Eat

Why Ferment?

February 8, 2018 by Mark Dewey

In a world where the goodness of anti-bacterialism is taken for granted, encouraging bacteria to infect your food seems almost as wrong as flag-burning. Don’t the hand-sanitizing stations screwed to the walls of all our public buildings confirm the status of bacteria as a public enemy? The word itself sounds unhealthy, like saying it too often might turn your tongue white or make your skin break out.

But the truth is that we need bacteria to stay alive — certain kinds, anyway. By one measure, nearly 1,000 different species of bacteria live in your intestinal tract, and research has shown that their health is crucial to yours. Healthy gut bacteria seem to have wide-ranging positive effects on your immune system, your central nervous system, your endocrinal system, your heart, your brain, and your capacity to absorb nourishment.

One of the easiest ways to nurture your gut biome is to eat fermented vegetables. You may associate term ‘fermented’ with the process that creates wine or beer, but the agent involved in that process is yeast, not bacteria, and the by-product is alcohol, which has largely toxic effects on your body, not the beneficial effects of the lactic acid produced by the lactobacillus family.

Fermentation is a traditional food-preservation technique which uses small quantities of salt to prohibit the growth of harmful bacteria and encourage the growth of lactobacillus, which thrives in the presence of salt. The fermented vegetable most of us are familiar with is sauerkraut, which is cabbage preserved by lactobacillus, and while cabbage is included in many popular ferment recipes, it’s far from the only vegetable that lends itself to fermentation. Almost any vegetable can be fermented, but the process alters flavor in unpredictable ways which may not harmonize with the original taste and aroma of all foods.

One of the great things about fermentation is that anyone can do it, at home, with no fancy equipment. All you need is a big bowl, a big jar or crock, and some salt. Most recipes recommend mineral salts rather than iodized table salts. The quality of your fermented end-product will depend on several factors, including the quality of the food you start with. Local, sustainably-grown vegetables are usually best in taste and nutritional density, but conventional supermarket produce works, too. Many recipes and how-to guides are available online, most of which encourage you to make your brine by mixing salt and water, but it’s also possible to extract brine water from the cabbage itself with the help of salt and hand strength.

Fermenting is a great way to make the most of those large quantities of carrots, beans, squash, or cabbage that come in all at once when you start to eat according to the seasons. It’s also a great way to discover flavors you’ve never tasted before — so why not plunge in? Happy bacteria to you!

First Curtido

January 23, 2018 by Mark Dewey

My first ferment moved into the eating stage today, after just five days in the crock. That’s on the early end of the fermenting window, and I did wonder if I was jumping the gun, but I was curious, so I took off the weights. This is what I saw: a lot more brine that I started with. I had read that there might be mold and strong, off-putting odors, but I found neither.

The experts said to let taste guide you at every stage, so I stuck in my fork. It was more salty than sour, and the bigger chunks of cabbage were still quite firm. I could still taste carrot in the carrots.

Since we’re dealing with bacteria and a process that seems to resemble spoilage, even though it’s actually a form of preservation, I wondered whether I had made the kind of mistake that might cause sickness. It didn’t look or smell like I had; in fact, USDA microbiologist Fred Breidt says he’s never heard of sauerkraut making anybody sick.

“Risky is not a word I would use to describe vegetable fermentation,” Breidt said. “It’s one of the oldest and safest technologies we have.”

But the only way to tell for sure was to eat, so I did, quite a bit. Then I packed three jars and put one in a bag for the friend who got me started in this. I told her not to sample my work until my own stomach determined whether things had gone according to plan. That was four hours ago, and I’m hungry for more, so I guess all is well.

I’m inclined to sit down with a whole bowlful of this curtido, but the experts say to start with about two bites of ferment a day and slowly work your way up to two or three bites with every meal, so I’ll try not to over do it.

Next up: lemon dill sauerkraut, which is reputed to be something of a gateway drug. I’m planning to get hooked on that and then move up to the hard stuff. See you in rehab.

First-time Fermenter

January 18, 2018 by Mark Dewey

I’ve been wanting to do this ever since I first made friends with lactobacillus, but I’ve been dragging my feet. Smiling at a milky-sounding bacteria is one thing, whereas cultivating it in your kitchen is something else — that takes a push from a friend. My push came in the form of a fermenting crock from Humble House — that’s the tall thing on the right in this picture. You don’t have to have one of those — a big jar or any number of other vessels will work — but a nice crock has so much tool-appeal that you’ll be eager to use it. Thanks, Kate! You also need a heavy bowl and a knife that’s sharp enough to hold its line all the way down to the cutting board.

Here’s a way to think of what you’re doing: you’re trying to create an environment where beneficial bacteria like lactobacillus can infect your vegetables but toxic bacteria cannot. The first step in that process is getting a vegetable like cabbage to release the water stored in its cells. You do that by slicing it into thin strips, sprinkling the strips with salt, and then squeezing them. The book Fermenting Vegetables, which we carry in the market, invites you to massage the salt into the cabbage, but to me it felt more like squeezing the water out. It takes some hand strength. As you break the cell walls, the cabbage will get wet and shiny, and eventually a puddle will form at the bottom of the bowl. That’s brine. You need enough of it to cover the cabbage, because lactobacillus can tolerate the salty water, whereas toxic bacteria can’t.

