Homemade Fermented Veg

Does having Ukrainian great grandparents mean I have homemade fermented veg in my blood?

I don’t know but it is a really easy process, becoming a little bit organised has been one of its happy side effects.

A search on homemade fermented vegetables will deliver many youtube clips on how to make sauerkraut, kimchi or get pickling to your heart’s content. They can show you better than I can describe the process of making our own, cheap alternative to probiotics. A lot of them show making industrial quantities but have a go yourself with smaller amounts first to see if it’s a habit that you want to get into.

The reason I started making my own sauerkraut apart from reading about its benefits online was it keeps you regular (this doesn’t present a problem for people who have delightful insides you could set your clock by but, if you haven’t got regularity you’ll know how miserable it can be and you’ll have a go at anything that might help!) and it looked a lot cheaper than regular probiotic supplementation.

homemade

I use the biggest, widest necked glass jars i can get (big jars of black olives from the supermarket have a good shape)

Fairly finely chop/shred

  • A red cabbage (peel off the outer two leaves before you start chopping and put to one side)
  • Bulb or two of fennel
  • 2 or 3 sticks of celery

Any veg that’s quite firm and holds a lot of water (but not potatoes) I’ve tried mushrooms and lettuce and courgette but they were too soft/water filled, I think and went to mush quickly

I find white cabbage a bit too sulphurous,

Leek gives a really zingy taste but after a week or two squashed in a jar outside the fridge its sulphurous smell is not for the fainthearted!

  • Beetroot (grated or sliced thinly)
  • Grated carrot is something to try chucking in: i think it and beetroot might be quite high in sugars (I’m guessing this is why they turned to a sticky mush on their own?) so probably they shouldn’t make up the majority of the chopped veg mix.
  • a bit of grated ginger or chopped fresh chilli adds another dimension!

Once the veg is chopped I use a big, ceramic cake mixing bowl and scatter over a good teaspoon of seasalt or Himalayan rock salt  (both hold more trace minerals which is a good thing apparently and are much better than table salt I’m told. The salt will stop nasties proliferating and draw water out of the veg. Perhaps also a teaspoon of caraway seeds (if you like that sort of thing)

After 24 hours of the veg sitting weighted down (I’ve inherited a big pestle and mortar but before that I was using bags of water which are quite heavy) it’s time to pack the jars up to an inch below the top.

Various places online suggest treating the jars as you would if you were making jam  ie putting the empty jars in boiling water or in a hot oven to kill off germs I did this once but, being one for the easier life I figured we’re after bacteria why does it matter if these jars are super, squeaky clean?

It is worth giving the jars a good wash tho!

Remember the outer cabbage leaves you put to one side?

Tear the leaves up to fit comfortably over the top of the veg and tuck the sides down the insides of the jar. You want to try and keep everything below the eventual waterline (mould can’t grow underwater). I’ve had a couple of furry tops of jars now and then and that’s when stuff has risen during fermentation and stuck out above the water. I’ve gotten rid of the first couple of inches of contents and the bottom half of the jar has been fine. You can gauge the consistency of the veg for yourself and decide when it looks like you might want to try eating it… or throwing it out!

It should taste sour (the bacteria already present on the veg make acetic acid) but the veg should still keep a crunch and should not go slimy.

My partner is far less gung ho than me when it comes to eating ‘off’ food so I appreciate this might not be everyone’s cup of tea but the only thing you can lose is a bit of time* so, why not give it a try?

Most of take advantage of the fermentation process when we eat, cheese, salami or yoghurt and drink wine or beer

In cooler weather (not necessary in the warmth of summer) you can try splitting up a probiotic capsule and mix it with water. I’ve used a kefir starter which has bacteria in as does VSL#3 the NHS approved probiotic (well, my mum got a prescription for it a while back). You’re going to top up to half an inch below the top of the tightly packed, veg filled jar (between half and one pint of water as a rough guide). I use filter water and the liquid from the last jar (this liquor also makes interesting vinegar for salad dressing). I imagine tap’d be fine too.

I get two jars at a time or thereabouts from a head of cabbage and assorted extra veg.

The addition of friendly bacteria from a capsule gets the fermentation process underway and the jars could be ready to eat in less than a month. Don’t forget to hold them in something that will catch any drips. We’ve created a living thing so the jars will breathe and ooze for want of a better word!

