Compelled to Tepache

simple yum refresh save the planet

Jul 12, 2024

mercado de la bola, mexico city, plastic straws, tepache

I have been “taking a break” from writing since I’ve returned again briefly to work full-time behind the bar at Odd Society Spirits in Vancouver, Canada. It’s not that there is a shortage of topics to write about that are culturally interesting or delicious enough on the West Coast. In the last few weeks I have discovered many culinary curiousities, such as makgeolli a creamy tasty Korean fermented rice drink now being produced across the Lower Mainland by small producers, or bubble-tea with crazy jellies, or forest foraging. I have been incorporating some of these local delicacies in my new cocktail menu. Check it out here. You can read the drinks, if you can’t read about the drinks.

It’s simply hard to commit to a schedule of writing while working a day or night job, as everyone knows. New subscribers who I’ve met at the bar laugh at me when they read my substack line that says that I am a RETIRED bartender. At the end of the weekend after working at the bar I just want to crawl into my bed and binge reality television, watch 60s films, read things, or even go outside in the glorious sunshine that is so precious here it creates a frenetic desperate impulse to really get out and enjoy it while it lasts, unlike in Mexico City where the good times do not have an expiry date. But I’ll stay inside today because I just need to tell everyone about tepache.

I am totally obsessed with fermentation. On a cocktail list if I see the words “fermented” beside any fruit or other ingredient I will be pleased, impressed, thirsty. The transformation of a basic sugary fruit juice into something tangy, bubbly, and living, the idea that the original components have been broken down by a host of micro-organisms, and these reactions have brought other flavor compounds to the mixture is… compelling.

Lately I’ve noticed, the word ‘compelling’ is having a moment, I’m hearing it everywhere. It’s been used to describe an appreciation of head-to-toe jean ensembles in fashion commentary, its making an appearance on my favorite podcast, and in daily banter at the bar. This summer we should all be compelled to make tepache. Unlike pulque, which I wrote about in an extensive treatise part I and part II, tepache is universally accessible. Wherever you are, if you can buy a pineapple, you can make tepache.

Fun fact: milkpunch has readers in 12 countries, 5 continents.

Tepache is a Mexican beverage underrated and underappreciated made from fermented pineapple skins. It is lightly alcoholic, and lightly fizzy, the degrees of which depend on a few variables such as sugar, and time. It tastes like pineapple juice, apple cider and mulled wine made a baby. It is intensely refreshing.

Tepache is not available at every restaurant or street corner in Mexico. It is kind of rare to see, even in the city, despite it being both easy and cheap to make. Once I saw a tepache stand perched on a narrow median between busy lanes of traffic in the South of the city but regret being too slow to take the picture, so it didn’t happen. The secret home of tepache in Mexico City is the obscure Sunday market Mercado de la Bola in Colonia Ajusco, a scrappy neighborhood to the South of the city. We go often on a Sunday afternoon. Tepache is a soothing hangover drink, and Mercado de la Bola is not too far from the best birria in the city. For the record, birria is actually an incredible goat stew rather than the cheesed-up greasy taco mess they call birria outside Mexico. At my place, they serve the soup with bottomless broth and thick house-made tortillas. That is an address I will not give away easily. I’m venal, corruptible, become a paying subscriber and I may tell you.

On Sundays we often go for birria first and then after lunch tepache and a walk through the market sipping it.

The market stretches for blocks down an incline. It is known for the giant red tent which covers its expanse. There is food, lots of pirated brand name clothing and shoes, loud music. Not a lot of items to fulfill my particular needs and desires, but it’s funny and dynamic. At every street intersection there is a tepache stand with a different seller. Some make it better than others, I like mine less sweet, and the way “Ricos Tepaches Samy” makes it is just right.

I am lucky that I can also get decent tepache close to my house on Avenida Popocatapetl. They serve tepache from a barrel along with flautas and gorditas for lunch.

Now that I am back in Canada for the summer, I am craving Mexican flavors. Tepache is something that anyone can make all over the world because all you need is: pineapple, sugar and water. The basic formula is you take the core and rind of the pineapple, add sugar, a few spices, and water and let the mixture sit for a few days to allow the natural yeast on the skin of the fruit to initiate fermentation. The liquid begins to form white foamy bubbles on its surface. Taste it, strain it and drink it very cold, on ice or chilled in the fridge in a big glass.

