Part 6: Discovering New Fruit Tastes — The Enzyme Drinks of Cooking Expert Sukenari Futaba
Sep 28,2023
When put in the hands of cooking expert and food coordinator Sukenari Futaba, enzyme drinks take on the ambience of colorful, classy non-alcoholic cocktails. Sukenari teaches us in this article about enzyme drinks that even people who are not great at cooking can make easily and about baked sweets made with fermented fruit.
Eye-catching enzyme drinks that look like fancy cocktails
An apple & lemon enzyme drink and a grape enzyme drink are mixed with soda water, producing beautiful translucent gradations
Sukenari Futaba makes enzyme drinks year round. When you preserve seasonal fruits in sugar, they ferment in about a week in summer and two weeks in winter. They can be used to create beautifully colored enzyme drinks anytime.
“When you soak fruit in plenty of sugar, the fruit’s moisture is extracted which dissolves the sugar and kicks off the fermentation process. I mix my drinks with chilled water or soda in summer and with lukewarm water in winter. They make excellent tasting cocktails too when mixed with soda and paired with rum, Cointreau, or orange liqueur. And if you mix an enzyme drink with beer, you’ll get a beer cocktail with an addictive bittersweet and sugary taste.”
Even people who don’t cook often find it easy to keep on making enzyme drinks, which is one reason her enzyme drink classes are very popular.
“Some students say they play Mozart for the microorganisms and others say they are like cute kids. It seems the time people spend watching over the microorganisms energetically going about their work can be relaxing and healing.”
“Another fun thing to do is trying out different ideas like putting herbs or spices in with the fruit to find your favorite blend. There are various things you can do — like combining different fruits with an eye to the balance between sweet and sour or adding in flavor with herbs or spices — to discover new tastes unlike the fruit’s own taste. Spices have antibacterial properties and can add depth to a drink’s taste. You can add in your favorite superfoods too, such as goji berries or black rice.”
How to make enzyme syrup to suit your own taste with spices
Prepare large preserve jars so the syrup is easy to mix by hand
Making enzyme syrup is very simple. In a clean preserve jar, layer caster sugar and the fruit in three layers, and cover the last layer of fruit with sugar.
“For 800 grams of grapes, I would use 880 grams of caster sugar, or generally 1.1 times the amount of fruit. Grapes, which have a good balance of acidity and sweetness, are a great fruit for enzyme drinks. If you combine two varieties of grapes with different colors, such as Kyoho grapes [a Concord-like grape] and Muscat grapes, you can make very attractive syrup. Other combinations I recommend are apples and lemons, kumquats and hassaku [a Japanese citrus hybrid between a pomelo and a mandarin], and oranges and beets. As long as the total weight is 800 grams, you’re good to go.”
Top the syrup with your favorite spices. You can put in goji berries, black rice, or other grains as well.
Sukenari’s style is to add spices or herbs to give more depth to the syrup’s flavor. Just add an appropriate amount of whole spices such as cinnamon, cardamom, star anise, cloves, or black pepper on top of the sugar, and your prep work is done. Closely the lid lightly and wait for the syrup to ferment.
“Add a handful of butterfly pea flower tea to grape enzyme syrup to give the syrup an incredible violet color. Adding natural ingredients that color the syrup — such as safflower to apple and lemon syrup or gardenia to pineapple syrup — will delight the eyes with attractive colors even when the syrup is diluted with water.”
Let the mixture ferment for about a week at room temperature. Close the lid lightly but don’t completely seal the jar. Be careful because if you completely seal off the jar, gases produced by fermentation may build up inside the jar and cause it to burst.
Starting from the following day, mix the contents once a day by hand to dissolve the sugar. When the sugar has completely dissolved and you see tiny white bubbles appearing, it’s proof that the fermentation has progressed. The syrup takes about one week in summer and two weeks in winter to mature completely. Strain the finished syrup and store it in a separate container in the refrigerator. Fermentation will continue to progress slowly even in the refrigerator, so it’s safer to leave the lid slightly ajar rather than completely closed.
Mix the contents by hand once a day at roughly the same time. The natural bacteria on your hands also help promote the fermentation process, so you don’t need to disinfect your hands.
Two mouth-watering sweets made with homemade raisins
A madeleine cake with enzyme grapes and walnuts, and an open-faced sandwich with enzyme rum raisins
Homemade raisins, which have had enough moisture removed to leave them with a crunchy texture, are a welcome by-product of grape enzyme drinks. They, naturally, taste great as is, or you can put them on yogurt, mix them into baked sweets, or sprinkle them with rum or brandy as a snack to complement a glass of wine.
Lazily making sweets while enjoying enzyme drinks is a perfect way to spend a day off.
