The Basics of Home Fermentation

Let’s Ferment a New Local Culture !

…creating probiotics from the orchard, field and garden…

Saturday, October 1^st, 2011 -10am to 2pm

Little Lake Grange  Kitchen

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An introduction to several delicious and easy ferments:

Vinegar – Make your own vinegar from this year’s “Bad Apples” – take home a vinegar “Mother”

Yogurt – Easy to make from Raw or Pasteurized Milk & a simple starter

Cottage Cheese “Curds & Whey” – simple and nutritious

Sourdough starters and breads – how to make your own starter & take home a starter

Sauerkraut– A tasty & health giving condiment from cabbage & veggies

Kombucha – Sparkling “Health Beer” from common wild & garden herbs for health & well being.

It’s hard to imagine life without refrigeration, but humans have been preserving and preparing foods without refrigeration for eons.  Fermenting vegetables, dairy, and fruit preserves them through the winter until the next harvest. But even more importantly, fermentation allows critical organisms to colonize in our food and our gut, protecting us and balancing our ecology and health. We can’t maintain health without our symbiotic organisms and bacteria. So even if you can’t manage to grow food where you live, you can still ferment foods and populate your gut with their bounty.  Let us learn yet another way to restore our health and ourselves by preserving & using local seasonal foods.  We will focus on Vinegar since it is the season to use those juicy apples, grapes & pears, but cabbage is ready to harvest too!  Let’s get started creating a new culture right at home with our healthy local foods.  Sourdough starters are provided by several local “Sourdough Personalities”.

Natural fermentation precedes human history, it happens by accident when the conditions are right for ripe fruit to slowly age in the heat of summer, or when honey and water mix in warm weather. Since ancient times, humans have been controlling the fermentation process. Thusly humans have been preserving foods without refrigeration for eons. Fermenting vegetables, dairy, and fruit preserves them through the winter until the next harvest. But even more importantly, fermentation allows critical organisms to colonize in our food and our gut, protecting us and balancing our ecology and health.

Every successful & healthy indigenous culture appears to use some form of fermented food in their daily diet.  Dr. Weston A. Price studied these surviving cultures & found that the Austrians have their yogurt & sauerkraut, the Russians make their yogurt, the Swiss their Sourdough Rye, the Japanese – Miso, Natto.  The Chinese eat Taosi fermented beans, Africans eat soured grain breads in many places.   There are also many cultural fermented drinks, beyond the wines & beer we are familiar with.

Lactic acid preserves food by inhibiting putrefying bacteria. This organic acid is produced by a beneficial bacterium present on the surface of all plants and animals – even our own skin! Traditional cuisines from around the world prized lactofermented foods and beverages for their medicinal properties as well as delicious taste. Most traditional cuisines included at least one fermented food or beverage with every meal, which worked to improve digestion and nutrient absorption

Think of lactofermented foods as “super-raw” foods; the enzymes in lacto-fermented foods more than compensate for the enzymes lost in the foods that are cooked. Regular consumption of traditionally fermented foods and drinks promotes the growth of healthy flora and overall balance in the intestines.  Healthy intestines equals long life & reduced incidence of Arthritis, Heart Disease., and more. Lacto-fermented foods are rich in enzymes as well as beneficial bacteria.  Eat some with every cooked meal.  Teach your children to love them from an early age.  Yogurt is surely the easiest to learn to love at a young age.  Let’s make some home made yogurt & other tasty ferments!

If you miss this class, I can let you know when it will be repeated.  Email me at awaters@pacific.net or call 77-459-6362.

 

 

SUMMER COTTAGE CHICKEN BROTH & SOUP

Rainy Day – the day after an August Family Gathering with lots of leftovers in the fridge…what to do with it all?  I am still trying to eat my way through this food before it is time to close the cottage & go back to California…it will be so sad to leave this beautiful place – Michigan has the kind of puffy white clouds that romantic dreams are made of!!!  I could lie on a float & look up at them for hours…  That is – except that there are so many good books to read while laying in a deck chair & drinking sun tea made from our waterside mint patch.

It is a bit of heaven here…so much wildlife…there are even two swans that cruise the lake at all times looking Fairy Tale-ish. They come around our shore & into our water lilies at about 9am to feed…so beautiful!  Sometimes I hear a loon in the early morning & we saw it yesterday too; lots of Canadian Geese honking & flying past.  As to edible fowl, I am rooted in the modern agricultural 21^st Century & will leave the wild birds to themselves as we eat chickens raised for the purpose.

I have eaten really well this trip.  A far cry from the days when I brought a lot of my own food from California – raw sunflower seeds, brown rice & such as it was very difficult to make a trip into Kalamazoo where there was a great Coop.  The local market seemed to have only browning heads of iceburg lettuce, some soft red delicious apples, and bananas. Nowadays , it seems that every small town market has rice crackers, organic butter, fruit & lettuce.

