FOOD NEWS
You Only Require 2 Ingredients To Make Homemade Rice Wine
BY EMMY SCHNEIDER-GREEN
If you're intimidated by the thought of making fermented foods at home by using a ton of effort and hard-to-find ingredients, rice wine is the perfect place to start.
To make your own rice wine, you'll need to decide on your choice of rice. Plain white, short grain sweet rice, black rice, or even barley, though less traditional, all work.
The only other ingredient you'll need are specialty wine yeast balls called qu, jiuqu, jiuyao, or Shanghai yeast balls. These contain microfungus that break down the starchy rice.
Make sure to only use clean kitchen utensils and clean hands. You can pre-boil your tools or wash them in hot water and soap to avoid contaminating the wine.
Use the ratio of 1 cup of uncooked rice to 1 teaspoon of yeast balls that have been ground into a powder. Begin by rinsing your rice with water and cooking it in a rice cooker.
Next, rinse and break up the cooked rice with cold filtered water until it's at room temperature. In a separate bowl, dissolve your powdered yeast in a bit of water.
Pour the yeast liquid over the rice and mix them together, then pour the mixture into a large, clean vessel. Make a hole into the layer of rice, which will fill up with fermented liquid.
Cover the vessel and let it sit at around 86 degrees Fahrenheit. In about 36 hours, your container will be full of sweet wine that can be strained from the remaining rice.