Rewilding Fermentation with Wines and Brines TPS-0006

Today, I want to share a bit about my very long awaited, sometimes glorious, sometimes not so glorious food preservation techniques, ancestral techniques, homesteading. Pickling, fermenting, using different traditions of partnerships with microbiology to favor the growth of microorganisms that are beneficial and to strategically inhibit the growth of harmful forms of life that can spoil food and can create toxins and can be very dangerous.

There were some white knuckle moments so far in this journey, but I have wanted to get into this for years and years. In my early 20s my roommate and I would go to the food bank and get government fruit bags, add yeast in bottles and create this Mad Dog type cider that knocked us all out and gave us the spins so fast.

So I had a little bit of home brewing experience with alcohol, that was a blessing as a person in the various DIY movements, for that to cross my path.

I did a bit of fermentation with just cabbage in my late 20s, just doing some gut health stuff. But I was not yet creating salt brines.

There's a lot it. It can be a turn off if it fails like when some people try to grow a plant and then it dies on them, and they don't feel like they have a green thumb. They say they have a brown thumb, and they just sort of give up on it.

There are definitely a lot of failed experiments in fermentation that can turn people off, whether it's the smell or just the uncertainty of whether it's being done right or whether it's being done wrong.

I've also done a bit of kombucha, although I do feel now that the sugar input into that process can be somewhat at odds with an overall paleo diet and lifestyle.

I'm sure there are people who do clever kombucha hacks to be ever more ethical in how they go about that process. But for me, I'm not gonna be focusing a lot on that.

What I really have been focusing on and living, literally day to day, meal by meal is by what I'm calling a brine wine and citric acid crystalline, rather, so wine, brine and citric acid crystalline.

So I’m just gonna briefly plant this flag, give myself this badge of surviving. It's been over six months of 100 % reliance every day on these techniques and kind of tweaking them and evolving them to get better results.

I'm very satisfied so far. So starting with the first category of the brine, I'm not trying to give this as an educational lecture, this is more of checking in and making a sort of journal entry of my experiences.

So whatever references I make to the science of it, always please, of course, do your own research or get your own advisement before putting anything into your body that I mentioned or doing any procedure that I talk about.

For me it’s been about being remote and not wanting to go out, of course, the pandemic is the perfect impetus for people to do more home, backyard, front yard, herb and vegetable gardening.

And if they have fruit trees, or can afford fruit trees, and get that aspect dialed in, also berry bushes, and even nuts, if that's possible. Back to the land, back to the homestead, the back to gardening movement, it really surged thanks to this bit of a silver lining.

All due respect to the people who have died and are still suffering long COVID, and the people who will die and continue to suffer long COVID, I’m hoping I won't become one of them.

But part of the reason why people are surviving and not dying or being more resilient is that they're really building on or evolving their health strategy.

So, of course, always gonna be advocating to make every effort possible to clean up the diet and to get more local.

I have so much experience, so many years,, so many trees and plants planted by my hands.

However, most of that planting has been on other people's properties.

I’m just barely starting now with my own property, and also under the most extreme conditions that I've ever been under, period.

It's really pushed me to go into something, synchronistically or serendipitously. This perfect storm of circumstances that took me away from the gardening that I had been doing that was ridiculously abundant and lush and so forgiving, such a temperate climate with so much moisture and so much already established.

Before moving to the desert on my own land, I was renting farm land in the Garden of Eden, and now I'm out in the desert, literally.

So everything that I was doing, obviously, all of my access to all those crops is gone, and they're just gonna be left to whoever may or may not care to take over. Or they just bolt, go to seed, drop some seeds, hopefully some of them become volunteers, or indigenize, is another word, they just self-re-seed.

Hopefully there's a legacy of stuff that kind of goes a little bit wild from what I left there, but since that was immediately, abruptly cut off, based on my pivoting of my overall survival strategy, I end up instantaneously overnight going to a scenario where I'm only eating food that I bring in. It’s only canned food, or if it is fresh food, then it has a very limited time span before it gets devoured by all the critters around me.

Because of lack of refrigeration, which I'm not really interested in bringing refrigeration to this site...

Eventually, there will be some form of cooling with what you would call a root cellar design, or with the earth tubes, where you can basically harvest and direct the the cool temperatures of several feet under the surface of the Earth that remains relatively constant.

You can direct that with clever design, piping, to keep food cool and cool yourself. That's gonna be an ongoing project for the coming months and years.

But this is very stark contrast of going from land that was moist, had an almost year round fog, it was very forgiving and on grid with water, to moving here and having no water, no nothing, no crops established…No infrastructure to even make planting viable, I need to build wind breaks, I need to dig depressions in the ground.

I need to do long term earthwork type projects and rainwater catchment projects that are gonna literally take one rainfall and trap the moisture from it, a significant percentage of it, into deep mulch pits that are going to be conducive to supporting growing things throughout both the wet and dry season.

So in the interim, to get to the point where I'm bootstrapping the system and it's actually producing its own oasis of fresh produce, I have to import everything.

Part of that strategy has been, let's say I have a can of some form of hopefully organic fruit or vegetable products.

There are certain things where one can is actually in itself a relatively balanced meal. It could be a soup or some sort of food product that makes sense to just eat the whole thing at once because nothing is gonna last more than a couple hours out here before it goes bad.

That's one way to do it. And of course, I'm saving all of the cans to be used as as seedling planters. I’ll plant seeds in the cans and be done with plastic pots, and start to switch a hundred percent over into non-plastic horticulture.

So there are food cans that I can open, eat it all the contents, put some water in it, swish it around, drink the rinse water, not sparing a drop, not wasting a drop, and then that gets stored to eventually be planted in later.

But then there's obviously cans of food where I'm only gonna wanna eat maybe a third of it. I don't usually follow the number of servings on things. I don't know if it's because I've always just felt like I have a relatively high metabolism. I don't think I've ever followed the the the the serving recommend recommended serving size.

If I were meal planning for other people, I would probably follow those serving amounts, because I would go out of my way to make sure there was a more diverse number of entrees to a meal. Overall, I get a balanced diet, just as a emergent property. I'm not really doing a nutritionist level.

