Fermented Foods for Better Health 

One of the many trends to better eating in this year, is eating more fermented foods for better digestion and for a healthier lifestyle.  We eat fermented foods all the time like pickles, sourdough breads, and my personal favorite saurkraut but more and more people are discovering the benefits of eating these "cultured" or fermented food that we are going to have a whole section in our recipe page for Sourdough baking which is the main thing for our concentration.  We will address the why in this blog and start with the sourdoughs in our next.  We thank Wellness Mama for some of the following information.

What Happened to our Fermented Foods!

The amount of probiotics and enzymes available in the average diet has declined sharply over the last few decades as pasturized milk has replace raw, pasteurized yogurt has replace homemade, and vinegar based pickles and sauerkraut have replaced lacto-feremented version... the list goes on.  Even our grains in earlier times were prepared with soaking, spourting and fermenting (sourdough) which largely reduces the anti-nutrient content and makes them better to eat.  Instead of the nutrient rich foods full of enzymes and probiotics that our grandparents probably ate, the average diet today consists mainly of sugar laden, lab created dead foods.

Why Eat Fermented Foods?

1. Probiotics- Eating fermented foods and drinking fermented drinks like Kefir and Kombucha will introduce beneficial bacteria into your digestive system and help the balance of bacteria in your digestive system. Probiotics have also been shown to help slow or reverse some diseases, improve bowel health, aid digestion, and improve immunity!

2. Absorb Food Better- Having the proper balance of gut bacteria and enough digestive enzymes helps you absorb more of the nutrients in the foods you eat. Pair this with your healthy real food diet, and you will absorb many more nutrients from the foods you eat. You won’t need as many supplements and vitamins, and you’ll be absorbing more of the live nutrients in your foods.

3. Budget Friendly- Incorporating healthy foods into your diet can get expensive, but not so with fermented foods. You can make your own whey at home for a couple of dollars, and using that and sea salt, ferment many foods very inexpensively. Drinks like Water Kefir and Kombucha can be made at home also and cost only pennies per serving. Adding these things to your diet can also cut down on the number of supplements you need, helping the budget further.

4. Preserves Food Easily- Homemade salsa only lasts a few days in the fridge- Fermented homemade salsa lasts months! The same goes for sauerkraut, pickles, beets and other garden foods. Lacto-fermentation allows you to store these foods for longer periods of time without losing the nutrients like you would with traditional foods.

   So How do We Get More Fermented Foods in our Diets?

   One of the ways to incooperate the fermented foods into our diets is by making the sourdough breads and baked goods.  We have some wonderful cultures that you can use to give the bread great flavour and texture.  The kefir and kombucha drinks are more readily available in the grocery stores and certainly saurkraut is easy to find or even make it yourself with cabbage and salt and a bit of time for the fermentation process to work.  I remember watching my German step-father making a large batch of saurkraut when I was young, by just slicing the cabbage thinly into a large crock and layering it with coarse salt and then putting a plate on top with a weight to press the mixture down.  He did put the concoction in a closet in the basement so that we couldn't smell the fermenting process and in a couple of weeks he had the best saurkraut ever!

   We will focus on the Sourdough baking to start with and then talk a little more about the Kombucha and kefir later.  If you have a Yogurt maker we do have a Kefir culture avaialble here.