From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You are listening to Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com. I'm John Gallagher. My guest today is fermentation revivalist, Sandor Katz. Sandor is author of wild fermentation and the brand new book, the art of fermentation, an in-depth exploration of essential concepts and processes from around the world. It gives practical information on fermenting vegetables, which is an amazing online resource. Sandor, welcome back to Herb Mentor which is an amazing online resource.
Sandor, welcome back to Herb Mentor Radio.
It's such a pleasure to be with you today.
Yeah. And, you know, you've made me a real happy guy because, like, Terry Gross is my radio hero. You know? And and, so if I can't actually ever be interviewed by Terry herself, just to be able to, like, interview someone she interviewed in the same week is, like, awesome.
So thanks. So I'm feeling kinda famous, you know, by proxy here.
So it was Well, it it it's it's a pleasure to be back on your show and, it's a pleasure to have, so much interest in, in the things I'm talking about.
So since I interviewed you last, many of your mentor dot com members, have gotten into fermentation as a result. So I've collected a bunch of questions from them. But before we get to that, I thought we'd do a little refresher for those who, who've who've listened to before but or also are brand new to this whole idea of fermentation.
So for those herbal folks here who are not yet aware of fermented foods, Sandor, just, what's a just a brief overview of fermented foods?
Well, broadly speaking, fermentation is the transformative action of microorganisms.
So fermented foods and beverages are those foods and beverages which have been transformed by microorganisms in some way. Now people with a biology background might think about fermentation in a more restrictive sense that it is anaerobic metabolism, the production of energy without oxygen and certainly most of the classic fermented foods and beverages are anaerobic processes transformative action of microorganisms.
Okay.
Oh, go ahead.
Well, I was wondering about, like, I hear about lacto fermentation, then there's the kind of fermentation where you're making beer, wine. Is there a difference there?
Well, sure. I mean, the difference is the types of microorganisms.
So, lacto fermentation is sometimes used to describe fermentations by lactic acid bacteria and sauerkraut and kimchi and pickles and other forms of fermented vegetables are examples of lacto fermented foods.
Certainly yogurt, kefir and other styles of fermented milks are also lacto fermented foods.
And whereas alcoholic beverages are as well well, alcoholic beverages are primarily produced by yeasts which are fungi that consume sugars and turn them into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Bread also involves yeast.
In most contemporary yeasted breads people work with pure yeast.
In most traditional situations before yeast was isolated, people worked with mixed cultures. That's what a sourdough is an example of, a mixed culture that includes both yeast and lactic acid bacteria. So, these processes are not always completely separate processes and often you'll find the organisms together. In the natural world, you always find the organisms together. Organisms exist in communities.
It's only really since the emergence of microbiology in the second half of the nineteenth century that anyone's ever been able to isolate, single types of organisms and work with them alone. All the traditional ferments are are are mixed culture fermentations.
Okay.
So then how does fermentation, like fit into our history? Is this something that's been going on Like, okay, like, canning, for example, for storing food is is fairly recent. Correct?
And and Sure.
I mean, canning is an invention of the nineteenth century. In France, they still call canning apertization, because they remember the name of the Frenchman Nicolas Apert who invented the process, early in the nineteenth century. Fermentation is ancient. I mean humans did not invent fermentation. I mean cells in our bodies are capable of fermentation.
That happens in women's bodies actually is essential to human reproduction.
So, fermentation is simply a biological process, a natural phenomenon.
And all of the foods that people eat, all of the products of agriculture are covered with microorganisms and there's a certain inevitability to microbial changes.
Most of the food that we reject, what we throw into the compost, we're rejecting it because microorganisms have digested our food in ways that we consider it to be rotting or stale.
What fermentation is, is a channeling of these sort of inevitable life forces that are present on our food.
People learned through observation of what happens and trial and error of basically manipulating environmental conditions for storing food, people learned techniques to, to guide the microbial development of food. So for instance, if you take a piece of cabbage and leave it on your kitchen counter exposed to the air, you could leave it there for a week, you could leave it there for a month, you could leave it there for a year, and it's never going to turn itself into sauerkraut. What will grow are molds. Mold spores are present on all vegetables, and if they're left exposed to the air, that's what's eventually going to start to grow.
The technique for making sauerkraut is to simply chop up the vegetables and salt them to pull liquid out of the vegetables and then stuff it into a jar or other vessel so that the vegetables are submerged. And it's that submerging that is the environmental manipulation that protects the vegetables from air and oxygen makes it impossible for those molds to grow except perhaps on the surface.
And on the submerged vegetables, lactic acid bacteria, which are also always present on vegetables, encourage the growth of, you know, some type of organism that's present rather than some other type of organism that's also present.
Well, that sounds very simple. But, you know, often people are are are afraid of bacteria, like you said, molds and bacteria for the most part. So have you found there's a fear people have to overcome when when wanting to enter this world of actually doing something as simple as make pickles or sauerkraut?
Well, you know, all of us in our time have been are dangerous, we have to be afraid of bacteria, and in fact, our lives would be better if we could simply eradicate all bacteria.
You know, this is a misguided idea. You know, we could not live without bacteria. We could not function.
You know, I already mentioned that bacteria enable human beings to reproduce effectively.
