Nature's Bounty Unleashed: Fermentation's Transformative Potential with Holly Howe

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome.

This is your host, Lindsey Parsons.

Today I'll be speaking with Holly Howe, the founder of makesauerkraut.com, a popular resource for online fermentation classes, recipes, and articles. A former grade school teacher, she helps students learn how to safely transform everyday vegetables into healthy and delicious fermented foods. But before our conversation, if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. And if you want to get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my free ebooklet, Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing, when you sign up. And if you haven't yet done my quiz on which stool test would help you get to your root cause, you can find a link in the show notes and take that. Now on to the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Holly.

Thank you, Lindsey.

Lindsey, thank you for having me.

It's my pleasure.

So tell me about what the benefits of fermentation are in particular over fermented, fermented foods, say over probiotics, and what fermentation is.

Okay, it's a great place to start. Let's start first with fermentation. And the way I like to look at fermentation is that we're taking vegetables and we're transforming them. We're transforming them into gold, into magical foods that improve our gut health, we can't do it alone. We need the help of bacteria, the microbial world. And so these vegetables come with bacteria. The bacteria, as the plants are growing, the bacteria nestle on these vegetables. And we set up a home for them through fermentation, packing foods into a jar or crock. And these bacteria get in there, they eat the sugars, and they transform it into lactic acid, which is a digestive aid and a preservative. And all of a sudden, that lowly cabbage has turned into this gold that helps us with digestion, that takes care of our gut microbiome, that adds probiotics and prebiotics to our diet, all sorts of wonderful nutrients. And it's through the ingestion of these fermented foods that we can improve our gut microbiome and our overall health. People think, you know, the probiotic industry, when I speak of probiotics, I'm thinking probiotic capsules in a jar that we go into a grocery store and buy off the shelf. And they're easy, they're convenient, you're popping a pill. It's that easy. But I think we can get ourselves in trouble with probiotics. It's a multimillion-dollar industry, and we just have to be careful with why we're taking the probiotics and what they're for. Probiotics are designed around a few specific species of bacteria that scientists and biologists have thought our bodies need. And so when we take a probiotic, we're taking thousands and thousands of this one, these small handfuls of strains of bacteria.

Or billions at that.

Yeah, millions. Exactly.

They're usually in billions CFU.

And yes, probiotic foods are full of millions of bacteria, but they come as a whole package. When we isolate that one strain, it can wreak havoc in our body and upset the gut microbiome that we're trying to balance. I think if you have a, a specific health issue and you're working with a practitioner, then those probiotics might be doing some good for you. But recent studies are showing that we're not so sure of how they can impact our health, our gut microbiome. And can wreak havoc on it and imbalance what's going on there, introduce too much of one strain and kill off another strain, or just have an imbalance in there. If you're dealing with a severe health issue where you need to work with a practitioner, then by all means they'll help you through that process. But for us just to go, oh, we wanna improve our gut health, let's go pop these pills. Food is where it's at and food is where we're going to heal from by eating traditional foods. And I think it's very hard to pop a pill and reap the same benefits.

Right. Plus there's so many different types of probiotics and so many different strains. And unless you have a really good source about which strains are good in which conditions, then you may choose the absolutely wrong probiotic. A good example being someone who has histamine intolerance or histamine sensitivity, taking a probiotic that has high histamine-producing strains would be an example of, of going wrong with probiotic pills.

Exactly. I think when we consume our foods and our taste buds, and we, we miss the pleasure of consuming fermented foods. They add a great umami punch and nourish our meal and make our meal taste so much better. So that meal is pleasurable by adding those fermented foods to it. So yes, you have to work with somebody who knows what they're doing to make sure you're not upsetting things.

Yeah. So what is a good place to start with fermented foods?