So there’s randomness to how much left over food will be in a can that’s been opened for a meal. That’s where these brining techniques come in to preserve what would have been traditionally the fresh harvest.

Similarly, I'm extending the shelf life of canned food where I don't have refrigeration, and I don't want modern refrigeration.

Knowing the risks of pressure cooking and canning, a process that can leave botulism growth almost to chance...You're kind of gambling that it's sealed properly and permanently, that the temperature was effectively able to get through all of the material in a uniform manner to cook everything at a high enough temperature that it would totally kill off all of the botulism producing microbes...

My understanding now, after doing more research and getting into this more, is that, if a salt brine ferment has mold on it, there are nuances to what molds are beneficial versus lethal, versus just off putting, or could turn your stomach or give you a sense of food poisoning.

I'm not gonna go anywhere near giving any advice on that. But I will say that the real fermentation geeks, the people who give workshops on this kind of stuff, I see the way that they personally determine whether or not one of their ferments is still edible based on the color of the mold.

Often you can just scrape off some mold, and I’ve heard and experienced that it can be okay to eat some mold that’s not particularly potentially harmful…you’d have to know that stuff to be safe.

I'm not gonna give any color coding, litmus test type of advice on that, but the experts give very boldly advise, I will defer to them.

So for me, it was just, having this dream, having this passion, doing a bit of searching for videos online, and then finding some long duration videos uploaded of workshops.

I found everything from the very strictly scientific, public health minded university extension courses where they are using science and research based recommendations of how to do the process and not risk harm to yourself.

Then other videos featuring artisanship of fermentation chefs and instructors. Watching the way they presenting it, it's so welcoming and, it helps to diffuse a lot of the fears around the dangers of doing this.

I synthesized the very strict scientific approaches with the more more folkloric and more artisan style approaches, where they may have their own style that they've evolved and that they would share and recommend based on their success in their non- clinical non-laboratory research, but the laboratory of their lives. So the anecdotal research.

It’s like sprouting, it’s been a big part of culinary life, more so in my past than my present as going with the paleo diet limits the number of types of sprouts I can do. That takes the legumes off the menu for the most part, although there is some gray area with that.

But sprouting is simple, and cheap ingredients can exponentially increase the nutritive value of food. It’s been so interesting to me in terms of personal finance, home economics...the idea that you add water to seeds and they can become either edible sprouts or sprouts you need to boil for them to be edible, or sprouts that become micro greens.

You took something that you could buy in bulk for dirt cheap, and then you transform it into something that a sells for a lot more if you wanted to get commercial with it.

By adding water, you're gonna increase the nutrient profile and the volume and the size of something exponentially.

It makes so much sense to get into sprouting and then taking it further, fermentation adds so many qualities. Just a few off the top of my head that are the most compelling...the process typically breaks down and consumes a lot of the elements of a raw food product that would have been somewhat harmful or even very harmful. It can be almost a form of cooking, killing some pathogens that otherwise would have to be killed with heat. Some compounds, like oxalic acids, can be broken down to some extent by fermentation.

A lot of the foods we take for granted are fermented, like green teas, black teas, a number of soy products.

If you look into it, you would be surprised that a lot of foods you take for granted have already gone through some kind of fermentation process, more than you might expect.

So take advantage of that science and to apply it.

Some people say, ferment everything.

I would say, start with the stuff that is known to work well, for example a kimchi recipe, or pickles which involves vinegar in addition to what would be a normal salt brine.

My research has been that you take basically a tablespoon of salt per quart jar.

You put the food products that you're going ferment in wide mouth quart jar, so that you can clean and reuse it.

Then create your own salt water solution and following whatever formula you like, it's basically as simple as adding salt to water,and if you sterilize the jar, utensils, and water, you will have more control over what is going on.

I have not wanted to spare the energy to go to that level myself. I have felt fine personally, both like psychologically and physically, after living now for quite a while, with this being a part of my daily life. It's worked out for me to take relatively, non sterile or freshly boiled water, but well filtered water that is just stored, stored in a bit of shade, and mixing that with the appropriate amount of salt to get the job done.

It does matter to not under-do the salt, because most importantly, in addition to creating an environment that favors the growth of the types of organisms that you want to be consuming and that will consume parts the food you put in there, you're you're basically feeding the biology that you want. The salt is favorable to the the life that you want in there, and it kills and inhibits the growth of most of anything else.

So there are number of steps involved to get that to be done right. But it's not difficult and so far so good, it's done great for me.

What has been an interesting journey is just seeing what different types of flavor profiles come out of different ingredients put into a ferment.

So far my main staple ferment is from what I brought, when I came here, I brought an arms load full of pumpkins that I had grown the previous season.

They were holding out pretty well, but I knew eventually they're gonna start disintegrating, they're gonna start molding.

By the time they got just a little bit soft to the touch, I cut them all up and put them into a salt brine.

I’ve been living off of that same brine, just keeping it alive, keeping it intact replenishing it, using it as a reservoir for the microbiology, maintaining a lineage of what you started with.

I've noticed that the pumpkin brine, has a very distinct and not the best smell, but it tastes really good. So that's part of the acquired taste as part of the lifestyle adjustment to fermentation.

If someone was to smell it, not knowing it’s a salt brine ferment, they might take the smell as an indication that it's gone bad. There is a list of diagnostics that can be done to know if something's gone bad.

I have had, of course, batches where little bits of the food material, little bits or chunks of get above the waterline, where that saline solution is inhibiting the growth of any molds. It’s like little tips of the icebergs that stick out, they can be obviously attacked where there's air. I've had to scrape those molds off and everything else was fine.

It's been very triumphant. There was a bit of white knuckling in the beginning.

Oh, man, did I do this, right? Was there enough salt that I’m gonna die of odorless, tasteless botulism toxin.

I'm gonna have to just sit and wait and see if I start having indications of that form of poisoning.

I remember distinctly the day where I said, I survived my first wild fermentation, and it meant a lot. That was months and months ago.

Still to this day, what was the big experiment for me, can I preserve meat in brine and survive and not end up with my stomach in a knot or hospitalized or dead from botulism.

It worked out very well. This practice of taking a can of sardines and adding left overs to a salt brine solution made with what just so happened to be the cheapest organic food product I could find, organic tomato sauce. It’s not necessarily a hundred percent resistant to botulism, but it's acidic in and of itself which helps.

