I got my eagerly awaited package from GEM a few days ago. Now I've got the tempeh I need to make the batch for Tim's Thanksgiving.


This is what the starter looks like:


It's a course mix of rice flour and the itty bitty black specks of spores that will reawaken into the white, fluffy fungus that does all the work.

I also ordered some calcium sulfate.

Doesn't that sound chemical? I suppose it it, but it's a naturally occurring mineral a.k.a. gypsum, and it works great for coagulating tofu. Tofu is much, much harder to make than tempeh, though that might be because I have a lot less experience with it. Tofu making also has a colder feel to it. Tempeh is kind of like a biology experiment, preparing the medium for life to flourish. Tofu is a chemistry experiment: grinding, boiling, and finally adding one last ingredient for those proteins to denature and clump together as tofu.