Winding Down: Kimchi and beer
The latest fermentation effort at my house is making Kimchi, the Korean fare made from cabbage, garlic and other good things. Besides giving us good food for low cost and minimal effort, Kimchi has healthy properties, as do many fermented foods.
A recent article in Molecular Psychiatry addresses how the wellness of our gut bacteria can influence our neural development, cognition, behavior and more. No doubt the livelihood of our gut flora can be bolstered by fermented vegetables like Kimchi.
The process is not so difficult. Our fermentation specialist, wife Nancy, explains that to make sauerkraut all that is needed is cabbage. This is because the liquid that comes from the cabbage, combined with the wild yeasts and bacteria resident in the leaves, are all you need to start and complete the fermentation process.
For Kimchi, however, a brine is needed because other vegetables are added and the liquid level must be high enough to cover everything and prevent contamination. Apparently there are as many Kimchi recipes as there are people eating the stuff, so experimentation is needed to find a formula that agrees with your palate. What combination is the heathiest? Who would know?
According to a 2005 BBC article, Kimchi acted as a cure for Korean chickens with bird flu. And by the way, no Koreans got the SARS virus while many other people did not fare so well. I also heard that Germans didn’t get SARS either, possibly because they drink a lot of fermented beer, or perhaps because they consume a lot of sauerkraut? Disbelievers can Google “SARS and Kimchi” or “drugs made through fermentation.”
With global warming, new viruses attacking every day and the pending presidential election, one can be made extremely fearful. Thus I am thinking of hedging my bets by making enough Kimchi to inoculate our entire family, chickens included. Perhaps stocking up on hundreds of jars stored in an underground bunker, much like the bomb shelters we used during the cold war. Just when we’re feeling like a frogs in a pot, hope springs eternal with Kimchi and beer!
Changing the subject back to home brew, when in the military in South East Asia I learned what happens to beer stored in high heat over time. Huge pallets of beer sitting in the sun for months made even good brands of beer like Pabst and Hams unappealing.
In Ramona our back porch easily goes over 100 degrees and inside the house over 80 degrees in the summer, not conducive to good fermentation or storage. A small drink fridge was out of the question for two reasons — too small and poorly insulated. However, we found a medium sized chest freezer at Costco for not much more than the cost of a small drink fridge, very well insulated and it holds more than four cases of beer, or two batches of home brew. All we had to do was add an inexpensive controller and like a miracle our home brew is always a perfect 40 degrees on the back porch in the blistering heat — with a small electric bill to boot.
Does anyone know how to convince chickens to eat Kimchi?
Send your ideas for this column to: dpatterson998@yahoo.com.