I got myself a PH test kit with the litmus paper strips, and did the due diligence on making sure the brines were coming out to a level where it would scientifically guarantee that it's inhospitable to the botulism pathogen.

What matters is the learning and the evolution of the experience with it to where, while I'm not the greatest chef, I a poor man's chef, but I’m at least developing my skills beyond the college ramen diet.

Growing up I did the macaroni and cheese thing. Growing up, I've done the bargain bin obesogenic, carcinogenic, non organic, non paleo, loaded with gluten, everything wrong.

I did the everything wrong, standard American diet, sad diet, for at least 15, probably almost 20 years. Then I slowly started to get healthier and make smarter decisions.

I'd say now I'm making the smartest health conscious dietary decisions of my life, and I don't know what could be go beyond this, certainly getting to the point where I'm growing all of my own food. That’s when there are no question marks about any kind of other forms of contamination or GMOs.

I have grown a lot of my own food for many years now, though haven’t yet got to the point of being a hundred percent.

I'm still hoping to cross that bridge, I'm just up leveling everything slowly, one thing at a time.

This fermentation thing, it's allowed me to really have a breakthrough...The economics of it, and my ideal design constraint for myself of going zero waste...

I don't wanna have a bunch of trash going in the landfill behind my existence, my lifestyle, I wanna buy bulk containers that I can reuse so I'm not just constantly throwing stuff out.

What didn't make it through the mesh of that algorithm was the single serving sardine cans that I had been subsisting off of for years and feeling like they're low on the food chain. They are bottom feeders in a good way, in the sense that they don't accumulate many toxins in one lifetime. They’re less dangerous in terms of what they call biological magnification up the food chain.

You gotta be careful what kind of seafood you eat, because the higher up the food chain you get, the more compounding the effect up the food chain. If you eat a fish that only eats decaying material at the bottom of a body of water then you're only eating the total toxin accumulation of one lifetime of one or a few fish per serving.

But if you eat the fish that eats that fish, or the fish that ate both of those fish, it's like a pyramid.

If you imagine the number of lifetimes of fish that go into feeding these higher trophic levels up the food chain...you’re super concentrating mercury and all kinds of other nasty toxins that humans have, unfortunately polluted the water ways.

There is an art and science to having a healthy seafood integration with your diet. I'm not gonna give advice on that. That's something to consult with your nutritionist, dietitian, doctor, etc.

But I will say to my research and knowledge and understanding, the life hack is eating low on the seafood food chain, if you wanna be able to benefit from the low price of a lot of it.

I would consider it a bit of a life hack, because you can follow that rule, and buy cheaper products that go a long way.

Going back to the design constraint of not wanting to have a bunch of trash, I had just mountains of single serving sardine cans in my wake for years I tried messing around with getting crafty with them. It just didn't never really panned out. So, I just said to myself, you gotta buy the regular 15 ounce-ish size cans, like soup cans.

It took a few times to unfortunately, learn the hard way that eating more than a third of a can in a 24 hour period is gonna result in severe constipation.

I was really humbled by the experience of too much fish meat in a 24 hour period.

So the saving grace was my faith and my research and my success in opening a 15 ounce soup can size container of sardines...eating a third of it and then mixing the rest with organic tomato sauce and two large ladles full of this pumpkin brine that has been now aging for six months.

The brining pumpkins jar, it was probably a gallon size jar. I've been able to just dip into that brine and then mix that brine with the fish and the tomato sauce, then it would come to life, it would start creating its own pressure.

After tightening the lid of quart jar, I’d turn it back just ever so slightly, just so that a little bit of the gas could escape.

Then it would do its thing, and it would last. So I would then have a total of three days of fish, one day of unbrined fish, and then two days of brined fish.

I've been basically doing that for months, and I feel better than ever.

For me, it's a milestone. It's an achievement to say, I could break one chain of waste and now be fully reusing the cans for little planters and also buying way cheaper, at least half or more savings of money to buy those bigger sardine cans versus the single serving cans.

It's been an amazing journey. It feels so magical just to say, I'm adding this salt brine, which has its own flavor and has its own biology from being a ferment, and then being able to apply that to the the fish that, if otherwise left out in this environment, would have become very dangerous to consume.

That was a fear of whether it would work or not. I knew it scientifically works, but, I might mess it up, and then I could really be sorry.

So that first success meant a lot, and I've built on that, now now I can continue to iterate and change flavors.

I just did my first departure from my first test. I’m starting to not use tomato sauce, so risking a little bit of a drop in the acidity aspect, relying again on the brine, the salting to a level that would keep it safe.

There are cultures, I've heard that have brines, that are eaten in a hundred years as a delicacy.

That's an amazing tradition to be standing on the back backs of giants.

Some people say you should only have ferments at room temperature for a short period of days, and then it should be an refrigerator. Do your own research, you can choose your own adventure.

That's kind of a broad overview of how the brining experience has been for me and what the fundamental building blocks of that science are and how it's worked out for me.

I definitely would like to be able to eventually do different kinds of jerky and solar dehydration. Though there are ways that drying things can go wrong as well, where it may not dry fast enough, and you may have pathogen growth in the center of something, or you may not have sliced it thin enough.

The next frontier that I crossed was the wine. I've already been brewing my own honey wine, which is called mead, and adding different spices and herbs and other more accentuating fruits to the mix.

I started adding blueberry juice to the honey mead . It doesn’t make me some culinary genius. It's just pretty much a formula where anything that's sugary goes into the wines. If I end up with some sort of sugary content of something that I would rather feed to yeast, then to my candidate...then it goes into the wines.

Having that platform going already for at least a couple years, having that constant alcohol generation, fermentation, alcohol, yeast platform going, it didn't take much time to research that it’s a good way to preserve fruits, just put them in wine.

You can put them in salt brines, though that doesn’t sound that appealing to me.

I remember growing up partying, they called it jungle juice. If you cut up a watermelon and saturated with hard alcohol, they called that jungle juice.

That was my reference point, but that's not what I want to go for. I wanted to see if there would be enough of a pathogen neutralizing effect with fruit in a wine product.

