Sunflower cheese

Hi folks,

Are there any cheese experts who can advise me on sunflower seed cheese?

So far I have soaked, sprouted, and mashed up the seeds. To make it interesting I decided to add a little tahini,  fresh chopped thyme and sage, ground black pepper, turmeric, and water.

Ground up it looked the business, so I made one small cheese left to dry at room temperature, another I put in a jar without a lid, the other I wrang out some whey but kept it damp and wrapped in a cloth.

Any part that has come into contact with the air has turned black! The naturally drying cheese has an incredible sharp flavour - like an acidic woody taste that almost makes my eyes water. The one in the jar has a black crust with white mold - that smells like rotten fish ... But the stuff underneath looks OK. The third cheese smelt so bad I had to hide it in the barn ... But I am not convinced it is bad. Could I be wrong?

So, is it normal for this cheese to go black? Is the intense sharpness part of the maturing process ... I mean, do I simply wait for a few months for it to become a totally heavenly flavour!!? Or should I take up basket weaving instead!?

The dark coloring is probably due to oxidation....possible of the chlorogenic acid.  Otherwise, could be some growth?

I don't know anything about seed and nut cheeses....is there a starter used or are they supposed to ferment at all?  

a little tahini,  fresh chopped thyme and sage, ground black pepper, turmeric, and water.

I noticed turmeric in your list of things you added and I remember another thread where it was thought that turmeric was interfering with the fermentation of some cucumbers.  Even the sage and thyme might have some effect on the direction you're wanting your cheese to go?

The flavors sound wonderful...the smell you describe not so much

Tim Seaward wrote:Or should I take up basket weaving instead!?

This gets my vote.  Never heard of baskets turning black and stinking...

I know nothing about making cheese, but this sounds awful.  Much like the time I tried to make comfrey tea.  Ugh.

Hey, Tim! The only nut/seed/bean cheese-like ferments I've made before have been soft, more like cream cheese. I've come across a firmer sunflower ferment more like cheddar in texture that utilizes pectin and agar. Everything I've tried and come across uses something as a culture, usually finished miso, I assume because it would have cultures and enzymes that can alter legumes and other seeds. I've never come across anything suggesting aging or air-drying these ferments, which of course doesn't mean they aren't out there. What I've learned, though, is that proteins can be quite dangerous to ferment. That's why we use very particular cultures on them that have been proven over generations to alter them in a safe way. I think, if I were going to try aging a sunflower seed ferment, I would either inoculate it with koji and treat it like miso (like the sunflower hozon that Momofuku makes, but I can't find a recipe online) or with tempeh spores and treat it like tempeh.

I used to make fermented sunflower seeds several years ago.  It could be called sunflower cheese, but I am not too sure if it is cheesy enough to deserve that name.

I started off following directions from Ann Wigmore's book The Hippocrates Diet.  She has you make "rejuvelac" by sprouting wheat berries, chopping them in the blender some with water, and then letting it sit 2 to 3 days and strain out the solids, saving the liquid rejuvelac.  This is a fermented food meant to contribute to your vitamin intake on a raw foods vegan diet, and it can be used to culture other foods apparently.

For the sunflower seeds, I would soak them overnight, and the next day I'd blend them in a blender with the rejuvelac until very smooth.  At this point I deviated from the recipe.  She has you ferment this for a day or maybe overnight, and it never came out appetizing to me when I tried it, so following the wisdom of cheese making, I salted it and hung it in fabric for a good 8 to 12 hours to ferment while draining.

If you go too far beyond 12 hours (in a warmer house) it will start to develop a little funk to the flavor, though still mostly edible.  Perhaps a heavy salting would help with this (I didn't know back then how important and healing salt was for us and may have skimped out of guilt).

I think with too little fermenting, it didn't taste as good.  A puree of raw sunflower seeds have a distinct flavor that is kind of hard to describe (nothing comes to mind), and I feel like giving it a good 10 to 12 hours helped tone down the flavor.  I am not sure if I'd call the fermented flavor cheesy, but it was relatively enjoyable.  The salt helped immensely in this regard.  I would slice some potatoes and bake them and eat it spread on the baked sliced potatoes.

The outside of the cheese ball (after drained several hours) does blacken.  I always figured this was some type of oxidization.

I am not sure if this experience helps at all, but I figured I'd share just in case.  Maybe it can inspire some other methods that could help you along with the sunflower cheese concept.

Beth Wilder wrote:I think, if I were going to try aging a sunflower seed ferment, I would either inoculate it with koji and treat it like miso (like the sunflower hozon that Momofuku makes, but I can't find a recipe online) or with tempeh spores and treat it like tempeh.

I found a recipe for Pumpkin Seed Miso in The Noma Guide to Fermentation that I bet would adapt well to sunflower seeds.

It calls for roasting the raw seeds at 320 F for 45-60 min. until browned and nutty, stirring and rotating every 10 min. or so, cooling, then processing the seeds to the texture of a fine meal in a food processor or what have you. After processing the koji (1.2 kg koji to 1.8 kg seeds) the same way, add the koji to the seeds. Add 120g non-iodized salt and mix everything together.

Then it says to mix up a 4% salt brine (4g salt thoroughly dissolved into 100g water) and add it a little bit at a time to the seed and koji mixture until it's wet enough so you can form a firm ball with it without either crumbling or oozing. Too much moisture and it's saying that the fermentation will speed up too much and break the seeds' fats down into fatty acids with rancid tastes. Then pack this tightly into a fermentation vessel and sprinkle the surface with salt before weighing it down and covering with a cloth and rubber band. (What I learned for packing miso is take a wad of it in your hand and throw/smack it into the vessel, aiming to do this from the center out and then up layer by layer, pressing down with something like a bean masher as you go, to prevent air bubbles as much as possible.)

Let this ferment at room temperature for 3-4 weeks. Longer than that and those rancid fatty acid flavors will start to come through, apparently. It's not cheese, but I bet it'd be good! And I wonder, if you were to take some of this fermenting seed miso out of the container after a couple weeks, form it into something like a cheese wheel, and age it in the air, wiping it down with salt brine a couple times a day, to finish its fermentation that way, what that might do.

I don't have the proper conditions to make koji from spores right now (and probably my spores haven't been kept cold enough anyway), but I may try something sort of similar using finished miso and a shorter fermentation period, sort of a hybrid between this miso recipe and the hard "sunflower cheddar" I posted earlier. I was going to try it with sprouted and brined sunflower seeds, but I was stymied when the seeds wouldn't sprout (my mom gave me a bunch of sunflower seeds, and maybe they're too old to sprout?), so I'll start over and try pan-toasting the seeds (no oven yet). I'll let you know how it goes!