Brewing Micro-Beasties
The more skilled we humans have become at killing germs, the more we’ve begun to miss them. Call it the anti-antibiotic movement. I recently came across an interesting article in the November 22 issue of The New Yorker (“Nature’s Spoils,” Bilger, p104) that declared, “Nearly all the DNA in our bodies belongs to microorganisms: they outnumber our own cells nine to one.” We are, essentially, the sum of our microscopic parts. Bacteria in our bodies plays all sorts of vital roles, from triggering sleep to processing nutrients. And it’s for this reason that lots of people are learning the fine art of brewing their own fermentations to help the body increase its “good bacteria” in the form of homemade kefirs, yoghurts, kombucha or sauerkraut.
My husband and I first concocted our own yoghurts while living in Spain. Our friend, Joe, scribbled the recipe out on a scrap of paper and we’ve varied our recipe only slightly since then. His directions were, “Take a cup of store-bought yoghurt to use as a your starter, add it to four cups of body-temperature milk in a glass jar, shake it up good, wrap the jar in a towel and sleep with it! In the morning, you’ll have nice, firm yoghurt to eat with your muesli.” (Joe was strangely enamored with muesli.)
Okay, we don’t sleep with our yoghurt for incubation anymore—although, yes, we did try this method successfully more than once. My sister-in-law kindly gave us a 32 oz. yoghurt maker for Christmas one year and we now use cream-top milk from Morning Fresh, a dairy in Fort Collins (available at Big Hollow Food Coop), to make rich, creamy yoghurt with an extra tang of live enzymes you don’t get in store bought yoghurts.
A friend also gave us a kombucha mushroom recently and we’re now brewing our own kombucha drinks, wrapped in a towel, Joe-style, on a warm shelf near a heater. Don’t ask me where a person might purchase such a fungus; it seems to be like a sourdough starter, something that wanders into your life through a long and enigmatic providence. The kombucha fungus is given a cup of sugar to ferment in a one gallon mixture of room-temperature tea (four green tea bags and one black. I use a green chai to give it a little spice). Leave to brew in a glass gallon jar–I use a sun tea dispenser–covered with a thin cheesecloth or other fabric for two weeks, only touching the kombucha with wooden or plastic utensils, no metal. You can heat the water in a metal pot, however. Add one cup of its “mother” or starter, and leave for two weeks to flourish. Pour the mixture into tightly sealing containers and refrigerate for a few days to create carbonation.
In our family, we can’t help but think of our kombucha as a kind of unobtrusive pet which we must separate from its offspring regularly and fling in the compost (or, less cruelly, gift to a friend to start their own kombucha with). Many thoughtful dissertations have been written about the wonders of kombucha on the digestive and immune systems. I find that when I drink it just as I’m feeling illness sneak up on me, I can shorten a cold by a few days. And when I drink it regularly, my digestion functions more comfortably too.
My next foray into the complex world of fermenting will be vinegar-less sauerkraut, made with water and salt alone, its own bacteria springing to life when sealed in an anaerobic container.
Now I just need springtime to come along so I can grow the cabbage.
