Rosui Maxwell

Thanks. I appreciate the reply. This is an accidental repost.

I'm not really familiar with home wine making. I went to relatives house and they were fermenting some grape juice in their fridge but they had to open it up every day so it didn't explode. I was thinking about buying them an airlock specifically for mason jars. Then I remembered last year when I was looking into making sauerkraut that I saw these pickle pipe air lock things  that fit onto mason jars.  I wonder how they would be as airlocks compared to the bigger ones at the homebrew store. Anyone have experience with this?

Thanks for the advice.  Good to hear about your successful recovery.

Hi, This is probably my first post and this looks to be an old thread but I want to try and make a contribution anyway. I tried doing a sourdough starter last year but it didn't work out. This thread made me want to try it out again.
I picked up a book called 'fermenting for total idiots' or something like that at the library and put some work into it and I've got a sourdough starter that's living and doing pretty well now.

I've got some kind of mysterious chronic illness and I don't have a lot of energy sometimes. When I read stuff like dechlorinate the water it sort of sets up a barrier although admittedly a small one but enough small barriers and I may decide to not do a project. Anyway to get things done I have to do things in really minimal surefire way so I'd like to relate a really easy minimal way that worked for me.

I had a 25lb bag of whole wheat flour laying around. A lot of methods say to start with rye flour or whole wheat flour and then add in all purpose flour afterwards. The method I read about uses all whole wheat flour all the time. A lot of other methods say feed once a day but this method feeds twice a day. I don't know what lactofermentation means but apparently if you only feed once a day it does more lactofermentation and I guess that's not the culture you're trying for?

Anyway so I started with one quarter cup of water and one quarter cup and two tablespoons of whole wheat flour in a quart mason jar with a coffee filter or paper towel on top held in place with an elastic band.  Stir that up and wait 12 hours.
If its bubbly add another quarter cup of water and quarter cup and two tablespoons of whole wheat flour and stir it. If not wait another 12 hours.
In 12 hours if it was bubbly throw about half of it away. I just eyeballed about half of it and spooned it out onto a sheet of newspaper and tossed it out.
I imagine you could compost this.  I heard you can clog your drain up good with it so the newspaper method seemed to me to be the best way to go.
Basically when it starts bubbling up and growing just keep feeding it for a week and after that I had a good starter going. I used regular tap water.

So far my bread bombed because I didn't put enough water in and I've made some really nice moist crumbly sourdough chocolate cake.

Hope this helps someone. Anyway if I can do it I'm sure someone else can. This way seems pretty much dead easy so there's no reason to be intimidated by sourdough.    

Congrats on the Japanese degree. My University only had Japanese available as a minor.
You'd probably not have as many difficulties with the language as I did.
I taught English for a couple years.

I'm a Zen monk and I lived in a big monastery for a couple years. I'm an adopted husband and I live at a family temple now though I'm back in the U.S for health and family reasons right now.

I wouldn't do the Korea thing. They set a hard limit of 180 days on that recently. It's better to get hired by people that will sponsor your visa. When you're in country you can look around at other stuff. They're having a population crash right now and there's a lot of things they have to import labor for.  I do know some people from the H.R. department of a company that hires English teachers and another H.R guy that independently recruits teachers for companies if that helps.