Home fermented Sukumo Indigo (Post 2 of 2

Next stage of my fermenting the leaves was to keep an eye on the temperature to keep up, the temps have remained around 40C I have read that traditionally the Sukumo would be fermented over a longer period at around 70C but I don’t have the volume of leaves for this yet, and so far this has worked well.

Around day 5 now and the leaves are almost at a sort of paste like consistency, the pigment is very dark and amazing, the smell has improved slightly but its still very strong of ammonia and a sort of chemical smell. Its actually alkaline in pH which makes sense since it smells of Ammonia.

I have made a small jar indigo vat to see if I can get it to reduce at this stage, we shall see. I added some wheat bran, soda ash and honey, probably didn’t need the honey but I’m impatient. This worked a treat, the paste reduces really quickly.

Added later: Its now September and the smell has subsided (mostly), the paste seems stable.

I think the big advantage of this is that it definitely seems to release pigment over a longer period than the water extraction powder, my vats been going for a couple of months (40 litres) and i’ve been using it weekly. It does need regular warming, and sometimes it does lacto ferment when a new batch of paste goes in, i’ve used about Half so far, and I reckon it started out with probably aroudn2 kilos of leaves.

I did start using the vat straight away and the colours weren’t that instense, it needed maybe 5 dips to get a strong (but not dark colour) which was frustrating because I am using rice paste resists which degrades over multiple dips, so I did want less dips. However after a few weeks the colour is now coming out stronger, and so it does take a little while for this vat to get going. The second observation is there is quite a lot of vegetable matter in the vat which can build up over multiple dips, it helps to wash every 5 dips for example.

A rice paste resist dipped in the paste vat.