Fermenting Foods—One of the Easiest and Most Creative Aspects of
Making Food from Scratch
December 29, 2013
Story at-a-glance
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90 percent of the genetic material in your body is not yours
but belongs to the bacteria that outnumber your cells 10 to
1. These bacteria have enormous influence on your digestion,
detoxification and immune system
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Fermented foods are an essential factor if you want to
optimize your health and prevent disease. The culturing
process produces hundreds if not thousands of times more of
the beneficial bacteria found in a typical probiotics, which
are extremely important for human health as they help
balance your intestinal flora, thereby boosting overall
immunity
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When fermenting vegetables, you can either use a starter
culture, or simply allow the natural enzymes in the
vegetables do all the work, a.k.a “wild fermentation”
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When fermenting foods, make sure to avoid plastic and/or
metal containers. Good options include glass jars, ceramic
crocks, and wooden barrels
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Any food can be fermented, although some are tastier than
others. Caution must be heeded when fermenting meats, but
any vegetable can certainly be safely fermented, and are
among the absolute safest foods there is in terms of food
borne illness
By Dr. Mercola
Ninety percent of the genetic material in your body is not
yours but belongs to the bacteria that outnumber your cells 10
to 1. These bacteria have enormous influence on your
digestion, detoxification and immune system.
Sandor Katz is a self-described “fermentation revivalist,”
and has published two books on this topic, along with a third on
the underground food movement. He’s a native of New York and a
graduate of Brown University. Sandor currently lives in
Tennessee, where he pursues his interest by presenting workshops
around the world on fermentation.
Fermented food is something I too have become quite
passionate about, and I firmly believe it’s an absolutely
essential factor if you want to optimize your health and prevent
disease. The culturing process produces beneficial microbes that
are extremely important for human health as they help balance
your intestinal flora, thereby boosting overall immunity.
Moreover, your gut literally serves as your second brain, and
even produces more of the neurotransmitter serotonin—known to
have a beneficial influence on your mood—than your brain does,
so maintaining a healthy gut will benefit your mind as well as
your body.
Fermented foods are also some of the best chelators and detox
agents available, meaning they can help rid your body of a wide
variety of toxins, including heavy metals.
“It wasn’t until I was in my 20s... that I first
began to learn about and observe some of the digestive
benefits of eating live culture fermented foods,”
Sandor says.
“It was another decade after that when I left New
York City, moved to rural Tennessee, and got involved in
keeping a garden that I first had a reason to investigate
the practice of fermentation. All of the cabbages were ready
at the same time, and I thought I should learn how to make
sauerkraut. I did a little bit of research in cookbooks and
started making sauerkraut. Thus began my investigations into
fermentation about 18 years ago.”
Starter Cultures versus Wild Ferment
When fermenting vegetables, you can either use a starter
culture, or simply allow the natural enzymes in the vegetables
do all the work. This is called “wild fermentation.” Personally,
I prefer a starter culture as it provides a larger number of
different species and the culture can be optimized with species
that produce high levels of vitamin K2, which research is
finding is likely every bit as important as
vitamin D.
For this past year, we’ve been making two to three gallons of
fermented vegetables every week in our Chicago office for the
staff, which they can enjoy with the lunch we provide as an
employee benefit.
We use a starter culture of the same probiotic strains that
we sell as a supplement, which has been researched by our team
to produce about 10 times the amount of vitamin K2 as any other
starter culture... When we had the vegetables tested, we found
that in a four- to six-ounce serving there were literally 10
trillion beneficial bacteria, or about 100 times the amount of
bacteria in a bottle of high potency probiotics.
There are about 100 trillion bacteria in your gut, so a
single serving can literally “reseed” 10 percent of the
bacterial population of the average person’s gut! To me that’s
extraordinary, and a profoundly powerful reason to consider
adding fermented vegetables as a staple to your diet.
You don’t have to use a starter culture however. Wild
fermentation is fermentation based on microorganisms that are
naturally present in the food you’re fermenting. It’s just as
simple as using a starter culture, but it will take a little
longer for it to ferment.
“It’s very predictable when you salt and submerge
vegetables [in their natural juices or brine]. The bacteria
that will initiate at fermentation are always Leuconostoc
mesenteroides. Then it’s a successive process whereby, as
the pH changes and as the environment changes, different
strains of bacteria come into dominance...” Sandor
explains.
“Typically, in a mature sauerkraut, the late-stage
bacterium that’s dominant is Lactobacillus plantarum. It’s a
very predictable succession, what happens with raw
vegetables, [but] the specific strains will always be
somewhat different depending on the vegetables you’re using
and the environment that you’re doing it in.”
To Salt or Not to Salt?
