War cannot be won. I’m not advocating anything dangerous here, just old-fashioned common sense—and practices. We are too clean and so are our homes. And that germaphobia has created a market—or the market has created germaphobia—for all sorts of wasteful products. I’m not advocating you never bathe. However, this MIT chemical engineer hasn’t showered since 2003 […]
microbiota
What Is Fermentation and Why Do I Go On About It So Much?
If you have read my blog at all, at some point, you may have had one of the following thoughts: Fermentation sounds revolting. Why does she keep going on about it? OMG. I love fermentation. I named my sourdough starter [insert name]. On [insert date] she turns [insert number] years old. We will throw her […]
How to Ferment Vegetables in Brine
Click here to go straight to the recipe When I prep sauerkraut, I add salt to a bowl of chopped cabbage and other vegetables, crush the vegetables, let them sit while they release water and then pack everything into clean jars. When I prep kimchi, I add a lot of salt to a bowl of […]
Will My Fermented Food Kill Me? Fermentation FAQs
I love teaching fermentation workshops and answering the many questions attendees ask me. Here, I’ve tried to address most of the common questions I hear but may have missed one or two. If you have a burning question about fermentation that I haven’t included, please ask away and I’ll do my best to answer. This […]
Simple Cultured Kimchi
How important is kimchi to Korean cuisine? Well, Koreans eat 1.5 million pounds of it every year, the Korean stock market’s “kimchi index” tracks the prices of kimchi ingredients and when Korea sent its first astronaut to the International Space Station, it sent kimchi along with him too—after spending millions researching and developing a recipe suitable […]
Off-the-Grid Kombucha
Because you want to take your hippie game to the next level… The word “ferment” comes from the Latin verb “fervere,” to boil One of the benefits of making fermented foods is that you can prepare many of them without consuming energy. So, after the apocalypse, I’ll still be able to eat my mouth-watering fermented salsa, […]
Why and How to Make Sauerkraut and Krautchi
Click here to jump to the recipe Why ferment? People have fermented foods for thousands of years. At first, ferments must have happened by sheer accident—a handful of vegetables forgotten in salty water or a misplaced bowl of porridge, discovered days later and showing signs of life and gentle bubbling. When those first curious cooks tasted these supposed mistakes, they would […]
16 Simple Tips to Clean Your Kitchen, Plastic-Free
When we first went plastic-free, cleaning presented a big challenge. How would we wash our dishes without plastic bottles filled with dish soap (not to mention filled with microbeads)? Sponges, made of plastic, come wrapped in yet more plastic. And how would we dispose of wet, stinky garbage? We found pretty simple solutions for all of […]
Fermenting Versus Canning
Updated 06/11/17 fermentation noun fer·men·ta·tion \ˌfər-mən-ˈtā-shən, –ˌmen-\ “[The] process by which microbes consume sugars and produce acid, alcohol and gases.” — from The Good Gut “The transformative action of microorganisms.” — from The Art of Fermentation Often when I discuss fermentation, people say to me “Cool! I’ve always wanted to try canning.” Before I started fermenting […]
The Secondary Fermentation: Hippie Jargon for “Put Kombucha in a Bottle”
Updated 09/19/17 During my fermentation workshops, I give students samples of my various kombucha flavors before I put them to work. They always ask for the recipes so I thought I better get to it and post a bunch. Before you can flavor kombucha, you must first brew a batch and wait for it to ferment. You can […]
A Great Read: The Good Gut
microbiota noun mi-cro-bi-o-ta \-bī-ˈōt-ə\ : a microbial community microbiome noun mi-cro-bi-ome \-bī-ˈōm\ : all the microbial genes in a microbiota I first read about the Sonnenburgs—a husband and wife team of Stanford PhDs studying the gut microbiota—in an article Michael Pollan wrote for the New York Times a couple of years ago. […]
Thumb Your Nose at Big Soda: Naturally Carbonated Lemonade
Click here to jump to the recipe This past Monday, summer arrived here in Silicon Valley. I could hear kids splashing in the pool outside. The ice cream truck, which, oddly, plays “Little Brown Jug,” resumed trolling the neighborhood. And with school about to end, parents went into panic mode. But something else tipped me off that summer […]