Kefir Two Ways

Kefir is hands down one of the best ferments for supporting the gut! While fermented dairy kefir is about 98% + lactose free some people still have a hard time digesting dairy. You’ll need to obtain Kefir Grains in order to make your kefir. We suggest ordering grains online from Cultures for Health or GEM Cultures .

With that in mind here is how we do Kefir both with dairy and without dairy! Make sure to read our notes at the end about keeping your grain cultures happy and healthy!

MILK KEFIR (DAIRY)

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon kefir grains

• 8–16 ounces of milk (Goat or Cow: Organic, Non-Homogenized, and Raw are best.)

Instructions

1. Add 1 tablespoon kefir grains to 8–16 ounces of raw milk in a jar with a lid. 

2. Let it sit on the counter at room temperature for 24–72 hours depending on how sour you like it. You can taste it to check.

3. Shake a couple times a day to keep fresh nutrients available to the grains.

4. Strain the milk so you can keep the kefir grains to make a new batch.

5. Put the strained kefir in a jar with a tight lid and keep it out of the fridge for a few hours. This will increase fizziness.

NOTE: The grains multiply. You can share them with friends or keep growing more. They work better if you keep them outside of the fridge. If you need to take time off from kefir, you can place them in some fresh milk and then put them in the fridge indefinitely. Once you are ready to use them again, rinse them off and begin the process from the beginning.

COCONUT KEFIR (NON-DAIRY)

Ingredients

• 1 Tablespoon kefir grains

• 8–16 ounces of full fat canned coconut milk or you can get young Thai coconuts and use the water and scrape the pulp and blend to make your own coconut milk

Instructions

1. Use the same recipe for original milk kefir; just replace the dairy with coconut milk. 

NOTE: Make sure to put the grains in dairy milk every 2–3 batches to keep them happy and healthy.

Shio Koji

Shio Koji in short means “ Salt Koji.” You take koji, salt, and water and let it sit for around 10 days. What I find most interesting about the Shio Koji process is that salt actually kills the Aspergillus oryzae. Lucky for us, it’s enzymes remain and when you throw into the mix the carbohydrates and sugars that exist in grains and by creating the right fermentation environment you are able to grow some solid bacteria. What does this mean for us? We have this amazingly tasty, umami, bacterial goodness that we can use to create other fermentations or secondary fermentations.

Here’s a list of some of our favorite uses for Shio Koji:

• Shio Koji cured meat

• Shio koji in handmade pasta (a lovely trick we learned from Ourcookquest)

• Sauces & Marinades

• An alternative for soy sauce

• Alternative ways to make pickles

Here’s our recipe for Shio Koji :

2 cups koji

2 cups water

1/8 cup salt

Mix together well and move to a jar with a finger tight lid. Let it sit in a cool and dark place for 10-12 days. Every day you’ll want to stir or shake the mixture. When it’s complete you can opt to blend the mixture or leave it in it’s original state and then move it to the fridge. Shio Koji can be used for 6 month from the date of making — so make sure you date it.

Boston Fermentation Festival 2018

See us here teaching at the 2018 Boston Fermentation Festival on Miso.

Miso Making with Cheryl Paswater In this short class we will cover the basic science behind making miso, why it is good for you and how to make it yourself. Miso is a traditional Japanese product produced by fermenting soybeans with salt and the fungus Aspergillus oryzae called Koji.

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Miso. Tempeh. Natto. And other Tasty Ferments! Out on Pre-order

We’re pretty excited about this gem coming out in 2019! This is the third book by our good friends Kirsten & Christopher Shockey and we’re super excited that you find some of our Miso recipes in this gem! Get those orders in!

Berkshire Fermentation Festival Presenter Videos

What a lovely weekend at the Berkshire Fermentation Festival! This was our third year back teaching and we’re happy to announce that the videos from all the presenters are now up online for you to enjoy!

Catch our Miso Workshop along with presenters Sandor Katz, Adam Elabd, Amanda Feifer, Anne Yonetani, and Alana Chernila!!

CHECK IT OUT HERE!

From the 4th Annual Berkshire Fermentation Festival, Cheryl Paswater talks about making miso.

Hoshigaki

Hoshigaki are a Japanese delicacy made by gently massaging persimmons while they air dry.
The persimmons used to make Hoshigaki are astringent varieties such as Hachiya. Ideally, choose fruit that still has part of the stem. We've used a couple different varieties of persimmons with nice success.

1) The first step is to cut the top off, while carefully leaving the stem that you will tie string to and they will hang from. And then use a knife of peeler to trim away the skins of the persimmon. Then attach the string and find a good place for your Hosigaki to hang. Broom handles work great for this, we've also used knitting needles, drumsticks and hangers to hang the Hoshigaki from.