Whether or not to use salt also largely comes down to
personal preference. While it’s not a necessity, Sandor does
provide some compelling reasons for adding a small amount of
natural, unprocessed salt—such as Himalayan salt—to your
vegetables. For example, salt:
- Strengthens the ferment’s ability to eliminate any
potential pathogenic bacteria present
- Adds to the flavor
- Acts as a natural preservative, which may be necessary
if you’re making large batches that need to last for a
larger portion of the year
- Slows the enzymatic digestion of the vegetables, leaving
them crunchier
- Inhibits surface molds
Again, natural unrefined salts are ideal as they contain a
broad spectrum of minerals, and the fermentation process makes
the minerals more bioavailable—a win-win situation!
“Just now, I’m getting near the bottom of a 55-gallon
barrel of sauerkraut that I made last November mostly out of
radishes. That would not be possible without the addition of
salt,” Sandor says. “You can make sauerkraut, and
then you can ferment for several weeks in a cool
environment. Maybe you could get to several months. But what
would happen eventually to a salt-free kraut is that enzymes
in the vegetable would basically digest the fiber of the
vegetables. It would just turn into a mush, which is not at
all appealing to me.”
What Type of Container Should You Use?
There’s no need to over-think or spend large amounts of money
on containers. The material they’re made of is important
however. You do NOT want to use plastic or metal. Plastics are
loaded with chemicals you don’t want leaching into your food,
such as bisphenol-A (BPA) and phthlalates. Metal is also
inadvisable as salts can corrode the metal. Even if you don’t
add salt, most vegetables have some natural salts in them. Good
options include:
- Glass jars (wide-mouthed Mason jars are ideal, so that
you can get your whole hand in there to press down the
vegetables)
- Ceramic crocks
- Wooden barrels
I completely agree with Sandor’s sound general advice here:
“My main message that I would encourage your viewers
and listeners to remember is you don’t need to buy anything
special. You need a head of cabbage or a couple of pounds of
vegetables, and beyond that everything you need is already
in your kitchen. Whatever tools or devices you typically use
to chop or shred vegetables, you can use that. Add some
salt, mix it around, squeeze it with your hands for a couple
of minutes, and stuff it into a jar.
Beyond that, you could use any kind of shredding
device you like: a mandoline, a food processor, a continuous
feed food processor, or a specialized cabbage-chopping
device. You could buy beautiful elegantly designed crocks.
But you have everything that you need to get started in your
kitchen. Don’t let the beautiful crock that you don’t have
yet be the reason why you don’t start doing this.
I think it’s really important to recognize that you
don’t need anything special to start a fermentation
practice. You might decide you want to play with starter
cultures, but you don’t need starter cultures to get
started. You might decide that you want to invest in a
crock, but you don’t need a crock to get started.
If you take two pounds of vegetables, you can stuff a
quart-sized jar with those. Just chop them up. Shred them.
They can be extremely fine, or they can be coarse and
chunky. It doesn’t matter. Lightly salt them to taste or
else weigh them and measure out 1.5 percent salt. I prefer
to salt them lightly to taste.”
Two Helpful Tips...
As Sandor explains, an important step in the process is to
squeeze the vegetables before packing them into the
jar. You don’t need any fancy tools for this; just use your
hands. “Bruising” the vegetables in this way allows the cell
walls to break down and release their juices. Capture the juice
in the jar you’re going to ferment your vegetables in. Then
stuff as many veggies into the jar that will fit. You want to
stuff them in as tightly as possible, forcing out any air
pockets that might ruin the batch. The brine should cover the
vegetables.
Sandor then simply covers the jar with the lid and leaves it
on the kitchen counter. A helpful tip I learned from Caroline
Barringer is to top off the jar with a cabbage leaf, tucking it
down the sides. Again, make sure the veggies are completely
covered with the natural brine you squeezed out of the
vegetables (or add a small amount of celery juice), and that the
juice is all the way to the top of the jar to eliminate trapped
air.
To speed up the fermentation, store the jars in a warm,
slightly moist place for 24 to 96 hours, depending on the food
being cultured. Ideal temperature range is 68-75 degrees
Fahrenheit; 85 degrees max. You don’t want it too hot, as heat
will kill the beneficial microbes. Don’t tuck them away in a
dark closet and forget about them, though! As
Sandor explains:
“The reason why you don’t want to just put it in the
closet and forget about it is that it’s going to produce
pressures, especially in the first couple of days. You want
to relieve that pressure by opening the jar for a second. In
that way, you don’t get a huge accumulation of pressure and
risk the possibility of the jar exploding – or what’s more
likely to happen, if you’re using a canning jar, where the
glass is thick and the lid is thin, it will just contort the
top. But it’s best to consciously release the pressure.”
The second tip is to smell and taste your ferment regularly.