So just submerging fruit from the canned fruit that I was getting, submerging that into my mead, or rather, putting the excess fruit from opening the can after the first serving that I ate, then putting the remaining fruit in a quart jar with mead.

I’d be sure to leave plenty of room from the top because they will get a little frothy in there, build up pressure, and possibly be leaking over or creating so much pressure that it's somewhat dangerous.

I got these things glass, sort of like cylinders. They look like hockey pucks, actually, or little ashtrays. They allow you to have a non porous object that is a weight, weighs the food in the brine down so that it prevents it from popping up and getting moldy. It’s nice because it obviously eliminates that fear factor and that extra work factor of decontaminating the moldy bits.

There's other ways to do it that you don't have to buy anything for, like zip lock bags with water in them, or plastic sandwich bags to kind of create this interesting water weight.

But again, moving away from plastic and going into more glass and metal things, these glass weights are the best gift I've given to myself as a homesteader.

The combination of a quart jar and these glass weights have really done a lot of good for me.

So merging with the wine, it's kept the fruit from being hospitable to pathogenic life forms growing that would spoil it. So the preservation factor is working. However, I will say the yeast that's still alive is going to eat sugars in the fruit and change its flavor. So there is a loss of the, the expected flavor experience of the fruit, though you can always add natural sweeteners later.

Eventually, I will be growing my own fruits and berries, again for the millionth time as a gardener, but now on my own property.

Once I get to that point, I won't have to buy anything anymore, but I will be preserving my own produce, my own excess.

I guess there's just sort of a trade off, let's say I was already a well established homesteader. You would probably think eating things fresh off the vine or off the branch, or picked from the plant...That's always gonna be a better experience than eating something that went through whatever process, whether it was cooking at extremely high temperatures which changes the texture a lot, or freezing, if that's an option, or whatever it is, you're gonna change the texture, you're gonna change the flavor, the nutrient values, so there's always that trade off.

But for me, this is like living on a razors edge of survival, trying to not die from the temperatures and dehydration alone, and certainly on top of that, not wanting to get any kind of food poisoning, life threatening or otherwise, or just have a really nauseous experience.

So far I’ve been successful, but it's been a sacrifice to some degree.

The flavor of the wine, the wine preserved fruits, it takes a hit, but it still works. I’ll often add stevia drops to it which can bring back the sweetness.



Eventually, I will not be wining and brining, with the leftovers of canned food products. I will be wining and brining the harvest of whatever I can't eat when it's fresh, while it's available on the branch or the vine, etc.

Now that I have had these breakthroughs in understanding, it's actually beautiful.

It's part of my altar, part of my meditation.

I look at these jars. I look at the colors, I feel like I've had my garden ripped out from under my feet hopefully for the last time.

But my garden became a garden of yeast, a garden of the bacteria, the wild fermentation bacterias that grow in the salt brine.

I will be continuing to, like a hermetic alchemist, do different experiments. I can't explain the magic behind the ear to ear grin that seems to come on like clockwork every time I sip my mead.

Then adding to that autonomic ear to ear smile response, I had things like the blueberry twists and stuff like that. Sky is the limit.

This not only saves me money, it saves me extraneous contact with the outside world, which for many reasons I'm trying to avoid.

It gives me more confidence that moving into even more uncertain times, I can scale this out, and I can continue to value add to what we what we used to call dead food.

When I was a raw food geek, I was a little bit authoritarian, though not as bad as those who would be very scathing and insulting.

It was really sad because, you're basically giving medical and health advice and it could be wrong, you could be hurting people by telling them to do things that aren't safe and aren't natural.

When I think about some of the useful aspects of being a raw food enthusiast for a time, it did help prime me for eventually becoming interested in the paleo diet.

It is an acknowledgment of what food was available before the Neolithic revolution, and designing to that, testing the results personally, doing elimination diets, and finding out what's giving you the rashes and the hives and the fatigue and the aches and the pains and the stomach cramps, etc.

You go back to the paleo. For me, this is very beautiful hobby to tap into these more ancient roots and to process foods in a way that adds value, and that takes otherwise “dead food”...That was the favorite sort of demeaning memes of the raw food movements to say, oh, I'm not going to eat that dead food. You cooked it. It's dead.

But maybe you cooked it to kill the stuff that could have killed you in it.

But now I realize, if after that, you you made it into a ferment, then it came back to life. So it's resurrected, miraculously brought back to life.

And it's as simple as adding some salt water to almost any type of food you can imagine, and then experimenting and discovering what flavors you might like out of that process.

I'm just extremely satisfied in my life journey that something that I had been putting off because I was spoiled by gardens, where I was just too busy in LA County, just being spoiled by there never being really that harsh of temperatures, no killing frost. I could keep stuff alive as annuals for years, longer than you would imagine possible.

I wasn't forced to do fermentation, so I just never got around to it, but being drastically forced into doing it, now it's under my belt.

Now I have that merit badge, and I'm not about to open my own cafe or my own fermentation bar or anything like that, but I am definitely proud of what I've achieved, and thankful eternally to the folks who have produced the content for me to learn from.

Thankful to the people who keep the homesteading wares alive and accessible, to be able to still get these jars, it's a really quaint and rustic, beautiful thing.

It does really warm my heart that the appropriate technology that I would want myself, and what for everyone...That the pandemic has put positive pressure on people to buy this homesteading gear, and the shelves are just kept bare from people continually buying them up. The market responded to the demand.

It’s a much more beautiful story than just seeing people fight over hoarding toilet paper and gas and whatnot like that.

It seems apocalyptic, but what seems very trans apocalyptic is when prices of quart jars go up because there's such a demand for them, that really excites me.

I'm proud to be happy to be part of that consumer market.

Maybe one day I'll blow my own glass. But for now, I'm just happy to know that there's a value add of looking at my glass jars that are my only gardens until the weather breaks and cools down a bit.

I have been able to sustain a gardener lifestyle and add to the evolution and the multi dimensionality being a gardener with fermentation.

If I was to say, you are going to be cut off from your garden, no more fresh produce, everything out of cans and buckets of seeds, nuts and canned food, basically that’s the entire profile of my diet...And that by this alchemy of micro organism gardening, wines and brines, I'm gonna be in some ways happier and healthier than ever.

