A natural living site where you'll learn about organic gardening, foraging, home medicine and more.
Staghorn sumac makes a lovely, vitamin-C-rich beverage sometimes called Indian lemonade. I’ve shared how I make sumac lemonade in a previous post, and this recipe is a variation on the theme. Fermenting the lemonade with wild yeast gives it some tang and effervescence, in addition to adding probiotics to your delicious beverage.Continue Reading
It’s spring and that means rhubarb and strawberries, a classic combination. Turn these fruits into fermented strawberry rhubarb soda and you have a real treat!
I love refreshing fermented sodas like root beer and ginger ale. But since I’ve learned to ferment with wild yeast, I may not go back to my former ways of fermenting soda and other beverages like lemonade. Wild fermentation is so much easier than keeping a ginger bug active, and a plus for those who can’t use whey which is a dairy product.Continue Reading
There’s something about a hot summer day that says soda, don’t you think? For me, it’s the childhood memory of Sundays at the lake with friends and cousins, sipping root beer, that makes me crave that taste. Soda is not a part of my diet anymore, unless it’s a refreshing fermented soda like homemade root beer.
We played a lot in the woods at the lake and, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, that’s where I fell in love with plants. What I didn’t know back then was that I would be foraging two of those plants in the very same woods for homemade root beer syrup.Continue Reading
When you think of preserving the harvest do canning, freezing, and dehydrating come to mind? Have you wondered how our ancestors preserved food before the days of modern refrigeration and canning? One method they used was to preserve vegetables through lacto-fermentation in stoneware crocks.
When canning was found to be more shelf stable and easily shipped, lacto-fermentation fell by the wayside. So why would we even consider fermenting vegetables today? Canning preserves food by destroying bacteria that causes spoilage. In the process, many nutrients are also destroyed. Lacto-fermentation, on the other hand, preserves food by growing the good bacteria present on all vegetables–lactobacillus.Continue Reading
When a new book arrives in the mail, it better not be time to make dinner. ‘Cause dinner will definitely be late and my nose will be in that book. This was doubly true when The New Wildcrafted Cuisine by Pascal Baudar arrived a few weeks ago.
This book is beautiful. This book is inspiring!
Keeping our guts healthy is extremely important, and fermentation is an easy and delicious way to support gut health. Eating foods that are rich in beneficial bacteria, like yogurt, fermented lemonade, and fermented grape jello, is one way to ensure that your family is getting the probiotics they need.Continue Reading