Healthy Recipes 360

Archive for the ‘Fermented Foods’ Category

It is very easy to make fermented vegetables. For hundreds of years – maybe thousands – people all over the world have made cultured foods part of their diet. We find sauerkraut in Germany, kimchi in Korea. natto and miso from Japan as well as pickles, yogurt, kefir, cheese and many other varieties from all over the world. Back in the days when there were no refrigerators, people’s survival depended on a way to preserve foods. Fermenting foods was a way to accomplish this.

The health benefits from cultured foods comes from live microorganisms, which the human body incorporates as gut bacteria. Healthy gut bacteria is necessary to help fend off bad bacteria. Too many foods in today’s world is lacking in good bacteria. If we don’t consume regular amounts of good bacteria, we are essentially giving the bad bacteria the advantage in our bodies.

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Natto is a Japanese fermented soy dish that can be made very easily from cooked soybeans. In order to make natto at home you will need a couple of things. First, you will have to obtain some cultured natto bacillus (Natto Kin) to add to some cooked soybeans. Simply obtain some frozen natto from an Asian market. The frozen natto will contain the live culture that you can use to innoculate your batch.

The second thing you will need is a thermostatically controlled device like a warming drawer or crock pot which can be set to 104°F – 105°F and will maintain a steady temperature for 24 hours to allow the live culture grow and reproduce so the natto will ferment properly.

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Water kefir is a delicious and easy-to-make probiotic drink that you can make yourself at home. I find this to be a very inexpensive way to culture your own probiotics. Just make them yourself from a live culture – like water kefir – and use the living culture to repeat the process over and over.

Ingredients you will need to make your own water kefir: dehydrated kefir grains, palm sugar, spring water, 2 qt mason jar and organic cane sugar.

Most of the websites that show how to make water kefir either sell the hydrated, living kefir grains from their websites or advise that you obtain the kefir grains from someone else who has a growing culture and can spare some kefir grains that have multiplied.

In this article, I will show you a different way. You can buy your own dehydrated water kefir grains on the Internet and then rehydrate them yourself. Rehydrating kefir grains will take just a few days and, following that, you can make regular, running batches of water kefir from them.

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