Today, I want to share a bit about my very long awaited, sometimes glorious, sometimes not so glorious food preservation techniques, ancestral techniques, homesteading. Pickling, fermenting, using different traditions of partnerships with microbiology to favor the growth of microorganisms that are beneficial and to strategically inhibit the growth of harmful forms of life that can spoil food and can create toxins and can be very dangerous.

There were some white knuckle moments so far in this journey, but I have wanted to get into this for years and years. In my early 20s my roommate and I would go to the food bank and get government fruit bags, add yeast in bottles and create this Mad Dog type cider that knocked us all out and gave us the spins so fast.

So I had a little bit of home brewing experience with alcohol, that was a blessing as a person in the various DIY movements, for that to cross my path.

I did a bit of fermentation with just cabbage in my late 20s, just doing some gut health stuff. But I was not yet creating salt brines.

There's a lot it. It can be a turn off if it fails like when some people try to grow a plant and then it dies on them, and they don't feel like they have a green thumb. They say they have a brown thumb, and they just sort of give up on it.

There are definitely a lot of failed experiments in fermentation that can turn people off, whether it's the smell or just the uncertainty of whether it's being done right or whether it's being done wrong.

I've also done a bit of kombucha, although I do feel now that the sugar input into that process can be somewhat at odds with an overall paleo diet and lifestyle.

I'm sure there are people who do clever kombucha hacks to be ever more ethical in how they go about that process. But for me, I'm not gonna be focusing a lot on that.

What I really have been focusing on and living, literally day to day, meal by meal is by what I'm calling a brine wine and citric acid crystalline, rather, so wine, brine and citric acid crystalline.

So I’m just gonna briefly plant this flag, give myself this badge of surviving. It's been over six months of 100 % reliance every day on these techniques and kind of tweaking them and evolving them to get better results.

I'm very satisfied so far. So starting with the first category of the brine, I'm not trying to give this as an educational lecture, this is more of checking in and making a sort of journal entry of my experiences.

So whatever references I make to the science of it, always please, of course, do your own research or get your own advisement before putting anything into your body that I mentioned or doing any procedure that I talk about.

For me it’s been about being remote and not wanting to go out, of course, the pandemic is the perfect impetus for people to do more home, backyard, front yard, herb and vegetable gardening.

And if they have fruit trees, or can afford fruit trees, and get that aspect dialed in, also berry bushes, and even nuts, if that's possible. Back to the land, back to the homestead, the back to gardening movement, it really surged thanks to this bit of a silver lining.

All due respect to the people who have died and are still suffering long COVID, and the people who will die and continue to suffer long COVID, I’m hoping I won't become one of them.

But part of the reason why people are surviving and not dying or being more resilient is that they're really building on or evolving their health strategy.

So, of course, always gonna be advocating to make every effort possible to clean up the diet and to get more local.

I have so much experience, so many years,, so many trees and plants planted by my hands.

However, most of that planting has been on other people's properties.

I’m just barely starting now with my own property, and also under the most extreme conditions that I've ever been under, period.

It's really pushed me to go into something, synchronistically or serendipitously. This perfect storm of circumstances that took me away from the gardening that I had been doing that was ridiculously abundant and lush and so forgiving, such a temperate climate with so much moisture and so much already established.

Before moving to the desert on my own land, I was renting farm land in the Garden of Eden, and now I'm out in the desert, literally.

So everything that I was doing, obviously, all of my access to all those crops is gone, and they're just gonna be left to whoever may or may not care to take over. Or they just bolt, go to seed, drop some seeds, hopefully some of them become volunteers, or indigenize, is another word, they just self-re-seed.

Hopefully there's a legacy of stuff that kind of goes a little bit wild from what I left there, but since that was immediately, abruptly cut off, based on my pivoting of my overall survival strategy, I end up instantaneously overnight going to a scenario where I'm only eating food that I bring in. It’s only canned food, or if it is fresh food, then it has a very limited time span before it gets devoured by all the critters around me.

Because of lack of refrigeration, which I'm not really interested in bringing refrigeration to this site...

Eventually, there will be some form of cooling with what you would call a root cellar design, or with the earth tubes, where you can basically harvest and direct the the cool temperatures of several feet under the surface of the Earth that remains relatively constant.

You can direct that with clever design, piping, to keep food cool and cool yourself. That's gonna be an ongoing project for the coming months and years.

But this is very stark contrast of going from land that was moist, had an almost year round fog, it was very forgiving and on grid with water, to moving here and having no water, no nothing, no crops established…No infrastructure to even make planting viable, I need to build wind breaks, I need to dig depressions in the ground.

I need to do long term earthwork type projects and rainwater catchment projects that are gonna literally take one rainfall and trap the moisture from it, a significant percentage of it, into deep mulch pits that are going to be conducive to supporting growing things throughout both the wet and dry season.

So in the interim, to get to the point where I'm bootstrapping the system and it's actually producing its own oasis of fresh produce, I have to import everything.

Part of that strategy has been, let's say I have a can of some form of hopefully organic fruit or vegetable products.

There are certain things where one can is actually in itself a relatively balanced meal. It could be a soup or some sort of food product that makes sense to just eat the whole thing at once because nothing is gonna last more than a couple hours out here before it goes bad.

That's one way to do it. And of course, I'm saving all of the cans to be used as as seedling planters. I’ll plant seeds in the cans and be done with plastic pots, and start to switch a hundred percent over into non-plastic horticulture.

So there are food cans that I can open, eat it all the contents, put some water in it, swish it around, drink the rinse water, not sparing a drop, not wasting a drop, and then that gets stored to eventually be planted in later.

But then there's obviously cans of food where I'm only gonna wanna eat maybe a third of it. I don't usually follow the number of servings on things. I don't know if it's because I've always just felt like I have a relatively high metabolism. I don't think I've ever followed the the the the serving recommend recommended serving size.

If I were meal planning for other people, I would probably follow those serving amounts, because I would go out of my way to make sure there was a more diverse number of entrees to a meal. Overall, I get a balanced diet, just as a emergent property. I'm not really doing a nutritionist level.

So there’s randomness to how much left over food will be in a can that’s been opened for a meal. That’s where these brining techniques come in to preserve what would have been traditionally the fresh harvest.

