Meg Thompson - Superfoods for Life, Cultured and Fermented Beverages: Heal digestion - Supercharge Your Immunity - Detoxify Your System - 75 Delicious Recipes

Making cultured beverages may seem overwhelming to begin with. The process may not have the sexiness of sourdough, or the mellowness of miso, but making your own fermented beverages is exciting and fun. You just need to find your rhythm. What is not to love about burping your turmeric beer, or watching the first bubbles of fermentation form, confirming you have a drink that is truly alive? In fact, at times you may feel like a mad scientist conjuring up experiments. And to be honest, that is what is so fun about making these drinks: You really can create your own brand of specialness with them. Fermenting teaches patience and trust, which is a wonderful thing to have in our homes to keep us grounded.

DID YOU KNOW?

Historically, fermented food and beverages were a part of everyday life. It has only been in relatively recent times, since the introduction of refrigerators and modern preservation methods, that there has been no need for traditional food preservation. Fermenting food improves the longevity of the product and increases its nutrient value. One popular historic example of its use was with Captain James Cook on his voyage to Australia; he fed his crew sauerkraut (fermented cabbage) to prevent them from getting scurvy, which is a disease resulting from a lack of vitamin C. But with modern food preservation methods, we have seen a dramatic reduction in the amount of cultured foods and drinks consumed, while at the same time refined foods have flooded the Western diet. This is not a good combination, especially for our guts, and there are countless health conditions that can be linked back to this general imbalance.

Two of my very favorite things in the world are fermented: coffee and vanilla. A combination of the natural enzymes in the pulp and the yeasts and bacteria from the environment break down the mucilaginous pulp around coffee beans. Vanilla pods are the fermented and dried seedpods of orchids.

Chocolate runs a close third. Chocolate comes from cacao beans, which after harvesting are fermented in vats covered with banana leaves for a few days. So the point I am getting to here is that fermenting is fabulous.

Throughout this book, I discuss various strains and species of the live bacteria found in probiotics. The current expert opinion on probiotics is that we cannot extrapolate and transfer the benefits. For example, if a particular bacteria strain has been shown in research to alleviate eczema, we cannot then say that all probiotics are effective, or even that all species are, but only that one exact strain has been proven to be effective in that research piece. Although I completely respect the research being done and agree that it is necessary to help us understand more about how our bodies interact with bacteria, I feel that this view is a little reductionist. The field of probiotics can be confusing, overwhelming, and expensive. For the average person trying to better his or her heath who is told it is necessary to have this strain for this problem and that strain for that problem, it can all be too much. By taking these strains in isolation, we know how they perform in isolation, but what about taking them in whole foods? I have included as many research articles as I could find using kefir and kombucha, rather than focusing on specific strains, as I feel that is how most people should be consuming their probioticsas fermented foods and drinks.

There are a couple of ways to go about culturing beverages. The first is by wild fermentation, popularized by Sandor Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation. This means relying on the bacteria and yeasts that are naturally present in the food or the environment. The other method is by culturing with the addition of a microbial starter of some kind, like a SCOBY, a packet of yeast, a collection of kefir grains, or whey. I cover both methods in this book.

The final note I want to make is that although this book is full of recipes with exact ingredients, you will most likely get a slightly different result each time you make a particular recipe. The end result of your recipe will depend on the sourness of your cultured beverage to begin with. My advice is to play around with the basic recipes and techniques to get your confidence up, and also to get to know how tart you like your drinks and how long you need to leave them to get that result. Then you can start experimenting!