Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Growing your own food and fermented foods

Excerpt from:
How You Can Start a Farm in Heart of the City

"When you grow some of your own food, you start to care more about all of your food. "Just where did this come from?" we'd find ourselves asking when we went shopping. What's in it? At the same time, we began to learn about cultured and fermented foods, which have beneficial bacteria in them. Few of these wonder-foods are available in stores. The supermarket started to look like a wasteland."

Janet and I have long made our own fermented food: sauerkraut.  We use Sally Fallon's recipe from Nourishing Traditions.  Sally provides for variations depending on whether you have access to whey.  When we first started, we made whey from raw milk.  Lately, though, we have limited our use of raw milk and have wondered how to get the whey that we need.

Our solution: Janet successfully extracted whey from Traderspoint Creamery Whole Milk Yogurt which is available at Whole Foods Market.  She placed about 3/4 cup of yogurt in a coffee filter in a strainer and let it drain into a measuring cup for 2-4 hours.  The result was 4 tablespoons of whey ... which is exactly what Sally Fallon calls for.
We have successfully made one batch of sauerkraut using this whey and have a second batch in process.

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