My favorite would be number one, if you have not consumed any fermented foods at all, it doesn't hurt to go out and buy some versus making them. I teach people how to ferment. I love fermentation. I love the process. When I first heard about the benefits of fermented foods, that traditional healthy cultures all consumed some type of fermented food, I was drawn to it and I bought it. This, this was 20 years ago when there weren't much choices in the way of fermented foods. So I started out by buying fermented foods and that's a great place to start, a great way to get used to the flavor of it. But eventually you get to the point where it gets too expensive and you want to get your hands involved in the process and understand what's going on. But if you are to buy fermented foods, there's a lot out there nowadays. We have kefir, we have kombucha, we have sauerkraut, pickles, all of these foods. But the one thing you need to be sure of when you purchase them, that you're buying live fermented foods. The benefits of the fermented foods come from the probiotics. The probiotics in the fermented foods are killed off at high temperatures. So if you're walking down the grocery store, down the middle aisle, and pulling a can of sauerkraut off the shelf, that is not gonna give you the probiotic benefit. You'll get the benefits of the fiber and the nutrients in there, but in order for that food to be shipped across the country, they heat process it and can it and kill off all those benefits. When you're looking for fermented foods to buy, sauerkraut is a readily available one, a good one to start with. You wanna look in the refrigerated section. And you wanna look for something that says live, raw, unpasteurized, and look at the label. And on the label, you should just see the vegetables, the cabbage, and salt. And then really that's about it. They're gonna be nowadays, plus myself, when I first started making sauerkraut, I added dill to it. That's the only way I flavored it. Now I add all sorts of wonderful, flavorful ways to, you know, enjoy that sauerkraut. So you'll see the vegetables, you'll see the cabbage. Some will introduce other bacteria into the fermentation process. I like to just— the vegetables are offering us in the way of bacteria. So really just look for salt and cabbage and vegetables on the label and that it's raw and unpasteurized. And that's a great way to get used to it.

Are there particular brands you like of sauerkraut?

You know, I live in Canada, so I'm not familiar with a lot of the US brands and I haven't bought much the way sauerkraut, but as long as you're looking, there's New companies coming out all the time. As long as you're buying something that you can access easily, you can even find it on Amazon. Don't make it too difficult. Just buy what you can get to. A local farmer's market might even sell some depending on what artisans are down there.

Oh yeah, we used to have this amazing stand when I lived in Takoma Park, Maryland, outside of DC. It was all sauerkraut and kimchi and different flavors, different colors of cabbage.

Yeah, exactly. And when we start buying local like that, we're supporting our economy, we're supporting our farmers, we're working together as a community, just like we need to work with the bacteria on our vegetables as a community to get those benefits.

So you mentioned you do all sorts of fancy things with your sauerkraut, and I make sauerkraut myself, but I never do anything other than just basically salt. So tell me what kind of fancy changes I could do to my sauerkraut.

One of my most favorite ones is what I call Hawaiian sauerkraut. And that has pineapple in it. It has cilantro and lime juice and lime zest and a few other spices. And it just adds a nice, it's like a very summer cooling sauerkraut. You can almost start pairing your sauerkraut with your meal depending on what your meal is, just like you would a wine. What I call my teaching recipe on my website uses grated carrots and chopped ginger., and that's a nice balance. The color of the carrots comes out and adds some nice brightness to it. Also, when we're fermenting just cabbage on its own, sometimes if that cabbage has been stored for too long, we don't get enough moisture out of it. And so by adding any like radish in and carrots in and, or grated beets, we're able to add some moisture into it. Cuz the success with fermentation is by having enough brine that everything's packed down below that brine where these bacteria work. In an anaerobic environment without air. And so by adding a few extra vegetables to the cabbage, not only do we get this beautiful flavor and a palate, you know, appeal to many people's palate, but then we have the extra moisture that helps out. Another favorite of mine is like grated beets with garlic and cumin seed. Just a beautiful color and the nutrients in the beets help with liver detoxification. So pretty much you can put anything you want into that sauerkraut recipe.

Hey, this is Lindsey here, just letting you know that if you're tired of dealing with digestive issues like bloating, indigestion, soft stool, diarrhea, constipation, reflux, IBS, IBD, or the numerous health conditions that come about when your gut is off, like brain fog, weight gain, UTIs, fatigue, mental health issues, or complex conditions like fibromyalgia and ME/CFS, that's my specialty. With my 3 or 5 session gut health coaching packages. We'll discuss different stool and functional medicine tests to find out the root cause of your symptoms. I'll interpret the results and provide clear explanations, empowering you to make informed choices for your gut and overall health. And together we'll develop a customized action plan based on your test results so you can find relief and regain your health and vitality. I come from a functional medicine perspective, trying to incorporate the latest peer-reviewed research and educating you on protocols used by functional medicine practitioners but devoting lots of time and support to my clients the way a doctor simply can't. If you're interested in a 3 or 5 session coaching package, you can sign up for complimentary 30-minute breakthrough session. Or if you can only afford one appointment at a time, you can book an initial 60-minute consultation. Links for those are in the show notes. Now back to the show.

