Tara Ruth:
Okay. John, I have a riddle for you.
John Gallagher:
Oh, no, I'm not really good at riddle, but go ahead.
Tara Ruth:
Okay. I'm going to say some words, and then I want you to tell me...
John Gallagher:
Oh, no.
Tara Ruth:
... what all of these words have in common. The first word is dandelion.
John Gallagher:
Dandelion? Okay.
Tara Ruth:
Then we got bacon.
John Gallagher:
Okay.
Tara Ruth:
And we got horseradish, sunflower seeds, and mushrooms.
John Gallagher:
Oh, it's easy, it's I would saute all that up and put it on a hamburger.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, I mean, that would be... I'm just thinking about all the different textures. That would be really interesting.
John Gallagher:
It would be weird.
Tara Ruth:
I could see it tasting good. I'll give you that.
John Gallagher:
Okay, okay, what do all these things have in common?
Tara Ruth:
Well, besides sauteing all of them on a hamburger, these are all ingredients you can make miso with.
John Gallagher:
Really?
Tara Ruth:
Yes.
John Gallagher:
I thought that was just soybeans and koji, that pasty stuff you get in the health food store refrigerator.
Tara Ruth:
Well, traditionally, yes, those are the main ingredients for miso. But in our conversation today with Gabe Garms, who's the founder of Creative Koji, he talks with us all about how you can create these miraculous medicinal misos with all sorts of different herbs, and he even talked about creating a bacon miso and a cheese miso. Blew my mind.
John Gallagher:
And it is incredible how he practices mindfulness in his miso making and his herbal medicine making, and I think everyone's going to get a lot out of that.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, I'm not a huge fermenter girly, but I really enjoyed this conversation, and it got me just excited about making herbal medicines in general, whether or not they're fermented. So I just want to dive on into this conversation with Gabe. Let's do it.
John Gallagher:
Yeah.
You are listening to HerbMentor Radio by learningherbs.com. I'm John Gallagher.
Tara Ruth:
And I'm Tara Ruth. Today we're chatting with Gabe Garms. Gabe is the founder of Creative Koji, a Pacific Northwest based company dedicated to crafting artisanal miso products using locally grown and sourced ingredients. Gabe draws on his background in permaculture and medicinal herbs to grow many of the ingredients for Creative Koji. He is passionate about fermented foods, natural medicine, and teaching people how to grow their own medicinals and food within a permaculture system. You can learn more about Gabe and Creative Koji at creativekoji.com.
John Gallagher:
Gabe, welcome.
Gabe Garms:
Thanks for having me, John and Tara.
John Gallagher:
It was really nice meeting you at the Northwest Herbal Fair. And I was wondering, so miso is a fermented food then?
Gabe Garms:
Yes, it's one of the longest aged fermented foods that at least we consume here in the West.
John Gallagher:
And what are the benefits of fermented foods?
Gabe Garms:
So many. First off, it's how we preserved our food before canning, and it was done with live microbes, especially in these prolonged ferments like miso, which could be anywhere from 10 months up to 5, 10 years. It has live microbes that help our immune function, which microbes are responsible for close to 80% of our immune function, regulating it, so making sure we've got those probiotics in our food. It also creates an acid called dipicolinic acid somewhere around six months to a year, which binds to radiation heavy metals in the body and remove them. And we all have cell phones in our pocket.
Tara Ruth:
Whoa.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, it's interesting, when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the low-income communities couldn't afford healthcare, and they didn't receive any of the fallout because they were eating miso and seaweed every day. And both seaweed and miso bind to the heavy metals and the radiation in the body and then moved them out.
But what fascinated me most the health benefit of miso is how it predigests our food. It's made with a fungus, aspergillus oryzae that is inoculated into rice or barley, into grains, and once it forms like a myceliated cake around the rice and the barley, and it's full of these enzymes that break down our proteins into amino acids, our starches into simple sugars, and our fats into fatty acids. So it's digesting all of our foods for us so that when we do eat, we're getting a lot more from our food. And the same goes for medicine. It makes a lot of the medicinal constituents, if we are to put medicinal herbs into misos, more easily assimilated into the human body. Lowers blood pressure. I could go on and on.
Tara Ruth:
No, go on and on. I want to hear.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, yeah. And longevity. The Japanese are one of the longest living cultures on the planet, and that's a staple in their diet every day. And they swear miso is one of the reasons for their longevity, and they have at least two tablespoons a day. Some villages eat significantly more than that. And I'm trying to, for Creative Koji, get us to eat a lot more miso here in the United States, starting here in the Pacific Northwest.
Tara Ruth:
Just a little bit ago, you mentioned medicinal misos and incorporating herbs into them. Can you talk a little bit more about that? As an herbalist, I'm so curious.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah. Well, traditionally soybeans, for thousands of years, were the ingredient misos were made from, and no one ever did anything until probably around 20 years ago. It was American chefs that started playing around and figuring out you could use anything that had protein, starch, or fat in it and turn it into miso. It wasn't just soybeans. This whole world opened up through The Noma Guide to Fermentation came out I think around 2016, 2017, and they were making misos out of local food, Nordic foods, wild foods.