Immune functioning.
And really more and more important roles for bacteria are being recognized every day. Just this week, the Human Microbiome Project published their results. And it was the first mapping of the genetics of the bacteria in our bodies. And it was a recognition by geneticists that that human beings are more than individual organisms, that that we are these, you know, complex communities that consist, you know, not only of our sort of single human organism, but of trillions and trillions of microbial organisms that are not parasitic or, you know, just along for a free ride, but rather, you know, they are mutualistic with us and they they actually provide us with, you know, incredible functional, benefits that we would not have without them. And and in fact, you know, human beings, every other animal, every plant, every fungus, no other form of life could exist without bacteria.
So we have this bacteria, and we, you know, we can't exist with this bacteria. And in fact, we're probably nothing but just large assemblages of bacteria in our own organism ourselves. Right?
So, like, how are western lifestyles being detrimental to this? And then, how then can fermented foods play a role in helping this?
Well, I mean, there are all of these factors in our contemporary lives, the chemicals that we're using in our daily lives that that that kill bacteria.
You know, every municipal water system, the water is chlorinated, the chlorine is put into the water specifically to kill bacteria, antibiotic drugs.
Certainly they save many lives that everybody agrees that they're wildly overprescribed and even more so than among human beings, animals in confinement agriculture are fed huge quantities of antibiotics every day and people are eating meat and milk that carries residue of those antibiotics and there's an accumulation of all this antibiotic use in the water table. So, all of us are drinking low levels of antibiotics in the water that we drink every day no matter how pristine the source of our water. And then compound that with these antibacterial cleansing products that have become ubiquitous and all of us are exposed every day to all of these chemical compounds that are designed as broad spectrum bacteria killers.
And so it has become in our time actually much more important than it's ever been in the past for people to think about consciously, replenishing and diversifying bacterial populations in in their gut with probiotics and foods that have live bacteria in them.
And then just to get back to this issue of fear of working with bacteria, in fact, at least in the realm of fermenting raw plant material, something like fermenting vegetables, it is just intrinsically safe. There are no foods that are safer.
According to the USDA, there has never been a single case of food poisoning reported in the United States from fermented vegetables, and there are not many foods that you could say that about.
You couldn't say that, for instance, about raw vegetables Right.
Because we, you know, we hear every year about, you know, outbreaks of illnesses, stemming from spinach, from lettuce, from tomatoes, from almonds, from apples. It's it's kind of one one food after another.
And so there always exists the possibility of contamination. Usually it's runoff from a factory farm with animals up the hill.
But whatever the source of it, there's always the possibility of contamination. But if you took some vegetables that the indigenous population of lactic acid bacteria would would would overwhelm, you know, any incidental contaminants.
And then as the environment acidifies, as the, you know, lactic acid So so you could think of your fermentation, as a strategy for safety.
Wow. I'm thinking when you're looking at it.
So then, it's interesting because you're talking mentioned, like, you know, what we what we can do is we can start to add in, and we think about adding things that are probiotic in nature and anything. But but, if people start you know, it's it's a little easier than say to say, like, hey. I'm gonna try to add different kinds of fermented fruits to my diet than it is to say, I'm gonna take these probiotics, which sounds so, you know, sterile and cold and capsule like and all. And whereas, like, adding fermented foods to your world and your diet just sounds like it's a lot more fun and and and in a way No.
And and it is.
You know?
It is more fun. And when I say probiotic, I mean, I I define probiotic broadly. I mean, I think foods with live bacterial cultures are probiotic. Right.
So I'm not encouraging anybody to go, you know, buy supplements. Like I think that like really you do much better to eat a variety of different types of fermented foods with their own unique populations of bacterial cultures, diversity is the name of the game when we're talking about bacteria and bacterial genetics. Bacteria are very genetically fluid, and shift the environmental conditions.
So, actually like a diversity of different types of bacteria is always better than there's no super strain. There's no single strain that solves all of our problems.
The best thing we can do for ourselves is expose ourselves to lots of different kinds of bacteria that are found in different types of fermented foods at different stages of their development.
And I think that's what really helps to replenish and diversify our microbial populations much better and more effectively than any single super strain that someone's promoting as the best probiotic.
Exactly.
I mean, I personally don't take any probiotic capsules or anything like that. I just I just eat lots of different, fermented foods.
You know, you said you just mentioned the word culture and, of course, fermentation requiring cultures. And you mentioned diversity.
So what I'm, like, always curious about is how you see, I mean, even in your own life, how how culture and diversity in those in the food that you're eating and creating the food that you're eating, how that relates on a macro level to the culture in diversity that you create in your own life on a on a larger level, like on a you know what I'm talking about? Like, right? Yeah. Sure.
I mean, I think it's I think it's fascinating that we use the same word culture to describe, so many different things.
But, you know, at the one level, we talk about the communities of microorganisms as cultures.
You know, when you make yogurt, you have to use a little bit of mature yogurt, you know, as a starter in order to, you know, introduce the community of bacteria that turns it into yogurt into the fresh milk that you wanna turn into yogurt. We call this, the the the scoop of mature yogurt that we introduce, we call that the culture. We call the act of introducing it, culturing it.
