"Fermented Vegetables" at the San Francisco Public Library

it was really by accident and it's also a bit about being lazy we have a small farm in Southern Oregon like any small farmers we tried to figure out how to make it pay for itself which is a really tough thing to do so we've made a lot of artisan cheeses which is which was great for us but we didn't sell much and our kids were starting to get to the age where they weren't going to want to do all the milking so that was gonna fall to us so we knew we needed something else I trained as a cider maker and we put a lot of cider trees in but those take years to come in while we were waiting Kirstin had been making sauerkraut sand and pickles for a long time so we thought well we'll just start this until the trees start producing and then that business took off and my cider business didn't so she's gonna tell you that story how she puts the flavors together I was I worked the crew in the kitchen which is the knives and the boxes and the jars and then we were in a business a couple of years it's it's a my hats off to anybody that can make it doing you know organic pickling business it's a lot of work every one of those jars of stuff by hand and so 10 gallon crocks so there were some days where you just saw a wall of jars and giant crocks you know and you thought oh this is so great we're living the dream we've got to get out of the dream the other thing was we would start bringing recipes and say hey here's how you make this real simple recipes and people just kind of freaked out because they thought you're not supposed to teach people how to do this but this has been done for 4000 years or more so we did not invent this product just some of the flavors you know putting on them together so we started doing that and then we actually enjoyed more teaching people how to do it than we did doing it so we decided to write a book to get out of the business as fast as we could and so unfortunately it's hard to write a book when you're in the business so we'd only do it in the wintertime when we kind of the cabbages weren't in season and then finally it got picked up by story publishing it came out last October and the first run sold out and it's five months six months and we're on the second run right now and a little shout-out to America it just came out in German so there are there are Germans who are learning how to make sauerkraut from a couple of hippies in Oregon it's pretty cool that's the story about that I think the best thing we want to do now is not teach you any longer we brought a lot of varieties for you to taste and so what we're gonna do is pass these out and get your get your taste buds going and then Kirsten's gonna tell you what you're eating so the first thing that I'm going to tell you about is it looks like regular sauerkraut you may or may not have a carrot it's going to have sort of a salsa esque flavor that is credito that is from El Salvadorian tradition it's a traditional flavor and I think there were a lot of German immigrants back in the day and so they brought this and and the flavors mixed it has cumin oregano onions garlic some carrots a few red pepper flakes you can make this super hot we don't especially when we're sampling it to folks what I love about this one is in the wintertime if you're trying to you know eat kind of local fine it gives you that same flavor on your meal that a fresh salsa might but you know you're not getting those yucky hothouse tomatoes you're getting this live probiotic rich food the really dark purple one any guesses beeps yep beets and cabbage I brought a really unusual one tonight because we've had it and because it's really a fun thing to see it's leeks so if you have you might have a few little shreds of something you don't recognize and that's a that's a leek kraut and it's all leeks and it's just sort of show you how delicious these vegetables that we wouldn't normally eat raw or when they're fermented there's a spring kimchee so if you have a piece of napa or some carrots or some things like that there's a just a really mellow kimchi this other purple one is a radish kimchi and then and nothing is nothing is spicy and like I said we do that not because that's how we like to eat things but that's how it's it makes it easier to sample and then if you have a piece of cauliflower or a bright piece of carrot all by itself for a piece of onion those are just simply pickled veg vegetables just done in a brine so let's talk really quickly about why you might want to ferment your vegetables like Christopher said originally they were fermented for the very basic need of needing to preserve our harvest needing to preserve our foods taking us through the months when we don't have fresh vegetable growth growing you know it's right there with dehydrating as far as one of the oldest techniques known to preserve food there's a lot of ideas of when humans started fermenting vegetables nobody actually knows for sure so that's that's thousands and thousands of years it was done as a basic necessity whether they knew it made them feel better whether they knew of the things that we call health benefits now I don't know but it was what they needed to do to keep fresh and vitamins through the winter many cultures have a tradition of fermentation the exciting thing that's happening now with this sort of rediscovery is it's almost a renaissance because we have refrigeration because we have such a vast availability of vegetables to us and the farmers are growing great stuff and and things are available year-round we don't have to just ferment our whole cabbage crop in the fall you know we can do just all kinds of things and that's that's where a lot