I've just done plain sauerkraut, but there wasn't enough moisture often. So I would, I've gotten in the habit of just making a little bit extra brine with salt just to cover it up. This has only happened to me once in my entire time making sauerkraut in the last, say, 5 or 7 years, but it just smelled off. You know, I put a folded-up piece, the exterior piece, I take that, I fold it, and I put it on the top, and I don't worry so much if that's not under the brine. So I had been less careful about pushing it under every day and making sure it was underneath, and it was moldy, but I thought, I'll just take that off and everything underneath should be fine. And the smell was off. I put some in my mouth, and I'm like, Oh no, that's not right. And I just spit it out, wash my mouth out, and threw it all out.

Yeah, that can happen once in a while. We don't always know why, but I don't think I've had more than— I had one batch of sauerkraut I tossed, and it was because I made it from cabbage that had been sitting in my garage for months. I kept going, I'm going to make it tomorrow, I'm going to make it tomorrow. And being the thrifty person that I am, I finally got started, and these cabbage heads were had turned from a dark green to a blonde white. They had no weight to them. There were brown bits that I had to cut off. And don't ask me why I kept going, but I did. I made the whole lime sauerkraut. We were just trained not to waste food. So I made a 5-liter batch of it. It fermented fine. It looked okay. And I packed it into jars and then put that in my refrigerator. And then I pulled the jar out later to take to a gathering. And I opened it up and there was this thick layer of pinkish-brownish slimy-looking mold on top. And it's because there was not enough bacteria in that head of cabbage, those heads of cabbage that had been in the garage for at least 2 months. And so the bacteria couldn't do their work. There wasn't enough of them. I knew right away that was a cabbage that needed to be tossed. But if we're using the best ingredients possible, And we're setting up the home for the bacteria. They like a certain amount of salt. They like a certain temperature. They're picky like the rest of us. So if we set up the right home for them, it's, it's fail safe. It's very, very hard to ruin a batch. And like you said, intuitively, you knew that batch was wrong. So fermentation is very safe. There's never been a recorded case of illness from eating fermented, you know, vegetables like this. It's a very, very safe process.

Just make sure it stays under that brine. That's sort of, this last time I just, I just, every day I just went and made sure I pushed everything under the brine so it all got re-wet every day because sometimes it does push up out of it. Do you have some sort of a device that keeps things under the brine when you do it?

Over the years, you know, 20 years ago when I first started fermenting, Amazon wasn't around and the way that we fermented was in large crocks. Today, everybody's fermenting in jars. It's a great way to learn. It's a great way to do all your fermentation if you want. They have come up with neat little devices to create an air seal and an airlock and also to hold things under the brine. My favorite one is what is called a fermentation spring. I received one in the mail at one time about 5, 5, 10 years ago now from a company called Trellis and Company. He was a spring engineer who developed this, but it's a wound spring. It's a piece of metal in a spiral, and you put that into the top of your the jar and the lid on your jar forces that spring down. That spring puts pressure on your packed jar of cabbage, and that holds everything under the brine splendidly. Most of the original fermentation weights for jars were glass discs because that was copying what we did in a large crock. Our great-great-grandparents, when they fermented sauerkraut in the basement, they would pack it into a large crock and put a large plate on top, and then like a heavy, heavy can or some type of large weight that pushed down hard on that packed cabbage. They could put a lot of weight in a large crock. When you get to a little jar, a little glass weight just does not push down hard enough during the fermentation process when all these gases are being created. Those gases push up, create air pockets, push everything out of it. So like you're doing every day by pushing under the brine works great, or by using my favorite device, which is a fermentation spring.

So I forgot one other piece to my fermentation mishap was that I usually take a clean towel, a dish towel, and lay it over my jars just to keep sunlight out. And I think I took a dirty dish towel on this occasion. So I was like, for one we'd been using to dry our hands with.

