New Foods!

A few posts ago we mentioned trying raw milk and seeing how it affected us.  Needless to say, neither Hilary nor I seem to have the same skin problems with raw dairy products that we do with regular pastured dairy.  Since we got the gallon of raw milk (priced at $10 here in AZ) we have made several batches of kefir.  Kefir (pronounced key-fear) is kind of like a drinkable effervescent yogurt, a centuries old drink that was first “brewed” in the Caucasus Mountains by shepherds carrying cow or goat’s milk in leather pouches for several days at a time.  The milk would then turn into the drink we know today.  The milk is transformed by using kefir “grains,” which are casein and gelatinous colonies of microorganisms that are grown together symbiotically.  Sounds fancy huh?  

Kefir Grains

So why do we drink kefir?   It’s because, like yogurt, it populates our guts with beneficial flora, i.e. probiotic bacteria. A major difference is that unlike yogurt, which contains one or two probiotic strains of bacteria, kefir can contain up to 26 strains of probiotic bacteria and up to seven different yeasts.  (More on gut bacteria in a later post).

So…kefir wasn’t the only food we have been fermenting, heck we didn’t even start there.  Several months ago I started making kombucha.  Kombucha is a fermented tea, cultured similarly to kefir, except a “mother” is used, or symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY).  The SCOBY can either be made from scratch by using a bottle of store bought kombucha, or gifted from someone (it is called a mother because it keeps growing, producing “daughter” SCOBYs that can be removed).  Since we (I) didn’t know anyone at the time who made their own Kombucha, I opted to start from scratch!  Hilary actually thought I was crazy when she discovered the first bottle “growing” in our pantry.  It was one of our water pitchers filled with tea and what looked like a white mold growing on the top.  Only, like mentioned above, it was yeast and bacteria and I was intentionally growing it so that I could drink it.  Sounds kind of weird, right?  In fact, I over-brewed our first batch and it tasted much like vinegar.  We have refined the process and it actually tastes pretty good now. So good that both Hilary and I drink about a cup a day, each!  

The Kombucha SCOBY

The benefits are similar to kefir,  as it is considered a probiotic drink.  The  first recorded use of kombucha comes from China in 221 BC during the Tsin Dynasty, and was known as "The Tea of Immortality" because it produces a range of organic acids like glucaronic acid, lactic acid, acetic acid, vitamins (especially B and C), amino acids, and enzymes.

A lot of these traditional and fermented recipes can actually be found in Nourishing Traditions Cook Book by Sally Fallon.  This massive cookbook also has quite a few non-fermented foods and drinks that I think would be a great resource for anyone.  

So, as you know, we are continually playing with our diets, and our most recent adjustment was trying out a recommendation by Martin Berkhan and Tim Ferriss to cluster our meals in an 8 hour time window.  Their rationale behind it was better hormone regulation and cellular repair, as well as improved gut health.  So, willing to try just about any change for 30 days, we began eating at noon, 4pm, and 8pm.  If you want to know the details, just ask.  We found it relatively easy to adjust our eating to this pattern, and enjoyed having our mornings to relax instead of preparing a meal, but didn’t really notice any other differences besides a flatter stomach, so Monday we’ll go back to eating as usual.