of people chefs and people starting their own fermentation businesses are having a lot of fun with the flea so now we're fermenting for that we're fermenting for flavor people are often fermenting in teeny-tiny batches just to have a ferment in their refrigerator or to have I like to have a few ferments in my refrigerator because to me it's convenience food you spend you know 20 minutes a half-hour making yourself a couple jars and then for weeks you have this instant live fresh salad fermented salad that's just ready to go a throw it on a soup throw it on a sandwich just eat it out of the jar you know and it kind of takes the pressure off of when you really don't feel like you have anything else healthy to eat just throw a little of that on there and that's probably one of the reasons people started eating fermented foods with with rich foods like sausage is because we have in this food that you're eating a whole bunch of digestive enzymes so it's getting your body ready to digest these foods you've got probiotics and I'm sure all of you have heard a lot about probiotics and our gut biome so we're discovering that a lot of our mood our happiness our our well-being our just feeling strong and able and fit comes from what's going on in our gut and these foods if you're starting to put those into your diet it helps keep your biome in good shape what's really interesting is what's happening to these vegetables as they get fermented how many people know what happens with fermentation sort of the basic process that means everybody's new crowd to this one so it's really cool the cabbage that he's got right has less vitamins than the cabbage in here the process goes through we've got our little bacteria on there they're fully loaded with everything we need for the process to happen and we'll do a demo in just a minute and show exactly how that happens but as it's happening the bacteria start working on the cabbage or whatever the vegetable is and eating the sugars the starches the carbohydrates they're digesting their pre pre digesting they're breaking down these things in the vegetables that we cannot assimilate so they're making this food more available to our body as they're doing that the vitamins are going up vitamin C goes up we now get vitamin b12 which most people know is not something that's usually available in any other food are any pure vegetable food it's an animal product but it's available in sauerkraut also you get D they're not excuse me k2 which is something we need to process our D we're gonna make a lemon dill kraut and we used to call this at the market our gateway kraut because it's a really bright lively flavor that people that swore up and down they would never eat sauerkraut often loved so for those of you that haven't met your humble cabbage in a while we're just going to talk through the basics we just got this one at Rainbow just about it a couple hours ago it's looking pretty good weight really varies in cabbages you know sometimes you get them and they're like cannonballs you know really thickly other times depending on if they've had to fly in from someplace else they can be really super light because they were almost ready to bolt when they picked them and so it's really the weight of the cabbage that you're working on in this one so this one's actually pretty light what I'm gonna do is take off the outer leave so anything that feels kind of tacky not quite up to snuff we're gonna discard that and then I'm looking for the next leaf in that looks pretty good and we're gonna actually that one's going to be it's gonna have a special purpose later so we're gonna hold that one back maybe two then we followed the farmers motto of having lots of kids and having them work for free unfortunately the first three were boys so we had three teenage boys in the kitchen with knives at one time yeah band-aids so luckily it's you know it's a washable everything's washable so again so we came up with a really simple rule and you can think about it too if you're we would do a couple hundred pounds of cabbage at one time with a knife and so but you know two o'clock in the afternoon you're getting pretty tired so we would do this rule where with the stem out I'm just gonna I'm right-handed flip this if you're left-handed but I'm just gonna make one diagonal cut along the core there and then I'm still gonna face it out I'm gonna take a second diagonal cut so what I'm gonna do here is just a third cut down this is the guy we don't want and now everything else is something we can chop so what I'm gonna do so chop is really important so for some of you that may be tasted a kimchi and you stick your fork in and out comes a quarter of the cabbage or half of the cabbage that's that's a that's a chop that's a the reason that they did that and so what you like or don't like this is your chance to dial it in so if you like a thinner chop you can just this is where I'm going to do maybe a thinner is chop for the lemon dill because it's a light sort of Airy kraut it goes on top of imagine on top of salads and things like that so I'm going to do really fine chop for this we actually came up with this flavor because our when our second son was I think 16 or 15 at the time and he loved to go hiking and he said to us hey could you come up with something that is refreshing on a hike actually he was he was also working a lot with the Forest Service and would be out for a few days at a time and so we thought we'd try to come up with a crowd that really felt like it had that thirst-quenching feeling of electrolytes sauerkraut anyway sauerkraut juice does have a lot of electrolytes in Eastern Europe especially you drink the sauerkraut juice or the