Author: cityprepping-author

“Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime…Please, treat your garlic with respect… Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.”

― Anthony Bourdain

Fermented Garlic Honey is touted as an immunity booster and a flu buster, but it also makes a great marinade with the addition of a little soy sauce or simply as is.  

Since I grow my own garlic and make my own fermented garlic honey, I’ll show you the process.  It’s pretty simple, so long as you don’t have an explosion.  So let’s jump in…

All you need for fermented garlic is a couple of bulbs of your favorite garlic, honey, preferably local honey, and a jar with a lid.  I have made this recipe just like that, and I have made it with additional optional ingredients.  In this batch, I will add ginger root as well.  You could also add spicy peppers like bird peppers, as some say that it enhances the immunity-building effect.  You could add lemons cut into small pieces.  You’re creating a flavor-packed, fermented honey concoction that is said to increase immunity and help stave off colds. 

When you peel the garlic, you’re going to get your hands sticky and smelling of garlic.  I’ll show you a trick for getting them clean and fresh smelling at the end.  In this step, you want to peel the cloves.  If they are cracked open in the process, that’s ideal.  They will ferment faster.

Honey is touted as being able to fight micro-infections and microbes, so you may be wondering how fermentation can happen when you are surrounding the cloves in honey.  Honey gets its properties from the lack of water in it.  Microbes and yeasts can’t survive and make a home because they can’t move around in it.  If you were to put it into a wound, it helps to protect the wound.  After a time, though, its hygroscopic properties come out.  If it is not in a sealed container, it will attract moisture from the air and become more liquid.  It will also give way to the bacteria and yeasts contained in the honey and found in the air and on many surfaces it contacts.  This can cause spontaneous fermentation, which will be the subject of a future blog on making mead.

The garlic, like many vegetables, has Lactobacillus in and around it.  Similar to sauerkraut, also a future blog here, this will cause the vegetable matter of the Allium to ferment.  Lactobacillus acidophilus and other similar bacterias are considered probiotic and already live in our guts.  They process the foods we eat and make the nutrients accessible to our bodies.  When garlic is chopped, chewed, or crushed, it produces allicin – an active compound with potent anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, anti-carcinogenic, and antioxidant properties.

Ginger root has been used since ancient times to enhance the effects of other medicines.  Ginger has anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.  There’s lots of good research touting the health benefits of this root.  Some people hate it, though.  They may even hate it at a genetic level like some do Cilantro.  If you don’t like ginger, don’t add it.  Stick to the honey and garlic alone.  If you do add the ginger, you can simply use a vegetable peeler, but I find this removes too much material.  A trick to peeling it is to soak the root in water for 5 minutes and then scrape the skin off with the side of a spoon.  The skin is edible, so you don’t have to do this.  It just makes your presentation better.  Process the skinned ginger by cutting it into 1/8th to ¼ inch pieces.  I use equal ratios of ginger to garlic for this recipe.

Combine both the honey and the garlic, and you have the potent health benefits of the garlic with the natural health benefits of the honey.  Fermenting them is said to increase the bio-availability of the ingredient’s natural compounds.  When picking honey, it is said that you are best served using honey that is locally produced and unfiltered.  The reasoning here is that you are exposed to small amounts of pollens or honey made from the same flowers that are enflaming your sinuses.  Lots of research has been done, and this hasn’t been proven, but it seems intuitive enough to me that I still lean towards using regional kinds of honey.  Every little bit helps, and if it is at all true, I’ll buy local over a horrible bout of sinusitis.  If you use non-raw, filtered honey from wherever it likely will have the same immunity protecting effect.

Recent studies have also leaned towards the idea that much of our immunity begins with a healthy gut.  The combination of honey, garlic, lemon, capsicum from peppers, turmeric, cayenne, horseradish, and similar ingredients and concoctions– you may have heard of the liquid forms referred to as a Ginger bug or immunity juice, has been proven to open our cells up, deliver vital nutrients, and combat microbial, viral, and bacterial infections.  If none of that at all is accurate, and some would say it’s just hooey, it’s worth finding a concoction of these ingredients that is right for you to give your body what it needs to stay healthy.  Perhaps it is all a placebo effect, but then again, maybe mom’s chicken soup and grandma’s hot toddy’s are placebos as well.  Still, they make us feel like we are in charge of our own health and might just give us a fighting chance and good nutrients.  At the very least, this recipe will make a great marinade, which I’ll share at the end of the page.

