By Jess Coffin
Connecting with the healing power of plants can be as simple as taking in the beauty of fall foliage or adding vegetables to every meal. As winter approaches, we’re stocking our plant medicine cabinets. EarthDance Organic Farm School offers fresh, organic, Ferguson-grown produce year-round to help you do the same. You can find it at the Pay What You Can Farm Stand or the Ferguson Farmers Market. We’ve also got easy recipes to boost the nutritional and healing power of your produce.
Fermentation is a key element in both of the recipes we’re sharing today. One is for basic fermented vegetables ~ it’s super simple & tasty! The other is for fire cider ~ a veggie & herb-based health tonic to help ward off and decrease cold and flu symptoms. Fire cider includes a live, fermented food – apple cider vinegar.
Fermentation uses one of our most common cooking ingredients – salt! People across cultures around the world have been fermenting food for millennia. It can enhance our overall health and well-being by contributing to the health of our gut microbiome, adding friendly bacteria and fungi. As fermentation revivalist Sandor Katz says, “If you are willing to collaborate with tiny beings with somewhat capricious habits and vast transformative powers, read on.”
You may not realize that many foods found in the grocery store are made using fermentation. Bread, yogurt, cheese, wine, coffee, chocolate, beer, and more harness the transformative power of fermentation to become what they are. Many of these are pasteurized (heated to hot enough temps to kill most or all the microbes), though, so they lose some of their superpowers.
What is fermentation? And how does it preserve food and make it better for us AND tastier?
Fermented foods are alive! When we ferment a food, we create an intentional biome in a crock or a jar wherein a bajillion beneficial microorganisms pre-feast on food. This pre-digestion makes the nutrients more accessible to our bodies and can add new nutrients and remove toxins. It’s a co-evolutionary boon – good for the microbes and for us – that it can also make foods tastier. The microbes help food last longer by excreting acids and antimicrobial compounds that prevent the growth of unfriendly bacteria and fungi.
Any food can be fermented. For vegetables: Chop or grate them to your desired size/texture, and add unchlorinated water (since chlorine may kill the microbes you want), salt, and time. See the recipe cards for more info and Farm Stand and Market hours!