Category: fermented food

How To Make Kefir: What I Didn’t Know

Seth Roberts18 Comments

Kefir is much easier to make than yogurt because you ferment the milk at room temperature, once you have the starter culture. I’ve made it about ten times. The most recent batch was the easiest and best because I learned two things from the woman who gave me the starter:

1. Ferment it until there is a line of separation. There eventually form a line of clear liquid between the curds (top) and the rest (bottom). This took about two days. In the past I didn’t know how long to wait.

2. After fermentation, separate the curds from the rest by putting it through a colander. This provides good separation. You drink the liquid, use the solids to make more kefir. In the past I tried to spoon out the kefir grains.

If I had to choose between kefir and yogurt I’d choose kefir. Not only is it easier to make but it is far more complex. Unlike yogurt, it’s a drink. I drink more often than I eat so there are more opportunities to consume it.

I suspect you can make kefir by putting store-bought kefir into ordinary milk. I haven’t tried this, however.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to Dave Lull and Alex Chernavsky.

Yogurt Accident/Discovery

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I’ve made yogurt a few hundred times, mostly with a yogurt maker (picture below). The usual recipe is 1 quart milk, 1/4 teaspoon whey (from previous batch), incubate 24 hours. Yesterday, after incubation finished, I opened the machine to find this:

The milk (now yogurt) had squeezed together to form a perfectly round disc a few inches thick. It had squeezed out all the whey. The only unusual feature of this batch — besides the fact that it is getting warm and relatively humid here in Beijing — is that I used maybe 10% less milk than usual. This difference means the pulling inward force was less resisted by sticking to the sides, so this outcome indeed was more likely than usual.

This is my yogurt maker.

I bought it because it came with a glass bowl. Most yogurt makers have only a plastic bowl. You simply pour the milk in the glass bowl, add the starter (whey), add hot (boiling) water around the glass bowl, and wait a day — infinitely easier than the insanely complicated yogurt recipes I find on the Web. And I am beginning to think the hot water is unnecessary.

 

 

Miso Bar

Seth Roberts6 Comments

At a hotel buffet restaurant near Tsinghua I had fermented food in a form new to me: a miso-soup “bar”. You serve yourself from a tureen of miso soup and have a wide choice of add-ons: carrot, turnip, tofu, pickled ginger, green onion, Japanese pickle. Adding color, visual diversity, crunch, and DIY to the soup makes it taste much better — and it already tastes really good.

If I made a scatterplot of all the foods I can make, with difficulty on one axis and deliciousness on the other, this would be a bivariate outlier: very easy and very delicious.

Kiviaq, the Fermented Food of Greenland

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From the new BBC series Human Planet, which I like even more than Planet Earth, I learned that Greenlanders store birds they catch in summer — during a migration over the island — in a sealskin bag. Stuff 300-500 little auk birds into the bag, press all air out, sew up the opening, cover with heavy rocks, and wait three months.

The fermented birds are called kiviaq. Kiviaq is valued highly, served on special occasions such as weddings. The aroma should “sting the nostrils. . . The flavor should resemble extremely intense Gorganzola cheese.”

The kiviaq segment ends with this voiceover:

And it’s nutritious, full of vitamins and minerals that will sustain people over the winter months ahead.

Reflecting the mainstream view that microbes (made abundant by fermentation) don’t matter.

Beijing Smog: Good or Bad?

Seth Roberts13 Comments

I am in Beijing. The smog is bad. It is more humid than usual and the air is dirtier than usual. At his blog, James Fallows, who is also in Beijing, has posted pictures and pollution measurements. (Incidentally, Eamonn Fingleton, an excellent writer, will be guest-blogging there. In Praise of Hard Industries is one of the best business/economics books I’ve read.)

The effect of smog on health isn’t obvious. Maybe you know about hormesis — the finding that a small dose of a poison, such as radioactivity, is beneficial. It has been observed in hundreds of experiments. It makes sense: the poisons activate repair systems. Even if you know about hormesis, you probably don’t know that one of the first studies of smoking and cancer found that inhaling cigarette smoke appeared beneficial: inhalers had less cancer than non-inhalers. R. A. Fisher, the great statistician, emphasized this (pp. 160-161):

There were fewer inhalers among the cancer patients than among the non-cancer patients. That, I think, is an exceedingly important finding.

This difference (a negative correlation) appeared in spite of two positive correlations: Heavy smokers get more cancer than light smokers; and heavy smokers are more likely to inhale than light smokers. It is far from the only fact suggesting the connection between smoking and health isn’t simple.

So I am not worried about Beijing smog. The real danger, I think, is not eating fermented foods. Which, thankfully, is infinitely more under my control.

Probiotic Helps Children with IBS

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) — basically, recurrent pain during digestion — is common. A new study by Italian pediatricians asked if a probiotic would help. They randomized children into two groups: active and placebo. Children in the active group were given pills with a lot of lactobacillus bacteria, which they took twice per day. The placebo was made by the same manufacturer, so it looked identical. During the study, the researchers did not know who was in each group.

There was a big difference between the groups, which took about four weeks to emerge. The active group had painful episodes less than half as often as the placebo group, and the episodes they did have were less painful.

Overall this supports my broad point that we need to eat plenty of fermented foods to be healthy. That’s not what the authors of the study concluded. They concluded:

Demonstration of the efficacy of a given probiotic for a specific therapeutic target will help clinicians choose which probiotic to use when dealing with a specific disease. We are entering the era of targeted probiotic use.

Which reveals a bad case of gatekeeper syndrome. I wouldn’t expect them to say their results support the idea that everyone should eat fermented foods — that’s an “alternative” (and therefore “crazy”) idea. But they could have said their results imply that kids with IBS should eat yogurt.

“Sour” in Chinese

Seth Roberts2 Comments

The Chinese character for sour (pinyin suan) contains a bottle-like element that is sometimes translated wine, sometimes whiskey bottle, and sometimes “the tenth of the twelve earthly branches,” whatever that means. The bottle-like element appears in the character for alcoholic beverage, the character for vinegar, and several other characters with no obvious connection to fermentation. But the connection between sour and fermentation is clear.

My belief that we need to eat lots of fermented food to be healthy began when I realized that would explain why we like sour foods, foods high in umami, and foods with complex flavors — preferences I’d never heard explained. We like those foods, I theorized, so that we will eat foods high in bacteria. Bacteria tend to make sugar-containing foods sour, protein-containing foods high in umami, and all foods high in flavor complexity. I had not previously connected sourness and bacteria — but the Chinese had. I don’t yet know the Chinese characters for umami or flavor complexity.