The cheapest superfood: Fermenting Vegetables

January 9, 2008 at 6:32 pm | Posted in Nutrition & Health | 10 Comments

Americanized Kimchi, for lack of a better name, inspired by the Weston Price Foundation and their Nourishing Traditions cookbook:

Essential: Cabbage (any kind) and salt

Choose among options: Almost any combination of fresh vegetables plus other items with spicy ones to taste preference:

Broccoli, carrots, ginger, onions, finely chopped garlic, jalepenos, peppers of any kind, radish, cucumber, cilantro, whole flax seeds, sesame seeds, etc.

Wash and chop everything up to about a sauerkraut consistency. Put in a large bowl as chopping, mix and add salt. Put it in a gallon container and crush everything down to container. The juice displaced should be visible so that the liquid and solids rise to the same level in the container. Let ferment at room temperature for 3-5 days. When it is like a crunchy, flavorful sauerkraut, it is ready, and can be refrigerated to keep indefinitely. By adding fresh greens, these will stay fresh and green for longer than anyway but freezing them. When crushed down to release the juice like this, vegetables change from a very bulky food to a high density food like cheese, which uncoincidentally is also fermented. The juice is quite refreshing too, don’t throw it out. It can even be saved to ferment other foods. I haven’t tried it to make a sourdough starter, but it would probably work.

Serve alone or almost any way, but is full of probiotics when eaten raw. Foods ferment either before you eat them or inside you. Better let the good fermenters like what resides naturally in cabbage and grapes do their work first. Otherwise, bad ones like candida will ferment your sugars and grow roots through your intestines, and send signals to your brain to feed them/you even more sugar. Then you will say in a Darth Vader voice, “It’s too late for me. I’m more yeast than man now.”