And and we use the same word, culture, to describe, language, music, scientific knowledge, belief systems, religious practices, all of these different big things and it's the totality of all the things that we seek to pass down from generation to generation is culture. But, you know, as a group, I would suggest that these, live culture foods are more than incidental cultural novelties and they actually are very important to cultural identity.
If we, look at the word culture, it comes from the Latin word for cultivation.
And so, in some way, it stems from the idea of cultivation of the soil and all of the other things that people have learned to cultivate. But I would say that, agriculture cultivating in the soil would have no meaning without fermentation and other techniques for preserving the harvest because how could a society ever invest all of its energy into crops that are ready at certain moments of the year if they didn't have some insights into how to effectively store those crops to feed them through the rest of the year.
So fermentation and cultured foods I think are very important in most cultural traditions and I certainly don't know about every culinary tradition that exists on this earth, but I've been looking really hard for a decade and a half for a counterexample and I can't find any examples of culinary traditions that do not incorporate fermentation in some way or another. I mean, the ferments in the Arctic Circle look very different than the ferments at the equator, but they are no less, you know, important to the ability of people to feed themselves, you know, and to cultural identity.
I heard a I heard a really fascinating story from a woman I've become friendly with, Betty Stecmeyer who, who started a business called Gem Cultures, and she sells food cultures. And among the food cultures that she has, sold is a Finnish milk culture called Vili.
And, and the Vili that she sells was actually, brought to this country by her husband's uncle.
And, she found herself taking care of her husband's uncle at the end of his life.
And one day he called her into his room with a sense of urgency and she went in and his question was, you're going to take care of he called it the seed, you're going to take care of the seed, right? And she assured him that, you know, she'd been propagating it for thirty years. She was very attentive to it. She was going to take good care of it.
And, and he seemed relieved to hear that. And the next time she went into the room, he was dead. And, you know, it was as if his, you know, final concern, you know, on this earthly plane was, you know, being sure that somebody would take care of the culture. And so, you know, for his cultural identity as, you know, an immigrant who left, you know, one world and moved to another world, but brought this embodiment of the culture he grew up in with him.
For him to be at peace with the idea of dying, he needed some reassurance that this culture was going to be treasured and taken care of the way he has.
Amazing. That's a great story.
So, lots of folks on herbmentor dot com hearing, and learning herbs in general community have gotten into, fermentation more and more, you know, the more they're involved in our site. And they're hearing your past interview you've done. And and and and we're always talking about your at least your first book. And now we're always talking about your second book. So there's been some questions that come up. And I think of, anyone I've interviewed, more questions streamed in, instantaneously when I announced that I was gonna be interviewing you. So let's get to some of these.
So, what I'm gonna do is I think what I'll do is I'll just ask questions because there's a lot of questions from a lot of people and some overlap and this and that. So rather than say so, you know, rather than say, Joe asks this, I'm just gonna ask the questions as if I'm asking them. But they're all from Herd Mentor members. So, the question the first question here is, her question is, how long do the fermented foods last? I know that's a wide open question with a lot of variables. So, specifically, how long would dill pickles last and how long would vinegar that isn't pasteurized last?
Okay. Well, dill pickle in the refrigerator would last for months and months. They might eventually get kind of soft because of enzymes that are in all vegetables that break down the pectins and they seem to be more active or faster crispness, assuming they were still crisp when you put them in the crispness, assuming they were still crisp when you put them in the refrigerator for a couple of months. But as far as like toxicity, you could leave them in there for ten years and they wouldn't get toxic.
Like acidified foods stored in a mostly empty container, this is significant because if there's a lot of air in the container then there's the potential for mold that can really degrade things.
But highly acidic and salty foods in the refrigerator will never go toxic.
Wow.
What was the second food that you wanted, an evaluation of the, time frame for?
Oh, well, you know, she's asking about the dill pickles and then the difference between that and the vinegar, pickles like Okay.
So so so so vinegar, I mean, you know, even unpasteurized vinegar, should be shelf stable for a very, very long time, for years. But it depends a little bit on how it's packaged.
If it remains sealed in a full bottle, then there's no reason it wouldn't be good for years and years. Once you get down into a half full bottle, that's a bottle that is half full with oxygen, and if the vinegar is not pasteurized, then Acetobacter, the bacteria that convert alcohol into acetic acid, in the presence of oxygen, they can actually digest acetic acid.
And so in a jar that's not well sealed or that has a lot of air space, the acidity will actually diminish over time.
So the answer has to be contingent you know being well sealed in a narrow necked bottle that is mostly full.
And if you see, like, so I'm just throwing this question in. If you if you go on your pickles and and you go in the fridge and you and then there's someone hitting the top there and it's got mold on it or something or or something like what? How would you deal with that? I mean, it doesn't mean the whole jar is bad. Right?
No. No. No. I would just, I well, first of all, as a storage strategy, I would say once your jar is in the fridge of foods that you're eating slowly get to be half full, try to transfer them to smaller jars that will be mostly full.
Okay.
And then you'll have a lot less problems like that. But, no, I mean, I would just, you know, if half of a cucumber was sticking up and started to get a little mold developing on the surface of it, I would just cut that cucumber in half and throw the moldy half in the compost and eat the half that remains submerged and didn't get molded.