Similarly, I'm extending the shelf life of canned food where I don't have refrigeration, and I don't want modern refrigeration.

Knowing the risks of pressure cooking and canning, a process that can leave botulism growth almost to chance...You're kind of gambling that it's sealed properly and permanently, that the temperature was effectively able to get through all of the material in a uniform manner to cook everything at a high enough temperature that it would totally kill off all of the botulism producing microbes...

My understanding now, after doing more research and getting into this more, is that, if a salt brine ferment has mold on it, there are nuances to what molds are beneficial versus lethal, versus just off putting, or could turn your stomach or give you a sense of food poisoning.

I'm not gonna go anywhere near giving any advice on that. But I will say that the real fermentation geeks, the people who give workshops on this kind of stuff, I see the way that they personally determine whether or not one of their ferments is still edible based on the color of the mold.

Often you can just scrape off some mold, and I’ve heard and experienced that it can be okay to eat some mold that’s not particularly potentially harmful…you’d have to know that stuff to be safe.

I'm not gonna give any color coding, litmus test type of advice on that, but the experts give very boldly advise, I will defer to them.

So for me, it was just, having this dream, having this passion, doing a bit of searching for videos online, and then finding some long duration videos uploaded of workshops.

I found everything from the very strictly scientific, public health minded university extension courses where they are using science and research based recommendations of how to do the process and not risk harm to yourself.

Then other videos featuring artisanship of fermentation chefs and instructors. Watching the way they presenting it, it's so welcoming and, it helps to diffuse a lot of the fears around the dangers of doing this.

I synthesized the very strict scientific approaches with the more more folkloric and more artisan style approaches, where they may have their own style that they've evolved and that they would share and recommend based on their success in their non- clinical non-laboratory research, but the laboratory of their lives. So the anecdotal research.

It’s like sprouting, it’s been a big part of culinary life, more so in my past than my present as going with the paleo diet limits the number of types of sprouts I can do. That takes the legumes off the menu for the most part, although there is some gray area with that.

But sprouting is simple, and cheap ingredients can exponentially increase the nutritive value of food. It’s been so interesting to me in terms of personal finance, home economics...the idea that you add water to seeds and they can become either edible sprouts or sprouts you need to boil for them to be edible, or sprouts that become micro greens.

You took something that you could buy in bulk for dirt cheap, and then you transform it into something that a sells for a lot more if you wanted to get commercial with it.

By adding water, you're gonna increase the nutrient profile and the volume and the size of something exponentially.

It makes so much sense to get into sprouting and then taking it further, fermentation adds so many qualities. Just a few off the top of my head that are the most compelling...the process typically breaks down and consumes a lot of the elements of a raw food product that would have been somewhat harmful or even very harmful. It can be almost a form of cooking, killing some pathogens that otherwise would have to be killed with heat. Some compounds, like oxalic acids, can be broken down to some extent by fermentation.

A lot of the foods we take for granted are fermented, like green teas, black teas, a number of soy products.

If you look into it, you would be surprised that a lot of foods you take for granted have already gone through some kind of fermentation process, more than you might expect.

So take advantage of that science and to apply it.

Some people say, ferment everything.

I would say, start with the stuff that is known to work well, for example a kimchi recipe, or pickles which involves vinegar in addition to what would be a normal salt brine.

My research has been that you take basically a tablespoon of salt per quart jar.

You put the food products that you're going ferment in wide mouth quart jar, so that you can clean and reuse it.

Then create your own salt water solution and following whatever formula you like, it's basically as simple as adding salt to water,and if you sterilize the jar, utensils, and water, you will have more control over what is going on.

I have not wanted to spare the energy to go to that level myself. I have felt fine personally, both like psychologically and physically, after living now for quite a while, with this being a part of my daily life. It's worked out for me to take relatively, non sterile or freshly boiled water, but well filtered water that is just stored, stored in a bit of shade, and mixing that with the appropriate amount of salt to get the job done.

It does matter to not under-do the salt, because most importantly, in addition to creating an environment that favors the growth of the types of organisms that you want to be consuming and that will consume parts the food you put in there, you're you're basically feeding the biology that you want. The salt is favorable to the the life that you want in there, and it kills and inhibits the growth of most of anything else.

So there are number of steps involved to get that to be done right. But it's not difficult and so far so good, it's done great for me.

What has been an interesting journey is just seeing what different types of flavor profiles come out of different ingredients put into a ferment.

So far my main staple ferment is from what I brought, when I came here, I brought an arms load full of pumpkins that I had grown the previous season.

They were holding out pretty well, but I knew eventually they're gonna start disintegrating, they're gonna start molding.

By the time they got just a little bit soft to the touch, I cut them all up and put them into a salt brine.

I’ve been living off of that same brine, just keeping it alive, keeping it intact replenishing it, using it as a reservoir for the microbiology, maintaining a lineage of what you started with.

I've noticed that the pumpkin brine, has a very distinct and not the best smell, but it tastes really good. So that's part of the acquired taste as part of the lifestyle adjustment to fermentation.

If someone was to smell it, not knowing it’s a salt brine ferment, they might take the smell as an indication that it's gone bad. There is a list of diagnostics that can be done to know if something's gone bad.

I have had, of course, batches where little bits of the food material, little bits or chunks of get above the waterline, where that saline solution is inhibiting the growth of any molds. It’s like little tips of the icebergs that stick out, they can be obviously attacked where there's air. I've had to scrape those molds off and everything else was fine.

It's been very triumphant. There was a bit of white knuckling in the beginning.

Oh, man, did I do this, right? Was there enough salt that I’m gonna die of odorless, tasteless botulism toxin.

I'm gonna have to just sit and wait and see if I start having indications of that form of poisoning.

I remember distinctly the day where I said, I survived my first wild fermentation, and it meant a lot. That was months and months ago.

Still to this day, what was the big experiment for me, can I preserve meat in brine and survive and not end up with my stomach in a knot or hospitalized or dead from botulism.

It worked out very well. This practice of taking a can of sardines and adding left overs to a salt brine solution made with what just so happened to be the cheapest organic food product I could find, organic tomato sauce. It’s not necessarily a hundred percent resistant to botulism, but it's acidic in and of itself which helps.