pickle juice the next morning after you know a night on the town Brian's have become so popular that some of the you know they sell them in the jar is now in the stores and it's actually a problem because people are buying the brines even more than the sauerkraut's and as you'll see this is this process only produces so much Brian you can't really dial it up and get a lot more Brian you're not gonna ever add water so the fact that the brains are so popular actually causes a bit of a problem for the sauerkraut so the waste not what not it was selling selling the extra and now that's the lead so if you can see right now it's it's you know you got the crunchy thing going on it's it's really dull I mean it's a great cabbage it's not dull that way but it's it's fresh by the time we are gonna add the salt it's gonna change quite a bit but I have to start shopping what we're doing is we want to make the environment perfect for the lactobacillus those are our little good guys are little bacterial friends that are going to change do that magic in their little environment quietly and and make this the good food that we're after so what we do after we chop is we want to create a brine and that's that's making that perfect little salty pool environment the reason we needed under a brine is because this process needs to be an anaerobic process which means no oxygen and so keeping the vegetables submerged under that brine keeps the oxygen out keeps the bacteria happy and what they're doing so this is this is the place where this food becomes shelf-stable to a certain extent is the preservation doesn't happen from the salt we're going to be adding salt but it's not the salt that's preserving the vegetable what's preserving the vegetable is making this environment they're starting to eat the carbs the sugars and whatnot convert it into acid when it becomes acidic than all the other bacteria the pathogen or the molds or the yeast or the things that we don't want in there they can't live in there in that anaerobic acidic environment so what Christopher is going to show you is dry brining there's ways to make a brine that is wet brining and that's like a cucumber pickle where you're taking a salt water solution and you're putting it over the top of your your vegetables the only thing you tasted tonight where were these these pickles that were pickled in a salt water solution and with that that salt gets in there that salt water with sort of an osmosis process the vegetable juices they they kind of switch places and that's getting that environment perfect for the bacteria to thrive Wow I really smell that time dill do you guys this sounds really good put the rest go Dooley yeah so there's no rules with what spices or herbs that you can use or not use and that's kind of the exciting part too if you have some flavors you really want to try out feel free to we have not come up with a vegetable that you cannot ferment because it won't do the process I'm gonna add the salt first so I can taste it and then add the vinegar or the juice so I'm gonna add salt now when I start scrunching this you should probably talk about salt a little bit more and what kinds of salt we use but I'll do the part about how much to put in this is gonna taste like it's going to taste when it comes out the jar so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use about it this was a pretty light cabbage so I'm gonna use maybe not quite I have a whole teaspoon but I'm going to put half of it 3/4 of it I'm gonna mix around taste it and what I'm going for is taco chip or tortilla chip not Doritos but like corn chip you know something that's made kettle chip good Cal chip it's some kind of salty that kind of flavor but not super salty something you'd want to eat over and over again because that's what it's going to basically come out as if you get too salty then you need to add more vegetables because you want to fix it right now because once it comes out there's no fixing it we had stories rarely we'd have people cry in the farmers stand but sometimes people come in and they'd say so I've got this crowd I did it three years ago it's still salty but I'm waiting how long do you think I need to wait I look at Kirsten she's look at me and it's kind of like that doctor thing about who's gonna depending on depending on who was in the dog out uses meat well one of us would say honey is not gonna it's just the water is gonna evaporate and just like the ocean it's gonna get saltier and saltier and so there's a time we just we had to say goodbye to we're writing a second book on hot fiery ferments and so we're inventing Kirsten's omitting a lot of new flavors and almost all of them work but one was a real dog and it didn't and we had to get rid of it and so we actually posted that on the Internet and so many people came back so I'm so happy to know that you have failures too it's really hard to let go of these things after you've made them and you know you really want them to taste good and they don't and they just won't so just be brave really no it's like tough love so there are pounders and there's crunchers I'm a scratcher so I really liked it so while he's scrunching let's talk a little bit about salt because I know that is a thing that people get confused about so like I said first don't think salt is what's going to keep your ferment from you know killing your family so if you're at that point and you're making it you taste it you're like oh that's tasty and you think well maybe just a little more salt because I want it to work you don't need to do that like I said it's it's the bacteria and the acidification the other thing is people ask well I don't really want to use salt um can