Great. Same with sauerkraut.
Right? And the same is true in general. Like, even outside of the refrigerator, I mean, that's the biggest, well, the people face in fermenting vegetables is that, you know, we're we're creating the surface to submerge the vegetables and pretty cleverly engineered fermentation system, the surface is always going to be exposed to air and warm weather will tinge towards mold growth. So if molds grow on your surface, just as soon as you notice it, try to scrape it off, skim it off as best you can, and don't worry about it.
Okay. Thank you. So, next question was curious on how long it takes to build up a healthy gut flora with the consumption of fermented food.
So how long?
Oh, I mean, that's a hard question to answer. I mean, I mean, I would just say do it. Don't worry about how long it takes. Just start start doing it now. I mean, I would guess how long it takes depends depends a little bit on, you know, how bad of shape you're in.
Right.
Well, in this case Well, first, introduce these folks, these foods slowly in small quantities, give yourself some time to get used to it.
Sometimes people who just have not eaten a lot of live fleetingly uncomfortable. But I would just say eat small quantities, like regularity is more important than eating huge quantities.
Eating these foods every day or at least frequently. And also incorporating different types of fermented foods, having not only sauerkraut, but yogurt or quesir, or experimenting with different types of what I grouped together as sour tonic beverages, which are these lightly fermented, probiotic beverages. I mean, there's lots of different types of foods and beverages you can introduce into your diet.
But just eating small amounts frequently, I think really helps change the microbial ecology in your diet much more effectively than just you know, eating a huge amount at once.
In in her case, she's, has, there's a nine year old boy who's fifty pounds. He needs to strengthen his immune system, and he gets sick a lot. And so, basically, you know, she was she was kind of speaking in terms of dosage and all and wondering, you know, for so so you're saying, so for this boy, same kind of thing. It's like try some variety and little bits and and stuff.
Yeah. And, you know, I mean, re recently, I went to a a a conference that was mostly parents and, caregivers for, children with autism.
And, you know, a lot of the discussion was about, you know, sort of ways to, you know, get these live culture foods into the diets of kids who might be really picky about what they eat.
And, you know, this one this one mom who I who I had a long conversation with was telling me that she'll make, popsicles, fruit juice popsicles and just put a couple of teaspoons of, of, sauerkraut juice into that.
Oh, that's great. So so, you know, I think, you know, whatever, you know, if you can get your kids to eat sauerkraut, well, that's great. But if you can't, there's ways, you know, there's ways that you can maybe, you know, hide some of the juice into something that they do like to eat.
And and often the yogurt that way. Oh, yogurt kefir off often are are pretty kid friendly too.
Yeah.
Yeah. So that that's another example because she also had asked for some examples, and that's great. I like that, the popsicle. Popsicles are always great to hide a lot of things in.
We do use them a lot in the herbal in the herbal.
And then, I mean, personally, like, any anytime I make something like a salad dressing, like, I'll always throw a little bit sauerkraut juice in it. It's, you know, it's sort of like a it's almost a universal ingredient for me.
That's awesome. I got another question here about, brassicas and that she says they should be avoided by those with hypothyroid. Is that true with sauerkraut?
I I am not a huge expert that are found in cabbage and other cruciferous vegetables are still found in them after they're fermented.
So, I mean, I would say the answer to people like that is different kinds of vegetables. I mean, some of the best one of my favorite sourcress I ever in my life was made with celery. It was celery root, celery stalks, celery leaves and celery seeds. It made an incredibly wonderful ferment.
Carrot ginger is a really popular combination.
But, you know, if there's certain vegetables that you need to avoid, you can ferment with different vegetables. I I wish I wish I could tell you that sauerkraut removed the goitrogens, but the information that I've been able to find on this question is that they don't. It doesn't.
Can beet kvass be made out of whey and replaced with just salt?
You made without whey?
Well, sorry. Yes. I'm gonna say it again. Can be kvass be made without whey and replaced with just salt?
Yeah. That's how that's how I typically make my kvass. So so okay. Kvass is a Russian beverage that's typically made out of, dry rye bread.
And it's basically the dry bread is re fermented as a beverage and it's really delicious and so iconic in Russian culture that any kind of a sour beverage is called Kvass. So beet Kvass is basically a fermented infusion of beets. You take a beet or two, chop it coarsely into cubes, put it in a jar, make sure that the jar needs to be no more than a quarter full of deep pieces, fill the jar with water, dechlorinated water anytime you're adding water to a ferment, if you're on a municipal water system, try to dechlorinate the water either with a carbon filter or you can evaporate out chlorine.
So cover the beets with water, fill up the jar with water and then I just add a pinch of salt to that and that's it.
Sally Fallon has popularized the idea of using whey as a starter for beet cloth and sauerkraut and many other ferments. And certainly, if you have access to whey, if you have some dairy fermentation process in your life and you're producing a lot of whey, you can absolutely do that and it can work beautifully, but you do not require whey.
All vegetables are covered with lactic acid I I think beet kvass has to be one of the most, nourishing, instantaneously nourishing feeling drinks I've ever had.
You know, you drink that. You just feel your whole body just it's like you're pouring hot.