So, you know, I'm sure there's a good bit of random bacteria on it. It's a very forgiving process. So even that dirty towel, when those things drop into the brine, those bacteria, are creating a safe environment. They get rid of the chemicals that are sprayed on our vegetables during the fermentation process. It's just amazing what they're able to do. Who knows what went wrong?

And you never know, but you can tell the, the color of the mold on top.

And yeah, exactly. You just know intuitively.

So I have a little sauerkraut with my egg at breakfast and maybe a yogurt a few days a week, a coconut yogurt I like. But help me with how I could incorporate more fermented foods into my diet.

Number one, just realize that we don't need to eat a lot of the fermented foods. Think of it as a condiment and think of keeping it very simple. To me, the easiest way to add fermented foods to your diet is to just add them to the meal like you are to your eggs, et cetera. When I'm eating dinner, I'll just put a dollop on the side, or when I make a salad at lunch, I'll sprinkle some of that onto my salad. So the easiest way is just to see it as sauerkraut and add it to your plate. But some people don't like the taste of it. It may be kind of off-putting. They're not used to the sour taste. If you did not grow up with fermented foods, sour, the sourness of them can be an uncomfortable flavor to get used to. So with that, you can add it to a salad. So if you're making a green salad and you're adding like a shredded cabbage to it, you're not even going to notice it. And in fact, it's going to add to the salad. It's going to taste so much better because of the, you know, just like adding vinegar to your salad. People have been known to take the brine and put into a smoothie, like if you're trying to get bacteria, the beneficial bacteria, the probiotics into children who maybe not want to eat the fermented food. Just adding the brine or even the sauerkraut into the blender and blending it up is kind of a hidden way to put it in there. Layering it into a sandwich.

Oh yeah.

Onto a hamburger. People that make like Buddha bowls, it's just one more vegetable to add to it. Fermented carrot sticks are a great way to get children eating the fermented foods. You can be dipping those into hummus or some type of ranch dressing or dip. So there's a lot of ways to mask the flavor of it, or then other ways just let it sit there and be prominent on your plate. But it tends to add— your meal tastes so much better with the fermented food. You'll get to the point where you're starting to eat your dinner and you think something's missing. And then you go grab your jar of sauerkraut or your pickles or your fermented carrot sticks and you go, wow, all of a sudden the taste buds are turned on and the food tastes so much better. And that's because of the umami taste. Fermented foods create umami, which is a pleasant savory taste. And chefs know the secret of adding umami-rich ingredients to meals because it brings out the flavors.

As I mentioned, I eat it with my breakfast. So I'll have a bite of egg with my Chipotle Hollandaise sauce with a little bit of sautéed spinach and a little bite of sauerkraut. And the sauerkraut kind of adds the salt component.

Yeah, exactly. And we have to be careful too, if you're brand new to fermented foods, that your body's gonna find it likes it, it's gonna crave it, and you'll start eating that, say, jar of sauerkraut. You almost wanna go to the bottom of it in one day. And it's just like those probiotic supplements where we talked about introducing too much bacteria all at once. You have to be careful with fermented foods that we don't add too much all at once. So start very, very slow if you have compromised gut health. Even just taking a sip of the brine for a few days, see how your body reacts to that. If it's doing okay, maybe sip a little bit more once or twice a day and then work your way up gradually over like even a month. Take it slowly because it's much easier to back off versus trying to undo, you know, damage of way too much bacteria thrown into your gut.

Right.

And so work your way up to 1 or 2 forkfuls of sauerkraut once or twice a day. And that is plenty to help you with your gut health. And then you start looking at adding other fermented foods to your diet. Kombucha's real popular. Milk kefir is another great one to add to your diet. Fermented pickles, various fermented vegetables. And then you get a variety of bacteria that you're introducing into your gut microbiome.