i ferment without salt technically you can't ferment without salt what the salt does is and we don't add a whole lot but what the salt does is it makes that environment really hospitable to the bacteria that you are trying to encourage and so it makes that fermentation process a little easier to get it started get it off on the right foot the other thing the salt does is it hardens the pectins and so it helps keep your kraut or your your whatever pickle that you're making a little more crunchy a little crispy and so instead of thinking wow I don't want to use so much salt I encourage people to explore some of the unrefined either mineralized sea salts or mineralized rock salts and I'm I'm actually happy to once Christopher knows he has enough salt I'm actually happy to pass this one around this is what we tend to use it's a rock salt out of Redmond you stop it's called real salt I like it because it's got a higher mineral trace mineral content so you're adding that to your food I also like it because the sodium chloride content is lower which means it doesn't taste as salty it doesn't have that bracingly briny flavor that some of these really refined salts can have and so that's why I like to pass it around for folks that haven't ever had a chance to taste a mineralized salt because you'll you'll see that it's actually got almost a sweet flavor and so I'll just you can just use the back of this and put a couple little sprinkles on your on your finger if you want to taste it it's called Redmond real salt yeah and it's from Utah and it's very similar to like the Himalayan pink salt I just think of it as a more local salt because it comes from here and not Pakistan but you know either one works Celtic sea salts are wonderful smoked salt smoked salt is a lot of fun that's a way you can play with flavor and get a smoky kraut without doing a whole lot just adding some smoked salt and said so if you can see now that the cabbage besides the Dill's in there it's really changed it's more dull dull color it's not squeaky anymore and what's happened is just that little bit of salt I ended up using just the teaspoon but it's already you know it's already breaking down this sub this is your ooh ah big moment here I didn't achieve it I didn't put the lemon in yet so you know that's really just that that's what you're aiming for is just that brined and so Kirsten has a lot better taste than I do so I need if I'm going to add some acidity like the lemon I need to taste it beforehand because once the lemon gets in there I can't really pick out the flavors so much so just depending on how how good you are so now we're just gonna add both and if you want if you want to make a kraut with a lemon flavor the acidity is is by the time this ferments the acidity that's created sort of overtakes the lemon it's a very light light lemony flavor if you runner really know that you've got that lemon flavor or if you're using something like an orange just a little bit of that zest in there will help increase that lemon flavor okay this guy's ready just ready just stuff we don't usually have this but tonight we have an additional device that's really cool that you can find these and canning supplies it we also can so it's great for putting sauces in but it's also nice to not be so messy so what you need for fermentation to work is a place to make this environment anaerobic really there are beautiful beautiful crocks out there there's Potter's all over the country are making these amazing handmade crocks but you just need a vessel so we like to show you how you a few I'm going to show you a few ways to ferment tonight that are just so simple that you probably have these things around so one of the places that you can get into trouble for those of you that had maybe problems the first time around is like Kirsten just said it needs to be anaerobic with caning and everything else you just fill er to the top right but in this case with forgetting what you're gonna want to do is just put a little bit in and then I'm gonna tamp it down I'm just going to build it in layers as it comes up but once you get into this there's a lot of woodworkers now that are building all these things on the internet so you can and christmas is coming and I need a tamper and I'm just gonna keep doing this just to fill it up and I'll tamp every every little bit you are making lactic acid towards the end there's some acetic acid starts to come in but so so little that it's you really it's it's really lactic acid that's happening here so while Christopher's getting all that prepped and we talk we just talk briefly about lactic acid people often ask especially folks that are looking for I really want this superfood I want my probiotics when is the best time in the in the process to eat my sauerkraut so the first thing to know is it's not just one strain of lactic acid the lactic acid bacteria family has hundreds of strains and recently there was a study done that showed one you know big nice spoon of kraut has as many bacterial species or not species but straight not strange just as many numbers population of bacteria as a whole bottle of the really expensive probiotic stuff that you buy so eating sauerkraut regularly isn't necessarily the same as as eating the pills but it's a really good way to get the probiotics the one thing they're not sure about is what strains are in population and what species besides the ones that they really know so there's there's a there's a succession as the fermentation starts and you get these different members of the bacteria that start the process and then some that move in as it's getting more acidic and Wow so I'm going to show you a couple different ways we'll