I got myself a PH test kit with the litmus paper strips, and did the due diligence on making sure the brines were coming out to a level where it would scientifically guarantee that it's inhospitable to the botulism pathogen.

What matters is the learning and the evolution of the experience with it to where, while I'm not the greatest chef, I a poor man's chef, but I’m at least developing my skills beyond the college ramen diet.

Growing up I did the macaroni and cheese thing. Growing up, I've done the bargain bin obesogenic, carcinogenic, non organic, non paleo, loaded with gluten, everything wrong.

I did the everything wrong, standard American diet, sad diet, for at least 15, probably almost 20 years. Then I slowly started to get healthier and make smarter decisions.

I'd say now I'm making the smartest health conscious dietary decisions of my life, and I don't know what could be go beyond this, certainly getting to the point where I'm growing all of my own food. That’s when there are no question marks about any kind of other forms of contamination or GMOs.

I have grown a lot of my own food for many years now, though haven’t yet got to the point of being a hundred percent.

I'm still hoping to cross that bridge, I'm just up leveling everything slowly, one thing at a time.

This fermentation thing, it's allowed me to really have a breakthrough...The economics of it, and my ideal design constraint for myself of going zero waste...

I don't wanna have a bunch of trash going in the landfill behind my existence, my lifestyle, I wanna buy bulk containers that I can reuse so I'm not just constantly throwing stuff out.

What didn't make it through the mesh of that algorithm was the single serving sardine cans that I had been subsisting off of for years and feeling like they're low on the food chain. They are bottom feeders in a good way, in the sense that they don't accumulate many toxins in one lifetime. They’re less dangerous in terms of what they call biological magnification up the food chain.

You gotta be careful what kind of seafood you eat, because the higher up the food chain you get, the more compounding the effect up the food chain. If you eat a fish that only eats decaying material at the bottom of a body of water then you're only eating the total toxin accumulation of one lifetime of one or a few fish per serving.

But if you eat the fish that eats that fish, or the fish that ate both of those fish, it's like a pyramid.

If you imagine the number of lifetimes of fish that go into feeding these higher trophic levels up the food chain...you’re super concentrating mercury and all kinds of other nasty toxins that humans have, unfortunately polluted the water ways.

There is an art and science to having a healthy seafood integration with your diet. I'm not gonna give advice on that. That's something to consult with your nutritionist, dietitian, doctor, etc.

But I will say to my research and knowledge and understanding, the life hack is eating low on the seafood food chain, if you wanna be able to benefit from the low price of a lot of it.

I would consider it a bit of a life hack, because you can follow that rule, and buy cheaper products that go a long way.

Going back to the design constraint of not wanting to have a bunch of trash, I had just mountains of single serving sardine cans in my wake for years I tried messing around with getting crafty with them. It just didn't never really panned out. So, I just said to myself, you gotta buy the regular 15 ounce-ish size cans, like soup cans.

It took a few times to unfortunately, learn the hard way that eating more than a third of a can in a 24 hour period is gonna result in severe constipation.

I was really humbled by the experience of too much fish meat in a 24 hour period.

So the saving grace was my faith and my research and my success in opening a 15 ounce soup can size container of sardines...eating a third of it and then mixing the rest with organic tomato sauce and two large ladles full of this pumpkin brine that has been now aging for six months.

The brining pumpkins jar, it was probably a gallon size jar. I've been able to just dip into that brine and then mix that brine with the fish and the tomato sauce, then it would come to life, it would start creating its own pressure.

After tightening the lid of quart jar, I’d turn it back just ever so slightly, just so that a little bit of the gas could escape.

Then it would do its thing, and it would last. So I would then have a total of three days of fish, one day of unbrined fish, and then two days of brined fish.

I've been basically doing that for months, and I feel better than ever.

For me, it's a milestone. It's an achievement to say, I could break one chain of waste and now be fully reusing the cans for little planters and also buying way cheaper, at least half or more savings of money to buy those bigger sardine cans versus the single serving cans.

It's been an amazing journey. It feels so magical just to say, I'm adding this salt brine, which has its own flavor and has its own biology from being a ferment, and then being able to apply that to the the fish that, if otherwise left out in this environment, would have become very dangerous to consume.

That was a fear of whether it would work or not. I knew it scientifically works, but, I might mess it up, and then I could really be sorry.

So that first success meant a lot, and I've built on that, now now I can continue to iterate and change flavors.

I just did my first departure from my first test. I’m starting to not use tomato sauce, so risking a little bit of a drop in the acidity aspect, relying again on the brine, the salting to a level that would keep it safe.

There are cultures, I've heard that have brines, that are eaten in a hundred years as a delicacy.

That's an amazing tradition to be standing on the back backs of giants.

Some people say you should only have ferments at room temperature for a short period of days, and then it should be an refrigerator. Do your own research, you can choose your own adventure.

That's kind of a broad overview of how the brining experience has been for me and what the fundamental building blocks of that science are and how it's worked out for me.

I definitely would like to be able to eventually do different kinds of jerky and solar dehydration. Though there are ways that drying things can go wrong as well, where it may not dry fast enough, and you may have pathogen growth in the center of something, or you may not have sliced it thin enough.

The next frontier that I crossed was the wine. I've already been brewing my own honey wine, which is called mead, and adding different spices and herbs and other more accentuating fruits to the mix.

I started adding blueberry juice to the honey mead . It doesn’t make me some culinary genius. It's just pretty much a formula where anything that's sugary goes into the wines. If I end up with some sort of sugary content of something that I would rather feed to yeast, then to my candidate...then it goes into the wines.

Having that platform going already for at least a couple years, having that constant alcohol generation, fermentation, alcohol, yeast platform going, it didn't take much time to research that it’s a good way to preserve fruits, just put them in wine.

You can put them in salt brines, though that doesn’t sound that appealing to me.

I remember growing up partying, they called it jungle juice. If you cut up a watermelon and saturated with hard alcohol, they called that jungle juice.

That was my reference point, but that's not what I want to go for. I wanted to see if there would be enough of a pathogen neutralizing effect with fruit in a wine product.

