More than just a stiff drink
I’ve never entirely understood fermentation. I always knew that making beer involved fermenting, where you throw a grain (like maize, hops, or barley) in with some yeast and sugar, along with a bunch of pipes and valves, and it turns into beer, releasing gas as the grain ferments.
The fermenting can’t be fixed to the gas, though – whisky and vodka generally aren’t bubbly, so gas production can’t be a core part of the process.
I checked into it, and it seems fermenting is any metabolic process that occurs without oxygen and produces gas, acid or alcohol as a by-product. Fermenting beer increases gas production; brewing liquor increases alcohol production.
While you can use fermentation to create a specific byproduct (which is how you make alcohol) there are much more common uses and examples of fermenting all around us.
For example, composting is a kind of fermenting. When you’re composting, you’re trying to encourage the microbes that break organic matter down into easier to digest units without destroying them. If your compost turns rotten, or leaks a toxic smelling black gunk, it’s because the fermentation isn’t occurring and there aren’t enough bacteria and micro-organisms in the soil to feast on the sugars in the food.
You need to kickstart things with an activated lactobacillus culture.
In your body, fermentation is what produces lactic acid buildup (it could just as well produce alcohol, but that’s mother nature for you).
Many foods were also historically fermented, including grains and tofu/soy. These things aren’t actually healthy if they’re not fermented, which is why mielie meal and tofu don’t digest properly unless they’re soaked properly.
The pictures show a story of how you can make a heathy ferment for your garden.
You start with a big sack of bran.
Then you mix in microbes from our essential micronutrients and molasses, until the bran has the texture of wet sand.
Put that into a bucket with an opening so you can release excess gas, then put in a layer of fruit and vegetables. Pumpkin and banana are mixed in for bulk, along with some kambucha scoby for extra EMs.
It then grows the layer shown, which you start with more bran and molasses to seal the ferment, and which teems with life.
When it’s all processed, it becomes a perfect supplement for foliar feeding, top dressing, spraying, or just rebuilding poor soil.
Fermentation is the simplest and oldest way of preserving foods – pickling is a kind of fermentation, and fermenting is how people have historically preserved foods.
The vinegar and acids are used to kill off the bacteria that would make it rot, and at the lower pH and without oxygen the fermenting bacteria can get to work.
The aim of fermentation is to improve healthy bacteria after clearing out the unhealthy ones that will tend towards rot. As a result, digestibility improves, and you get more of the goodness out of what you eat.
More good compounds emerge, and your food preserves but doesn’t rot.
There are various ferments available in town at the moment. If you’re interested in making your own kambucha, Redbeard sells simple and effective starter kits (search Facebook for Redbeard Permaculture).
Full Circle Foods will be selling locally made EM infused bran from their site at fullcirclefoods.co.za.
Further afield, there’s also Bokashi bran, who make a bacteria and fungus infused bran.
Full Circle also sell fermented kale, which sounds awful but is apparently great for your health, and are making a fascinating honey and cranberries ferment, which seems like an extraordinarily tasty experiment.
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