What’s incredible about this drink is that it’s made from the waste of the pineapple, the stuff that normally is tossed away. The actual fruit of the pineapple can be eaten as usual, squeezed for juice, thrown in the blender for a pina colada, or brought to a family potluck on a fruit platter. Tepache is pre-Hispanic genius poised for a 21^st century explosion with the current attention to closed-loop bartending. The term, for those unfamiliar, refers to the sustainable bartending movement for using every part of an ingredient, no waste. One common closed-loop technique is that after lemon or any citrus are juiced, rather than throw away the rinds, they are soaked in sugar to extract the oils, then water is added, making an oleo-saccharum, an oily sugar, a zesty lemony syrup. Oleo-saccharum is a 19^th century technique, but Trash Tiki, started by Vancouver bartender Kelsey Rammage along with British Iain Griffiths, took no-waste bartending into the 21^st century.

Try this Trash Tiki recipe that uses all the citrus rind waste lying around after a party or in the bar to make a substitute for fresh juice : https://punchdrink.com/recipes/trash-tiki-citrus-stock/

Also this Trash Tiki recipe for avocado orgeat, especially useful if you live in Mexico and consume an avocado a day: https://sustainablebartender.com/avocado-pit-orgeat/

Closed loop bartending is fairly standard practice in most cocktail bars today. I think it is both fun and useful to try to conserve and re-use different components of the ingredients in a menu. It creates a functional workflow, and saves money. I spend a lot of time at the bar trying to find ways to re-use the odds and ends of cocktail making and experimentation, the slushy machine is my best friend. If an infusion doesn’t make its way to the menu, I make a slushy with it. In my particular situation at Odd Society Spirits, running the bar in a distillery, there are many ways we repurpose what could have been waste from spirits production in the bar program. The recipe for Wallflower Gin only requires the rinds of the lemon, so we use the leftover lemon juice in our cocktails. If the Strawberry Gin had too much pectin in it and is not clear enough for bottling, we make a slushy with it. A distillery bar comes to closed-loop bartending naturally.

However, my hot take is that the positive impact of typical closed loop bartending as proposed by Trash Tiki is overblown. It is so trendy because it makes people feel fine, and it saves money. If an ingredient is used multiple ways than you are getting double the value for that ingredient, which is a great thing. However ingredients and their scraps are first consumed, than composted/thrown out whether or not they are used one more time for a final contribution of flavor. Furthermore, if using limes from Mexico, bananas from Central America, and rum from the Caribbean, then you are still leaving a gaping footprint even if you make an oleo-sacchurum from the oils of the rind after you squeeze them for juice, throw your old banana skins in the rum after you utilize the fruit, and shake it all up to make a kick-ass banana daiquiri. This is still hyper-modernist global capitalism. A world tour whizzing around from Seoul to Sydney doing pop-ups promoting Trash Tiki ideology also leaves a large footprint. I am not against it, let’s just call it what it is: good business.

Trash Tiki & The Absolut Company – Drink like you give a fuck

A more transformative model in my opinion is the one that my favorite bar in the world Velvet in Berlin follows. They are hyper local, the menu changes with the seasons, and they use only ingredients foraged and farmed near to Berlin, and many of the spirits they distill themselves or find locally. They do not use lime or lemon, instead verjus an acid from grape skins, or acid powders like citric and malic.

Drinking from the menu is an experience in which you truly drink the seasons, the place and moment in time. Each drink is named with the ingredient which it features such as TARRAGON or CORNELIA CHERRY. The place where that ingredient comes from is listed, such as foraged in Berlin, or a farm where it is grown. The drinks are exceptionally delicious. However this exact model is difficult to emulate because of the amount of labour and knowledge it takes to adapt the menu every week to the season, and to utilize each ingredient properly. The team spends Tuesdays foraging and creating new drinks. They are always adding to their encyclopedia of botanicals, how to prepare each one, and when and where to collect them, and they stockpile a flavor library of distillates for winter months and cocktail invention. They have a side instagram account @10ingredientminimum where they publish their cryptic recipes written on scraps of paper.