Truth is – Great fresh & seasonal local foods have always been available during a Michigan summer – my childhood memories include heaps of corn on the cob & fresh tomatoes in August, peas by the bowlful & lots of squash.  August was always a healthy food month for us.  We tired ourselves out with canning many quarts of peaches, tomatoes, grape juice, and made jams and pickles.  I learned to make sauerkraut with my neighbor too.  The root cellar was packed by the time I started school, and could take a break from being my mom’s “peeler & cutter-upper”

So – back to the barbeque leftovers of yesterday… let’s make some bone broth & soup!

Got your leftover chicken bits?

Making soup stock from those old bones & skin…so good for you too!  The vinegar breaks down the bones into Calcium, releases the nutrient in the marrow. And, all of that “gristle” is also melted & becomes liquid in the hot broth.  Bone Broth is medicine food – a healthy builder of bones & ligament for all of us.

Take the edible meat off of that ole chicken whether baked or BBQ’ed,

Add all the bones, skin & gristle into a pot of water & boil for several hours with any herbs you have – thyme, bay leaf, sage, rosemary.  If you have a bit of wine or vinegar or even some Italian Dressing, add a big spoonful of that too.

Strain out the bones & bits, then add cut up vegetables to the broth…

We still had sliced onion & ripe red tomatoes from the hamburger fixin’s, so they went in.

I also had 4 ears of boiled fresh corn on the cob waiting to be used up, as well as a heap of baked potatoes, sliced summer squash, cut up yellow peppers, and some other crudités that didn’t make it into anyone’s salad or sandwich.  Add a handful of celery, carrots, garlic, if you have it.  Cook it all until tender & add your meat back in.  Salt & pepper to taste.   This soup is so fresh & good!   Mine came out very much like a stew from so many veggies added.  Yours will be a unique reminder of the party you just had.  Toasted Hamburger or Hot Dog Buns are almost as good as French bread with this Summer Cottage soup of the day.

Straw Bale Planting Beds –Building with bales!

WATER RETENTION

Last seasons garden was semi successful…I was happy to be planting a garden in the 5 raised beds bequeathed to me in this wonderful vintage home.! I discovered that this soil was also quite vintage, and so last winter we used each bed in turn as our compost pie. Then, in early spring I amended the beds with oyster shell, perlite, azomite, chicken manure, rock phos & other minerals. I was so used to dealing with the hard clay of my former garden, unfortunately I went too far toward building a permeable soil – and spent the dry summer dealing with a very silty soil that does not hold water well. Luckily, I have been continuing to make plenty of compost, and will correct that problem very soon. In the meantime, I am trying a great experiment in water retention & mulch for this winter’s garden. Frey Biodynamic Organic Winery is using these innovative straw bale beds in their old parking lot. Instead of tilling the compacted & hardened soil, they brought in a number of straw bales, made rows and proceeded to plant right into the bales, by cutting holes or “rows” & adding soil into those areas for planting. After 3 years the original beds are now made of wonderful humus about 4” deep, and the original soil underneath is getting healthy too! They inspired me to try this method in my raised beds. I brought in 4 straw bales, and laid them onto the soil in the bed, first removing about 3 inches of soil to use elsewhere. I was having a hard time cutting the straw until after the first rains, when it was really soaked through. Now I could more easily cut, reach in & grab handfuls of straw to remove until my hole was deeply set, and my little starts would be happy in a small bit of soil set into the decaying straw. It was a decent soaking rain, and I felt confident about planting now.

STEAM HEAT

An interesting development! As I was reaching into the first hole, I felt extreme warmth inside the bales. Richard has a compost thermometer, so he inserted it into the bale, and – wow! It was a 60° day, but the interior temperature was almost 140 degrees!!! Over the next week, as the bales slowly dried out, the temp went down to 120°, then 100°., then 80°, where it has stayed for well over a week. Today the soil temperature was 60 degrees in the rest of the garden, and the straw bales remain at 80°. The starts are doing just fine, not extraordinarily so – but showing normal growth rate for this cooling time of year. My hope is that they will get an edge from the heat, and in fact – I am going to use bales in another bed for some spinach, normally almost impossible to grow here in winter. I will use the hoop bed (see rear of picture) and add a “greenhouse” cover to it soon. The hope is that the decaying straw will add warmth to the interior of this mini-greenhouse – heck, I may be able to put my lemon trees in there!! And, then – next spring! Head start on tomatoes!! Ok, I am getting ahead of my self, but am very excited & hope to be reporting positive news in the next months – from this little experimental bale garden.