Table Of ContentKOMBUCHA, KEFIR, AND
BEYOND
A FUN & FLAVORFUL GUIDE TO FERMENTING
your own
PROBIOTIC BEVERAGES
at home
ALEX LEWIN & RAQUEL GUAJARDO
CONTENTS
PREFACES
1 WHY FERMENT YOUR DRINKS?
2 OUR CULTURED HISTORY
3 FERMENTATION, SCIENCE, AND HEALTH
4 BEFORE YOU START
5 FIVE-MINUTE RECIPES
6 STARTERS, MASTER RECIPES, AND GENERAL PRINCIPLES
7 KOMBUCHA AND JUN
8 VEGETABLE DRINKS
9 SODAS
10 BEERS, GRAINS, AND ROOTS
11 WINES, CIDERS, AND FRUITS (AND VINEGAR!)
12 MEXICAN PRE-HISPANIC DRINKS
13 FERMENTED COCKTAILS
RESOURCES
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
RECIPE DIRECTORY
INDEX
PREFACES
RAQUEL GUAJARDO
I WAS BORN and raised in Monterrey, Nuevo León, an industrial town surrounded
by mountains in the north of Mexico that is well known for its carne asada,
cabrito, tortilla de harina, and beer. As a proud regiomontana, I have always
loved beer, but I didn’t associate it with fermentation, and never in my wildest
dreams could I have imagined myself brewing my own.
For me, fermentation started in Seattle, Washington, during a Real Food
Cooking Course taught by Monica Corrado. Among other things, she taught me
how to make sauerkraut and the principles of fermentation. She recommended
the book Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, and soon I was hooked on
everything fermented.
Then, two years ago, I invited Sandor to teach a workshop in Monterrey. More
people got hooked, and I got inspired to experiment and come up with my own
recipes.
Then I invited Alex to teach another fermentation workshop in Monterrey, on
kimchi and the science of fermentation. During his stay, he tasted a couple of my
fermented beverages, and I am pretty sure he enjoyed them. After all, the idea
for this book was born in my kitchen as we drank pulque and tepache.
ALEX LEWIN
I GREW UP in the Northeast of the U.S., in New York, Connecticut, and
Massachusetts. I started thinking and reading about food and health when I was
in my 20s. One book would say one thing, another book would say something
different and incompatible, and both would have good justifications for what
they said. I was curious by nature, and at the time I hated unsolved mysteries, so
I started reading more. This led me on a path of discovery informed by Andrew
Weil, Sandor Katz, Sally Fallon, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, the
Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and many more. In fact, my views are
informed by almost everyone I talk with about health and food. And I have made
my peace with unsolved mysteries—there will always be some things that we
don’t know, and I’m okay with that. Fermentation, especially with wild starters,
depending as it does on invisible forces and serendipity, is a great stage on which
to dance with the unknown.
I speak for both Raquel and myself when I say that we’ve enjoyed being
learning partners together. Our skills and perspectives and communities are
similar in so many ways, and complementary in so many others; working
together has been fun and enlightening.
We are all stronger when we work together, embracing difference, diversity,
the unfamiliar, and the unknown. Do not let misguided demagogues suggest
otherwise.
We hope that you enjoy this book that we’ve brewed up for you. Salud!
CHAPTER ONE
WHY FERMENT YOUR DRINKS?
We are in the midst of a health crisis—or, to put it
another way, a disease crisis. For proof, just turn on the
television. You’ll be exhorted to buy diabetes
maintenance equipment; cholesterol-lowering drugs
with significant side effects; digestive nostrums that
blunt unpleasant symptoms without addressing
underlying causes; allergy pills that suppress the
immune system; painkillers; and more.
The interspersed commercials are for sugary
drinks, junk food, and toxic personal care
and cleaning products, the use of which
likely contributes to conditions such as
diabetes, cardiovascular disease, digestive
problems, and allergies. Sound familiar? It doesn’t seem like this is a complete
coincidence.
Love it or hate it, advertising is a reliable bellwether: The commercials we see
are the ones that sell product and make money. Super Bowl commercials, for
example, are the caviar of the domestic advertising world. Guaranteed millions
of viewers, these ads cost 10 million dollars per minute. Yet during the 2016
Super Bowl, we saw an ad for a drug to address a very specific malady that
many of us had never considered: opioid-induced constipation. Opioids are
opium-derived and opium-related drugs, including a long list of prescription
painkillers and street drugs. If we were a nation of healthy people, we’d be
seeing different commercials.