With you. That is just such a powerful tonic. I love it.
So I I I just love it when, when I open the refrigerator and see how my wife's made it.
So, you know, so, of course, I could be into which is better at it.
From a from a team of, Canadian, Russian Jewish women, that about lettuce kavas and a tradition of basically making a liquid infusion of lettuce and fermenting that and that's really quite delicious.
Also the process is pretty much identical to the beet cross process except to use lettuce instead of beet.
Cool.
I mean, the flavor is not quite as rich but it's, you know, it's a it's a it's a nice sour tonic beverage.
Nice. So, here's an interesting question. It's probably common about people that you you you you do talks or new people added that she's and I also get with this question often with people, you know, with herbal things as well is, you know, getting your loved ones over the, the yuck factor. And, and then he said her boyfriend fears it'll be worse for it'll be worse rather than better for his tendency towards yeast infections, which is just another separate question.
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, there's a lot of misinformation out there about, you know, the necessity to avoid all fermented foods if you're dealing with the yeast infection.
And I think it does make sense to avoid, heavily carbohydrate based foods if you're dealing with yeast infections.
And certain ferments are heavily carbohydrate based, breads, alcoholic beverages, kombucha, many ferments really are based on sugar or other forms of carbohydrates. But some of the ferments that are not heavy carbohydrate ferments such as vegetable ferments, such as milk ferments, and that have these live lactic acid yeast that are that are overgrown in your body are brought under control by the bacteria.
Very cool. And I imagine, getting over the yuck factor is just, I always just say start with things that people are familiar with already, you know, yogurt and pickles, things like that. And then Yeah.
Absolutely. And another thing is, like, try lightly fermented vegetables rather than heavily fermented vegetables. I mean, it's the strong smell that develops over time that sometimes people recoil from. And if you just ferment them for a few days, they really are no less probiotic.
But but but the flavors are, you know, they're they're more familiar. They're not as, you know, they're they're not as challenging to people.
And, you know, certainly people like, everybody eats fermented foods every day. By one scholar's estimates, one third of all food that human beings put in our mouths has been been subjected to fermentation. So, you know, the most common foods that everyone eats every day bread, coffee, cheese, these are all products of fermentation. So I think rather than emphasizing the exoticness of it and the strong flavors for people who are a little bit squeamish about it, just emphasizing the everydayness of it.
All of the condiments that people love to put on their foods, either they're directly fermented, such as soy sauce and fish sauce, or else they use vinegar which is a product of fermentation as a means of stabilizing them. And so even our commonest our most common American condiments and mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup, those are all based on vinegar as a stabilizer.
So, really like these foods are not also kind of exotic and extreme and almost all of them can be made with either stronger flavors if that's what you desire or milder flavors if that's what you desire and most of that corresponds with fermentation because the acidity accumulates over time. So you could ferment your vegetables for two or three days or for two or three weeks or for two or three months and you'll get very, very different flavors depending upon how long you ferment them for. And that's one of the great things about fermenting them yourself is you're not, you don't have to eat things that are made to somebody else's idea of how strong it is or what's desirable.
When I did my cross country sauerkraut roadshow when Wild Fermentation first came out, I began with six week old sauerkraut that I was serving people and at a certain point I ran out of sauerkraut and I started serving people two or three day old sauerkraut that I had made at my demonstrations just a couple of days earlier.
And at first, I was really embarrassed to be serving such young sauerkraut because it's not really very strong at that point. But I got so much feedback from people telling me that's the best sauerkraut I ever had in my life or, you know, I thought I hated sauerkraut, but I love that. And so, you know, one of the beautiful things about making it yourself is you can make it the way you like it. And if, you know, if you're trying to cater to someone who is squeamish about strong flavors, make them something that doesn't have strong flavors.
Yeah. Something to do with all that cabbage that you grew out too. Boy.
Yeah.
So, Kathleen here, she's a little hardcore here. She goes, this is a good question. Do you, first of all, do you think that fermented foods could be safely stored in a root cellar? She has, she says, I have trouble finding room for all my ferments in my fridge. This is long term storage. For example, the twenty five pounds of pickles I make every summer. So not stuff that she's gonna be able to eat in a few weeks.
So, so how what's your, your Yes.
Absolutely. I mean, understand that the context in which these foods developed was before people had refrigerators. You know, refrigeration is a phenomenon of the twentieth century. People have been doing this for thousands of years.
You know, this was how people preserved vegetables when they didn't have refrigerators and and freezers. And if you don't, if you want to store it and if you have a cellar, that's the ideal place because the cellar stays more or less the earth temperature. So, it stays cool in the summer and things don't freeze, but still stay cool in the winter. It stays somewhere between fifty five and sixty degrees and that's ideal.
Yes, you absolutely can safely store ferments for a very long time. I'm actually getting to the very end of a fifty five gallon barrel of radish sauerkraut that, that I made in November and now it's July. So that is or no, I'm sorry, it's June. So So that is, you know, seven months old now.
Yeah.
And radishes It's never been in a refrigerator.
It's been in the cellar the whole time.
Radish.
That's cool.
