The all-soy tempeh turned out great, but not so much the peanut mix. I must have over-roasted the peanuts when I was drying them out to get the skins off. The mold grew just fine over the soybeans, but it completely ignored the firm, nearly crunchy peanuts, so that it didn't bind together; it's like nuggets of tempeh with peanut halves loosely bagged in with it. It made for a decent hash sort of thing.

I made a major breakthrough in de-hulling (or should it be just 'hulling' in the sense that when you remove peas from their pod or nuts from their shells, you're 'shelling'?). It hit me while I was bringing a pot of dry soybeans to a boil (in a boil-then-soak soaking), when the hulls of the beans, which, when dry, are white and brittle, soaked up the water immediately and pulled away from the still-dry beans. Now, I had read of tempeh producers using a wet-roller method to de-hull, so I grabbed a rolling pin and used it with some other ad hoc spacing implements to half-squish the beans as I rolled them, de-hulling them in the process.

The Thanksgiving tempeh prep did not go as planned. The soybeans weren't quite as soft as I'd like them to be when I had finished cooking them before inoculation (over the weekend before T-day). Come to think of it I cold soaked them instead of a boil-and-soak like I usually do, and had trouble getting them de-hulled. I didn't think too much of it, but the straight-soy tempeh turned out a little wet, a little too much stinking of ammonia. Oddly enough, the mostly-peanut tempeh, which was about 1/3 the same soybeans, turned out divine.

I decided to do one more quick, all-soy batch. I did EVERYTHING right this time. I did a boil-and-soak, the hulls came off easily, and I only inoculated the beans when they were good and cooked. The tempeh turned out perfect, and Tim reports that it went over very well at the Rudin/Rennick T-day feast.