And I was a medicinal herb grower, and grew a lot of perennial vegetables, and is a wild forager. And I was like, "Whoa, I have access to all these really neat medicinals and perennial vegetables and wild foods. I want to start doing the same thing." And I started going down that rabbit hole, and I never came back up, and just keep going deeper and deeper. And then using specifically our root medicines into misos became my thing, specifically dandelion, burdock. And now I'm doing a lot of marshmallow horseradish, that kind of thing.
Tara Ruth:
Whoa, a horseradish miso.
John Gallagher:
Wow.
Tara Ruth:
What does that taste like?
Gabe Garms:
It's really good. Surprisingly, when you steam dandelion root and horseradish, the steaming process takes a little bit of the bitterness out of the dandelion, and it takes a lot of the bite and the spice out of the horseradish, and then the horseradish miso, I actually do it.
John, when you visited my booth, I was out of the fire cider miso, but that's what I do with it. Since I need a starch, I do around 80% of the miso a little bit more, 85% is steamed horseradish root, and then I would add raw garlic, onion, and ginger, and then ferment that for about 10 months in salt to keep it stable and pathogens out. And that was a really good one. But I think the two that are going to have the most impact are going to be the dandelion and the burdock. And so far, every time I have those, they're sold out within 20 minutes. They're popular ones.
John Gallagher:
Is miso something that we can all make in our kitchens, or is it more like maybe you can't make in your kitchen, but it's sort of something maybe like wine or something where it's going to take some time and a process? Sauerkraut, fermented food, that's easy to do, that's really easy to make, but miso always seems a little trickier. So how was it made?
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, so the first step is it's a two-staged fermentation process. And the first step is I have to make the koji, which is, so I take spores of aspergillus oryzae, which is also, the Japanese have named Koji. They got to name it because they've used it the most. So I steam a grain full of starch. I usually use rices, is what I make most of my misos out of, but I also use pearl barley, and also I'll steam them, and then let them cool. And then inoculate the spores into the rice and the barley. And then I incubate it at around anywhere from 83 to 88 degrees Fahrenheit for a little under two days with around 70% humidity. I have a box, a incubator box that I built that has a little space heater and a humidifier in it...
Tara Ruth:
Wow, cool.
Gabe Garms:
... that regulate temperature and humidity. And then once that finished project, it turns the rice and barley into this sweet cake, and mycelium binds it all together, and it smells. Some people say it smells like chestnuts, I've heard grapefruit. To me, it smells like mushrooms and flowers, really sweet smell.
And then I take that koji, which is just rich with enzymes. I've heard anywhere from 24 to 50 different enzymes, this produces, and it predigests all of our food for us. And then once you have that finished koji, then I can add any protein, starch, or fat and make a miso.
The seed, if I add seeds, I would toast them, add them with the koji and salt. And the seed misos take around five months, four to five months. But the bean and the root misos, I steam my roots and cook my beans on low. And really all miso is is mixing koji, the starch, fat, or protein and salt, packing it in a crock, weighing it down, and then fermenting it from anywhere from four months to... I never really do over a year myself, but I've heard the oldest miso is around 13 years.
Tara Ruth:
And does it have to have both starch, fat, and protein, or is it or? So it can either be a starch, a fat, or a protein?
Gabe Garms:
Either, it can be any one of the three. With the fats, the fats you have to do in a refrigerator. So I don't do a lot of the fat-based misos because they can taste a little bit rancid when they're left out. It's a lot easier to make a mistake. The fats can go a little rancid, like leaving meat gets a little tricky. So I mainly stick to seeds, beans, and roots myself.
Tara Ruth:
And what inspired you to start adding in dandelion root or burdock root?
Gabe Garms:
Back to the Noma Guide for Fermentation, David Zilber was the head-
John Gallagher:
And that's Noma Guide, N-O-M-A, I don't know.
Gabe Garms:
N-O-M-A.
John Gallagher:
Okay.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, they started the revolution all over the world. It was Noma and a restaurant called Larder by Jeremy Umansky in Cleveland, Ohio. They were just using everything. They had a floral miso where they would do I think yellow peas and rose petals, and they were doing it more for the flavor, but they had said and mentioned in the book, they were playing with elderflower and lemon balm. And I was like, "Wait a minute, we have all these things growing in our gardens. Let me start playing with these." We have tons of dandelion, tons of burdock. And I just started taking some of their inspiration of doing everything that grew in the Nordic region and doing it, everything that was in our garden and even wild foods that I was able to forage mostly in Western Washington.
John Gallagher:
So does it bring out the medicinal qualities of the plant more than, let's say you're making a qing cha or a tea, because you're having that time to ferment, and it's really changing the character maybe of it. Can you talk a bit about that?
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, so they've done studies, the Japanese, that the longer the miso ferments, different, more resilient microbes take over releasing, creating enzymes that are breaking down nutrients or medicinal constituents to an even greater degree, so they're more easily assimilated. And alcohol is a cost prohibitive for low-income communities. I think, I don't have the means to test it, John, the scientific equipment, but I would wager a large amount of money saying that a prolonged fermented miso would be just as good if not better than a qing cha. But that's research I want to start to see done kind of really at the forefront of this medicinal miso thing.
