Ok. How far your brain can go? How insane I can possibly be? How many people are hanging a roasted inoculated dehydrated smoked ages celeriac bulb in their bedroom loft? Do I really want to know? As I said before a couple of times – my ‘geniusness’ will be appreciated only after my death. Or never. Anyways – here we go.

I prepared the celeriac bulb in a very similar way how I did before – roasted (light on salt) then dehydrated a few hours and inoculated with awamori spores.

When it grew fully and happily – i brined the two halves for 2 hours in 10%.

footnote: u probably need to ‘wash’ your celeriac to ‘make it wet’ cause the layer of the spores is very thick. Don’t scrape off but be gently and let the black layer get wet while massaging off the spores with the brine.

Let’s smoke it. I used some birch bark to smoke my babies (leftover from the previous ice cream project) – 10 minutes on active high heat then 10 minutes heat turned off but still covered and sit tight.

Rubbing with LOVE. Im Hungarian so it was obvious i will going to use paprika for seasoning. I also wanted to reach out for some liquid smoke (now i know i don’t need that at all!!! :) but just before the project i accidentally discovered the magnificent Angelika seed.

footnote: I’m working on a forever birthday gift to one of my besties, Angelika (you can see when i did it first here) a special cocktail using sour amazake. Previously i used Galliano Italian liquor to finish off the drink but because i didn’t find in any shops this time i thought i will make it myself. I believed it is just a simple vanilla vodka. So i had vanilla and vodka, right? After reading a bit i realised that Galliano is actually a herb infusion for real – and then i decided to try to toast some Angelika seeds and infuse my vanilla vodka for this special cocktail. Angelika vodka for Angelika – nice one right? :) At that moment i realised that the toasted seeds carry a very smokey flavour – so turned my vanilla vodka into a crazy MEZCAL. Good to know – keep learning people :)

So i rubbed the celeriac with paprika and toasted ground Angelika seeds and hung for a few days in my loft at room temperature.

The first half i opened and sliced up after 3 days of ageing.

Result:

• smokey enough – definitely dont need more additional smoke (my friends loved it as it is – i would possibly reduce the active smoking time to 5 minutes)
• salty enough with the acidic tone from the awamori
• some of my friend liked it raw the most but most of us preferred the deepried version of it – being careful not ‘overfry it’ so we got the little softy middle with crunchy sides
• i am on a (stupid) elimination diet now again – but i left the other half ageing more – so hopefully next month i would prepare it with a naughty ‘greasy’ maple syrup glaze
• i sliced it very thin (bacon project) but im curious of a thicker version after a bit more ‘dehydration’ to reach a cheeky chewy texture MAYBE

Stay tuned and keep learning. xxx