Over-fermented Ferments: What do I do with these?!

Alright. I realize I probably have more over-fermented items than y’all do, because you guys are better at following rules than my lackadaisical, haphazard cooking style generally allows for. But y’all might also have it happen sometimes, and as always, I’d like to see you not waste that food if possible.

This list will not be inclusive, so please add your ideas in the comments! I know I’ll certainly need to take advantage of them at some point!

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Kombucha and Jun

You now have vinegar! Or possibly, not quite but almost vinegar!

For those of you who like to take shots of apple cider vinegar, you can do that with this, too. Also? Salad dressings! Sub in your kombucha vinegar for whatever your dressing recipe called for. Other recipes that include vinegar are also great candidates for direct swapping of the type the recipe calls for over to the kombucha version. Along these lines, you can also make kombucha mayonnaise!

You can also use it to rinse your hair or as make-up remover, same as you might with ACV. Some people also like to use it as a facial toner. I still don’t really understand what toner is for, but those of you who do and like to use it may benefit from using your over-fermented kombucha this way!

In fact, you can use it to make ACV! It functions as your starter vinegar, and over time, while you’re making the apple scraps stuff (save those scraps in the freezer until you’ve got enough), it’ll convert properly over to AVC.

Cleaning! You can totally clean with this vinegar. Note here that kombucha vinegar usually is a 2-3% vinegar instead of 5% like you’re used to buying at the store, so it is a bit weaker. Still gets the job done, though!

You can save it as a strong starter for your kombucha! I think most people do this with their over-fermented stuff, and it’s a valid way to use it. Especially when you want to share some starter with a friend and don’t have quite enough for both of you? Kombucha vinegar to the rescue!! Ideally, you’d do this with just over-fermented but not yet vinegar kombucha, but let me know if it works with full-vinegar kombucha in the comments, please.

You can also use it to marinate food! Also, you can make shrub with it, which will be a lovely, refreshing drink this summer!

I can’t figure out if this is my picture, Sabrina’s, or one of y’all’s. Please tell me if you do know!

Dairy Cultures

This really sucks when this happens, and I honestly don’t have a lot of advice to give. You can strain down your over-fermented dairy cultures into proper cheese, and that’s probably my favorite way to do it. Also Ross and CT get excited whenever they see cheese of any kind being made by me, so this is a really easy way to keep them happy and not waste whatever I forgot to check on until it was over-fermented. You’re really just gonna strain it all in a straining bag, many layers of cheesecloth, or a layer or two of muslin. Catch all that whey in a bowl, too, to use it for smoothies, soups, stews, or even just to drink plain!

If what you’ve got is some over-fermented dairy that isn’t really in the curds and whey stage yet (this is how it usually goes for me), I do love me some mashed potatoes. This is where most of my semi-overdone dairy cultures go. I also bake with them, sometimes use for sauces (usually not because I don’t like dairy sauces most of the time), tart smoothies, and again, bake with them. If y’all haven’t experienced the holy that is a pound cake made with over-fermented milk, you really have lived yet! This is good for pretty much all pastry, but I really also like to use it in scones. Beautiful, beautiful scones. I love scones. American biscuits (specifying for you non-Americans!) are also just as great a candidate for it as their scone cousins are. Bread is also great to use up this stuff.

Again, mashed potatoes. Those are the best use, in my opinion. If y’all poke about the recipes in here, you’ll find a large number of recipes that include potatoes and some kind of dairy culture. You can use any dairy culture you’ve got; it never needs to be the one I specified in a given recipe.

I really like that jar. Anshu A/Getty

Water Kefir

This one is a lot like kombucha. If you catch it early enough, you basically have a really mellow wine. You can drink or cook with that. If you do not, then you have vinegar (or nearly vinegar) and should bop back up to the kombucha section. These really do get treated the same.

I would like to say, however, that if it’s your second ferment that went wrong, you’ve probably got a fruity or herby style of vinegar, and I’m going to say you should do cakes. I’ve seen recipes for soda-included dump cakes, and those are a great candidate. But in general, I will sub out non-milk ingredients from a cake in order to toss my yuck water kefir in there.

