Fermented Foods : Testing with Lauren Mones from Fermenting Fairy

Hey, how's it going? We're here live from the Glendale Whole Foods. This is Lauren Mohnes. Is it Lauren Mones? Moniz monets. Okay. From fermentingferry.com and I actually got in touch with you through. Was it David Dinwiddie? Yep. Yeah. So David is a friend. Awesome customer of Altura. But I wanted to meet with you and just kind of, well, mutually wanted to meet because, number one, I love fermented foods. And as you can see right here, this is. She has an assortment of products. What if you could just kind of. Lauren is just starting off as an entrepreneur and just launched her brand six months ago, and she's already in Air1. That's huge, by the way.

Erewhon and Bel Campo.

That's awesome. So if you're. Can. Can people purchase online and can you ship to them or is it just.

Not yet. So we're only through retail right now.

Okay. Yeah. So. And that's understandable, considering this is a perishable product. And I just wanted to kind of try this. I have had this lavender ginger lemonade, and it is. It's unbelievable. It's. So this is coconut water based?

No, it's not coconut water based.

Okay.

What I do is I ferment ginger, and then that fermented ginger then ferments lemon juice.

Okay.

And then we add lavender at the end.

So there's no added sugar.

No added sugar.

Wow. And I'm telling you, I don't even. Oh, so you get this. You get the sweetness from the ginger and the lemon juice kind of when it ferments and kind of develops that.

Exactly. Well, I.

May.

I make a ginger bug. So I ferment ginger. A ginger bug.

Explain to them what that is. I've never heard that.

Ginger bug is this bubbly ginger drink where I feed sugar to ginger initially, but the microbes on the ginger on the skin of the ginger eat the sugar and metabolize it.

Okay.

Into lactic acid. And then that is the probiotic drink that I add to lemon juice.

The culture type. Okay. All right. Got it.

Exactly.

Nice. All right, so that's. That's unbelievable.

So when you drink it, you're actually not drinking any sugar, but it maintains the sweetness.

Yeah. So people in the Los Angeles area, I mean, this is available at. Are all locations carrying All Air ones? All Air1 location.

Bel Campo has the lemonade as well.

Bel Campo is on what, Third Street?

No, Wilshire and.

Oh, they have another. No, they have another location actually, too.

Right. Just the one in Santa Monica carries it.

Okay. Yeah, we better start pounding the pavement to the people over there on.

On third Street.

Third Street. But so that's. That's unbelievable. Highly recommend that. Good work.

Thank you.

I mean, it's really cool, guys. I mean, she made this out of her. Her home, and she has these really cool videos. That's. That's what takes me back to when I was first starting my business. But that's, you know, you taste test. I was talking to Shannon Drake from John Bo Superfoods, and she. Yeah, no, she's great. She's awesome. But she. Same thing. It's just like, you know, when you're fine tuning your baby, the first one, the first time you get a chance to show to others, you know, your. Your creation. People don't understand that hours, hours and hours and hours that you put into just, you know, each one of these. When it comes to, I mean, even the texture from this, I mean, you need. It's not just every little part of that, you know, see, like the different slivers of the carrots and the cabbage, and every part of it has a story. There's a, you know, just developing the fermentation stage. It's not just throwing together water, salt, and, you know, an food processor, blended, chipped away vegetables. There's a science to this, and you have your own story where if you'd like to tell them about how you battled Crohn's disease and how you came up with the importance of fermented foods, just battling your gut and healing yourself from the inside out.

I started fermenting fairy because about four to five years ago, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. And I bought my first jar of sauerkraut at a Whole Foods, and it helped me so much. I got my energy back. I started having normal bowel movements, and I just felt totally different. So I started teaching myself how to make sauerkraut and just absolutely fell in love with the process of fermenting. I fell in love with the microorganisms, the unseen world, what they did for me. And then that was about four years ago. And I've developed all these recipes to heal the gut and to decrease inflammation in the body.

That is something that I've never seen before.

Yes. So, you know, I'm glad you noticed that.

Oh, yeah, definitely did. So this is caraway fennel sauerkraut with glutamine. Glutamine is an amino acid which I definitely need right now, and it's essential for it's Actually really good for gut healing as well, but also post workout recovery if you're looking to heal. Oh, man, listen. Smell that.

I put it in the sauerkraut. It actually was just a test one day and it turned out to be phenomenal. And so this sauerkraut, the caraway sauerkraut.

Oh, the caraway. The fennel.

Yeah.

Oh, I got that right there.

Good balance, right?

That's insane.

And so you get the benefit of the sauerkraut, but then you also get the benefit of the L glutamine, which heals the mucosal lining of the gut and the lungs. And also why Andy likes it for post workout.

That's so original. You're not gonna find that anywhere.

You'll find it anywhere.

