Alchemy Courses · Permaculture Asia
Alchemy is just good chemistry.
Cheese from milk, mushrooms from a log, charcoal and lye from bamboo and ash, food and preserves turned into something that keeps. Daruma's Alchemy courses teach the old food-transformation skills by hand, the same way they have always been done.
Four ways to transform food.
Alchemy is a Daruma name for an old idea: use fire, salt, microbes and time to turn a harvest into something that lasts.
Cheese making
Fresh milk worked by hand into curds, whey and finished cheese, following real cheesemaking references rather than a shortcut recipe.
Mushroom cultivation
Inoculating log sections with grain spawn and watching them fruit, a slow, low-input way to grow food in the shade of the farm.
Fermenting & preserving
Cooking and preserving, vinegar making and smoking vegetables, turning a glut of harvest into pantry stock that keeps.
Charcoal & lye
Smoking meats such as bacon, and burning bamboo into charcoal, the ash saved and turned into lye for making soap.
Cheese, the honest way.
No shortcuts and no rennet tablets from a kit. Milk is warmed, cultured and strained by hand, curds separated from whey, and the result worked and pressed into cheese in front of the people making it.
It is slow and a little messy, which is most of the point.
A log becomes a harvest.
Grain spawn is packed into cut log sections by hand, a small, patient piece of work that a whole group can do together around one table.
Leave the logs in the shade, keep them damp, and wait. What comes back is mushrooms, for months at a time, from wood that would otherwise have been firewood.
Catch and store energy
Bamboo becomes charcoal, becomes lye.
The Willmann Mark IV Charcoal Furnace turns Daruma's own bamboo, along with fallen and pruned timber, into charcoal for cooking. The leftover ash is saved and turned into lye, which in turn becomes soap.
"We like food, and fire! And a good old social around the fire with our food."
Neil Willmann, on charcoal and barbecuing at Daruma
Tell us what you want to learn.
Alchemy courses are returning to Daruma's calendar as the school grows back, and some can run on request. Tell us what you want to learn, cheese, mushrooms, fermenting or fire, and we'll contact you as the next course takes shape.
Alchemy courses
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Leave your details and we'll email you as soon as the next Alchemy course is planned.
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