When I have clients dealing with diarrhea or loose stool, I always tell them about Tributyrin, which is the best absorbed form of butyrate, which is normally made by bacteria fermenting fiber in your colon. Supplemental tributyrin can help slow your motility down and feed the cells lining your colon, firming up stool and helping create an oxygen-free environment in the colon, which helps the butyrate-producing bacteria to survive and multiply. Those bacteria are often wiped out after taking antibiotics, which is why tributyrin is a great accompaniment and follow-up supplement if you have to take antibiotics. My new supplement, Tributyrin Max, has 750 milligrams of tributyrin which is the highest dose currently available in a capsule. You can find it at tributyrinmax.com. That's T-R-I-B-U-T-Y-R-I-N-M-A-X.com and use code INTRO15 for 15% off your first order.

Do you do your own yogurt or kefir?

I do my own milk kefir kind of on and off. Right now I've switched over to making a special yogurt. Milk kefir I love is a way, especially with people with compromised gut health, who think they might be intolerant to dairy. The fermentation process will break down the lactose and make it much more digestible. And there are more strains of beneficial bacteria in milk kefir than they are in yogurt. And so it's a very wonderful food to take into your diet when you're trying to really take care of a lot of gut issues. And milk kefir is made ideally with a raw milk, which you can make with any type of milk. And then you're adding what they call milk kefir grains. They look like little pieces of cauliflower. Flour, and they're a collection, a symbiotic collection of bacteria and yeast. And really you're putting that into your jar of milk. You're letting it sit on your counter anywhere from 12 to 36 hours and it will thicken and sour. And then you drink that milk kefir and it's a very, very easy fermentation process. And finding the milk kefir grains can happen on any of the Facebook groups and groups out there. A lot of people have them to share. And that's a great way to take care of your gut health.

And are you not heating the milk at all like you do when you make yogurt?

No, you don't heat the milk at all. And that's why it's so nice because you have no, nothing to do other than taking, and I even was doing this with a bare hand because the grains were large enough. I'd reach into my jar when it was done fermenting, pull the grains out of the jar and put them into the next jar. If you're careful, you're really straining them through a strainer. I found it just so, so simple. Wow. No heating at all.

And you can just keep reusing them over and over.

Yeah. And then they grow and they grow. And so then you have to donate some to a friend because they've gotten too big. And then fermentation, because there's more grains, fermentation happens quicker. But that's a wonderful drink. And people do make it with coconut milk. If you are sensitive to dairy, it's worth the try because many people find they can digest it without any issue at all. And then there's all the gut healing properties of it.

Yeah. I've made yogurt. Used to make a wonderful lemon yogurt, which was something I'd first tasted when I was studying abroad in France. And then I'd also do rosewater, which I would make it. And then I think there were 7 jars that fit into the yogurt maker and I would add a little bit of whatever flavoring so I could have multiple flavors in one batch if I wanted using different. But that was when I was eating dairy and I'm very picky about coconut yogurts. There's literally the only brand I like is that Cocojune and That's the only one I eat, but I haven't tried ever to make myself with non-dairy milk.

Right. I haven't played with it because I just want the nutrition out of the dairy and I'm good with it. One thing I've gotten onto recently is Dr. William Davis, who wrote the Wheat Belly book. He's been experimenting around with making yogurt with specific strains, and these are what he calls keystone species. And these are species of bacteria that we should all have, but he's finding that people are lacking in them. His book called Super Gut teaches you how to make yogurt from these different strains of bacteria. And the one I'm making right now is called L. reuteri. So you buy capsules that have the L. reuteri species strain in them and you make it. This is with pasteurized milk. It's not with raw milk. The idea is that you only want to introduce the strain that he's trying to reinoculate into your gut microbiome, and you don't want it to compete with the other strains that could be found in the milk. You make this yogurt at a specific temperature, 100 degrees, and you do it for 36 hours. And he's found tremendous gut healing, skin smoothing, better sleep. I mean, it's like this miracle. Yogurt when you work with a specific strain that all sorts of wonderful things happen.

My understanding is that a traditional yogurt maker is at a higher temperature than the batch that he's doing. So you have to use something special. Like I've been thinking I've got to get an Instant Pot and I understand that the newer ones will keep things at a particular temperature, like 100 degrees.

Yeah, exactly. You have to be able to control the temperature. So yeah, the newer Instant Pots, you can control the temperature. There are specific yogurt makers that you can have a closer control on the temperature, and then you can use a sous vide cooker. So I do mine in a, with a sous vide wand in a big pot of water with 3 or 4 jars of yogurt in there.