No, that's awes. Highly recommend that. So I'm talking with my.

That's okay. So I've been. I've been developing these recipes for four years now. And it was really. It came from healing my own body and the people that I know who also have IBD and ulcerative colitis and other gut issues. Ibs. Sibo.

This one right here. Not to interrupt. This one right here. I was really excited to try this. I haven't tried it yet. This is coconut vanilla coconut kefir. So this is from the raw coconut milk.

Yes.

So this is not coconut water. If you can explain the difference between that and the coconut water kefir, because it's. That's pretty profound. I had no idea that you kind of just your body processes out the coconut water, but this stays in there and actually builds your gut.

Right.

So this is one of the most important things for healing your gut. Right here is actual coconut milk kefir, not the coconut water.

Right.

So yeah. So I like that. See a little residue right there? That's all obviously.

Yeah, that's delicious.

Yeah. All right.

So when you ferment coconut water, you have to use coconut water crystals. When you ferment coconut milk, you have to use coconut milk or milk kefir grains. And they're very different in how the body and the gut processes it. So water kefir crystals tend to be more transient in the gut, meaning that they stay and they do their job and they help decrease inflammation and boost the immune system. But they're transient. You poop them out after a couple days with milk kefir, either coconut, any kind of kefir, they actually inoculate the gut so they stay. They become the resident bacteria.

What I love about that. Oh, it's amazing. Yeah, it's really good. And a lot of the time people add stevia, xylitol in the worst case, like guar gum. There are no multiplying agents in here. I love the pure Ugandan. Yes. You know, I love just kind of going a little bit extra, you know, going the extra mile on your ingredient decks and like explaining, you know, I got a chocolate bar once and they would Madagascar, you know, Himalayan salt. You could have just gone, you know, vanilla extract. Love that. Hey, just, just a way to separate yourself when you're ingredient decks. There are a lot of people out there that read that and it's intriguing. You can use that in your marketing and yeah, it's brilliant.

And the extract that we use in the vanilla is alcohol free. A lot of people with gut issues can't do alcohol, including myself.

So. Yeah. All right, so so far you're three for three and this is the last one. Oh, and we want to mention this is the best form of probiotics. You know, I mean you get a lot of the, the capsule formed of form of probiotics that are, I mean, for me it's just not the same. I mean, if it's been sitting on a shelf in a plastic container for months, who knows, maybe even years, you're not getting the good live active culture that this has. 82 billion CFU. So if you could explain to the audience what, you know, what the difference is between that and having say like a normal probiotic or popping a couple of those meals. This is a lot better, I think.

Much better. I mean, everything is better in a food based culture. So instead of taking a supplement, sometimes supplements can't be absorbed because they can't pass through the stomach and the acid sort of gets to them before they get to the rest of the GI tract. And food is always absorbed through the rest of the GI tract. So you're getting the bacteria to surpass the stomach acid.

That's really good.

And it's more bioavailable to the gut too. So all the minerals, all the vitamins are absorbed better than supplement.

Yeah, I love that. I gotta, yeah, I gotta go for all these. That was really good. What I like about this is you the hibiscus and then the lavender flowers, how you, you, you extract the, like the essence from those. But how do you use those? How do you incorporate those in your drinks?

So it's really interesting, like when, when you go through a fermentation process, you don't need to blend anything into the ferment. So what I do for the hibiscus coconut milk kefir is I add organic hibiscus leaves, and I leave them in for an hour, and then I take them out, but it still tastes like hibiscus. So what happens is the microbes and microorganisms absorb the taste because they're actually eating the sugars. And so they're absorbing and eating and metabolizing, and they're flavoring it at the same time so that when you drink it, you're not drinking hibiscus leaves or even. You're not even drinking ginger. You're just. You're drinking the flavor and you're getting the probiotics.

Yeah, the essence, where it's kind of like. Like an orange peel or a lemon rind, where that essence, those. Those oils that you squeeze out. Back when I used to bartender, you'd have to do that, and they would squeeze out the essence. That's where, like, a good amount of the bioflavonoids are in the rind of the lemon and the orange. So when you. That's not. Don't just toss those. Squeeze that essence out. And I think that's the same with hibiscus and the lavender that you're using in your. In your products. Hey, Lauren, give me a hug. I gotta get going. Oh, you got.

Oh, yeah.

And she's got a little apple cinnamon kraut right here that I will try later. I'm running late to. Okay, but the. The. The URL is right there. You can check out more about her and her story. I mean, I just. I love just. Just hearing things like this where people are just grinding it out and following what they love and they. And if they have a story to support what they're doing and why they started doing what they're doing, that's. That's cool to me. So I love it. All right, well, thank you for joining us. If you have any questions, myself and Laura, Lauren. Excuse me. We'll be answering them, and we'll go from there. Have a good rest of your day.