So just submerging fruit from the canned fruit that I was getting, submerging that into my mead, or rather, putting the excess fruit from opening the can after the first serving that I ate, then putting the remaining fruit in a quart jar with mead.

I’d be sure to leave plenty of room from the top because they will get a little frothy in there, build up pressure, and possibly be leaking over or creating so much pressure that it's somewhat dangerous.

I got these things glass, sort of like cylinders. They look like hockey pucks, actually, or little ashtrays. They allow you to have a non porous object that is a weight, weighs the food in the brine down so that it prevents it from popping up and getting moldy. It’s nice because it obviously eliminates that fear factor and that extra work factor of decontaminating the moldy bits.

There's other ways to do it that you don't have to buy anything for, like zip lock bags with water in them, or plastic sandwich bags to kind of create this interesting water weight.

But again, moving away from plastic and going into more glass and metal things, these glass weights are the best gift I've given to myself as a homesteader.

The combination of a quart jar and these glass weights have really done a lot of good for me.

So merging with the wine, it's kept the fruit from being hospitable to pathogenic life forms growing that would spoil it. So the preservation factor is working. However, I will say the yeast that's still alive is going to eat sugars in the fruit and change its flavor. So there is a loss of the, the expected flavor experience of the fruit, though you can always add natural sweeteners later.

Eventually, I will be growing my own fruits and berries, again for the millionth time as a gardener, but now on my own property.

Once I get to that point, I won't have to buy anything anymore, but I will be preserving my own produce, my own excess.

I guess there's just sort of a trade off, let's say I was already a well established homesteader. You would probably think eating things fresh off the vine or off the branch, or picked from the plant...That's always gonna be a better experience than eating something that went through whatever process, whether it was cooking at extremely high temperatures which changes the texture a lot, or freezing, if that's an option, or whatever it is, you're gonna change the texture, you're gonna change the flavor, the nutrient values, so there's always that trade off.

But for me, this is like living on a razors edge of survival, trying to not die from the temperatures and dehydration alone, and certainly on top of that, not wanting to get any kind of food poisoning, life threatening or otherwise, or just have a really nauseous experience.

So far I’ve been successful, but it's been a sacrifice to some degree.

The flavor of the wine, the wine preserved fruits, it takes a hit, but it still works. I’ll often add stevia drops to it which can bring back the sweetness.



Eventually, I will not be wining and brining, with the leftovers of canned food products. I will be wining and brining the harvest of whatever I can't eat when it's fresh, while it's available on the branch or the vine, etc.

Now that I have had these breakthroughs in understanding, it's actually beautiful.

It's part of my altar, part of my meditation.

I look at these jars. I look at the colors, I feel like I've had my garden ripped out from under my feet hopefully for the last time.

But my garden became a garden of yeast, a garden of the bacteria, the wild fermentation bacterias that grow in the salt brine.

I will be continuing to, like a hermetic alchemist, do different experiments. I can't explain the magic behind the ear to ear grin that seems to come on like clockwork every time I sip my mead.

Then adding to that autonomic ear to ear smile response, I had things like the blueberry twists and stuff like that. Sky is the limit.

This not only saves me money, it saves me extraneous contact with the outside world, which for many reasons I'm trying to avoid.

It gives me more confidence that moving into even more uncertain times, I can scale this out, and I can continue to value add to what we what we used to call dead food.

When I was a raw food geek, I was a little bit authoritarian, though not as bad as those who would be very scathing and insulting.

It was really sad because, you're basically giving medical and health advice and it could be wrong, you could be hurting people by telling them to do things that aren't safe and aren't natural.

When I think about some of the useful aspects of being a raw food enthusiast for a time, it did help prime me for eventually becoming interested in the paleo diet.

It is an acknowledgment of what food was available before the Neolithic revolution, and designing to that, testing the results personally, doing elimination diets, and finding out what's giving you the rashes and the hives and the fatigue and the aches and the pains and the stomach cramps, etc.

You go back to the paleo. For me, this is very beautiful hobby to tap into these more ancient roots and to process foods in a way that adds value, and that takes otherwise “dead food”...That was the favorite sort of demeaning memes of the raw food movements to say, oh, I'm not going to eat that dead food. You cooked it. It's dead.

But maybe you cooked it to kill the stuff that could have killed you in it.

But now I realize, if after that, you you made it into a ferment, then it came back to life. So it's resurrected, miraculously brought back to life.

And it's as simple as adding some salt water to almost any type of food you can imagine, and then experimenting and discovering what flavors you might like out of that process.

I'm just extremely satisfied in my life journey that something that I had been putting off because I was spoiled by gardens, where I was just too busy in LA County, just being spoiled by there never being really that harsh of temperatures, no killing frost. I could keep stuff alive as annuals for years, longer than you would imagine possible.

I wasn't forced to do fermentation, so I just never got around to it, but being drastically forced into doing it, now it's under my belt.

Now I have that merit badge, and I'm not about to open my own cafe or my own fermentation bar or anything like that, but I am definitely proud of what I've achieved, and thankful eternally to the folks who have produced the content for me to learn from.

Thankful to the people who keep the homesteading wares alive and accessible, to be able to still get these jars, it's a really quaint and rustic, beautiful thing.

It does really warm my heart that the appropriate technology that I would want myself, and what for everyone...That the pandemic has put positive pressure on people to buy this homesteading gear, and the shelves are just kept bare from people continually buying them up. The market responded to the demand.

It’s a much more beautiful story than just seeing people fight over hoarding toilet paper and gas and whatnot like that.

It seems apocalyptic, but what seems very trans apocalyptic is when prices of quart jars go up because there's such a demand for them, that really excites me.

I'm proud to be happy to be part of that consumer market.

Maybe one day I'll blow my own glass. But for now, I'm just happy to know that there's a value add of looking at my glass jars that are my only gardens until the weather breaks and cools down a bit.

I have been able to sustain a gardener lifestyle and add to the evolution and the multi dimensionality being a gardener with fermentation.

If I was to say, you are going to be cut off from your garden, no more fresh produce, everything out of cans and buckets of seeds, nuts and canned food, basically that’s the entire profile of my diet...And that by this alchemy of micro organism gardening, wines and brines, I'm gonna be in some ways happier and healthier than ever.