At Odd Society I tried to emulate one of Velvet’s drinks JAPANESE KNOTWEED. The plant is invasive species both here and in Germany, and apparently juiced it tastes like a more delicate, floral, nutty rhubarb. A friend of mine who works combating the weed brought me some, however the season was apparently not right because the stems did not produce a drop of juice when I fed them through my industrial juicer and I had to carefully dispose of the radioactive bundle of Japanese knotweed so as not to trigger an explosion of growth in the port of Vancouver by way of its insidious rooting capacities.

Something every bar or home-bar can do to be more sustainable is incorporate more locally made spirits. To make our spirits at Odd Society we are legally required to use only grain grown in BC. We use produce from local farmers like black currants, strawberries, elderflower, and wild foraged salal berries, arbutus bark, and garryana oak chips. We support the local economy and culture in a myriad of ways. I think the next sustainable trend is the hyper-local movement, once in and out again, and the positive effects would be tremendous, from my biased perspective coming from a family of distillery owners. I have seen how challenging it has been to convince bartenders to use local spirits. We are coming up against mega-corporations that ply bartenders with all kinds of perks, including free and low-cost alcohol, trips and prize money in exchange for loyalty. Never forget, we’re in a recession. There is less interest in craft. Everyone wants cheap and ready, RTDs. But Velvet is not the only one doing hyper-local, check out this 2023 article from Punch Magazine
Hyper local may again be the sustainable future.

“Eating local seasonal alternatives, as we have throughout most of the history of our species, will help provide a healthy planet for future generations.” Professor David Raubenheimer

Food transport accounts for 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions according to a 2022 article published by the University of Sydney, and according to the article, a handful of affluent countries account for half of the total food transport emissions. Fruit and vegetable transport emissions are double the emissions from their production. Researchers urge that eating locally grown and produced food should be a priority. Alcohol origins should also be considered when trying to make environmentally conscious choices. Instead of buying vodka from Russia, better to buy vodka made in your neighbourhood from local grain.

#drinklikeyougiveafuck

picking elderflower in yarrow, bc to make elderflower liqueur

In regards to the hyper-local cocktail, Mexico has many possibilities and fewer limitations than more Northern parts of the world. The variety of produce available locally all year round is endless as are the number of spirits and beverages produced and originating from Mexico, as I write about often here.

If we only ate local in Canada, we would have nothing but potatoes, beets and kale to eat all winter long. As it stands, we are accustomed to a lot more variety, including 365 days of pineapple a year. I have wanted to make tepache at Odd Society for a long time because down the street from the bar is a fruit and vegetable packaging company called Frankly Fresh and they throw out kilos of pineapple skins every week. I look longingly at the cores and peels rotting in the compost bin out back. A few weeks ago I arranged with Franca of Frankly Fresh to give me some of her scraps and so I began experimenting with some closed loop bartending inspired by pre-Hispanic culinary tradition.

Tepache is fermented by different microorganisms, both yeast and bacteria. Bacteria, such as Lactobacillus pentosus, L. paracasei, L. plantarum, L. lactis, and yeast from the genus Saccharomyces have been found in tepache. They are naturally present on the skin of the pineapple and so the fermentation occurs spontaneously. Yeast, like in beer fermentation, eat the sugar and produce carbon dioxide and alcohol, making the tepache lightly alcoholic (0.5-2%) and fizzy. The bacteria turns sugar into carbon dioxide and lactic acid, magic to a bartender. Lactic acid is creamy, tangy and better known as the desired output of the process of making milk punch.

(finally) To make tepache:

Use a glass jar, never plastic, because the fermentation will not go well. Cut the skin off the pineapple. Cut up the fruit and put it aside, and reserve the core. I had no fruit from Franca, so I simply placed cores and skins in the jar. Two pineapples are better than one, but whatever you have.

I used a 3L glass jar. For the sugar I used 680 g bag of raw cane turbinado sugar, which is probably too much, but I ended up using the excess unfermented sugar at the bottom of the jar for tepache syrup.