2) The first week you just let the Hoshigaki hang and dry till they start to create a thin skin.  After a week has passed you begin to gently massage each persimmon every other day. Be careful not to break the skin.

3) As you keep massaging every other day the fructose in the fruit will begin to come to the surface. The "bloom" begins to appear...it looks like powdered sugar on your persimmons. Keep massaging until the persimmons are more like a dried fruit, changing into a darker color with the bloom, and then enjoy!

Hoshigaki

Fermented Cranberry Relish

I think a lot of people have a love hate relationship with cranberries. As the holidays have rolled around and Thanksgiving came I was thinking a lot about cranberry sauce and how I like it and yet I don't like it but, something in me wanted to redeem what magic cranberries do have so I took it to the kitchen and with the power of fermentation by my side decided to whip up a fermented cranberry relish and the result was a good one! I packed multiple jars for friends and family on a recent Thanksgiving trip to Virginia and Washington DC and it was a hit! Lovers of cranberries and non lovers alike enjoyed this tangy fermented gift. With the hollidays in full swing we hope you'll take a stab at this yummy ferment for the holidays.

Fermented Cranberry Relish

Ingredients:

• Fresh cranberries (3 cups)
• Dried cranberries (1 cup)
• Ginger root (2 inch piece)
• Sugar (3 tablespoons)
• Sea salt (1 tablespoon)
• Cinnamon (optional)
• Walnuts (optional)

Take your cranberries and put them in a food processer and rough chop them. Move to a bowl and add a sea salt. Stir well to allow the brine to start coming out of the cranberries. Grate the ginger root. Add the ginger, sugar, and dried cranberries to the bowl. Mix well. Add cinnamon or chopped walnuts as an optional added bit of magic. Move the mixture to a jar and pack it down, add a weight to keep it submerged below the brine. Cover with a lid or towel and put in a cool dark place to ferment. We let our sit for about 5 days before harvesting.

Cinnamon Fig Shrub

Shrubs! We first fell in love with shrubs on a trip to Portland, Oregon when we hit up the coffeeshop Barista and they had an amazing Fig Shrub based Espresso drink with some other magic mixed in. It was absolutely amazing and when when we got home we started making these easy and tasty drink mixers. We like them in bourbon, gin, seltzer, and more!

This is our Cinnamon Fig Shrub that we recently made after being asked by our friends Thomasin and Alex to make a drink mixer for their upcoming wedding. They wanted something that people could take away as a gift and that would be a nice mixer....so Cinnamon Fig Shrub it was! We love this delightful fall mixer and we think you will too! Note: if you save all those ends and tips you can use them to make a nice Fruit Scrap Vinegar which is what we did!

Cinnamon Fig Shrub

Ingredients:
Fresh Figs
Sugar
Raw Apple Cider Vinegar
Water
Cinnamon Stick (optional)

Directions:

    - Add equal parts of sugar and water to a saucepan, and heat and stir until the sugar dissolves.
    - Add figs and simmer until the fruit's juice blends well into the syrup.
    - Let it rest till it cools
    - Add vinegar to the syrup in a large (ideally glass) container
    - Cover with a lid or airlock and let ferment for 5-10 days
    - Filter your shrub through a strainer and enjoy!

Pistachio Miso

One of my favorite things about winter is teaching Miso Workshops. We only teach Miso making in the winter since Miso is traditionally started in the winter months, so when it was time to start amping up for our winter workshops at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and Enlightenment Wines we went and started digging through our Miso stash to see what we wanted to share with our students. If you got a chance to make it to the NYC Fermentation Festival then you likely got to test out some of our Miso's there as well. From our Chickpea Leek Kelp Miso, Blackbean Miso, to our Cashew Miso we've been all about Miso this winter so we wanted to share one of our favorite recipes of late with you. We've be playing with nuts and seeds a lot lately and Pistachio Miso has become one of our favorites. A quick and easy ferment, guaranteed to be a nice accoutrement to any meal.

Here's our recipe:

1 cup Raw unsalted pistachios

1/2 cup Koji (rice or barley koji)

Sea salt

Instructions:

Soak the pistachios for 2-4 hours. Drain the excess liquid. Soak the koji in a few tablespoons of water while you prep the nuts and blender.

In a blender combine the soaked pistachios with the koji and 1 tbs of sea salt and blend into a paste. You will likely have to add a little filtered water while you blend. You ultimately want it to be a toothpaste consistency.

Take a wide mouth jar and pour the mixture into the jar, leaving room at the top, put on a lid and let sit for 2-4 days in a cool dark place.

We like to use this miso as a spread on baked fish, toast, as a soup, in salad dressings and more. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do!