John Gallagher:
Yeah, probably more in accessing the nutritive qualities versus a higher level. I don't know if you would replace a larger amount of herbal medicine. It might take for a certain health condition or something that you're taking, but for longer-term general nourishment and nutritive qualities, you're getting a lot more out of the burdock and dandelion, I imagine.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
Tara Ruth:
How did you learn to make miso originally?
John Gallagher:
Yeah.
Gabe Garms:
Well, I had always been an avid fermentor ever since Sandor Katz's Art of Fermentation came out, and did cheese-making sourdough, every kind of lacto-ferment there was. But I was always intimidated by the food molds like tempeh and miso because they required incubation in specific conditions. And then a friend gifted me with some tempeh starter, rhizopus oligosporus, and I started making tempeh, and created a little incubator out of a cooler, and was starting to make really good tempeh. And I was like, "Hey, I could do miso." And then once I got into koji and miso, I was hooked, I knew that this is what I wanted to do.
Tara Ruth:
Oh, it's so cool then to bring in all this background you have with growing medicinal herbs too and incorporating that into the miso. How did you get started on the plant path too, with growing herbs and permaculture? How did that make its way to you?
Gabe Garms:
My mom passed away of cancer, and she suffered for 15 years before with melanoma before she passed. And that got me looking into alternative medicines outside of pharmaceuticals, and led me out here to Washington, ended up attending Alderleaf Wilderness College in Monroe, and came out here to learn another way, ended up teaching there. And just really, it was actually, John, it was learning herbs. One of my teachers, I think Heather Swift had us check out your website, and it was the coolest thing.
John Gallagher:
Cool.
Gabe Garms:
And I think I was just telling my partner, Reisha, "Yeah, John's a big reason why I started going down this medicinal path."
John Gallagher:
Wow.
Gabe Garms:
You gave a portal to all these herbalists with all these different ideals, and I thought it was great. And I was on your website a lot, if you would look at my activity back when I was doing it. I'd be listening to the podcasts, the YouTubes, the zines. You had great content, and then just started growing them. And my partner, Reisha, she has Wayside Botanical, she was an herb farmer, so now we have a big farm of medicinal herbs, and I just love it. And that's how I got down that path, and I'll be a farmer for the rest of my life.
John Gallagher:
That's great. Well, I appreciate those kind words. I also want to mention that you mentioned Jason Knight at Alderleaf College and Sander Katz earlier. And folks can listen to podcast interviews that we did with both of them in the archives on HerbMentor Radio.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, and your partner, Reisha, wrote an article for us on soil health and prepping your garden for really helping amend the soil, so you can check that out on the Learning Herbs blog.
Hi, John.
John Gallagher:
Hello.
Tara Ruth:
Something I'm really appreciating in this conversation with Gabe is this spirit of experimentation.
John Gallagher:
I know, I know. It's just inspiring when someone is able to improvise. It's like playing music. You know they know some scales and whatnot, but then someone takes that guitar solo, and it becomes transcending. They take those three chords or five notes of a blues scale and turn it into something that just takes you somewhere else. And I think that with herbs, it's very similar. I use that analogy because I played a lot of music, but I think it is similar in that sense.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, I totally agree. And Gabe is talking about herbs that I'm familiar with, but he's kind of turning them on their head and using them in entirely different ways. I'm familiar with dandelion and marshmallow, but the flavors he's describing, but come out when you ferment them are entirely unfamiliar to me when I think of those herbs.
John Gallagher:
Yeah, and you just know nutritively that you're getting so much something different out of it and so much more perhaps because it's taking the time to break down and ferment.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, it feels like alchemy to me what he's describing.
John Gallagher:
So I think that is, in order to do that, there's something about learning the basics, and then once you know some basics, it's like the artistic part of you takes over and you're able to see things, the world through a lens. And then I think then your own spirit and then your own creativity takes over, and you just never know what you're going to be able to make. And I think that's why I love herbs so much over the years is because there's no end to it. We've been putting out these blog posts with recipes for 20 years, and there's never a repeat. It's always like, "Oh, that sounds delicious. How come we didn't think of that 15 years ago?"
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, absolutely. And the more you learn, it changes how you view the ingredients that you've maybe been working with for years.
John Gallagher:
Yeah, yeah. It's really just an art that takes time. You learn some basics, then you can break the rules. And then if say it back to the music, if I'm playing guitar and getting really to good, I don't stop learning, I don't stop taking lessons. I can still learn from the great experts that are out there and even people that have been playing as long as I have. And that's sort of I think what had me design and set up HerbMentor, our membership site, the way I did, because kind of people wanted this point A to point B, like I want to start here, I want to end here, and get a certificate. And that's fine, and there's lots of folks that do that. But I wanted to use my voice and put what I thought, which was let's just have some foundations, let's have a lot of creativity, let's have experts that can come on and share what they have noticed. And just somehow over time you develop into an herbalist that's very unique and to yourself.