There’s really no objective moment when the fermentation is
ready, so go ahead and taste it at frequent intervals, starting
after about 48 hours. Then keep on tasting it every few days or
a couple of times a week as it matures. It typically takes about
a week for the optimal amount of fermentation to occur. Resist
the temptation to eat out of the jar, however, as this can
introduce undesirable organisms from your mouth into the jar.
Instead, always use a clean spoon to take out what you're going
to eat, then, making sure the remaining veggies are covered with
the brine solution, recap the jar.
When the flavor is to your personal liking, transfer the jars
into the refrigerator to dramatically slow the progression of
the fermentation. Keep in mind, the vegetables will tend to get
increasingly sour as time goes on, but according to Sandor, you
could let the vegetables ferment for weeks and even months
without worrying about them spoiling—after all, that’s what the
fermentation process does: It preserves food without
refrigeration.
Some additional info on how to ferment vegetables can be found
here.
On Allowing Your Creative Juices to Flow
There is no food that cannot be fermented. As Katz states in
a recent NPR article1,
bread, coffee, pickles, beer, cheese, yogurt and
soy sauce are all examples of foods that have been fermented
at some point during their production process. That said, not
every vegetable will produce equally delicious results, and not
every food is as easily fermented as vegetables, but your
imagination is really the only limit when it comes to what you
can concoct.
“If you ferment summer squash, which are very watery,
they will tend to get soft and mushy much faster than any
other kind of vegetable would,” Sandor says. .. You
can certainly ferment kale and other dark green vegetables,
but the high levels of chlorophyll in these vegetables
produce a really strong flavor in fermentation. I prefer to
use dark green vegetables as a minor ingredient rather than
as the primary ingredient. Then I feel like that strong
flavor can become a nice accent.
But if it’s pure dark green vegetables, that flavor’s
a little bit too strong for me, although I have heard from
other people who really, really love it. In a way you can
only learn what you like by experimenting.
My biggest batch every year has been from radishes. I
have a farmer friend who uses daikon radishes as a cover
crop over acres and acres of his land. He invites me to pick
a truckload full of daikon radishes. And I augment that with
some cabbages, some chili peppers and garlic, and make a
55-gallon barrel full every year... Then
you can also ferment whole vegetables. The difference with
whole vegetables is that you can’t pull the water out of
them, so you need to mix up a brine – salty water – and
ferment them in the salty water.
... I met a woman whose grandmother was from a town
in Poland, where they used mashed potatoes in their
sauerkraut. And I love making mashed potatoes sauerkrauts.
What I do is I steam potatoes, I mash them up, cool them to
body temperature, and then I layer the mash potatoes in with
my salted cabbage. That makes a beautiful sauerkraut. You
can really be experimental and go wild. You can add things
other than vegetables.
... In German tradition, juniper berries are often
used. I’ve been tasting wildly experimental krauts with
curry seasonings and things like that. Really, the only
limitation is our imagination, once we understand the
underlying principles of getting the vegetables submerged.”
A Word of Caution Regarding Meat Fermentation
As just mentioned, while virtually any food can be fermented,
and the fermentation process automatically renders the food
exceptionally safe since the probiotics produced kill any
pathogens present, a disclaimer regarding fermenting meats is
worth taking note of.
“Fermenting vegetables is an intrinsically safe
practice. In the United States, according to the USDA,
there’s never been a single case of food poisoning reported
from fermented vegetables. There is no danger. The food
itself is a strategy for protection. Fermented vegetables
are safer than raw vegetables,” Sandor says. “With
meat, I can’t say this. The word “botulism,” which is the
most feared food poisoning form of all, comes from the Latin
word “botulist” or sausage. Until the advent of canning,
which was in the 19th century, it was from fermented
sausages that people knew about the rare food poisoning
disease of botulism.
There’s a little bit more of a learning curve.
Another limitation with fermentation of meat for
preservation process is the acids, which are what enable
certain fermented foods to preserve so well. Acids are
produced from carbohydrates, and meat fundamentally lacks
carbohydrates. There’s a tiny bit of glycogen, but not
enough to support a significant fermentation and formation
of lactic acid. Typically, when salami is produced, the meat
and the fat are minced or ground. And then they’re mixed
with a tiny bit of sugar. The sugar is really what is
fermented by the lactic acid bacteria and creates the acidic
environment that is able to preserve the meat.
It’s not through acidification alone that the meat is
preserved. It’s a combination of acidification, drying (the
meat is partially dried), and salting (the meat is always
salted). Any one of these mediums could preserve the meat,
either making it very, very dry as in something like jerky,
making it very, very salty as in a food like prosciutto, or
very highly acidic.”
More Information
To learn more, pick up one of Sandor’s books, The Art of
Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential
Concepts and Processes from Around the World, or
Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of
Live-Culture Foods.
You can also find more information on his website at
WildFermentation.com.
© Copyright 1997-2013 Dr. Joseph Mercola. All Rights Reserved.
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