ecosophia | Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 174

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Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 174

We are now in the fourth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary more than three years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health are anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; ~~public health authorities~~ government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.

3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

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iridescent scintillating elver - following up about sauerkraut from last thread. I just made my first sauerkraut too so I’ll find out how it went soon. As to your question, I’m not sure, I just followed the recipe. Perhaps others have advice as to what to do if not enough liquid. The recipe i have says mix one cabbage, 1 tbs caraway seeds , 1 tablespoon sea salt, 4 tbs whey or add additional 1 tbs salt, pound until juices come the surface. Mix and put into quart sized mason jar and pound until juices come to the top. I didn’t need to add extra liquid. Best of luck with your experimenting!
Tamar

Actually small correction - mix cabbage, caraway, salt and whey (or more salt) in bowl and pound for 10 minutes, then put into quart sized mason jar and pound until juices come to the surface.
-t

You don't need whey for the cabbage to ferment. Don't stress about the salt, just make sure you see bubbles forming and the cabbage is submerged.

Jed

So many ways to make pickle - the recipe I followed was different to yours - maybe harder to get it wrong than one thought? The author of my recipe was a stickler for specific quantities (0.4oz ginger, 0.2oz garlic, what the deuce... !!!) and kept warning not to use too much salt... which was way less than in your recipe anyway. Still, with kimchi the salt is rinsed out before fermentation so maybe garlic and ginger assist that aspect of the process.

In the end I doubled the salt in the extra brine, to make 2% saline - still not strong but it was to top up the jars after the already salted cabbage didn't release enough liquid so hopefully will be enough to stop the wrong kind of microbes growing.

iridescent scintillating elver

Ok, looks like I’ll need to find a new recipe! My husband says this one tastes like caraway and not like sauerkraut. I’ll find a new recipe and try again!
-t

Dear JMG, sorry to stray from stated forum topic, wanted to keep the discussion in one thread rather than moving over to FF...

Tamar, I had assumed your recipe from that book would resemble the one I had found from the WAP site, given the association of Trad Nutrition author.
Wrong of me.
However, the recipe I found thereupon threatens to be extremely yummy. No caraway :)

It is https://www.westonaprice.org/golden-sauerkraut/#gsc.tab=0
(maybe a relative of yours, dear host?)

Thank you! I’ll give it a try! I may have also had a problem with not enough liquid, because it looked pretty dry when I opened the jar. The kimchi from nourishing traditions was delicious however, and turned out fine every time I made it.

perhaps this isn’t too far off track of this forum topic since the Covid debacle is what landed me here, focusing on developing a more complete picture of what I need to do to restore health. Fermented foods seems to be one aspect of restoring gut health that I didn’t realize before. And gut health being a key component of overall metabolic health.

Casey Means talks about the digestive system as being the boundary between us and the outside world and we need to have healthy boundaries to be healthy. I have been working on that idea generally so this seems to physically support that idea. Fermented foods contribute healthy bacteria to your GI system keeping it healthy. Ultra processed foods support less beneficial bacteria, which lead to Inflammation which causes leaky gut and poor control of what goes in, allowing more toxins in.
-t

The sauerkraut recipe I "inherited" from my mom and grandmom (and they probably inherited it from generations before them) is really simple:

You need a container suitable for fermentation, i.e. which lets gases out, but no air in. In a pinch, any mason jar will do if you don't close the lid firmly (otherwise you'll end up with a exploded sauerkraut on your walls and ceiling...).

For the actual kraut, it's 2% salt per weight of sliced cabbage. I.e. for 1kg of kraut (= 1000 grams), we use 20 grams of salt - divide weight of cabbage by 100, then multiply with 2. Try to get "good" salt without additives (but really, this has been done with supermarket salt, too, and works just fine). We don't add any spices etc - these are added during cooking. But I know other people do, and only your imagination is the limit here.

Put a layer of the sliced cabbage into the pot, add a bit of salt (just use common sense to distribute it somewhat evenly throughout the kraut). Pound/Press down hard e.g. with the back of your fist until it's a bit mashed (10 minutes? I've never had to pound even remotely that long!). Add the next layer of cabbage and salt, pound, etc etc. If your hands are sensitive to the salt, use gloves (but since the pounding doesn't take that long, for me it's good enough to just wash off the salt afterwards).

In our big pot, we then spread a clean cloth on top of the kraut, add the "weights" which came with the pot (a clean, cooked stone or a weighted down plate would be just as suitable), and then fill the brim with water to prevent air from coming in and put the lid on. Store the pot in a reasonably cool place (we make a lot, and thus fill the pot right in the coolest part of the basement since it gets heavy), but not in places where it will freeze or get close to freezing, as too low a temperature is also not good for fermentation.

The kraut usually has enough innate liquid to rise to an adequate level, although this might take a day or two. I think we've had one year where this wasn't the case, the kraut felt extremely dry and we added a bit of water - but I'm not even sure about this anymore. Our pot is in the basement, and we usually forget about the kraut for the next few weeks and don't even check inside the pot during this time.

The water in the brim needs to be refilled occasionally, but we've had years when we simply forgot about it, it fell dry for a long time, and the kraut still turned out just fine. I'm sure it helps that our pot has been used for kraut for ages now and there are probably good little fermetation critters in all the pores...

For cooking, do not rinse the kraut - but don't salt it either. The salt from the fermentation is fine. Saute some cut up onion in a bit of fat, add the kraut, some juniper berries, bay leaf, a bit of white wine or white sparkling wine (in a pinch, red is fine, too, although it will show), and however much of the kraut brine comes out of the pot anyway when you lift out the kraut. If necessary for cooking, also water.

