The fermentation slows down after a few days so the difference between one and two weeks isn't huge but the difference between a week and 4 months is significant. Consider that Worcestershire sauce is mostly fermented onions and fish... It's amazing what a couple years of aging can do. Also, there's no reason your final product can't be a mix of both! Get the best of both worlds.
Yeah was going to say the same thing. I've been making kombucha for a while, and I have a process down where at the final stage I blend kombucha from various fermentation stages to get the mix of tartness, sweetness, fruit flavor, and alcohol content I'm looking for.
It doesn't need to be binary. You can always mix cooked sauce with fermented to get the flavor profile you are looking for.
I was making kombucha too! Again, too vinegary. I wasn't sure if it was too much heat, too much sugar, etc. But again I was only doing 1-2 weeks. Good idea to mix.
Visited a manufacturing facility of one of the big Louisiana hot sauce brands, and they basically have a got a guy that mixes all these pepper mashes of varying ages to get their desired flavor profile - similar to blended scotches! (No idea if these are fermented)
Generally at some point the microbes die but some of the enzymes they've produced are still active and slowly breaking things down into tastier chemicals.
No prob. Often metal guitarists have a some portion of the amps on stage pumping out clean, undistorted sound because it adds a ton of depth. Occasionally this is super useful in cooking, too. Mixing raw and roasted garlic in an aoli is a pro move, as is mixing cooked and raw fruit in a coulis or sorbet being sure to add enough acid to brighten it back up.
I'd hesitate to even call myself a musical dilitante over the past decade, but it was my primary medium from my teens to mid twenties. Having graduated culinary school in my late twenties and now getting my first actual degree– a design BFA– a bit over a decade later, I'm often struck by the similarities among creative endeavors. Conceptual elements like texture, metaphorical or otherwise, can interface with so many of the same underlying emotional triggers in such interesting ways. These realizations certainly would have made me a better musician. Too focused on the composition and not enough on the feel. I think it was because my first guitar teacher, my dad, is a mechanical engineer. He's a far better musician than I am, but he's just used to communicating ideas in cut and dried technical terms.
Technical stuff is important, but for menu development, I'd partner with an experienced creative musician who can confidently manipulate abstract concepts over someone who'd memorized a food science text book, any day.