So if anyone wants to join us on HerbMentor, we always have a special offer for our podcast listeners on herbmentorradio.com.
Tara Ruth:
Woo-hoo.
John Gallagher:
Yeah, and I appreciate if you go check that out. You can subscribe to the podcast there and all. And oh, don't forget to rate and review the podcast too, if you had a chance, right?
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, that would be so cool of you.
John Gallagher:
Oh, so helpful. Yeah, we always forget to ask people that, so we're remembering right now.
Tara Ruth:
Yes. I would love that.
John Gallagher:
Something else I'd love is let's just get back to that conversation with Gabe because there's so much more cool stuff to talk about.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, let's do it.
John Gallagher:
So you have your miso, and then how does a person, a listener here incorporate miso into their foods, into their everyday routines, because for a lot of folks, it's going to be a new thing? Or maybe they've been getting some, and sometimes I think people get miso because they hear it's healthy, but aren't sure even how to use it properly. So could you kind of help folks understand how to use miso?
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, that's a great question. I will vend at events, and I get that question constantly. "What do I do with this?" Traditionally, it was always used by both the Chinese and the Japanese as a seasoning, as a salt substitute. We know miso in the West as a soup primarily, but it's so, so much more. So anything that you would put salt in, you would replace with miso. We even do sweets. If you're making chocolate chip cookies, you can replace miso with the salt, and it absolutely tastes amazing. Yeah, we make a lot of vinaigrettes. Reisha does this amazing pesto out of my pumpkin seed miso, so good that you just can't stop eating even if you're full. Yeah, and just using it as a seasoning as you would salt. And then I had, at the herbal fair, there's an espresso maker there, and he was making miso espressos.
John Gallagher:
What?
Gabe Garms:
I've even seen miso coffee. It's starting to happen in Seattle. There's two people doing it, and just using it as a tool in the kitchen because that's why the chefs have been using it. I talk about all the health benefits, but it's the flavor, they can't replicate these flavors that these misos create. Each bean, each root, each ingredient that you add imparts a different flavor after around 10 months to a year. And they can't create this in the lab. And these chefs are using it primarily for the taste. So it just makes the food so much better. Even have kids that are picky eaters that only eat a few foods that will eat certain misos that I make.
So it's arguably one of the healthiest foods in the world and one of the best tasting, which is why I'm so excited about it because we can get people to eat it rather than, "Ooh, this tastes disgusting," because it doesn't.
John Gallagher:
And if you're adding it to some soup you made, you can add it later, but you're not supposed to boil it with the broth. Is that correct?
Gabe Garms:
Yeah. My misos are living and live ferments, so I wait until it's warm water under somewhere in the low 90s or a little cooler. But yeah, if you start to get above 100 degrees, you'll kill off the microbes and you won't get that probiotic benefit.
John Gallagher:
And are there misos, like if I go into the co-op, are there some that really aren't as probiotic? Are some better than others? How do I know what I'm buying? It might be like, "Oh, this one's cheap. I'll buy this miso."
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, definitely. South River is definitely the best. They do the living misos, and they're out of, I believe, Vermont. They sell all over the country, and that would go with South River.
Tara Ruth:
I'm taking notes.
John Gallagher:
Yeah, right?
Tara Ruth:
I want to talk a little bit more about taste. You just mentioned how incredible it is that something that's so good for you also tastes so good. I feel like I often encounter this narrative that the strongest or the, quote-unquote, "best medicine" inevitably won't taste good, think it might be incredibly bitter or astringent or pungent, but I find that often the most healing medicine for me actually tastes good, it feels good to take it. And I'm just wondering, can you talk a little bit more about the taste of miso and the importance of making home remedies that tastes good and feel good to take?
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, kids are going to be your... We have an 11-year-old, and they're going to be your greatest audience in test market, right? If they'll eat it, other people, adults will eat it more likely. But it's that taste is the koji breaks down the proteins into amino acids for us, and that's that umami taste that if you heard that word umami, and that's the body like, oh, I need this. It's one of the building blocks of life. And as we taste all these amino acids, our bodies are like, more and more, give it to me.
And it turns starches into simple sugars. People are using koji to make ice cream and sweets for people that are diabetic because it doesn't have the processed sugar in it. It's taking simple sugars from the rice or the barley and making it sweet.
Yeah, it's just crazy. And you never know what flavor you're going to get after 10 months. I just did a marshmallow root, and it tasted amazing, like a taffy with a hint of horseradish on the back end.
Tara Ruth:
Whoa.
Gabe Garms:
These crazy flavors come out, and you never know what you're going to get. And that's why I'm so excited about this. I'm always doing new flavors every week, and I never know what I'm going to get because there's not really much I could research about these weird flavors. Most of the research was done either on soybeans, chick beans, or chickpeas, and adzuki beans. Everything else is just kind of new, but it works, and it tastes great.
John Gallagher:
I would just maybe think of creating a five taste of herbs, like five taste miso with something that's combination of sweet and salty and pungent and sour and all together.
