- Hello, everyone, this is Sarah,
the Healthy Home Economist.
And what am I gonna show you today?
Well, I thought and thought.
I've got so many things I want
to show you on these videos
and it's hard for me to
decide every week what to do.
And I try to mix it up
so that some of the new people
will find things that are
helpful for them as well
as people who've been doing
traditional cooking for a while.
So what I came up with today
is a dish that is adapted out
of "Nourishing Traditions".
And it's a dish that, I
call it fermented potatoes.
Okay, so we're gonna ferment potatoes here
and the reason I like this particular dish
is so many times we
think of fermented dishes
like sauerkraut, beet kvass,
and various things like
that that are condiments,
particularly sauerkraut
and apricot chutney
and some of these other
fermented dishes that I've done.
They're nice little
condiments with your meal
but we don't really tend to
ferment starchy foods very much.
And starchy foods make a
great side dish with a steak
or a hamburger or a
grass-fed burger, of course,
or something like that.
And a lot of people have
trouble with starches nowadays.
Starch is difficult to digest.
It's a very complex molecule,
well, it's actually a simple molecule
but you've got a lot
of 'em strung together.
And the gut tends to have
trouble breaking it down
unless your gut is in
very, very good shape.
Which is why if you're
following the gaps diet,
which is the diet based on
gut and psychology syndrome,
or the specific carbohydrate diet,
starch is not permitted
on either of those diets
because of its difficulty to digest.
But say you're coming off of those.
You've been on those diets for a while.
Or maybe you're just
trying to limit your starch
and you would like to have
a way to eat your starch
that's a little bit more digestible,
this would be a great dish for you to make
and have in the refrigerator
to have as a condiment with your meals.
Particularly meats, like steak
or something like that, chicken, whatever.
So what I've got here is I've
cooked up four cups of potato
and I prefer organic Yukon Gold potatoes.
To me, the taste of those
potatoes is superior
to organic Russet potatoes
or even red potatoes.
I just love the Yukon Gold potatoes
and make sure you get organic
because organic potatoes
have such a superior flavor
to non-organic potatoes.
It's worth the extra money to buy them.
So I have baked four cups
worth of Yukon Gold potatoes
and I've peeled them and I've mashed 'em.
And here's what I have in the bowl here.
Now the next thing you're
gonna do to make this dish
is get yourself some yogurt or some kefir
or even some clabbered milk
or buttermilk would be fine.
Now I've got raw yogurt here.
And you're gonna notice
that the consistency of this
is more like kefir.
Raw yogurt is a much more
drinkable consistency than kefir.
So that's why you're going
to see me pour it here,
rather than scoop it out.
So I've got the one cup of raw yogurt,
let me get one more cup here.
And there's two cups of my raw yogurt.
I'm also going to use one
tablespoon of sea salt.
And I'm gonna use pink Himalayan salt
for this particular dish.
Pink Himalayan salt imparts
a superior flavor, I think,
when it comes to potatoes.
I have my, kind of my favorite sea salts,
depending on what I'm cooking
and I really do like this
particular salt with potatoes.
So I'm going to sprinkle
on a tablespoon of that
and then I'm going to start
mixing it in just a bit.
It's going to take a little bit of work
to mix all this in.
Okay, we have mixed up
our yogurt and our potato.
And you can see now that
the liquid has been,
it actually looks like
mashed potatoes now,
if you look at the consistency of it.
It really does look like mashed potatoes.
Now we are going to just cover this now.
We're done, all we have to
do is let the probiotic,
the beneficial bacteria in the yogurt,
work on this starch for a
couple days on the counter.
It's going to break it down.
Then when you eat the potatoes,
after it's been fermented,
your gut's going to say,
"Thank you." (laughs)
It's going to have to do a
lot less work to digest it
and get the nutrition out of it.
So we're going to leave these.
Did you get a good shot of that?
How it's a consistency of mashed potatoes.
Let's just simply cover this
with a nice clean cloth,
a cloth that has never been bleached,
and we're just going
to cover it like that.
And we're just going to leave it
on the kitchen counter for two days,
and as I said, let the beneficial bacteria
in that raw yogurt work on all that starch
and break it down.
And then we're going to either
transfer it to mason jars
and refrigerate it
or put it in a bowl with
a lid and refrigerate it.
And it should last several weeks,
even a month or two in the refrigerator.
Because remember fermentation
is an old form of food preservation.
Not only enhance the nutrition
and digestibility of the food
but it also enhanced the shelf life.
And this was in pre-refrigeration times.
So go ahead and give this a try.
If starch is something that you're having
a little trouble with in your diet
or you just would like
to add a probiotic aspect
to some of your side
dishes with your steak.
Make your fermented potato and
let me know what you think.
This is Sarah, the Healthy Home Economist
and I'm wishing you all
the best in the kitchen.