The fruit left over after straining the drinks can be stored in a container in the fridge for over a month. “You can save some raisins for kids to eat as is, and for the adults, you can sprinkle on a little rum to make delectable rum raisins,” says Sukenari.
●Madeleine cakes with enzyme grapes and walnuts
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- Ingredients (for seven cakes)
- Enzyme grapes100 grams
- Rum1 tablespoon
- Cake flour120 grams
- Baking powder1 teaspoon
- Butter (no added salt)100 grams
- Granulated sugar80 grams
- Honey1 tablespoon
- EggsTwo
- Walnuts50 grams
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- Directions
- 1.Sprinkle the enzyme grapes with rum. Sift the cake flour and baking powder together.
- 2.Break the eggs into a bowl, add the granulated sugar, and whisk with an eggbeater. Then add the honey and whisk again.
- 3.Mix in the sifted flour mixture with the egg mixture from Step 2.
- 4.Put the butter in a small saucepan over a low heat and, when it has turned golden brown, strain it through a colander lined with paper towel.
- 5.Mix in the butter from Step 4 with the mixture from Step 3, and then add in the enzyme rum raisins from Step 1. Let the mixture rest in the refrigerator for about 2 hours.
- 6.Pour the batter into cake molds, top with walnuts, and bake in a preheated oven at 180°C for about 15 minutes.
●Open-faced sandwich with rum raisins
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- Ingredients (for ten slices)
- Enzyme grapes100 grams
- Rum1 tablespoon
- Butter (no added salt)70 grams
- Powdered sugar70 grams
- A
- Cake flour120 grams
- Cocoa powder20 grams
- Beaten eggHalf of one egg
- B
- Butter (no added salt)100 grams
- Powdered sugar20 grams
- Lemon juice1 teaspoon
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- Directions
- 1.Sprinkle the enzyme grapes with rum. Let the butter come to room temperature. Sift the powdered sugar.
- 2.Put the butter in a bowl, add the powdered sugar, and whisk with an eggbeater. Then add the beaten egg and whisk again.
- 3.Mix in the sifted ingredients from [A] to the mixture from Step 2. Wrap everything in plastic wrap and cool for about 2 hours in the refrigerator.
- 4.Roll the dough out to a thickness of two to three mm, dusting with flour as you go. Cut out the sandwich shapes with a cookie cutter.
- 5.Arrange the dough cutouts from Step 4 on a baking tray lined with baking paper and make holes in the dough with a fork.
- 6.Bake in a preheated oven at 180°C for about 15 minutes and then leave to cool.
- 7.Soften the butter from [B] in a bowl, mix in the powdered sugar and lemon juice, and then put the icing in a pastry bag. Pipe the icing onto the baked sandwiches from Step 6 and finally top with the rum raisins from Step 1.
Another simple arrangement is topping store-bought biscuits with buttercream and rum raisins
“Enzyme grapes have a texture somewhere between fresh grapes and raisins. Enzyme grapes are very handy when making sweets.”
Making full use of fermented foods for regular meals as well
Another constant presence on Sukenari’s dining table, besides the enzyme drinks that she never runs out of year round, are fermented seasonings she makes with koji rice malt.
“Meat prepared with koji has no unpleasant smell and is moist and tender. It’s also easy for my elderly mother to eat, so I use amazake [a sweet drink made from koji] and koji seasonings in almost all of our dishes. The side dishes I put in my son’s bento lunches are delicious even at room temperature, if I prepare and season them with koji seasoning. I use koji in all my cooking, my sweets, and my bread, so I lead a fermentation lifestyle every day (laughs).”
Sukenari’s fridge is always stocked with salted koji, soy sauce koji, and homemade amazake and koji seasonings, such as tomato koji, which is made by fermenting tomato juice and koji, and onion koji, which is made by fermenting grated onion and koji. She chooses the seasoning to match the meal she is cooking.
“Koji has this Japanese cuisine image, but it goes equally well with other types of cuisine. For example, topping gazpacho with black koji amazake tastes like caviar and looks gorgeous too. The sweetness and acidity of the black koji really brings out the flavor of the tomatoes. Rice cooked together with seafood, salted koji, and amazake is superb. Onion koji and tomato koji are useful substitutes for bouillon. When you think the flavor is a little lacking in something, the umami of fermentation will help you out.”
Sukenari has fully adopted fermentation into her daily diet, whether for a morning wakeup drink, for a regular meal, or at snack time.
“Koji seasonings are really useful in all kinds of dishes, and once you get the hang of them, they are super convenient. And enzyme drinks are fun and uplifting because of their colors and aromas. They don’t go off or turn moldy, so they’re perfect for making your first fermented foods.”
The baton goes to cooking expert Horie Sachiko in our next installment. Be sure to check it out.
