On Wednesday, we'll start to get inland San Diego weather. That is, sunny days and temperatures upwards of 80. It will be the perfect time to assemble my Momma Daisy Memorial Chamber of Doom Tobacco Fermenter and get to work on, well, fermenting my tobacco.
I spent a little time looking up what happens during fermentation. The gist of it is that the tobacco gets oxidized. Volatiles are sweated out of the leaves, mostly ammonia. Several sites talk about making the leaves more chemically stable so that they can be stored and consumed over time. Supposedly it improves the flavor as well.
To ferment tobacco, you need heat and humidity. All of the methods that I saw try to replicate the old time tobacco mulching technique where massive piles of leaves are created so that fermentation happens at the bottom. As the bottom leaves ferment, their chemical reactions release heat into the rest of the pile. Workers toss the pile at regular intervals.
What's the point of the pile? If all you need are heat and humidity, it seems like the pile is like cutting off the ends of the roast.
A mother was teaching her young daughter how to make a pot roast. The recipe was a very old recipe that was handed down from generation to generation and it was a tradition to teach the younger women in the family.The methods and apparati simply replicate the old way of doing things - putting the leaves in a pile. To me, this sounds like a recipe for mildew and mold.
“The first thing you must do”, said the mother “is cut off the ends of the pot roast.” The daughter, curious as to why that was necessary, asked her mother why they had to cut off the ends.
The mother replied, “That’s just the way we’ve always done it. My mother did it that way and her mother did it that way”.
Not satisfied with that response the girl went to her Grandmother and asked the same question. “Grandma, why do we have to cut off the ends of the pot roast before we cook it?”
Her Grandmother gave her the same answer…”That’s just the way we’ve always done it. My mother taught me to do it that way.”
Still not satisfied with this reasoning, the girl finally went to the source of the recipe…her Great-Grandmother. “Great Grandma, I would like to carry on the tradition of your delicious pot roast but I have a question for you. Why do we cut off the ends of the pot roast before we cook it?”
The elder woman of the family gave this great insight into the mystery of why they’ve ‘always done it that way’…”Oh honey”, she said, “When I was first married, the pot I had wasn’t big enough for the whole pot roast so we always had to cut off the ends so it would fit in the pot.”
Questions for the Chemists
From a chemical point of view, if my goal is to sweat out volatiles, why don't I want air movement around the tobacco leaves? Why should the leaves sit there in a stew of ammonia leached from the other leaves?
My plan is to take my solar fermenter, a 33-gallon trash can, and build a rack in it from PVC pipe and then hang the tobacco from that rack. I'll put the glass lid over the top and plenty of water in the bottom. With daytime temperatures in the 80s, my Chamber of Doom should hit 110-120, no problem.
I also plan to pop off the lid in the evening after the internal temperature has dropped below 100. If my goal is to get rid of ammonia, why do I want it trapped inside the chamber? The homemade fermenters I saw all seal the tobacco up tight in an insulated box. Where is the ammonia supposed to go? They recommend opening it from time to time to turn over the leaves, so I guess the volatiles escape then, but it sure looks to me like simply replicating the Old Ways.
So there you go. An unorthodox fermenter and an unorthodox method. What do you think?
5 comments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Chemistry
I suspect that the reason you don't want a lot of free air movement, is that nicotine itself is somewhat volatile, and is subject to oxidation. If you aggressively move warm air through the leaves, you may get rid of ammonia more efficiently, but you may also end up evaporating a lot of the nicotine, and what doesn't evaporate is likely to get oxidized by the oxygen in the fresh air to things like nicotine oxide, nicotinic acid, and methylamine. And since nicotine-free tobacco is basically in the same "why bother?" category as decaffeinated coffee or alcohol-free beer, that would not be a useful thing to do.
Also, nicotine is a nitrogen-containing compound. I expect that a lot of the ammonia that is being removed is from nicotine breakdown in the first place, so a more aggressive ammonia-removal environment may just end up accelerating nicotine breakdown even more, producing more ammonia.
One other point is that, if they really mean "fermenting", fermentation requires anaerobic microorganisms (usually bacteria or yeast). While these grow best if they are warm, the line between "warm and growing well" and "cooked dead" is a thin one. Since your Mama Daisy chamber didn't actually kill your daisy, it obviously can be operated without killing everything inside, but you'll need to keep an eye on it.
Then again, they may be calling it "fermentation" when it really isn't fermentation at all. If what they really mean is "slow cooking", then your solar chamber will probably work just fine as long as you don't keep blowing fresh, oxidizing air through it.
Fantastic comment! I didn't know that about nicotine.
OK, on to Plan B. How about suspending the pile of leaves in a tobacco hammock made from shade cloth? The cloth would allow the humidity to get in among the leaves and keep them in a pile. I'd keep the lid on so there wouldn't be any air movement save for when I "tossed the salad," as it were. No need for styrofoam or electricity there.
Since I don't know good tobacco from bad, it's clear that I'm going to need some connoisseurs at the end to let me know if this worked.
Agree that Tim has covered it very well. My only comment is that I suspect (based on the previous reading that I did) that each tobacco company has their own colony of microorganisms. I would also bet that they seed each pile with some leaves from older piles, to get that same colony each time. Obviously you don’t have that and are going to have to count on whatever is around to do the job. It may make little difference, or may be the entire secret sauce. You can’t know until you try.
Your Plan B seems a s good a way to try as any.
Thanks for the confirmation. OK then, we'll go with the Hammock Chamber of Doom. It should be trivial to construct.
I just pulled my tobacco off of the racks where it was drying in my garage so I could start fermenting it tomorrow. It smells so sweet! The leaves are sticky with sugars. Finishing this project is going to be fun.
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