Mexico finds itself in the same boat as the United States. It is one of the
world’s most obese countries with one of the highest infant diabetes rates.
American fast food chains and supermarkets have been crowding out mercados,
where fresh seasonal food used to be found. For the younger generations, buying
American fast food is part of the modern way of life, cool and hip, like having a
cell phone, whereas the typical grandma foods such as pozole, tamales, and mole
are old-fashioned. Even the tortilla, the hallmark of Mexican food, has changed
for the worse, and sadly, traditional tortillerías are disappearing.
As the United States goes, so go not only her American neighbors, but much
of the world. With the expansion of markets for big-business food and tobacco
products comes diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer, and chronic digestive
and immune system dysfunction. And these maladies create new markets for
pharmaceutical products.
Are drugs really the best way to break this cycle? Maybe fermented beverages
can help.
WHAT IS FERMENTATION, ANYWAY?
Fermentation is the transformation of food through the action of microbes.
Microbes are microscopic life forms, including bacteria, yeasts, and molds.
(Viruses are sometimes considered microbes. They have no metabolism, so they
aren’t direct agents of fermentation, and they won’t be discussed here.) Via
chemical reactions, these microbes transform carbohydrates (sugars and
starches) into acids, alcohols, and gases. Along the way, small but useful
amounts of vitamins and enzymes are created too.
Digestion refers to processes in living organisms that break down food into
various components. Digestion is generally accelerated by heat and catalyzed by
special proteins called enzymes. Enzymes are employed by all life forms, from
microbes to mammals. In fact, it turns out that many of the same enzymes used
by microbes are also found in the human digestive tract. This is not a
coincidence—many of our gut enzymes are created by microbes that live there.
These enzymes play a crucial role in human digestion.
These enzymes also play a crucial role in fermentation, which happens when
microbes use them to start breaking down food. These microbes are effectively
predigesting our fermenting food, in some of the same ways that we ourselves
digest food inside our bodies, using some of the same enzymes. So when we eat
fermented foods, we are getting ahead of the game; these foods are easier for our
bodies to digest. This may help us to better assimilate important nutrients from
the food—we have more time to break down compounds that could inhibit
nutrient uptake. It may also reduce difficult-to-digest and inflammatory
compounds, so we face fewer signs of digestive difficulties such as gas, bloating,
acid reflux, and heartburn. This helps us to mitigate, avoid, and sometimes
reverse chronic long-term digestive diseases.
As by-products of metabolism and digestion, some microbes create
meaningful amounts of B and C
vitamins. Some microbes also create
other, more obscure human
nutrients, including some whose
functions we are still learning about
and some that we may never know
about or understand. Additionally,
many of the products of
fermentation promote health, stave
off disease, and/or actively reverse
some types of health problems in
humans and other bigger creatures.
This is particularly the case when
small amounts of minerals or
organic materials, such as herbs, are
included in the fermenting process.
We are only beginning to understand
some of the substances and
mechanisms involved.
EAT REAL FOODS
Food science does not necessarily prioritize the discovery of new food nutrients
—there’s much more incentive to invent new industrial processes that save time
and money, or to create new flavorings for potato chips and fast food. From the
point of view of human health, food science advances slowly, sometimes taking
two steps forward and one step back. Unfortunately, that means the messages
that reach consumers about what they should or shouldn’t eat may not be
focused on what would help them maintain robust health.
Because food science isn’t focused on nutrition, it’s worth our while to seek
out real foods—foods that are close in form to how they occur in nature,
processed in the home kitchen, with trace compounds intact. Industrially
processed foods almost always lose nutritional value during processing; even if
they look okay on paper, they are often stripped of poorly understood or
unknown trace compounds. Their production process serves the food producers
first and the public second or third or not at all.
Consider the story of Soylent: In 2013, a pair of young entrepreneurs were
creating tech products that they hoped would change the world. Because they
wanted to maximize the time they spent working on their projects, they were
frustrated that it took so long to select, procure, prepare, and eat food. So they