Gabe Garms:
I could do a Schisandra of misos.
John Gallagher:
Yeah.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, gosh, that would be wild.
Gabe Garms:
I'm writing this down right now, Schisandra miso. I've never incorporated berries, but somebody suggested me to try that at the fair, and I want to try.
John Gallagher:
Yeah, are you able to...? Because I know you sell at your farmer's market and you were at the herbal fair. Are you able to package and ship? Are you still small batches? How does that work?
Gabe Garms:
We're still doing small batches, and then we're working with the Department of Agriculture to be able to sell in stores and two restaurants. But right now I'm just kind of small, kind of cottage stuff. And then we're actually looking to grow the company in October. We're making a pitch to investors to grow the business and get into stores quicker. But yeah, right now we're still pretty small.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, it's so cool to have this really incredible foundation to draw on too, as with your background in permaculture and growing the herbs and then all your knowledge of fermentation, what a strong foundation to start with as you grow this company.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, yeah. I'm excited, so much so I've been teaching for about 13 years, and that has been a huge passion and still is, but this is swept me off my feet. I feel like it's my calling, and I have to see where this road goes. And I feel like, again, going back to arguably one of the healthiest foods in the world that tastes absolutely amazing, think about the impact that could have on the health crisis by making dandelions, which can grow in a city into misos and really making them super healthy and getting it into urban settings. I'm excited about where the company can go as we get bigger, but those are the kinds of things that I want to do.
John Gallagher:
So keeping that healing focus for the masses, and that's great, that's a great mission.
Tara Ruth:
For folks who are feeling inspired and excited about fermentation but might not have all the supplies or the skillset yet to make miso, how do you recommend people get started who are like, "I want to start my own fermentation journey at home"?
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, I used to teach a class called the Fermentation Immersion, and misos were the last thing we do. I consider miso to be the Mount Everest of fermentation, so don't do that right off the bat. If you've never fermented, I think everyone should try doing sauerkraut or kimchi and just doing lacto-ferment, salt some cabbage, or Jerusalem artichokes work really well as a cabbage substitute, and start with sauerkraut, really easy. There's a million tutorials on how to do that. Just start working your way up.
And then finally, when you feel comfortable, I would recommend even before you go to miso. I like my journey. I did tempeh first because homemade tempeh just is so much better than store-bought, although there's some good... there's a thoroughfare there in Bellingham, they make great tempeh. They're a local tempeh maker, but the huge corporate brands that you get in the store, a lot of them taste like rubber, so people don't like tempeh for that reason. But the homemade is just absolutely amazing. And then once you're comfortable with that and using an incubator, then you could do miso.
Although I did have one student at my workshop at the herbal fair that I gave some koji too, and he hadn't had a lot of experience fermenting, and he made his first miso and sent me a picture of it a couple days ago. So I was super excited to see people and inspiring people to do it here in the West. Because it was something... Every culture fermented, and we've lost that. The convenience of living here on the West, we don't need to preserve our food or get the most out of a little amount of food that we have.
John Gallagher:
Kimberly and I apprenticed at RavenCroft Garden back in the day, which is still apprenticing herbalists in Monroe in Washington. And I would say that as important, as much as we were taught about herbs and making herbal remedies, fermented foods were a part of the curriculum and making them were as much of the work that we did as herbal stuff. So we were always fermenting everything we could basically, because it was about health and the foundations of health and how fermented foods are missing so much from our diets and how healthier it is to make your own and do it yourself.
Gabe Garms:
And a lot of the ferments, even beyond misos are pasteurized because what's required to get on the shelves of some of the big box stores because they want to make sure it's shelf stable because living ferments are producing carbon dioxide as a byproduct of metabolizing the food, and you'll create bombs on the shelf.
I had a friend that bought a sauerkraut at a Columbia City Farmers Market and exploded in their fridge. They didn't burp it, it was the CO2 buildup. So for safety, a lot of times, they're pasteurized, so it's best to make ferments at home, and it's so easy and it's so fun to do.
John Gallagher:
And for that reason, it's a great reason to learn to do a lot of this on your own, a lot of fermented foods and herbal remedies because you never can quite get the quality and the potency and nutritive value when some things mass-produced and bottled or jarred.
Gabe Garms:
It's a connection to our food. And if we don't have the space to have a farm support a local farmer who's growing... an organic farmer who's growing really nutrient dense food and turn that into a ferment. Yeah, you're right, the flavor is just, it's not comparable when you make it at home compared to what's in the store. It's night and day.
Tara Ruth:
For folks who are just getting started too and might be making sauerkrauts at home, what kind of herbs, if they were wanting to incorporate herbs into that, what kind of herbs would you recommend or think of?
Gabe Garms:
The same ones that I make miso in. I started making kombuchas and sauerkrauts with dandelion and burdock and anise hyssop, the kombuchas, and then I started burdock, dandelion, anise hyssop kombuchas, mugwort, and they were having crazy flavors. The mugwort tastes like Seven Up, the mugwort kombucha. The burdock tastes like root beer. It was just like, wow, it was mind-blowing.