Cucumber pickles, you know, you have this issue of them getting softer, which which which could happen depending depending on how, you know, how warm your your root cellar might get to. But that's the worst that'll happen is they'll start to get soft. They certainly won't get toxic. There's no safety concern at all.
Right. Okay. Great. So another question here. Does fermented food help the skin to fight off fungal infections?
Sure. And I I mean, I've actually heard of people using it topically.
Oh. Wow.
I've heard of people, soaking their fungal infested toes in sauerkraut juice or vinegar, as as a means of treating that.
Wow.
So there's a lot of I've heard people using, yogurt on on, on yeast infections also.
Sure. Sure. It's like the said the laying on of the leaves. It's the laying on of the pickles Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's just it's a poultice. Yeah.
It's a poultice. Yeah. Exactly.
I mean, I actually heard I I heard a really dramatic story from this, elderly Russian born woman who I met in Australia a few years ago, and her her husband was dealing with a skin cancer, that was on his ear. And he was scheduled for surgery to have it removed and this woman had a dream. And in her dream, her grandmother who had been dead for many years by this point, appeared in the dream and reminded her that when she was a little girl in Russia, people would use sauerkraut poultices on any kind of a skin irregularity.
And in the morning, when her husband woke up, he she told him about this dream and talked him into letting her put a sauerkraut poultice on her ear on on his ear. And, you know, and and the cancer disappeared before the scheduled surgery. No.
So so, you know, in in in in this case, it was it was it was effective.
Wow. Wow. That's good.
And then, I mean, it's it's well established that sauerkraut has, compounds called isothiocyanates that are that are regarded as carcinogenic compounds.
I don't know that if you got diagnosed with brain cancer, if you would want to just treat it with sauerkraut, I'm a little skeptical of that myself. But knowing that these compounds are in it, I think that they're incorporating food like this into your diet is a great way of diminishing your chances of developing a cancer.
A couple of questions here on on kefir.
She's been drinking it for ten days now. On the second day of fermenting, I add, she adds teas for twice the punch. Interesting. I love kefir and have not had any bouts of reflux since using it. So how much can she drink a day?
Oh, but well, okay. I mean, I'm I'm it's not clear to me whether she's talking about milk kefir or water kefir.
But, you know, with either one of them, I wouldn't be so concerned about any maximum amount per day. But what I would do is not just start right off the bat by drinking a quart a day. You know, start start with a few ounces, see how that sits with you. The next day, try having a cup of it, see how that sits with you. And I mean, I would just say increase it gradually.
I have not heard any particular problems ever from people drinking too much Caesare.
So I mean I wouldn't suggest any particular quantity as the maximum amount, but I also don't think that there's necessarily great benefit to drinking a huge amount of it. I mean, really if you drink a glass a day of kefir and could do that every day, you'd be in good shape.
Great. And you can store the grains in the fridge. Right? You're not using them?
Well, you know, all of these SCOBYs that that's what we know. The Kefir, is in the form of these little rubbery blobs that are that are frequently referred to as kefir grains.
And, they want to be fed more or less continuously. I mean, having these SCOBYs, these cultures that have evolved into distinctive physical forms is a little bit like having a pet.
You just have to keep on feeding it.
And like but most pets can take a certain amount of neglect. Most these cultures can take a certain amount of neglect, their nutritional requirements are slowed down if you put them in the refrigerator, but you still eventually need to feed them.
So what I usually do when if I go out of town is I leave Mikey Fear Grains in milk, which is their sort of favored food nutritive medium and I just leave them in the refrigerator which slows them down. But then as soon as I get home, I try to feed them right away and and feed them frequently and, you know, kind of tamper them a little bit.
And I I certainly have left Kefir grains for too long and had them, you know, just kind of dematerialize into the milk.
Okay. Thank you.
Now we got a question here about, meads and wines from wild yeast. So when fermenting meads or wines from wild, actually, wild or cultivated yeast, do you kill the yeast before bottling or let the yeast reach its maximum alcohol level, and sweeten to the desired level, and then bottle.
So you said she's always used it. You always used Camden tablets prior to bottling, but she's curious about your experience in not killing before bottling.
Yeah. I have never used Camden tablets before bottling, and I have never heated up my my my beverage before bottling.
I I just I I mean, I I I leave them in the carboy with the airlock.
I mean, until the until visible fermentation has ceased, and then I rack it, which is siphoning it into another carboy and leaving behind yeast residue.
And then I'll usually top it off with some fresh sugar water if it's a wine, honey water if it's a mead and let that continue to ferment until it stops again and then I'll bottle them. And I've just it's never been a problem.
I've been really pleased with called for these tablets to sort of kill all the wild organisms that are in whatever the liquid that you want to ferment is and all these different new yeast nutrients that you could buy and it just seems very, very complicated.
And I had this contrasting experience from earlier in my life before I specifically got interested in fermentation, but I spent a few months, traveling with a friend of mine in West Africa.
And every little village we found ourselves in, people offered us homemade alcoholic beverages, usually out of open vessels. And they were fermenting beverages. They did not have airlocks or carboys. They certainly did not have access to Camden tablets. They didn't have stores they could go to where they could buy different isolated strains of yeast or yeast nutrients.