Once your garlic is peeled, the cloves cracked, and at least half of your jar is filled, you will add the honey.  To get the garlic scent off your fingers, wash a stainless steel spoon with a bit of dish soap and water in your bare hands.  The chemical reaction will neutralize the garlic smell.  It’s a tip my mother taught me years ago.  

I had some regional honey and some local honey, so I added them both.  Leave a solid inch of headspace from the top of the jar because fermentation will add bubbles to your mix and exposure to air will add liquid.  If you have fermented foods before, you may have a fermentation weight.  The point of a fermentation weight is to weigh down your vegetables during fermentation, which means it actually needs to weigh enough to hold things down.  If you have one, you can use it here.  It’s not really necessary, though, since the honey will coat your food and keep it from being exposed to the air; and the honey, as I mentioned earlier, should prevent bacteria from getting ahold of your mix.

Once you have added the honey and left about an inch of headspace, seal the jar and give it a really good shaking.  Make sure the honey is all mixed up.  With the jar sealed, you can set it on its top to isolate the air bubble at the bottom of the jar.  Now, once or twice per day, you will want to burp your jar and give it a gentle shake to remix the substance.  Fermentation releases C02.  If you were to simply leave it sealed, the jar may explode.  You have to burp the jar at least once per day for the next week or two.  Place the jar on a saucer in a shaded and cool part of your kitchen.  Burp and shake once per day, sealing the lid tightly each time.  Some have said that you can leave the lid loose, and you could if you plan on using it up within a few weeks; however, leaving the honey exposed to air will result in it pulling moisture from the air, lowering the viscosity to a runnier liquid, and welcoming in unwanted yeasts and bacterias.  In the short term, this is good, if you need a batch now and plan to use it up before harmful bacterias can take up in it.  For a longer shelf-life, though, keep it sealed, burp and gently shake one or two times a day, and refrigerate around the third to fifth day.  If your fermentation is happening, when you open it, you will see tiny bubbles around the edges.  Even in the refrigerator, make sure to burp it once or twice per week.

I have heard people just add honey to top up their fermented garlic honey as they use it, but do not do this.  Don’t think of it as a yeast or sourdough starter.  Unrefrigerated garlic can foster the growth of clostridium botulinum bacteria, which produces poisons that do not affect the taste or smell. Even refrigerated, there’s a shelf-life to your fermented honey garlic.  Spores of this clostridium botulinum bacteria are commonly found in soil and can be on produce such as garlic.  If you don’t know what bacteria that is, it’s the one that causes botulism.  You can’t cook botulism out of foods.  Plan on using your mix within the month you create it and keep it refrigerated once the fermentation has run through your mix.

HOW TO USE IT

There are several methods for using this concoction.  It tastes much better than you might think.  Some put a teaspoon per day in hot water and drink it as a soothing tea.  Some put it over chicken or wings along with other spices in the final minutes of cooking.  Some just eat a spoonful per day as an immunity booster and for a healthy dose of probiotics to aid digestion and nutrient absorption.  Whatever you do, plan to use your batch within the month to be safe, and plan to make a fresh batch at the end of that month.

Like I mentioned earlier, it makes an excellent marinade for chicken.  I will soak the chicken in a few heaping tablespoons of the fermented garlic and ginger honey, a cup or two of soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, bird peppers, or other hot pepper, and one cup of pineapple juice to make what is sometimes called Huli Huli chicken.  After an hour or two of marinating, I will grill the chicken and hit it with a nice warmed-up coating of the fermented garlic and ginger honey and a little soy sauce in the final minutes of cooking.  It’s guaranteed delicious.

If it can keep you healthier and is an immunity booster, fermented garlic honey is an excellent first step into fermenting foods.  It’s an incredibly easy recipe and process to tuck away in your prepper kitchen.  I would love to hear how your batch turned out or if you have used this or a similar recipe to keep healthy.  Let me know in the comments below.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.  Keep your kitchen prepped.

