Protective Diet Class #334

Vinegar Making Workshop

In this class, Julie Marie shares her sugar-free, organic, probiotic-populated, gourmet vinegars made from free local fruit finds. After a year of testing, she honed a simple 2-stage process. Since beneficial microbes do all the work, the hardest part is a 5-week wait.

Announcements

• Engage in our official support group, Protective Diet Living (PDL). Join Live Chats & Coaching Hour for personal assistance.
• Shop https://www.protectivediet.com/azure, the organic farm that delivers near you, for low-cost, high-quality PD staples.

Vocabulary

Action Steps for Homemade Vinegar

• Make Room for Vinegar in Your Protective Diet Pantry
• A Protective Diet includes vinegars. Raw, unfiltered, organic, zero-calorie vinegar contains beneficial, live, active cultures.
• Look for unpasteurized (raw), zero-calorie apple cider vinegar in glass bottles. Vinegar extracts toxic BPAs from plastic bottles. BPAs are known to inhibit hormone production, thyroid function, fertility, and our microbiome.
• Distilled White Vinegar in plastic jugs is chemically derived and best used as a cleaning agent, not a food.
• The base product gives each type of vinegar unique characteristics, making each suitable for a different culinary application.

Probiotic Vinegar Can Boost the Gut Microbiome

When starting out on a Protective Diet, you will not have a gut microbiome population that prefers fiber. When you eat an abundance of plant fiber, you may feel bloated and lousy. So if you are just getting started, ease into plant fiber. Don’t eat half a batch of French Onion Dip. Don’t load your plate with beans, or a pound of vegetables. Don’t eat Chili without Mix and Mac or rice. Eventually you will have microbes that desire and require plant fiber. You won’t bloat, get gassy, or have reflux or indigestion.

Homemade Fruit Vinegar adds a

 little kick of live, functional

 microbes to help you along.

A simple way to include it: add

a splash to a glass of Pellegrino for a

calorie-free soda pop-type drink.

• Pellegrino should contain only mineral water. No flavorings, spices, or citric acid. Those chemical food additives cause cravings. They are designed by food chemists to make you an addict; a loyal consumer of their product. Chemicals kill beneficial microbes. Review Class #082 to become an independent label reader who can detect sneaky chemicals in food.
• Dilute vinegar to protect tooth enamel and the stomach. Drink only a couple of ounces of vinegar a day. Start with just a little bit so you can populate healthy microbes that are just waiting to digest plant fiber.
• Adding little bits of other probiotics, like 7-day Sauerkraut, to everything you eat can also build up healthy microbes.

• Make Homemade Fruit Vinegar
• Follow the detailed recipe. Read all directions and notes. This is a 2-stage process. The first stage takes 2 weeks. The second stage takes 3 weeks. The fruit to water ratio and the timing are important. Since Protective Diet Homemade Fruit Vinegar is free of added sugars, it’s important to follow instructions for packing fruit tightly to the top of the jar to be sure there is enough natural sugar present for alcohol fermentation to take place in the first stage.

• Prevent fruit flies—keep the porous lid dry. A wet lid will attract fruit flies. Set out ramekins of Apple Cider Vinegar covered with plastic wrap poked with a few holes to attract fruit flies to one bountiful fly fest location.
• In Homemade Vinegar, you may notice:

The Mother—all the probiotics hanging out together in one cloudy mass inside the liquid.

Kahm Yeast—a naturally occurring white film. This is harmless and edible.

Blue or Black Mold—this may occur if the water to fruit ratio is off. This smells foul and indicates spoilage.

• Repurpose glass bottles for Homemade Vinegar storage. Collect Pellegrino bottles, Tamari bottles, old hot sauce bottles, glass vinegar bottles, etc. Wash thoroughly. Remove labels in hot water. Scrub off any sticky residue with a scotch brite pad. Store with lids off so air can circulate and odors from original contents can dissipate. Keep lids handy in a separate organizer. When ready, fill these bottles with vinegar and cap with plastic or cork instead of metal lids. Metal will rust.

Cooking Tips

• Get hydrated. Dehydration makes it hard to focus, and causes us to feel sleepy and produce the hunger hormone ghrelin.
• Check out the Protective Beverage recipe category. We’re saving a lot of money, buying organic herbs in bulk and brewing them up, like hibiscus flowers in Flower Water, or things that are growing for free in our gardens in Fresh Herb Tea.
• Consuming vinegar will not break your fast because it has zero calories and a bitter taste. Microbes love bitter things like Rooibos, green tea, black tea, Protective Coffee, Tuber Tonic, and Homemade Fruit Vinegar. Anything that has a sweet effect to our taste buds (natural or artificial) will trigger insulin, which kicks us out of autophagy or cellular recycling.
• We avoid drinking alcohol because it kills the microbiome. It’s the number 1 accelerator for breast cancer.
• We replaced Frank’s Original Hot Sauce with Probiotic Pepper Sauce, which has beneficial microbes and far less salt.

Encouragement

• I don’t want processed things in my house or in my life experience. I know my ancestors didn’t have granular sugar. I use erythritol to balance the sweet and bitter, and I want to serve Sheet Pan Apple Cake to my friends.
• We are eating so beautifully on a Protective Diet. I put my heart and soul into the recipes to produce beautiful food for Jerry and I and my friends here in the valley. But I have you in my mind, in my kitchen when I’m making something.

“I have been working on this recipe for months and

my kitchen smells like a sandwich shop.”