The book has fermenting recipes for 64 different vegetables and herbs, ranging from common items like cabbage to things most of us don’t eat, like dandelion greens, which are supposed to be really nourishing. I stared with curtido, which is a Salvadoran relish based on cabbage, onion, and carrot, with oregano and cumin thrown in. If you’ve ever eaten pupusas at the kind of place where only the kids speak English, curtido is the stuff they put on the side of the plate. With pink Himalayan salt, this is how it looked before I started squeezing:

As I said, I had to squeeze a lot and let it rest and squeeze a lot and let it rest a couple of times before it got briney, but when I put it in the crock and pressed it under the weights, I saw brine welling up.

So, why weights? As I understand it, lactobacillus produces carbon dioxide, and you want to make sure none of that pushes the vegetable material up out of the brine.

My first batch is 24 hours old now, at 3:00 p.m on January 18. The fermentation range for curtido is between four days and two weeks. The instructions say to open the crock every day and tamp the cabbage down to keep it submerged, and to start tasting after day four. I’ll let you know how that goes!

Why Local Food?

January 16, 2018 by Mark Dewey

If you’re new to farm food or still considering your first CSA membership, you may be wondering exactly what makes this food different from convention grocery store fare. Most of the answers to that question lead to more questions, so we thought we’d point you to some resources that move the information train forward.

Let’s start with a list of basic factors. This particular list comes from the University of Washington’s “Whole U” wellness initiative, but most CSA farmers would come up with similar reasons.

Local foods are fresh.
Local foods are seasonal.
Local foods have a higher sustainability quotient.
Local foods promote variety.
Factors 1 through 4 combine to make local food considerably more nutritious than food from the industrial system.
Local foods promote local economies.
Local foods create community.

Many resources are available to explore those factors in more detail. We’ll point you to some of them.

This post from an organization called Local Harvest starts with the feature that initially attracts most local eaters — taste — and it makes a useful connection between taste and nutritional density. Here’s a word about the source:

“Local Harvest is a community project, initiated by the Ethical Consumer Group, with a view to providing a resource to make it easy to find local and more sustainable food sources.”

This article from Scientific American discusses the alarming probability that nutritional density has been slowly bred out of most food in the industrial system. Industrial farming selects for size, growth rate, and pest resistance, not optimal nutrition. On top of that, it tends to use growing practices that damage soil, such as raising the same crops in the same fields year after year, with the help of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

“Because of soil depletion,” the authors report, “crops grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today.”

Unlike its industrial counterpart, our soil gets better every year because we enrich it with tons of compost and nitrogen-fixing cover crops. And since our soil is strong and we’re always changing crop locations, we don’t have to select for size or pest resistance. So our fruits and vegetables are more nutritious than what you’re likely to get from industrial sources.

A note on the source: “Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the U.S., has been bringing its readers unique insights about developments in science and technology for more than 170 years.” Learn more here.

If the process of breeding nutrition out of the food supply interests you, try this article from the New York Times, which follows the process back to its earliest origins.

Check back for links to more websites as we continue to explore the question over the next few months.

Ferment Your Own!

October 30, 2017 by Mark Dewey

The next time you drive to the farm, glance to your right as you approach the Dirt Farm entrance: those shiny purple and green plants are cabbages. We have them in the market as stand bonuses this week, and they’re likely to keep coming for the rest of the season. Arriving just as most other vegetables begin to disappear, cabbages are a real boon to late-fall culinary life. They’re versatile, nutritious, and long-lasting — especially when they start to ferment!

Most of us aren’t inclined to think of bacteria as a nutritional boost or a food preservative, but the right bacteria do in fact improve our health and preserve perishable foods, especially vegetables. The process that allows that to happen is called lacto-fermentation, and it begins with the humblest item in your kitchen: salt.

Anyone who has eaten yogurt or other probiotic foods like kombucha knows that not all bacteria is bad; in fact some strains are really good for you, including the family known as lactobacillus. Well, it turns out that toxic bacteria can’t tolerate salt, whereas lactobacillus bacteria get along with salt quite well, so a simple salt brine will protect vegetables against the stuff that makes you sick while encouraging the healthy stuff to jump in.

From the culinary perspective, fermentation is a way of opening the door to a range of surprising flavor variations: different strains of lactobacillus combine in different ways with different components of the specific vegetables they encounter, so you never know exactly what you’re going to get. That’s a bonus, in my book. And from the nutritional perspective, fermentation initiates chemical changes that give us access to nutrients we can’t otherwise digest. Sauerkraut is a great way to get acquainted with fermentation, and great sauerkraut starts with great cabbage — we’ve got that, so come on out to the farm!

Pick your Own Fruit Farm

OPEN DAILY 10am-5pm