Cook to your taste, serve, enjoy. We like it with cooked potatoes (with butter and salt) and German style sausages, e.g. liver sausage. Bonus points for home frying your potatoes with the liver sausage and serving that with the kraut.

Oh, and I guess you can also eat it raw for health purposes. ;-) But the cooked kraut will do you a lot of good, too. (For people who are sensitive to this, cooked kraut will also show in their digestion.)

That's it - nothing fancy. But seriously, sauerkraut is one of the hardest things to get wrong. I can't recall a year when it has failed us. The taste and consistency vary a bit, as is natural, but the kraut itself has always turned out yummy. If you intend to do it in the future, it might be smart to invest into a decent kraut pot (earthenware), as the fermentation will get better and better in a well worn-in pot. Make sure it has a lid and a rim for water. Don't fret about whether it comes with weights, they are the easiest thing to replace with something else.

Milkyway

I forgot…

1. Add caraway during cooking, too (or alternatively afterwards - some people like less, some like more)

2. If the kraut absolutely stays too dry even after two days or so, and you have to add water, I‘d do so sparingly (only as much as absolutely necessary, the kraut isn’t supposed to swim) and probably not add any extra salt - the salt which is already in the kraut will suffice.

Generally, salt isn‘t necessary for fermentation. It will change the „environment“ and keep some less desirable things at bay, and does make it more likely that the fermentation goes according to plan. But it‘s not necessary, and you could do kraut without, it‘ll just be a bit more likely to spoil. Too much salt isn‘t good, though, as too much will also inhibit the good fermentation critters, and thus your stuff will spoil for sure.

3. The above instructions can be used as general recipe for any kind of leafy vegetable: 2% salt per veggie weight, then do the same things as for kraut.

For „chunky“ veggies (carrots, cucumbers, …), you‘ll need brine. In this case, forego the pounding, instead cover with salt brine: 5% salt per water weight. The weight of the veggies does not matter in this case. (For water, in a metric system, this is easy: 1 litre of water = 1 kilogram of water. Divide by 100, multiply with 5).

Then follow the rest of the procedure, minus the cloth - keep stuff below the water with weights, plates, …

Milkyway,

I hereby award you my recipe writers' all time prize. Relative proportions, general methods, exceptional cases: one page is all it takes to convey the principles of an entire genre of cooking.

It renders all the clickbait and word-wasting recipe sites redundant in one beautiful swoop.

When is your recipe book coming out?

iridescent scintillating elver

ROTL!!

Thanks a lot, you made my day. :-))

And yep, you nailed it - imo a lot about cooking (and especially about fermenting, and about working with herbs, and about …) is just knowing a basic, transferable „recipe“ and understanding why some things are done. These fancy recipes for basic stuff… „use 3.7 grams of spice X“… har! It never tastes as good as the spices you just throw in on a whim.

All the rest is imagination and courage. ;-)

Milkyway

Thank you Milkyway! I appreciate all the detail you’ve given as well! I had never even heard of a special pot or weights for fermenting foods. And I am learning from you and all other contributors about how salt is used (and how much!). Thank you, and all others who added input! Tamar

You can use just literally salt and cabbage. I use a gram scale and go for 2% salt by weight or slightly less (less than about 1.5% and it gets dodgy). You just shred some of the cabbage you’ve weighed out, pound till there’s enough juice to cover (I’ve never in decades of making it encountered cabbage that will not produce enough juice if you keep pounding long enough), and keep going in batches, adding salt more or less evenly as you go. I think it tastes the best without other spices personally. Sometimes I will add some shredded carrot and radish. I aim closer to 2% salt (not lower) if there’s a significant amount of carrot since the yeasts seem to like it.

I've always heard 5% salt (by weight) to weight of vegetable (or fish, if you fancy making one of them old roman-style fish ferments... ;))

That has been my own rule of thumb, and it seems to work well. Best wishes.

PS - I just checked back through my notebooks and realise why working from memory can be deceiving!

Actually, in both cases, the ratio of salt to weight of "stuff" (veg or fish) that I have used in the past is 1/50. This translates to 2% by weight, and not 5%.

Many apologies all.

Ok thanks all! I’m going to try again, with just cabbage and salt.
-t

Please note that I have corrected my advice (why you should never accept random advice without checking it!).

The ratio is 1/50 by weight (salt/whatever).

My memory played me false by "remembering" this number as 5% and not 2% by weight. Please take note.

Yes got it thank you!

From the responses here and own experience it would seem that the functional range is between roughly 2 and 8%. Your numbers are in range either way! ;)

I always use red cabbage for my sauerkraut, because it provides a natural pH indicator. The cabbage goes in purple, but turns rosy-red as the acid is created during fermentation. If I let yeast grow (from the surface, down), the product turns blue as the yeast consumes the lactic acid. (I would not eat blue sauerkraut!)

Also, I use a double layer of waxed paper over a 1-Qt Mason jar, held on with the usual canning lid right. It keeps the dust and spores out, but prevents pressure build-up. A typical head of red cabbage fills two jars. I cut plastic disks to hold the cabbage below the brine, weighted with a small jar ("baby food") of stones. Any strip of cabbage exposed to the air becomes a pathway to spoilage.

I can't say that having sauerkraut in my diet has prevented COVID infection, but both times I tested positive, I was back on my feet in 36 hours, so (at age 65, when the youth start to warn us about frailty) I must be doing something right.

Lathechuck

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Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 174

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