bacteria

KSF… My favourite!

So what’s a KSF? It’s my name for one of my favourite, most economical dishes… ‘Kitchen Scrap Ferment’. It’s just chopped vegetable leftovers after a couple of meals fermented in a salt solution, but ‘KSF’ sounds pretty cool. So… How do I make it?… It’s an ‘anaerobic’ (without oxygen) process using anaerobic bacteria. That means that the bacteria don’t like oxygen. The salt in the water stops the wrong bacteria from thriving. The acidity from the citrus helps too. I used to often get mold on the top of many of my ferments because I didn’t make sure the veggies were underwater and they got exposed to the small amount of air trapped under the lid. Thinking on it, I mused ‘I need a good way to keep the veggies under the water level, an air seal and acidity’ (that helps both the fermentation and the taste). One day I was inspired to use a thick slice of excess grapefruit

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Making a LAB culture from Yakult

You’ve all probably seen my other posts on culturing Lactic Acid Bacteria or LAB (sorry, not your sort of LAB, Athena). We culture the little fellas for our Bokashi setup. Today I thought about trying a different approach…culturing the bacteria from Yakult. For folks who don’t know, Yakult is a health drink made mostly from water and the Shirota strain of Lactic Acid Bacteria. It’s very common and ridiculously cheap in Asia and not so common and equally ridiculously expensive here in Oz. Now, I’m assuming that this experiment won’t work because the Yakult people probably sterilize or pasturize the final product. However, having some knowledge of how bacteria feed and incorporate DNA from their food source into themselves if that DNA is more efficient, I reckon it could still be worth a shot. All I’ve done is get 2 clean jars, fill them with 200ml of milk and add 1 tablespoon of the culture to them. Then the jars

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A week old and no smell

What’s that golden, bubbly liquid in the pic? It’s week old urine, thats what! Yuck! You may well say, but its been modified by the addition of billions of bacteria that have fermented it over the last week. Now, it has only a sweet smell and tiny bubbles. No, I havent tasted it. Someone posted a link on Facebook a while back about fermenting urine and I thought I’d give it a go using my own and some of the Bokashi liquid that I make. I’m not sure what super powers it has, but I’m working on the theory that fermentation improves our food and our compost, so why can’t it improve our bodily wastes in some way. I’m also making the wild assumption that the fermenting bacteria have out competed any nasties that might have come about through normal aerobic fermentation of the urine. One of these days, I’m going to have to get a decent microscope! Anyone got

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