start with the jar we like to put that cabbage leaf that Christopher saved on the top it just is another place of protection so if something is going to move in and want to spoil your ferment it would come in from the top and so you're your magic potion is having that nice thick layer of brine on top of your ferment but as the process happens the carbon dioxide starts creating I mean this thing doesn't look like it's going anywhere but as soon as the carbon dioxide starts pushing the oxygen out and doing all of that you can have your brian all over your kitchen counter so we did a book tour the summer up to the islands see the San Juan Islands and every bookstore every little island has a book store which is awesome and so we made a new kraut on every island so our Jedi got filled up with these Krauts as we're moving along right and it's warm it's the summertime so even the San Juans are in 90 degrees now and so at 90 degrees these go really quickly and as we were in Seattle or Portland or somewhere we were hitting those bumps and from the back trunk you just you can hear it you know like here it comes you could count it's kind of like little kids in a car one two three and they hit you know and and one of the islands we stopped and Kirsten got some of these out just to burp them and they just went off so if if you see your lid dome for the canning folks that just freaked out you know if you see a domed lid that's really bad these guys can take it you just if you see it like that you're gonna give it some space when you burn do this for sure so I don't want to confuse you but I want to show you there's different ways to manage this whole anaerobic thing this one is nice and full and this is what we were doing when Christopher was talking about traveling in the car we just we didn't want it to leak and so we just tighten it up and then what happens is as that action happens you just you sort of undo it a little bit and it makes sometimes though like the one he was talking about in the parking lot because it was so hot the fermentation went so much faster we'll talk about that again in just a minute when when those bubbles came out and when we opened it it it caused it to just you know it was volcano kraut so when you when you see that happening because that can happen on a kitchen counter to what you'll do is just do it over a bowl or clean bowl or plate and as you're opening it you know sort of press gently and bring that brine to where you see it go fall back in so that's that's one way to manage the brine or that a similar idea where you don't have to burp it is to use this kind of jar with this this rubber lid or rubber gasket and what happens is you've got that in there nice and tight like the jar lid except the difference is that when the pressure builds up there's just enough give that it will let the extra carbon dioxide out and not bring any in and so you can ferment quite a bit in these without having to burp it now when you do open it they can take a lot of pressure before they start throwing stuff out so you're still going to get that wild effervescence and that's that's an okay thing the other method that we like to use is a really simple method that this jar is kind of a little too full for you'd want it may be a little less full and you're creating a seal with this bag and what's cool is that water is going in there and it's filling around the bottom or the bottom of the bag the top of the crowd and the brine is sort of going along the bag and you're creating a seal that way the co2 is going to escape through the little wrinkles in the bag and not let oxygen in and it's weighting it down and weight is another strategy for keeping the the crowd under that brine so you can kind of see what's going on there so you would just sit this on your counter so it's ready to go in whatever format you put it in and I actually discovered this summer you can take and ferment in a in a bag if you don't even have a jar I was at the mother earth news Fair this fall and I was doing a fermentation class with kids and somehow wires got crossed and I wasn't given any of the jars and the kids were all supposed to go home with their own jar sauerkraut and so but we did have a bunch of bags and so we ended up the kids ended up putting their cabbage and their salt in fermenting in their flows bag we squeezed out all the oxygen and I mean I'm not a big plastic fan but it's a pretty cool way to make a little batch of sauerkraut so now this is going to go on your counter right it's going to ferment best in that 55 to 75 degree range lower than that and the fermentation process doesn't really get going quickly enough for the good bacteria to overwhelm the bad bacteria and get that acidity going warmer than that and it might get going a little too quickly and it just you lose that flavor because what's happening remember we talked about that succession of bacteria each of those types of bacteria are kind of layering on a different flavor and so if you if you're at that sweet spot of fermentation temperature somewhere in that 50 55 to 75 range you're going to get more Lavers as more bacteria have their time to really go through the process which is which is kind of interesting if it's too hot then it like you know hundred degrees it's just plain too hot for the bacteria to really do a good job so you're gonna put that on your counter so room temperature obviously is is fine it's perfect you'll read put it in a dark closet or under a bed or something I say don't do that especially when you're learning how to do this process because you'll forget about it and all that Brian will herb over and you'll come back and they'll be oxygen and brine and mold