But literally anything that you have growing in your garden that's edible, like I said before, I use Jerusalem artichoke. Whatever's in the garden, just chop up and put a little bit in the sauerkraut. You just want it to be primarily cabbage because it has a high water content and low chlorophyll, so it doesn't have the bitterness, that's why they use cabbage. But if you do primarily cabbage, you can put a little bit of anything. Fruits, sweet ingredients go good in sauerkraut. Yeah, a little bit of lemon balm, any of the medicinal herbs. I think I've put a little bit here and there into various sauerkrauts or kombuchas, and they almost always come out pretty good.
John Gallagher:
I love this because you're not reading this in books. You are experimenting with miso as this delivery system, if you will, in a sense, and just trying things. And then maybe is it the more herbs you use and more experience you have is sort of like you start to realize, "Hey, this might be good, this might be good." So where does that come from in you that experimenting, and how do people develop that ability to trust themselves on experimenting?
Gabe Garms:
It's trial and error and the ability to accept a lot of failures, because before I started making good ferments, I made a lot of really, really bad ones. And it's being able to laugh at yourself and take that and pick yourself up and do it again. And there's certain things that you control. You just learn to make sure you've got clean vessels that you're fermenting in and you're using the correct amount of salt and pH. And that all comes with trial and error.
And the cool thing is is there's a lot of resources out there and a lot of... Sander Katz does amazing... Any podcast that he does, he's got a great sauerkraut video that he does. Just get out there and do it and embrace your failures. You're going to have a lot.
John Gallagher:
Right.
Gabe Garms:
And it was, again, those chefs at Noma and the cooking community that inspired me to try all these things. I had all these ingredients at my fingertips in the garden that most people didn't have, and I was just like, "Hey, if this has a protein, starch, or fat in it, I'm going to try it." I've even made cheese misos, bacon misos. I don't sell those, but I still... If it can be made into miso, I want to know how it's going to taste, because a lot of this stuff is just brand new. And that's so exciting about it is there's so many possibilities with medicinal herbs.
John Gallagher:
Can you eat too much miso, or is it just a matter of you stop eating it when you're not hungry anymore? That sort of thing.
Gabe Garms:
If it's a living ferment, any living ferment, if you don't have fermented foods in your diet, you want to approach with caution because you'll experience die-off of the microbes that were living in your gut before as you're exposed to more fermented foods. And then they release kind of toxins when they die off. That can make you feel nauseous or sick. So whenever you're approaching eating live fermented foods, when you don't have those in your diet, do it slow, a little bit at a time, and then build your way up to a place where you can take a little bit more. And eat just not miso, but a myriad of ferments. Eat sauerkraut.
Yeah. I'll always, even though my business is miso and that's my passion, I still love all fermented foods, and any great fermentation teacher always inspires the people that they're teaching or talking to to use many different kinds of fermented foods because different biology also live on different plants.
John Gallagher:
Right, that's one of the biggest things you could do with your health and eating is variety of foods.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, exactly.
John Gallagher:
Because we just don't have a variety that we had in previous times. When you think about wild foods and what things were attached to those, and whether it was a little soil or insects or fungi or whatever [inaudible 00:36:14], maybe it was fermented. There was so much variety, and that everything is more sterile and [inaudible 00:36:20]. So focusing on being alive and liveness in your diet and vitality of the foods.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah. And supporting the local farmer. A lot of times since California has been running out of water, I don't know where a lot of our organic produce comes from. I mean, the most cooperatives will support as many local farmers as you can, but I think there's an organic food shortage. So yeah, making sure we're supporting the local farmer because that's a hard life.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, this spirit of experimentation that you're bringing to fermentation is reminding me of when I was in herb school and all of the excitement I had about experimenting with making different herbal remedies. And then one friend of mine started making kombucha with different herbs in the garden, and I started to, and I was so intimidated at first, but it was so much easier than I thought it was going to be actually. And how fun it was to just walk out into the garden. And when you're talking about mugwort kombucha tasting, I think, you said Sprite or Seven Up. I was like, "Yes, I remember that too." Just harvesting mugwort, burdock, some elderflower. And it's such a beautiful way to get to connect with the plants around you too.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, yeah. There's only a way we can get lomatium dissectum and osha to taste good.
John Gallagher:
Oh, my gosh.
Tara Ruth:
I wonder what some of the really bitter herbs like blue vervain would taste like in a kombucha. I'm so curious.
Gabe Garms:
I'm going to be trying that. Yeah, I was thinking, I look at a lot of Reisha's tincture formulations, and I was like, "I do this into a miso."
Tara Ruth:
Oh, cool.
Gabe Garms:
I love my... Where I want to go is... I was talking to a few herbalists at the fair about this is I want to go like a liver tonic miso or ones that can be used using the same medicinal herbs. But the only caveat is it needs to be a starch or a protein. But yeah, start doing some miso medicinal formulations like a lot of the tinctures we see for pain or other things.
John Gallagher:
Like immune system nourishment, perhaps with mushrooms?
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, did you buy a mushroom one from me? I think maybe I gave you a black bean mushroom oyster.