ULTIMATE HULI HULI CHICKEN RECIPE

• 5 pounds chicken thighs, legs, or wings
• 3 heaping tablespoons fermented garlic & ginger honey
• 2 cups soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
• 2 cups pineapple juice
• crushed bookie, bird, or hot pepper of your choice (optional)
• scallions & sesame seeds for garnish sprinkle

Make marinade and reserve 1/3 cup for brushing cooked chicken in the final 5 minutes.  Marinade chicken.  Grill chicken.  Add an additional tablespoon of fermented garlic & ginger honey to reserved 1/3 cup to thicken.  Brush chicken with reserved liquid in the final 5 minutes of cooking.

When the internal temperature of the chicken is 165 degrees Fahrenheit, 73.8 degrees celsius, remove it to a serving platter.  Pour over the top any remainder of the reserved sauce or a few splashes of soy sauce and sprinkle with sesame seeds and chopped scallions.

Enjoy!

Before you could pick up a bottle of Vegetable, Sunflower, Olive oil, or even a can of Crisco or lard, people made and used Tallow. Tallow can be kept in your pantry and is naturally shelf stable for years. You can use it anywhere you would use cooking oil–from baking to frying. It has been used in cooking, for making soap, candles, as a healing salve and skin balm, as well as a lubricant for wood and leather working industries. Recent studies have shown that despite its high saturated fat and triglyceride content it may actually be an essential part of a healthy diet and is safer for you to consume than many other oils. When you trim the fat off your ever-increasingly more expensive cut of beef, don’t throw it away. Instead, make some Tallow. Here, Shawn will show you how and give us a brief history of Tallow. Let’s see how he does it… WHAT YOU NEED Beef fat or other fat. A slow cooker or pot with a lid if making your tallow in the oven or on the stovetop. A means to stir your fat. A mesh strainer or cheesecloth to strain the pure tallow from the cracklins and impurities. That’s it. Now for the details… HOW TO MAKE TALLOW Trim the fat off your beef and store it in a zip lock bag in your freezer. When you have an entire ziplock freezer baggie full, you have enough for a batch of tallow. You can, if you have the connections, get fat directly from the butcher. It is very inexpensive, and there’s a good possibility your butcher will just give you a pound or two for free if you tell him what you plan to use it for. You used to get bones for bone broth that easily, too, until bone broth became the latest and greatest super-food. Will tallow be next? When the fat is cold, it can be cut more easily. You want to cut it into smaller pieces no larger than 1/4 inch cubes. You can use a food processor to pulse it down to this size. When it is at the right size, place it in the slow cooker on the lowest setting for six or more hours. Stir occasionally and make sure no scalding or burning is occurring. You can make this on the stovetop at the lowest setting there, but the likelihood of burning is higher. You can also make it in the oven. Fats begin to break down around 130 to 140 degrees, so you can use your oven at its lowest setting. Mine only goes down to 175 degrees Fahrenheit. You want to make sure that your fat doesn’t burn. I will use both the slow cooker and the oven for this example with equal amounts of fat so we can compare the results. After I compare the results I’ll coax out a little more on the stovetop burner. As a general guide, one pound of beef fat will give you about six to seven ounces of rendered fat. Once you have rendered the fat down for six or more hours, occasionally stirring, run through the strainer or cheesecloth to obtain the pure liquid tallow. Refrigerate your finished product. When you want to use some, just remove it from the refrigerator and let it warm a little. I scoop it out with a large spoon and let it melt in my cast iron pan before cooking any number of things. The remaining crispy chunks of fat are called cracklings. They are suitable to feed your dog. I have eaten them on occasion. It’s probably not the healthiest thing I could eat, but they’re tasty. Think of them like a pork rind but crunchier. I used three methods of rendering the tallow just to see how the quantities would differ. I used a slow cooker, the oven, and then the stovetop. Whichever method you use, you want to stir it at least once per hour to help work the liquid fat out. After 6 hours in the slow cooker, I had almost a half cup of tallow. That’s about what I would have expected from a half-pound of beef fat. The saucepan in the oven only yielded about a quarter cup. I combined both cracklins into the saucepan and finished it on the stovetop. The saucepan on the stovetop allowed me to coax out a little bit more. I think the best way to do this based upon my three methods is to use the slow cooker and then the saucepan on the stovetop. My total yield was about seven ounces, which is pretty good. You can do this with any fat from bison to chicken to duck and more. Yes. you could reserve your hamburger fat in this same way, and you certainly should, but I like knowing the tallow I am using for cooking is from high-quality fats. I think you can taste the difference. WHAT’S TALLOW? When Truman C. Everts was lost in Yellowstone in 1870, he nearly starved to death. Surviving on only the roots of a thistle plant and whatever meager substance he could find, he was nearly at death’s door when he was found 37 days later. Even after being found, his recovery was uncertain. He writes in his harrowing account entitled 37 Days of Peril:

