How beneficial would it be to have affordable fermented foods which build your immune system while providing natural nutrition and probiotics for your family during this crazy coronavirus pandemic? Due to the neverending negative news about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), many people are seeking helpful tips and reliable information about affordable foods and benefits for health and immunity.
Right now, many people are buying fake Frankenfoods, harmful health hazards, and toxic products that unintentionally harm their long term health. To avoid these health hazards, it is beneficial to look for affordable, easy, and healthy whole foods. Common sense confirms that eating healthy whole foods that have been consumed for thousands of years makes good sense when the negative news around us gets too crazy. Being better educated and doing a little research on the history of natural nutrition will lead us to a treasure of cultured, fermented, and pickled foods to boost our optimal immune system and resilience. Remember, our family cultures and history offer us clues, habits, and insights to help us survive and thrive by using their fantastic knowledge and traditions as our nutritional foundation.
This blog post is dedicated to helping people learn the many benefits of making delicious and nutritious cultured, fermented and pickled foods as part of a good pandemic plan.
Some reasons to make your own cultured, fermented, and pickled foods include avoiding the artificial additives and cheap distilled vinegar pickled products, which are not healthy and enjoy better probiotics and food quality making your own while saving money.
Boost Immune System with Fermented Foods
Our ancestors depended on cultured, fermented, and pickled foods for health, nutrition, and even survival. Without the robust process of naturally fermented and preserved dairy, fish, fruits, herbs, legumes, meats, and vegetables, most of us would not be around today. Whether we call it culturing, fermenting, or pickling, the process is very similar. The basic concept is to allow various food items to naturally culture or ferment in such a way as to enable friendly bacteria to interact with the food and convert it into a more bioavailable, digestible, and storable form. In the process, naturally cultured, fermented, and pickled foods are preserved for longer shelf life even without modern refrigeration.
Well-known fermented foods include beets, kimchi, and sauerkraut. There is a wide range of cultured dairy products to include cheese, cottage cheese, kefir, sour cream, and yogurt, to name a few. Examples of pickled vegetables include beets, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, cucumbers, eggplant, okra, olives, onions, peppers, tomatoes. Cultured, cured, and pickled animal products include bone broth, herring, jerky, pickled pigs feet, potted meats, salami, salmon, sardines, and Vienna sausage. Even cacao and coffee involve the process of fermenting the fruit and seeds to create a higher quality product. Even ketchup, mustard, relish, and tomato sauce are additional examples of foods that originated as cultured foods. Porridge was made by cooking oatmeal and allowing it to culture with a little milk added to provide some lactobacillus bacteria to ferment the food. Sourdough bread is another example of a cultured food. Soybeans are fermented into miso, natto, soy sauce, and tempeh.
As you can see, almost any type of food can and has been cultured to enhance some of the food qualities and also extend the shelf life. These fermented whole foods provide a lot of antioxidants, enzymes, fiber, minerals, phytonutrients, trace elements, and vitamins.
At this point, you may be curious and thinking about how to go about making a batch of fermented foods such as kimchi or sauerkraut. Well, it is as simple as finely shredding some green or red cabbage and placing it in a bowl of brine (salt water with or without spices) and allowing it to ferment for a few days in a covered container or kraut crock. After a few days, you can transfer the mixture to glass jars with liquid and seal them. After a few days to several weeks, depending on the temperature, you can slow or stop the fermentation process by putting them in cold storage or refrigeration. Many of our ancestors stored foods to consume during the winters without freezers or refrigeration. I have consumed many jars of sauerkraut that I made in the fall and stored in the garage for six months or longer and found it to be delicious and nutritious. In Sugar Land Texas, the temperatures would range from 28 degrees to 80 degrees over that time. Avoid foods that look moldy or taste bad.
Some of my favorite spices include bay leaf, black pepper, chili peppers, dill, garlic, ginger, habanero peppers, jalapeno peppers, juniper berries, seaweed, and turmeric. Adding different spices is a great way to boost the health benefits and taste. Some people even add in specific cultures or probiotics to create a prebiotic and probiotic-rich fermented food. There are literally hundreds of foods and thousands of recipes to make cultured, fermented, and pickled foods. You can find many DIY procedures, recipes, and suggestions online or in great books like Wild Fermentation Cultured & Fermented Foods by Sandor Katz.
By buying or growing your own low-cost foods like beets, cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, grapes, mustard, and sesame greens to make your own cultured, fermented and pickled foods them you can create a nice supply of shelf-stable and storable foods to gain some degree of food independence, resilience, and self-sufficiency to ensure your health and well being. These methods of food preservation and storage allow you to stock up with healthy, low-cost foods to thrive despite whatever disease or turmoil may cause disruptions and distress.
It is important to remember that our ancestors discovered ways to prepare and preserve food to see them through cold, long winters, droughts, and famines. So, tap into your ancestors’ wisdom and discover the joy of making cultured, fermented, and pickled foods as you strengthen your DIY self-sufficiency skills and enhance your health. Remember, there is an abundance of low cost and easy to grow foods that can be stored for months when you learn the secrets your ancestors used to survive cold winters, droughts and other tough times. It is up to each of us to choose what we do or do not do feed our family and improve our immune system and resilience during a pandemic.
Passion and Purpose
The passion and purpose of Morningstar NEWS is to condense hours of research down to two minutes of education, information, and inspiration for a healthy lifestyle and mindset. Remember, it is essential to eat and prepare healthy foods, so choose wisely. What will you do to make your health and immune system a higher priority during the current coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak?
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