In Mexico piloncillo sugar is used. It comes in hard cones, and is unprocessed. Any kind of unrefined sugar will do. If you do use piloncillo you need to chop it into smaller pieces, simmer in water to dissolve it, and wait for it to cool.

panela, like piloncillo but not in cones

I added two sticks of cinnamon and 12 cloves. I poured 2L of water on top. I covered the container with two layers of cheese cloth. The covering must be breathable; some sort of lid with punctures could also work. The tepache was left to ferment for 5 days. I did not stir, but you could. After 5 days foamy bubbles formed on the surface, which look gross but are totally natural and indicate that the tepache may be ready.

notice the sugar on the bottom of the jar, because I did not stir and used a lot of sugar

this is a batch of tamarind tepache, ie the brown near the surface

I tasted it and I liked it so I strained the liquid, and poured myself a glass over ice. It was spiced and crisp like apples, slightly tangy, fizzy. Cinnamon is not only a winter flavor like it is typically in the North; it is also for summer, all year round in fact. The rest of the liquid I put in the fridge to slow down the fermentation, and have found that it has lasted for weeks in the fridge. It still tastes good last I checked.

There was some sugar that had not fermented at the bottom of the jar, so I boiled some water and poured it on top and stirred to dissolve the remaining sugar. I left in the cinnamon and all the pineapple pieces. An hour later I strained it. This is how I made a tepache syrup.

I tried other batches with different additional fruit flavors. In one I added about 2 cups fresh pressed pineapple juice leftover from the bar. This batch turned out very nice. I did not love the batch with tamarind. Other fresh non-citrus juices or fruits could be added for good results. Strawberry juice is used at Superbueno bar in New York. Yum.

Basically, never throw out your pineapple skins again. The worst case, if it doesn’t taste good, too funky or vinegary, you toss it. Only if there is blue or black mold is it not okay to drink. If it is hot, the fermentation will go more quickly, closer to 3 days. Alternately it could be left longer to increase the alcohol content, the funky notes, or to process the remaining sugar that has not yet been fermented. There is no dogma, just use what you have on hand. Pineapple cores and skins, unprocessed sugar, water, and spices in a glass jar with a perforated covering. Other spices could be great, add ginger! tarragon ! anything goes.

The tepache I make still doesn’t taste quite like in Mexico City at Mercado de la Bola. The flavor is more intense there, probably improved by the quality or quantity of pineapples, and the piloncillo sugar. I spoke to Billie Ann who came in for a tepache cocktail at the bar later in the evening. She has made many tepaches, and she told me: “every pineapple is different”. And what is incredible is that in Mexico City, they have mastered the tepache, by mastery I mean every week they make a consistently good and identical product. I hypothesize that its because they’re making it in large vats, and the microbial differences on the pineapple skins are equalized, just the way big distilleries are able to blend barrels to make a consistent whisky. Or maybe, its those Mexican pineapples. In some places around the globe, you might have to add your own yeast to your tepache, because the skin has been sanitized. Every pineapple is different, but compelling anyway.

At the bar I have been serving tepache two ways. You can also drink it without alcohol or make a highball with your spirit of choice.

TEPACHE COOLER

1 oz of Mia Amata Amaro (or substitute for local bitter liqueur)
0.5 oz sherry fino
0.25 lime (more to taste)
5 oz tepache

Rim Collins glass with salt
Fill glass with ice
Add ingredients
Stir
Garnish lime wheel

MARGARITA

1 oz of mezcal or tequila
0.75 Oaken Wallflower Gin (or other barrel aged local gin)
0.4 orange liqueur
1 oz lime
0.75 oz tepache syrup

Rim rocks glass with salt
Shake with ice, dump in rocks glass

**For a sunstainable alternative outside of Mexico replace lime juice with acid solution. Measure 2 teaspoons of citric acid and 1 teaspoon of malic acid in 300mL water. Stir to combine.

Pineapple, Golden Jumbo, 2.05-2.29 kg each

I hope you find tepache as compelling as I do.

Never throw out a pineapple rind again.

Share your experiments!

Compelled to Tepache

simple yum refresh save the planet

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