and that's no fun so you know keep it on your counter talk to it every morning when you start making your coffee or what not and and that's why people don't like to throw away their ferments I mean they know their life food and they make friends you know well they're well they're curing together and so keep an eye on it and also back to the full flavor idea taste it you know taste it like I said four or five days in see what you think pack it all back in there let it go a little longer see what you think then it's not like canning where you can't touch it once you've done it as long as you use you clean utensils and get everybody tucked back in the anaerobic environment you're you're definitely welcome to scooch a little out and see what you think so that's that's how long it takes is anywhere from you know we we start thinking of it as done when it's starting to turn acidic 4.6 percent pH level is the point where it's safe other things won't live I've noticed when I when I'm doing experiments and testing it with little pH strips that it'll sort of hover in that neutral stage for a little while and as soon as it hits 4.6 it's actually passed 4.6 it doesn't really go down slowly it's sort of it hits that critical mass and it's below four often so you don't really have to worry about is it acidic if your mouth will tell you it's nice and sour it's pickly it's ready to go all right now I think we can start questions where do they come from do you have answer oh you were saying they're there they're everywhere they come from the soil that's why it's really nice to use organic vegetables where you know they're all on there they become fully loaded some people like to add cultures but it's really not necessary the other interesting thing is some people will try to sell you cultures because they want to tell you oh well we have el plantarum which is very good for your gut well the thing with those purchased cultures is that they did studies in Korea that we read we're inoculated and not inoculated ended up in the same place anyway in their own way so yeah you know it's fine as long as everybody's under the brine you can leave the lid off I that's why I try to give people a couple of different strategies because everybody's comfortable with a different method some people will not ferment without an airlock which is allowing that sort of like this allowing it to escape not allowing anything in but you can ferment without a lid we sometimes will put another jar a smaller jar into the jar to wait it just put a towel over that what can happen is stuff can grow like if it's a longer ferment maybe some yeast will grow on top or some molds or different things as long as you scoop that stuff out and everything under the brine is anaerobic it's it's fine and the cool cool cool thing about sauerkraut or fermented vegetables is you can't kill yourself you really can't nobody yet has died from sauerkraut in any kind of recorded history it's not a good suicide plan and do you know why because you have five senses and when it's bad you know it's bad there's no secret lurking botulism tasteless odorless thing going on it's nasty it's either slimy it's the wrong color it smells like rotting potatoes it is not a it's there's nothing that says put me into your mouth and that's what's keep that's what's kept us alive we were gonna self-publish this after we got rejected a few times so we had some great pictures and then when story picked us up they said oh we'll send a crew up and so all the pictures were done by a San Francisco photographer and her crew and they're beautiful the only thing that survived of our work is the scum gallery these are all shocky photographs published in the back not two don't look at these before you go to sleep but if you're making some and you want to check the book out the library because you've got something going on look in the back of here because we'll show you what a what a column yeast looks like and what to do about it versus mold versus any things it just saves you because you find something we wanted you to know what things were and what's okay and how to handle them so very back scum section you know when we were researching for the first book there was this very brief period that they said you know everything everything's fair game like right at the beginning but I think again nobody's ever gotten sick that I know of you know but as soon as you see that color starting to change and I this has other things in it but see see the difference between that yellow and that vibrant green as soon as you see that and smell that pickly flavor even you're not it's not you're not going to get sick from it now we do so this this crowd here this crowd here I was really pleased with myself this one I made last August and it's been refrigerated the whole time it's been tucked in a jar with Brian on top and in the refrigerator not opened and there was nothing on top it's perfectly good I tell people to watch their kraut some Krauts in the refrigerator they will kind of turn a little sooner but you can tell because see how these colors are vibrant you kind of lose that vibrancy when they're starting to go and often it's not even that they've gone bad like spoiled like I'm gonna get sick often they're just done they're lifeless the bacterias worked its way through it's not alive anymore and they just don't have that spark not necessarily well here's here's the thing so old school right those big barrels they were made they were kept somewhere as cool as they possibly could we have refrigerators and so we can keep things like this without any change because as soon as you say wow I really like that crowd now five weeks four weeks two weeks