Don’t cut your radishes like this! Cut them in coins. See comments.

Even though we know–intellectually–that for centuries people have preserved food via lacto-fermentation, again, as with cultured milk, it is a head trip for grocery store kids like us to soak some veggies in brine for a few weeks, open them up and chow down.

Lacto-Fermentation is a process in which naturally occurring lactic acid producing bacteria are allowed to multiply. The lactic acid that they produce prevents the growth of the kinds of bacteria that cause spoilage. Thus lacto-fermentation is a method of preserving foods as well as a way of creating a distinct flavor. Lacto-fermented foods include sauerkraut, kimchi, Swiss cheese, and sourdough bread among many others.

Lactic acid producing bacterias, and there are many different varieties, tend to have a high tolerance for salt unlike their unwanted bacterial cousins. The process of lacto-fermentation begins with creating a brine, which is the is the way pickles used to be made–most store bought pickles are now made with vinegar due to unwarranted safety concerns over lacto-fermentation.

Today, sauerkraut is the best known lacto-fermented food. Dill pickles are traditionally made this way too. In an old country store pickle barrel, lacto fermented pickles would sit out all winter long. All they’d do is make sure the brine always covered the pickles. They’d get stronger flavored, and softer textured as the year went on, but they lasted.

We look forward to trying this with cucumbers, but for this first experiment we used a big, pretty daikon from the farmers market. The entire process is amazingly simple:

Stir up a brine solution of 2 Tablespoons sea salt (un-iodized salt) to 1 quart water. Note that you must use salt that has no additives-check the ingredients of your salt to make sure that it contains nothing but salt. Additives in salt can prevent the lacto-fermentation process from occurring. Bottled water is best, but we used LA tap with no ill effects. The worry is that the chlorine in tap water will also interfere with the culture.

Peel and slice the daikon, and pack it into a very clean quart sized mason jar. Add a peeled garlic clove if you want. Pour the brine over the slices until the jar is nearly full. Leave just a little room at the top for gas expansion. Put the lid on, and place it your cupboard for as long as you can wait. A week, two weeks, a month–the flavor changes over time. We waited 2 weeks.

When we opened the jar it hissed and fizzed, and let off the powerful aroma of sauerkraut. We fished out the first slice, sniffed it and eyeballed it like curious but frightened monkeys. An uninformed and vague discussion of botulism followed. Finally the gauntlet was thrown down, and the challenge could not be ignored: are we wimps or are we homesteaders? So we ate of the fruit. Or one of us did. The other stood by ready to dial 911.

Yum! Our pickled daikons are salty and garlic-y and firm, and taste a lot like a good garlic dill, only with a different texture. Now that the jar is open, we’re keeping it in the fridge.

Survive LA declares Fermentation Month a success!

During the month of March the Homegrown Revolution kitchens were full of strange jars full of burbling mixtures. We are pleased to report that none of these experiments have failed, and that we have not yet succeeded in contracting food poisoning.

One of our most successful ferments was a Swedish milk product called filmjölk. This starter came to us as an unexpected gift. We’d never been filmjölk drinkers before, but were willing to give it a go. There are three ways to get the culture you need to produce this beverage: live in Sweden and buy a carton of it in the store, order the culture from a supplier such as G.E.M. Cultures, or what we did–meet someone who smuggled it back from Sweden.

Like sourdough you must keep your filmjölk milk starter alive: we made more filmjölk with the small amount we were given by putting 2 teaspoons of the culture in a quart of milk and leaving it out on our counter top overnight. Filmjölk culture, by the way, is not something special–it is just filmjölk, the same as you drink–you just use one week’s filmjölk to make the next week’s, and so on and so on.

Now, as a thoroughly industrialized people, it does go against the grain to leave dairy products just sitting around at room temperature. But power to the people, it works! The next day we had a jar full of kind of chunky, yogurty stuff, which was not rancid, but really quiet tasty. We shook it up to remove the lumps before drinking it.

We must confess that only one of us partook of that first glass, since our other Homegrown Revolution compound comrade is a bit of a, dare we say it, pussy when it comes to drinking questionable milk products.

As of now we’re treating the stuff like a salty lassi –meaning we pimp it out with a little salt, fresh cracked pepper and crushed fresh mint.

One of the big problems with citrus trees is that you get a whole lot of fruit all at one time. There are two ways to deal with this–share the harvest and/or preserve it. Homegrown Revolution has done both this week by mooching some lemons off of a friend’s tree and preserving them by making one of the essential ingredients of Moroccan food, L’hamd markad or preserved salted lemons. L’hamd markad is easy to make. Here’s a recipe from Cooking at the Kasbah by Kitty Morse:

12 or more unblemished organically grown Meyer or other lemons, scrubbed
Sea salt
fresh lemon juice as needed

Pat lemons dry. Cut a thin dime-sized piece from both ends of each lemon. Set each lemon on end and make a vertical cut three quarters of the way through, so halves remain attached at the base – do not cut all the way through. Turn lemon upside down and make a similar cut through at a 90 degree angle to the first. Fill each cut with as much salt as it will hold. Place lemons carefully in a sterilized wide-mouth glass quart jar. Compress lemons while adding them until no space is left and lemon juice rises to the top. Lemons must be covered with juice at all times, so add lemon juice if necessary. Seal and set aside in dark place.

Keep for 4 to 6 weeks before using. To use, discard seeds, and rinse lightly if necessary. Once opened, store in refrigerator where they will keep up to 6 months.

In the photo you will see that we added some spices to our lemons. This is an optional thing. A traditonal spice blend would be something like 3 peppercorns, 3 cloves and one cinnamon stick.

Also, we found it impossible to follow the command in the recipe to cut the lemons this way and that, cleverly leaving them whole and stuffing them with salt. That just didn’t work because our lemons were too big to fit in the mouth of the jar while whole. You see, we’re using honkin’ big ghetto lemons, not nice little Meyers. So we cut them up into quarters and just made sure they were well coated in salt.

You can use your L’hamd markad in a variety of dishes, from salads to meat stews. You use them in a relish sort of way, as a salty-sour accent. We want to try chopping them fine, blending them with other tasty things, like garlic, and sprinkling them on everything from greens to pizza.

There’s also an expensive condiment you can recreate at home by blending together 2 preserved lemons lemons, 2 tablespoons dijon mustard, 1/4 cup honey, 1 garlic clove, salt and pepper. Blend in some olive oil until it gets the consistency of mayonnaise.

Moroccan cuisine makes a lot of sense in Los Angeles as the two places have similar climates and all the stuff that grows in Morocco also grows in Southern California–olives, tomatoes, fava beans, dates, and mint. The only thing we’re missing are the sheep . . .

Homegrown Revolution’s month of fermentation continues with the following bubbling containers–from left to right:

Rye Sourdough Starter
More info in a future post, but rye flour is much more active than a starter made with white flour!

White Flour Starter
We’ve already ranted about this stuff here and here. So far, much success.

Crème Fraîche
Special thanks to Susan of Northeast LA’s “culture club” for giving us some Swedish fil mjolk culture. We gave it some cream to feed on to produce a delicious batch of crème fraîche, though you can also make crème fraîche with buttermilk .

Filmjölk
Once again, more filmjölk given some milk to feed on thus producing more . . . filmjölk. More info here.

Lacto-fermented Daikon Radish
We’ll report the results. In the meantime read all about lacto-fermentation from an excerpt from the book Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.