And so this was just kind of a confusing question for me for a couple of years. Why is the hobby literature making it so complicated and telling me that I need all these special things when all these people in villages who didn't have access to these things were making wonderful alcoholic beverages.
And the first sort of key to unlocking this paradox for me was a self published Ethiopian cookbook that I just randomly encountered in a friend's bookshelf and it had a recipe for Ethiopian style mead.
And it basically was, you know, honey, water, stir, stir, stir. And so I started making alcoholic beverages like that. I usually add some, you know, some sort of a fruit and fruit is all covered with yeast. It's really easy to get any ferment started if you add some fresh fruit to it.
Especially fruits with edible skins, like just in the past week I made beautiful plum wine and within twelve hours it was vigorously bubbly because we had such a high density of plums with all of their yeast that are on the skins of them in it.
So I've just never I've never used the sort of more common high-tech approaches.
I recognize that those are kind of your dominant in our time.
I use what some would consider to be cruder. I prefer to think of them as just, you know, sort of lower tech approaches to it.
Right. Okay. Which which I mean, me personally in that, I don't mind doing that if I'm making a small bottle or something or even a gallon. But sometimes when I take the effort or whatever five you know, to make a five gallon batch of wine, I sometimes don't wanna risk the wild, you know, it not tasting good.
I mean, I understand I understand the perspective. I will say that, you know, I mean, in fifteen years of doing it this way, eighteen years of doing it this way, I mean, I have hardly ever had bad batches. I feel really good about the quality of the beverages that wild yeast produce. One perspective on it is that until the 1860s, every alcoholic beverage that was ever made anywhere was made with wild yeast. Right. And so all of our traditions derive from that. And so today, the highest quality beers and wines are made with wild yeasts.
The Lambic beers of Belgium for instance are all wild consistent results by adding by adding by adding consistent results by adding yeast that have been selected and propagated for various characteristics such as alcohol tolerance, it is still recognized that the highest quality, the most complex flavors derive from communities of wild organisms that are indigenous to all of the foods that we eat.
Okay.
Great.
This is a great question from Pamela. I was making a batch of kimchi. She had some turmeric because she didn't have enough ginger. So it occurred to me, she says, it occurred to me garlic, onions, turmeric are strong, and then microbial. So how does the fermentation work? Why aren't the fermentation bacteria killed by this? And will this fermentation even work with turmeric, since she hasn't tried that before?
Well, yes. It'll work with with with with turmeric. And, you know, turmeric is no more antimicrobial than ginger is. I mean, ginger also is antimicrobial. So there's garlic. I mean, but really what they are is mold inhibitors is functionally how they work in sauerkraut. The lactic acid bacteria can grow perfectly well in them.
And, mold inhibitor So the things that we think of as antimicrobial, you know, they're not necessarily things that, you know, kill every kind of microorganism.
They're things which create a selective environment that certain kinds of organisms can tolerate and other kinds of organisms cannot. So, the lactic acid bacteria, which is found on all raw plant material, you know, the plants that are regarded as antimicrobial can tolerate lactic acid or or lactic acid bacteria can tolerate those because they're found on those plants.
Okay. Wow. How about, Mary wondering if fermented foods tend to raise glucose levels? Good question.
I'm not exactly like it like in in in the blood, in our bodies.
I I I can't really That's true.
That's that's kind of not a completely, yeah, detailed question.
So, And then also, you know, I mean, I I also just have to emphasize a little bit, like, I really am not a health care practitioner.
You know, I'm I'd let you know, I'm a guy who likes to make food and, you know, I've gotten to, you know, write and talk about my food and done a certain amount of research about it, but I I am I am just not a healthcare practitioner and there's a certain level of questions that people have about the effects of these foods in their bodies that I'm just not equipped to answer, unfortunately.
Okay. And, couple of questions here, kind of similar, and I'll see if I can just kind of hybrid and put them together.
And it was around storage. And we already talked about that they can last a long time. And we talked about the root cellar one. Now, the question of the root cellar person was like, hey.
She's got a root cellar. So she has that cool place where she can put that. But here's a person whose husband, doesn't seem to be happy with anything, you know, lasting in the fridge because it must take up that real estate. And, I was wondering, is there you know, what spot in what other spots in the house, for example, might you recommend people put them if they don't, you know, have enough fridge space?
Well, I mean, for one thing is, like, you don't have to make things in huge batches that require long term storage. Right. I mean, you know, for for for people who don't have a a cellar and don't have a lot of space in the refrigerator, what I would suggest really is make small batches. Right. I mean, you know, the, the, historical purpose of this food was to sort of use the harvest and preserve foods for the long winter. But I'm pretty sure that anybody with the technology to be listening to this program can buy vegetables through the winter. So maybe you don't need to make a fifty gallon batch to go through a whole winter and maybe you're better off working in gallon sized batches and making a new batch every month.
And then you just have a smaller quantity to store. That said, I will say that in most living environments, you can find micro climates.
So, I think about certain spots in my house as being warm spots because sometimes in my fermentation practice, I'm looking to get something going faster. Maybe I'm trying to make some dough for bread and I want it to be in a warm place and maybe I'll put it on top of my refrigerator. The refrigerators generate a little bit of heat and so the top of the refrigerator is a warm place or maybe I'll turn on the illuminating light in my oven and let that be an incubation chamber.
