got lazy.  I didnt do everything completely sterile, and I just left a clean rag over the top, litterally a paper towel.  So it got a little lactobacteria infection.
Goes to show you that cleanliness is always step one.  I shoulda just got a clean rag, cut a piece out and washed it good like I did in the past, but I was lazy.