Last night I pulled a decent batch out of the incubator. It's 100% soy bean. This time I picked up a bag of soybeans at a market in Chinatown while I was there buying persimmons. They're a little smaller than the ones I get at Whole Foods bulk, maybe a different grade or strain?

The great leap this time, though, had more to do with the de-hulling process. Instead of rubbing/kneading the beans by hand to pop off all the little rubbery hulls (that would otherwise block the mold from the beans), I followed instructions I found in a YouTube video that I can't find again and used the dull dough blade in the food processor to knock the hulls of the beans after soaking them for just 10 minutes.

It worked. The least pleasant, most tedious step of making tempeh is now a matter of a few minutes in the Cuisinart. This feels like a revolution, like when some farmer took a look at the ox and said, 'what if HE pulls the plow?'