So like you put a wand in and it keeps it at a certain temperature?

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, okay.

And that works well because I already have lots of jars in my house because we have no drinking glasses. We drink everything out of the various canning jars. So we have them in all sizes. And I just didn't want to introduce a new set of jars into the house with the yogurt makers that had those nice cute little jars that I wanted. And so I found by using the sous vide wand in a spaghetti pot of water, I could put 3 jars in there and make a 2, 3-liter batch of yogurt all at once. That tends to work well in our family.

So has it been giving you those amazing benefits?

Yeah, I'm noticing a great difference in sleep. And then I'm also noticing that my dreams are much more vivid. I didn't used to remember dreams at all.. And now I'm remembering those dreams and I ran into a gal at the market the other day that was getting ready to make her another batch of her yogurt. And she says, look at me, I'm 70. I have no wrinkles. So, uh, you know, it's just wonderful that that's it.

I'm making it.

You've convinced me. Yeah. There you go. On the wrinkles, et cetera.

Anything for vanity.

Yep. You bet. Why not?

Are there ferments that you particularly like for people with gut health issues?

Definitely the milk kefir.

Mm-hmm.

And then probably starting more with what I would call gut shot or the juice from the sauerkraut. So you in essence make a watery batch of sauerkraut and you drink just the brine from it. And that's because a lot of times people with gut issues cannot take the fiber from the sauerkraut. Mm-hmm. So I think that's a wonderful way to gently introduce the beneficial bacteria. And then not a fermented food, but bone broth would be another one that is so healthy and healing for people with gut issues.

I love my bone broth during the winter. I try and have that every morning with some lemon and salt in it.

And yeah, exactly. It's so nourishing and so healing. There's just so many things we can do to take care of our health through foods that traditional cultures, that was their mainstay diet. Stay away from the processed foods and go back to these original foods. They are so healing for the gut.

I think of it as sort of an accidental thing, like they needed to preserve the food, so it fermented and then, right, that's how it stayed good.

Exactly. And fermentation is not just a recipe you want to try for the day. You open up your cookbook like you want to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies. You run to the store and buy everything. Fermentation is a way to preserve foods. And so if we're going to have success with fermentation, we need to preserve what is locally available and in season. So if it's December and I want to make pickles, just like I want to make chocolate chip cookies in December, I'm going to be fighting it. I'm not going to have the success because those cucumbers were either grown in a hothouse or they were shipped from halfway around the world, or they've been sitting on the shelf for weeks. And we have to look back at what's the number one, the worker bee, what's going to make fermentation happen, and it's the bacteria. So the minute that we pick that produce, that vegetable that we want to ferment, It's trying to decay. The bacteria that break it down are fighting with the bacteria that are going to transform it into gold for us. We really have to look at fermentation as, like you say, a way to preserve foods. And we're preserving our local foods. And when we work with something local that was recently picked, it's very, very hard to mess it up because it's just teeming with that beneficial bacteria.

So what are some of the more advanced ferments that people might consider making if they've already done the sort of the basic, the sauerkraut or the yogurt.

Well, just like we were talking, I actually have to say that fermenting cucumbers into pickles, cucumber pickles, is to me one of the more advanced ones. It's just a little more finicky. If you're starting with fresh-picked cucumbers, it's hard not to mess it up, but it's just sometimes they come out too soft because you haven't added enough tannin-rich vegetables in there. You have to cut off the blossom so they don't soften during the fermentation process. It's just more finicky, and also people are trying to ferment because we pick the cucumbers in the middle of summer, so we're fermenting in heat. Ideally, you're fermenting at cooler temperatures, but when your house is 80 degrees and you want to make your cucumber pickles, you're fighting the heat, and the bacteria that help make fermentation happen don't like that heat. And so there's a lot of factors at place when you're trying to make your cucumber pickles. I ferment them in an ice chest where I put a frozen jug of water so I can drop the temperature down. Ideally, you get about 65 65 to 70°F for your fermentation temperature. When it gets above that, you're fighting all these other things going on, and your chances for success are greatly diminished. To me, that is a more challenging one. Kimchi is beautiful to make. It's just more steps involved, because if you're making it in the traditional format, you're soaking the napa cabbage in salt water first, and then you're having to make the paste that the leaves get layered into. So that one's a little bit more complex. But you can get the same flavors by making, like I have on my website, a kimchi-style sauerkraut. And we slice the cabbage up finely, and then we add the green onions and the carrots and the Korean red pepper and the fish sauce to get the same flavors, but in a much more simple process. It's a learning process. And once you learn the fermentation process, then it becomes intuitive and second nature. And then you start going to the market and you see everything down there and you think, what can I make with that? What can I make with that? Yeah.