And similarly, you know, maybe there's just a place that never gets any light that stays cooler than the rest of your home. Maybe there's just a little corner where it stays three degrees cooler. So, you can just experiment with different spots in your home and you know, figure out where where the, you know, cooler spots and where the warmer spots are.
And, you know, and another option too is if you need just a little bit of space, you can usually hop on Craigslist and get a used small little, you know, fridge for twenty or thirty bucks.
And if that's a, you know, to even if that's a place to put just a few of your jars if a person in your house doesn't that's an Sure.
Sure. Sure. There's a there's a big tradition in Korea where people have, like a, an extra refrigerator that's smaller that they call their kimchi refrigerator. Oh. And they just use it for storing kimchi.
Yeah.
And sometimes sometimes sometimes they keep it at a more moderate temperature.
And I was looking at the, your book, in your book, in the color plates, and you have like a picture of, kind of a modified refrigerator where you make salami.
Sure. Sure. Sure. I mean, that's yeah. So, you know, a lot of if if, you know, most fermentations involve somehow manipulating environmental conditions. And so, you know historically a food like salami was only made in the late fall. And so you know you make it when if you can rig up a refrigerator to stay somewhere around fifty seven degrees Fahrenheit rather than the typical thirty eight degrees Fahrenheit then what you can do is simulate the temperature range that's required to do the fermentation.
You know, and I, you know, Sandra, I really appreciate you answering these questions because, gosh, when I look in your book, it's like I could come up with, days worth of questions. So it was great to get some people's real life practical situations that they're having to kinda go a little more in-depth there, a way, you know, that we could do that.
And so Well, great.
Let let let me let me just also point out that in in my new book, The Art of Fermentation, at the end of each chapter is a little section on troubleshooting, where I've tried to anticipate what some of the questions or, ferment.
I I love when folks I'm interviewing just, like, start to answer my next question for me. And I'm like, oh, great. I don't even have to ask it. So I was actually wanting to talk about your book and, you know, so people could understand. Like, so how how is this, organized? Because you have a great introduction on things. But, gosh, you have section after section.
It's just it's a thick book, like three, what is it, four, almost five hundred pages Yeah.
Packed.
Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I worked for two solid years on it.
And I tried to put as much of the accumulated wisdom that I have gleaned from my experiences and my correspondence and conversations with people in it. The first couple of chapters are pretty broad. Chapter one is called Fermentation as a Coevolutionary Force, and it just drives to sort of broaden the context for talking about fermentation and relating it to issues of evolution.
The second chapter is called the Practical Benefits of Fermentation and then talk about the Preservation Benefits of Fermentation, the Health Benefits of fermentation, fermentation as a strategy for energy efficiency and also the flavors of fermentation, which are really what got me interested in the first place. I have a chapter on basic concepts and equipment and then I get into different types of ferments.
And so the chapters are organized around fermenting sugars into alcohol, fermenting vegetables, fermenting sour tonic beverages, fermenting grains and starchy tubers, fermenting milk, fermenting beers and other grain based alcoholic beverages, then a chapter on growing mold cultures, fermenting beans, seeds and nuts, fermenting meat, fish and eggs, then a chapter on considerations for commercial enterprises, and then finally a chapter on non food applications of fermentation, uses of fermentation in agriculture, fiber arts, energy production, and other applications, bioremediation.
Wonderful. And the cool thing about it too is, you know, it's it's it's a constant reference guide for folks. So, you're not going to read it all at once. You know, you maybe pick up a chapter here and there.
But when you want to make beat kibas, you can open it up and just do that, you know, when you want Yeah. I mean, that that's that's what it's intended as, as a reference work.
Exactly. So it's it's and it's very thorough. And yeah. And so, so do you like you can buy it on your you got it right off your website. I mean, of course Yeah.
You can buy it on my website, wild fermentation dot com. If there's a local bookstore you like, I would love if you would encourage them to order it and buy it through them. You certainly could find it it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, walmart dot com, you know, any of those like big booksellers. But, you know, better to buy it directly from me or from a local bookstore.
That's why I like to mention that. Because we always want to support the herbalists here on Urban Mentor Radio. So I always like to ask people, where would you prefer people purchase your book? So some people don't ship from their websites. And you do. So I'm just presencing that. So go to wildfermentation dot com to buy it, folks.
And, you know, Sandra, I hope you had as much fun here as you had on Fresh Air. No?
I mean I was did you get to go to like This was a little bit more relaxed for me.
Did did you But I had a great time talking to you and, and I really appreciate your continued interest in this and, I'm glad to hear that your your listeners are are interested in this and, I hope some of them will will check out my book and go deeper with their, fermentation practices.
Thanks so much. And everyone, WildFermentation.com also has a list of Sandors' live, events. So if he's teaching or he's speaking anywhere, you can go there. And he also has lists of other, folks' fermentation events around the country. So it's a great site to check-in on from time to time. And then you can go meet him in person and take your book with you and get it signed. Right?
Yes. Indeed.
So, Sandor, thanks so much for joining us today on Herb Mentor Radio.
Thank you. It's my pleasure.
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