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Sourdough

This one can feel tricky, and it happens in one of two ways:

1. You’ve neglected your starter for a really long time, and all you smell is yuck.

2. You forgot you were baking and your dough is overproved.

Both of these happen “to” me, and often. I am frequently doing weird experiments to see what will kill a sourdough starter, or other weird stuff I want to know about so I can figure out what happened to y’all when you email me.

I did finally lose a starter, by the way. After 15 months of not being fed in the fridge and not having been given some extra water to prevent it from drying out too much or even a feeding before it went in, it did finally get some pink mold. I really did just leave it sitting there that long without touching it other than to check for mold. At 12 months, it was fine. I didn’t check it again until 15 months, and it was no longer fine.

If you see pink stuff in your starter, you’re throwing it away and grabbing a backup from the freezer to start anew. That’s a level of “over-fermented” that legitimately isn’t safe to consume.

If that isn’t what happened (mold), then your starter is still good. It just smells bad, and is going to be extremely sour. Typically I just bake with enough of it to get it back down to a small amount of starter I can rebuild, but you don’t have to. I’d prefer you not pitch it, but do what you’re comfortable with. I generally wind up with 1-2 loaves of extremely tart bread, or I wind up with a ton of pancakes I probably didn’t make with anything but starter. Do what you will.

If the issue is that you forgot you were baking, just continue along as though you hadn’t. Your loaf will probably not rise as well, so maybe shape it into flat breads like pita or pizza so you’re less disappointed by the final product.

Once that’s all done, you can continue as though none of this had ever happened. Just put it out of your mind entirely!

There is, although I don’t like to do it due to the food waste component, one other method of fixing a starter that’s in really bad shape. It’s actually the same as everything I said up there, except it involves throwing away all but about 50 grams of your starter and then resuming good sourdough care habits. Again, I don’t like to mention this method because I have terribly strong objections to food waste that isn’t necessary, but I also understand that some of y’all get too freaked out by what happened to do anything but toss most of it. Again, do what you will.

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Fruits and Veggies

This is always a tough one for me. Not using them, but just seeing that I over-fermented them. There’s just nothing worse than not getting to eat your fermented fruits and veggies!

If this is a vegetable ferment, I usually will cook it into something else. I know that a lot of y’all have different food ideologies and will do just about anything to not cook your fruit and vegetable ferments, but I cook them all the time. I nearly always cook them if they’re over-fermented, because the smell and tartness levels are too omg to pretend they weren’t overdone.

If you’re cooking overdone veg, use it sparingly or it will overwhelm the rest of the flavors in your dish. You also can blend them up, strain, and use the resulting liquid as a vinegar. It’s not vinegar, but it will hit all those same notes. I generally compost the solids when I do this, because that’s the only way I can dump the solids without feeling like I wasted food.

For fruits, I like to go on ahead and use the solids to make fruit compotes, ice cream with sour fruit swirls, other types of sauces for cakes, ice cream topping, or similar, or occasionally sneak a bit into a dairy-free smoothie. Don’t use too much if you’re going the smoothie route, because it really will overwhelm things. It’s always better to use less than you think and add more to taste than it is to go all wild and dump the lot in. Sometimes I use all the fruit in a pie, and you can do something similar for dump cake.

Wrapping up

It can be really, really upsetting to over-ferment something, and especially when you’re emotionally tied to getting the results you were looking for. That happens to everyone, and recently happened to me with some kimchi cucumbers. I simply forgot they were in the pantry, and a month later you know that wasn’t properly food anymore. I went with the blending, straining, and “vinegar” method for that.

If or when this happens to you (it’s probably going to at some point), the above tips will help you waste less. If you come up with some new ideas, though, share them with us! We all want to do better at using the foods we messed up instead of binning them, yes? I in particular deal with this a lot more often than y’all probably do, so I look forward to trying your suggestions!