Designing Software for Things that Rot
The white mold was good. The green-grey mold was probably fine. The fuzzy black spot was... well, that's when I ended up in a midnight rabbit hole of forum posts debating whether that particular shade of black meant penicillium or something that would send me to hospital. I had photos, I had descriptions, I had twelve different opinions from twelve different strangers on the internet.
What I didn't have, was the confidence. "Is that safe to eat?" my neighbour asked, eyeing the salami hanging in my garage. Fair question: it's raw meat that's been sitting at room temperature for six weeks.
That's when it clicked: I'd been treating fermentation like cooking when I should have been treating it like infrastructure. But how did I end up here in the first place?
Half of the first batch hanged Italian-style on the ceiling didn't survive Scottish humidity and got a few spots looking too similar to zygomycetes fungi, at which point I got too scared and built a proper chamber.
First, there was hardware ¶
I started fermenting almost a decade ago, before sourdough starters became everyone's pandemic tamagotchi. You know the drill: shy attempts at sauerkraut, then mozzarella, then progressively weirder things and Sandor Katz books on the shelves. Tracking went from paper scraps to text files to an Obsidian vault. None of it helped because the problem wasn't tracking, it was knowing what to track and when it mattered.
Things escalated when I moved into a detached house–the kind where neighbors won't hear you checking on your sausage at 2 AM (which, reading that back, sounds worse than it is).
I bought a £150 larder fridge on eBay, added two Inkbird controllers, a reptile mat left after koji experiments, and went on a quest for a dehumidifier that resumes automatically. Most need a button press, which is useless for automation, and for some reason sellers never mention it in descriptions; cue exciting returns and very odd Amazon ads I keep getting three years later.
Temperature was easy. Humidity, not so much. Without a humidifier, the dehumidifier would overshoot and stall around ~75% RH, the case-hardening sweet spot where you build a meat Matryoshka you can't trust. The fix was bidirectional control: add moisture gently below target, remove gently above. Haven't had a case-hardening scare since.
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