“The night after my arrival at the cabin, while suffering the most excruciating agony, and thinking that I had only been saved to die among friends, a loud knock was heard at the cabin door. An old man in mountain costume entered–a hunter, whose life was spent among the mountains. He was on his way to find a brother. He listened to the story of my sufferings and tears rapidly coursed each other down his rough, weather-beaten face. But when he was told of my present necessity, brightening in a moment, he exclaimed:

“Why, Lord bless you, if that is all, I have the very remedy you need. In two hours’ time, all shall be well with you.”

He left the cabin, returning in a moment with a sack filled with the fat of a bear which he had killed a few hours before. From this, he rendered out a pint measure of oil. I drank the whole of it. It proved to be the needed remedy, and the next day, free from pain, with appetite and digestion reestablished, I felt that good food and plenty of it were only necessary for an early recovery.”

Tallow saved his life. Tallow is simply fat that has been rendered down to liquid oil. It will be a solid at a cool room temperature or if kept in the refrigerator, but it will quickly become a liquid when warmed or heated. It can be used anywhere you use cooking oil or butter and will impart a little more flavor to the food. Historically, tallow came from more than just the fat. It was brains, spinal cord, thymus, tonsils, spleen, intestines, placental tissue, and so on all rendered down. Modern versions, however, are cleaner and rendered just from the fat. It is primarily made up of triglycerides that current research shows aren’t as bad for you as was once thought when consumed as part of a healthy diet. It can be used anywhere shortening is used and is the main ingredient in the Native American food pemmican, which I have another video on how to make that. Subscribe to this channel for more on that recipe. It’s a good fat for frying, baking, sauteing, and roasting. It can help give crusts, pastries, fried foods, and baked goods a delightfully crumbly texture like only a shortening can do. If you save and re-use your bacon grease, you are using a type of tallow. Because bacon is often cured, smoked, and peppered, it will have a more flavor-forward profile than just beef fat. Today, tallow is making a comeback, and several companies sell duck, chicken, bison, lamb, even wild boar tallow. Traditionally, tallow was used for high heat frying in most fast-food restaurants because it remained very stable under high heat conditions and imparted a good flavor. The industry switched in the 1970s when the vegetable oil industry gained power and touted the benefits of polyunsaturated fats. These saturated fats are returning to favor, though, and casting off the maligning they received in the 70s. This whole, cleanly sourced, and purer fat sources like tallow are more accessible for the body to break down and utilize. Natural animal fats may be healthier than partially hydrogenated vegetable shortenings, especially those containing trans fats, which have been linked to conditions including heart disease. Tallow is an excellent source of niacin, vitamins B6, B12, K2, selenium, iron, phosphorus, potassium, and riboflavin. As a lubricant for engines to candles to fuel to soap to leather working to moisturizing body butter, there are hundreds of uses for tallow. I almost exclusively use mine for cooking. Frying foods imparts a slightly different texture to the finished product. You can use it in place of butter or oil in recipes to impart a marginally earthier tone to the food. The gaminess of the fat source will determine how earthy the final product tastes. That’s it. It’s a straightforward recipe and procedure. You pretty much just trim the fat and apply the heat. Instead of throwing out that fat or thinking it’s terrible for you, trim it, save it, and render it into tallow. Your cooking will improve in flavor, and you may even be a little healthier as a result. If you have to bug out, grab your tallow and throw it in your bugout bag. It will stay stable for a long time and will be helpful to you in a multitude of ways. If you infuse some with tea tree, lavender, clove, citronella, or cinnamon oil, and some powdered zinc oxide, you will have an incredible bug-repelling sunscreen that will stay put and moisturize your skin. That’s just one non-cooking use for this incredible base fat. Learn how to make it, and let me know in the comments below how it went and what you use it for. If you liked this video, please hit that thumbs-up video. If you’d like me to make something else in my prepping kitchen or garden, let me know in the comments below. I try to read many of the comments to bring you fresh ideas and new skills. So, make some tallow today and bring your cooking to a whole new level. Keep building your skills in the prepping kitchen…