New Fermentation recipes are here in a new book by Leda Meredith. Leda, a foraging and food preservation expert joins Eric today to talk about fermentation, making cheese, and foraging. Leda has two new books out, Preserving Everything: Can, Culture, Pickle, Freeze, Ferment, Dehydrate, Smoke, Salt, that has a bunch of easy fermentation recipes and Store and a foraging book, Northeast Foraging: 120 wild and flavorful edibles from beach plums to wineberries. (Affiliate links)
What I like about Leda's new book is the easy way it has. You don't have to go out and buy a big crock to make sauerkraut, you can use mason jars. Nice.
Despite many people's constant use of anti-bacterial soaps, fermentation is becoming very popular, and it celebrates bacteria, the good kind at least. We talk about how to prepare your fermentation properly, how much salt to use, what is a brine, and a neat thing I did not know about, a fermentation starter culture!
Food prepared by fermentation is safe, and has been done for years. How long you ferment it is a matter of how you like that kind of ferment.
Leda brings up that you can ferment apples and cherries and other fruit, something most had not thought of before. The fermentation recipes are in her new book.
There is a difference between fermentation and pickling. Pickling uses acid, usually vinegar to preserve food, but there is no pro-biotic properties to those kinds of pickles.
A fermentation starter culture is the leftover brine from batch of a fermented vegetable that you pour into a new batch. You can also use the whey from yogurt as a starter. Be sure the yogurt has live cultures , it should say on the container. If you made the yogurt yourself, it has live cultures.
Something not thought of before is preserving food with sugar, we talk about sugared grapefruit rinds. Take them out of the compost and get something for nothing. Neat.
We move onto foraging, specifically foraging for edible plants in the Northeast. Japanese Knotweed is edible. Go harvest it when its young and help save the planet.
@rhkennerly
Great show. Just bought the book in trade paper, not an ebook. Reference books need to survive if there's trouble ;->