Rebuild from Depression Blog

I always look at the price of old pickle crocks when I'm in antique stores and yard sales. A large antique pickle crock in good condition sells for about $75 in Central California. They are probably over $100 in other parts of the state.

One problem with a 5 gallon crock is that it is a 5 gallon crock. They are beautiful, but they are heavy and take a lot of storage space. They could certainly keep me in pickles all winter and one crock may have just that opportunity some day.

But I found something even better and more useful all year round -- these small crocks. I paid $20 for the two crocks and can use them on small projects.

If I have a few pieces of fruit I want to turn into a fermented fruit compote, I put them in the small crock, cover with water keifer, and weight them with a saucer. Some people will use a bit of whey to start the fermentation instead.

For a small batch of vegetables, I add a few sprinkles of salt, mix and stir around, cover with water, and weight with a plate.

In both cases, I cover the whole business with a dish towel and check it every day or so. I let fruit go for at least two days and vegetables go for longer (more like a week). But I'm not a slave to the calendar. If the batch turns, my nose tells me. Yours will too -- if it smells like it's rotting, it is.

Kefir is a great cultured dairy product. It is easier to make than yogurt, particularly because you do not have to heat the milk first. If you are a raw milk drinker, then you preserve the enzymes in that milk by not heating it.

There are actually kefir starters available in health food stores that allow you to use a yogurt-like approach to making kefir. The starter just contains some bacteria strains different from yogurt. This is not the cheapest way to make kefir, nor the traditional approach.

Kefir is cultured from a substance called kefir grains. These grains are not anything like comes to your mind when you hear the word "grain." Kefir grains are a symbiotic mass of bacteria and yeasts that will culture your milk for you. You can find kefir grains on the kefir yahoo group and then follow these instructions. (I may also sell them from this site at some point should I become organized enough.)

Milk kefir instructions

In light of the entry on making your own kefir, I asked my mom to write a bit about smoothies. Here's what she says:

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When summer comes and the sun beats down, I think of ice cream. The cold and the sweet of it are so refreshing. Refreshing, but gosh, that's a lot of cream. So, I've found an alternative that is almost as satisfying: kefir smoothies.

Sometimes it is a really good idea to be hooked up with some good probiotics. Probiotics are beneficial bacteria that help keep your digestive system healthy. You can find them in health food stores and they are generally quite expensive. You can also take advantage of Mother Nature's probiotics - fermented and cultured foods.

I eat fermented foods or drinks nearly everyday as health insurance (home ferments, not the fermented beverages popular in college dorms). I expect that insurance helped keep me from getting extra ill this week.

I made passing mention of this tea idea in my ebook on iron-rich foods. Nettle tea is a traditional remedy for low iron levels but it is interesting that nettle is also fairly high in tannins which bind iron. My thought was that if we could ferment the nettle tea we might have the gold standard in plant-based iron boosters.

It took my own iron levels to take a little dip to inspire me to try the concoction.

I dragged my father and son to an area creek to harvest nettles and discovered that someone else in the area is into nettle tea as well. I managed a small bundle and brought them to boil in about a gallon of water. I let them steep until the next morning.

In the meanwhile, I was making my other water kefir concoctions and just saved a couple of cups of the inoculated sugar water to add to the nettle tea. (See this post about water kefir drinks. Instead of adding fruit juice, I add the nettle tea.)

I let the tea ferment on the countertop, covered in a dishtowel for a couple of days. After those couple of days, I put the jar in the refrigerator to stop the fermentation. (It could get very sour if allowed to sit out but it's all a matter of taste.)

Although nettle tea is a very boring drink, I found myself wanting more and more of this tea. I felt a bit of an energy boost.

If you ferment drinks, give this a try and post here about your experience. In the meantime, I realize that I need to go harvest some more nettles.

Yogurt is a traditional method of preserving milk that adds beneficial bacteria to the milk product. The process is fairly simple: heat the milk to scalding to kill competing bacteria, cool the milk to about 110° Fahrenheit, add a bacteria starter, and keep the milk at 110° Fahrenheit for twenty-four hours.

Supplies
1) Starter. Use about a one-quarter-cup portion of a live culture yogurt for every quart of milk. Warm to body temperature, or about 100° Fahrenheit. Alternatively, buy a yogurt starter, a more foolproof method.

2) Stainless steel bowl or pot to heat milk. (See double-boiler method below.)

3) Container to culture yogurt. This can be a glass mason jar or the container that comes with a yogurt maker.

4) Optional: digital thermometer with alarm. (Alarm sounds when the heating milk reaches the desired temperature.)

Soy is high in a substance called called phytic acid which binds to minerals in your digestive tract and keeps your body from absorbing those minerals. In many foods, the phytic acid content is reduced by soaking (in the case of beans, soaked porridge, and bread during rise time). But the phytic acid in soy is recalcitrant. You can soak and soak and still have phytic acid.

A 1985 study by Sutardi and Buckle tested the level of phytic acid in soy after different stages of preparation. I provide many of those stages in the figure above. Keep in mind that the activities I list in the figure are successive: the researchers boil the beans, pour off the water, soak them again, dehull them, steam them, drain them, and cool them. The phytic acid levels change very little with all of this effort.

It is only when they ferment the beans in the form of tempeh that the phytate levels reduce to about 45% of the levels of the soaked soybean. Fried tempeh is an improvement still, but if the tempeh is stored for two weeks at 5ºC and then fried, the researchers reached the optimal (but not perfect) reduction of the phytic acid. A 2003 study also found that the phytic acid level decreased by only 31% by fermenting soybeans (Egounlety and Aworth 2003).

Keep these results in mind as you shop for soymilk and tofu. Soybeans in soymilk are soaked, strained, and cooked. Tofu has an additional step - a coagulant is added. Both of these products retain nearly 100% of the phytates according to the results of the research I present. Eat tempeh for a soy fix, but eat it sparingly if you do not prepare it yourself and do not know that traditional preparation methods were used.

When you look at your tub of tofu and see that one of those 12 ounce tubs has 100 milligrams or so of magnesium, keep in mind that you would only absorb about 10% of that magnesium. You would likely triple that absorption in a fermented soy product. If you rely on legumes for iron and zinc, keep in mind that these minerals are also bound by phytic acid. (Read the food iron ebook or the phytic acid ecourse on this site for more on increasing your iron absorption.) In the meantime, enjoy some miso soup as the weather cools here in North America.