The benefits of cruciferous veg coupled with fermented food and the smug feeling we get for homemaking a ‘thing’ makes this activity worthwhile, for me. I’ve seen suggestions out there to not eat this straight from the jar as we harbour lots of pathogenic bacteria in our mouths that we probably don’t want to multiply. Keep the jar in the fridge once opened (it will still ferment but at a much slower rate).

I try to have at least a couple ‘brewing’ in the cupboard under the stairs at  at any one time.

*Go gently at this new way of eating veg, it’s undoubtedly good for us (please see my candida posts to rule out if you are one of the people that should avoid too much fermented food until you’ve rebalanced your gut bacteria). The microbes in our tums may need a little time to get used to all their new friends.

A wider group of friends for your gut microbiota can have positive effects on the body as a whole but especially so for the brain (microbes themselves are microbiota whereas microbiome describes their genes)

mainstream and less so

night scene of a Brooklyn sidewalk

I took this image when I was getting a form of angioplasty to counter some of the effects of MS in 2012. It hasn’t stopped the disease but my heat intolerance and brain fog is still vastly reduced two years later. I don’t believe the auto-immune theory answers all the questions that MS poses.

The auto immune theory lies at the base of mainstream, accepted MS treatments (see below for details and links on most).

An auto-immune disorder arises when the immune system, the body’s bouncers get confused, go a bit postal and start attacking the body’s own cells. In the case of MS the bodyguards appear to start beating up the nerves’ protective coating (myelin). There’s still big questions about proof that this is what’s happening in MS. MS auto-immune and/or neuro degenerative?

In the vascular model, researchers hypothesize that these bouncers are merely sweeping up at the end of a particularly rowdy night rather than attacking these cells themselves. It is theorized the damage was a side effect of vascular disruption.

The autoimmune model believes that these bodyguards go rogue and kill perfectly healthy and functioning cells. They can no longer distinguish between foreign cells (whose presence would rightly cause an immune response) and self.

The alternative MS theory has been explained most recently by Paulo Zamboni of Italy. He considers MS to be mostly a vascular disorder and a name for this disorder is Chronic Cerebro Spinal Vascular Insufficiency (CCSVI). There are a number of people who don’t agree with the theory that has its roots in the 19th century.

I felt the theory was worth further exploration and went to Brooklyn to get someone else to explore my vasculature for me.

The standard medical approach to multiple sclerosis includes disease modifying therapies, DMTs that don’t really address symptoms as such and require quite a leap of faith in your belief of your caregiver’s ability to alter the course of your disease. That could encompass having a belief in your yoga teacher as much as the men in white coats.

Having some sort of belief in something appears to be good for your brain to get on with its own healing (our brains consist of about 7% stem cells that could, in theory replace our own damaged myelin. Choosing to believe in something I don’t believe is silly.

MS medical treatments started with Copaxone, Rebif, Avonex Beta-Seron (fondly referred to as the CRAB drugs by past patients) which form the cornerstone of accepted MS modification. These guys have a pretty exhaustive list of some treatments available to us. The first of them was released in the US in the early 1990s and the fair prescribing of them brought about the creation of NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence seems to have changed its name once or twice and now stand for NIHCE… Health and Care Excellence rather than Clinical.

Newer treatments include Tysabri which has a very chequered history including being withdrawn from market and then brought back and still being responsible for some of its users contracting another brain disease entirely, PML!

Campath or to give it it’s newer name Alemtuzamab works by knocking out certain proteins in the patient’s immune system. This therapy was first used to treat cancer – decide carefully about the risks and benefits attached to taking any treatment but perhaps especially a recycled cancer drug?

Alternative treatments I’ve tried include hyperbaric oxygen therapy HBO, treating CCSVI, physiotherapy, Feldenkrais Method, Shiatsu, Reflexology, diet modification (gluten, dairy and sugar free), as wide a range of exercise as is possible, mindfulness, MBSR emotional freedom technique EFT, vitamin and mineral supplementation, Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN), Inclined Bed Therapy (IBT), and are discussed further on other pages on the site.

I also take cannabis using a vaporiser as it seems if big pharma are trying to replicate the real thing with Sativex why don’t I just get hold of some of the real thing?

I feel having a chronic condition calls for becoming an active participant in our own health rather than sitting back and taking what’s offered.