you you put it in the refrigerator and and it slows the bacterial action down so much that there's really no change for a very long time in the flavor old school they didn't often have that cold of a temperature unless you know it was wintertime and it was buried in the ground and so you hear a lot of stories of people going down into their cellar or their grandma's cellar and you know having to peel back sort of a mat like a mold matter or something that was protecting it what was underneath but then as as winter progressed you know it went from this sort of vibrant crunchy - you know successively more sour and until it was done and so a lot of that we can save with the refrigeration I you know some people say you don't because you're not opening it and that oxygen has left the environment there gets to be a certain point where I feel there's a flavor difference if you have these big air pockets that you can see I've noticed a bitterness so for me I go in there and I press everybody down anyway if I see some of them so I think ferments as introverts and extroverts there are some and it's really just a sugar content starch content that are just wild you don't know what you did differently but they are just a ping and burping and Christopher he's I can just feel it little kids how to do this at the libraries up in Oregon this summer so we did it was cabbages in chemistry because this is a chance to introduce pH the city acidity there are little guys and usually when we say they've been drugged here right and as soon as they know this is about sauerkraut you can just start to feel the passive resistance and there's usually somebody who will well the whole time but once they get to make it and you're explaining it especially when we talk about you know these these guys that are living on their and and they're eating sugar and they're farting and that's all they're doing they're just sitting around doing that and you just see this big smiles on their face they're magic in Garland they're imagining themselves as microbe thinking wow this is all they do this is so cool and then now burping is like oh so the kids are just waiting for the farts to build up and they have it yet you say Kenny you got to take it home in the morning they'll be farts in the morning but you gotta watch it you can't have them yet I think it's so excited but we'll have one or two mothers will come up and go how I understand can I didn't understand without the farting thing but now I get it so all ages farmers market the thing that would kill us was you know the parents would come in and they where kirsten talked about they'd have that oh my gosh meanwhile their kids have come in and started sampling they're just going down the line because it's pretty and it's they don't know any different and the parents would say whoa stop you're not gonna like that as they're mowing down our samples you know so there's a lot of things now about getting your kids interested earlier there's a lot of different kind of things you can do to sneak it in their diet we got mirrors which smears were introduced by a family friend a long time ago about these bagels and shmear thing it's a great way to introduce it you just you just squeeze up some of these things that you make and put that in some kind of spread you're getting it into their guts and you're getting your building what's going to become an addiction and then pretty soon they're they're eating it out of the jar can you only ferment vegetables no he can ferment all kinds of things cheese is also lactic acid fermentation kombucha is another really popular one right now and that's that's a bacterial mad it's a whole different thing kefir there's all alcohol is fermented but yeah but with the lactic acid fermentation it's a really great way to kind of enter the fermentation scene because you you can't screw up and if you do screw up you know you screwed up talk about fruits and fruits fruits fruits can be fermented if they're too juicy and too sweet they actually become alcohol so when you're fermenting them with vegetables you want to use a small amount or you want to use dried fruits it's really wonderful to use dried fruits to sweeten something up so if you want a sweet flavor add some raisins cranberries I didn't bring any today because we just cranberries are just coming on but I make this time of year is a cranberry ferment for Thanksgiving and think about it you've got this raw enzyme rich probiotic that you're having with your meal so that you're getting your digestive enzymes in there instead of the stuff that bloops out of the can so the recipes in the book if you want to buy it or if you check it out but also if you go to our website it's Fuhrman teesta dot kitchen and if you scroll to the bottom you'll see sort of a secondary navigation bar that says presentations in that you'll see something that is M e NF which is Mother Earth News Fair and I gave out that recipe in a class that I did there so you can get that cranberry recipe online but basically all you're doing is you're chopping the fresh cranberries you're adding salt and orange juice just like we did here you're adding dried cranberries and that's your sweetener and you get a pretty incredible ferment that way too so that's a lot of fun well thank you we're gonna sign books if you'd like

Channel: San Francisco Public Library

Views: 82,501

Keywords: sfpl, san francisco public library, san francisco, sfpl.org, fermentation, Sauerkraut (Food), Vegetable (Food), pickling, Fermentation In Food Processing (Literature Subject), kirsten shockey, christopher shockey

Id: ESjWTRP_vuY

Length: 47min 33sec (2853 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2015