John Gallagher:
Maybe, maybe that's what it was. I don't know. It just happened, so I'm not sure.
Gabe Garms:
I haven't talked about that yet, yeah.
John Gallagher:
Yeah, let's get into it.
Gabe Garms:
My favorite misos are beans or roots mixed with mushrooms. I do mainly king boletes oyster mushrooms and shiitake so far, but I want to try candy caps and some other edible mushrooms this year that I haven't done. I've also done king stropharia. I really don't like the flavor that that imparts after 10 months, but most other mushrooms are really, really great.
And what I'll do with my mushroom misos is put about make about 10 to 15% of the weight mushrooms because I like to dry them and then reconstitute them before putting them and then cooking them after they're rehydrated and cooked, then I put them into the miso. So I usually mix them with beans or roots. And a dandelion root shiitake, that's a really good miso.
Tara Ruth:
Whoa, my God.
Gabe Garms:
And really how can we get some of the other mushrooms and what other herbs could we put in there? I've done a burdock nettle seed miso that was really good. And I want to work a lot with nettle in the spring. And now that I'm in the East Side, we have a lot of the edible lomatium, so I want to do lomatium, nude kale and maca carpum. There's a lot of good ones over here. There's bitter roots. Spring beauty roots are really, really good.
John Gallagher:
I'm thinking elderberries, hawthorn berries.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah. Elderflower is a great one. I'm going to do a lot of that one next year. But yeah, I want to try with the elderberries. They're out right now and about ready to pick here where I'm living, so yeah.
Tara Ruth:
I'm curious, what did the bacon and cheese miso taste like that you mentioned a little while back?
Gabe Garms:
The cheese is great. I take milk kefir, and I turn it into milk kefir cheese. So I just drain it for 24 hours, and the whey all comes out, and then I mix that with koji and salt, and it'll do the same thing [inaudible 00:40:40], it'll turn it into a blue cheese in just two months, the same process. That's the magic of Koji. You can cure meats and cheeses, and times that would be one to two years in just a couple months. So I was making blue cheeses in a month, and the bacon is just incredible. You can't go wrong with bacon.
Yeah, lately I've been really interested in the garums, which the world's most popular garum is a fish sauce. It's used a lot in Vietnamese cuisine, pho. And it's how cultures all over the world preserve fish and meat for long periods of time. It was fermented with just salt, the meat itself, water, and then I use Koji to break it down. That's what soy sauce is.
And we have a lot of grasshoppers over here on the East Side, and I was reading one of the Noma chefs, they did a grasshopper garum. It's like the fish sauce, instead of using fish, they use grasshoppers.
Tara Ruth:
Whoa, cool.
Gabe Garms:
And they're a plague over here, they eat everyone's gardens. So I think it was like two days ago, I was out all day with a net just catching grasshoppers, and I just did that one, and just starting to do all kinds of different insects and things and making these really nutrient rich, great tasting sauces.
Noma was rated the best restaurant in the world five out of 10 years, and their best sauce was a grasshopper garum. They said it was so good, it was cheating. So I'm really excited. That's a nine-month ferment for me. So I just did that a couple days ago. So in nine months, I'll reach out and let you know how that is. But yeah, garum-
John Gallagher:
You have to have some patience, you have to have some patience.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah. I think the garums are the best way to do the meats. It's a lot safer, more shelf stable, where the meat misos, they can go bad and rancid pretty easy.
Tara Ruth:
I love this aspect of the time aspect with fermentation of having to sit with your medicine through the seasons as it changes and becomes what you want it to be. That kind of medicine, it's great. And I don't know, we live in such a fast-paced world, and to be forced to slow down and move with the speed of fermentation, it's so cool.
Gabe Garms:
It's beautiful.
John Gallagher:
And observing what's growing around you and saying, "Okay, this is what's in season now, this is what's flowering, this is what's coming out, and I'm going to experiment with this," versus going to the store and just buying anything and putting it in. That says a lot too about the process. I mean, it's a big part of the medicine is the medicine making, so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah. And I wanted to also talk about this concept that the Koreans have called son-mat, meaning the biology of...
John Gallagher:
[inaudible 00:43:21].
Gabe Garms:
... living on our hands affects the medicine, affects the food and nutrition and the flavor. And it started, different kimchi's would taste differently, and it was because of the biology and the flavor that was on the hands of the maker.
I don't know if that's the question you were looking to get answered, but that's a big part of the process too. I like to go garden and make sure I've got good biology on my hands when I'm touching some of my ingredients for all my ferments and making sure I'm getting as much good microbes in there as I can.
And then just the making of the medicine. I like to do my harvest in the morning when the energy is highest in the plant, and take pride in building the best soils. I actually ferment for my plants too. I practice Korean natural farming, which is like 80% fermentation, and giving all my plants ferments to make sure that they're as nutrient dense as they possibly can, and the medicinals are at their peak, harvesting at the right time, and putting that care into the plant itself and having relationships with some of these plants, our marshmallows, and [inaudible 00:44:31] campaigns we've had for way over a decade, like 15 years to spend dividing off of the same mother and mothers and just having a deep relationship with the medicine and the food. I think it imparts into the ferments too. So it's often the condition and state I'm in is really important when I'm making misos as well. I believe in that.