My husband grew up near a Korean family and he said that they would bury the kimchi in their yard and then dig it out when it was done fermenting.

Right. And they were burying it in their yard to have that nice cool temperature, that stable temperature.

Yeah. They lived in Florida. That makes sense. Yeah.

Even in Korea, et cetera, they would, you know, that's just a nice stable temperature and your best flavors happen when you have a nice stable temperature during the fermentation process.

Tell me about your fermentation courses and your book.

So on my website, I have, I kind of like to give people 3 entry points. I have a great teaching recipe on there if you want to just jump in and learn how to make sauerkraut, takes you through step by step. And then in my book, Fermentation Made Easy: Mouthwatering Sauerkraut, that's a book available on Amazon as a print book or as a Kindle or off my website as a PDF. And that's full of 20+ recipes with all my beautiful combinations, the firecracker sauerkraut that has diced jalapeños in it and oregano and red onion. There's the beet sauerkrauts in there. There's a kimchi sauerkraut in there. So I teach again the process step by step and give the recommended tools, how to make, you know, various flavors of sauerkraut. And then I have a course on how to make sauerkraut and then an online course on how to make fermented vegetable pickles.

And where do they find all those things?

At makesauerkraut.com. So that's M-A-K-E, then sauerkraut, S-A-U-E-R-K-R-O-U-T.

Erkrout.com.

Any final thoughts about fermentation for us before we head out?

Just jump in and try it. It's an amazing process, and I love it because it introduces you to a whole new community, the microbial community. When I first made sauerkraut, I did not realize I was following a recipe, just like a chocolate chip cookie recipe. I did not realize there was bacteria in there that were making all this magic happen. And once you realize that, it's just a whole new world and You start wanting to take care of them and make sure that you have fed them properly and set up their home properly. And then before you know it, you're trying to get the best cabbage possible. So you're looking for a local community farmer's market where you can buy great cabbage from your farmer if you're not growing it in your backyard. And all of a sudden your food, you sit down at night for a meal and you realize how much of your food came from your local community.

I mean, it also is too so much less expensive to make your own ferments.

Exactly.

I mean, I think you could buy fancy sauerkraut for $10 a jar and you can make 3 jars of it from 1 head of cabbage.

Right, it's more like $20 a jar.

Oh yeah, and it's like $2.50 for a head of cabbage.

Yeah, exactly. And we need those skills. It's a very empowering process when you can take and slice up this cabbage and sprinkle some salt on it and pack it into a jar. And then you watch the bubbles happening through time. You watch the colors change and the smells change. And you open that up and all of a sudden you have something that you made yourself that's going to take care of your gut health. That is not a new diet or a new thing you have to do other than opening up that jar and putting a fork of the sauerkraut onto your plate. The meal tastes better and you sleep better and your gut is healthier because of it. And so it's such a wonderful empowering process. It's just great to learn and to add to your repertoire.

Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us about fermentation. You're actually the first person I've had on who's talked about this topic.

Excellent.

Well, I hope you'll check out Holly's website, makesauerkraut.com, and grab your free sauerkraut recipe and start fermenting if you're not already doing it. I will mention, for folks who have histamine issues, you'll likely need to wait until those are resolved before you start eating fermented foods. But for other folks, it's a great place to start for better gut health. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can buy supplements at a discount from my FullScript Dispensary, order tests at a discount from my Rupa Health Lab Store, or use my affiliate links to eVitamins, Bulk Supplements, or Amazon.com. If you'd like to connect with me online, you can follow my High Desert Health Facebook page, join my Gut Healing Facebook group, or join my newsletter list at highdeserthealthcoaching.com, as well as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Links for those are in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today. And just wishing you all the perfect stool!