John Gallagher:
Wow, that's amazing. Thanks, Gabe. That is there's so much to think about in what you just said in all that we do in working with plants and our gardening and our wildcrafting, right, Tara?
Tara Ruth:
Yes.
Gabe Garms:
And then I also want to talk about wildcrafting. I think one thing here is... And I teach an ethnobotany course where we go and learn how to ID and how to use plants for food and medicine. But the very core of that program is in propagation. And before we start to wild harvest and harvest plants from the wild, we have to learn how to make sure we're leaving more than we're taking. Because what I've seen from a lot of people just get excited, we haven't been taught to give back and to propagate, and we don't think about carrying capacity or how much there is of ingredients out there. But I think it's also important if we do want to start wild harvesting our foods that we know how to propagate these foods that we are harvesting, and make sure we're leaving more than we take.
John Gallagher:
So Gabe, if folks want to learn about these classes that you teach and more about your miso, creativekoji.com, and what all do you offer there?
Gabe Garms:
I do classes through my school. So my main job is I teach at Raven's Roots Naturalist School. I founded it with Fil Tkaczyk and Jamie Weaver. Yeah, we just turned 10 years old.
John Gallagher:
[inaudible 00:46:21].
Gabe Garms:
I teach fermentation through that school, and I'll probably continue to do that because I'm going to still teach permaculture, even though I've got the business, I still want to teach permaculture and wilderness survival and some of those things. So Raven's Roots would be a good... I'll also announce classes and workshops on Creative Koji, and I'm just kind of doing workshops, educating people on this, working with the Bellingham Co-ops right now. They have an amazing kitchen classroom. I'm going to do some miso workshops with them, and just get people tasting and seeing that miso is just not soup and it's just not soybeans and all the possibilities it has.
Tara Ruth:
Oh, my gosh, Gabe. Well, this is so inspiring.
Gabe Garms:
[inaudible 00:47:04]. Thank you.
Tara Ruth:
I have some miso in my fridge right now.
John Gallagher:
And I'm so hungry right now.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, if we'll be doing a mailing list, and miso of the month clubs through Creative Koji. But until we're up and running, we're still small business, and we don't have enough for everyone yet. Support South River. And there's another miso maker in Seattle called Yoka Miso. They make good stuff. Support your local miso maker.
Tara Ruth:
Yes. And yeah, folks, check out Gabe's amazing misos at creativekoji.com and all your offerings there, and just thank you so much for joining us on HerbMentor Radio.
Gabe Garms:
Yeah, thank you, Tara and John. I had a blast. It was fun geeking out.
Tara Ruth:
So good. And for folks listening, make sure you stick around for an Herb Note.
Welcome to Herb Notes. I'm Tara Ruth. In recent years, turmeric, Curcuma longa, has exploded in popularity. Chances are your favorite coffee shop might now even include a golden milk latte on the menu. Turmeric, however, is not just a fad, this vibrant herb is a traditional Ayurvedic remedy for centuries of use. Let's dive into three benefits of turmeric.
One, turmeric for inflammation. Turmeric can modulate inflammation in the body. It does this through its high levels of antioxidants and its ability to stimulate glutathione, a protein with considerable antioxidant abilities. Inflammation drives many modern chronic conditions, so modulating inflammation can be an effective way to support overall vitality and wellness. When working with turmeric, I like to cook with the fresh rhizome and dried turmeric. And I also like to sip on a golden milk latte. When enjoying turmeric, make sure to prepare it with black pepper, which increases its bioavailability.
Two, turmeric for chronic pain. Turmeric's ability to modulate inflammation makes it a fantastic herbal ally for addressing pain. Turmeric has traditionally been used for addressing various inflammatory conditions within the musculoskeletal system, like arthritis and chronic joint pain.
Three, turmeric for digestion. Turmeric's, pungent, and bitter taste gives us a hint as to how it can help support healthy digestion. As an aromatic carminative, turmeric can address gas, bloating, and cramping in the GI tract. As a bitter, turmeric can help stimulate the release of bile plus other secretions throughout the GI tract to support fat assimilation and overall digestive efficiency.
And just a few notes of caution when working with turmeric, as a warming and drying herb, turmeric has the potential to exacerbate hot and dry conditions in the body. Turmeric is also contraindicated for folks who are taking blood thinners, have blood clotting disorders, or have known gallstones.
Want to learn more about the benefits of other common herbs? Visit herbnotes.cards to grab a deck of our top 12 herb notes. You'll learn all about herbs like chamomile, elderberry, yarrow, and more. This has been Herb Notes with me, Tara Ruth. Catch you next time.
John Gallagher:
HerbMentor Radio and Herb Notes are 100% sustainably well crafted podcasts written, performed, and produced by Tara Ruth and me, John Gallagher.
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HerbMentor Radio is a production of learningherbs.com LLC, all rights reserved. Thank you very, very, very much for listening.