The nice people at lovingfoods.co.uk send me 10 jars of assorted kimchi and kraut every 5 weeks. I eat kimchi with fish, eggs and oriental food, and sauerkraut at least once a day. (I like to make a side salad with sauerkraut, mixed with nuts and fruit, chopped dried apricots and walnuts/grated apple and chopped roasted hazelnuts/dried goji berries and pistachio kernels). I also really like the Vadasz Super Beet Kimchi, so I get a jar of that in every now and again.
I have kefir every day, usually a 100ml glass with some kind of fruit to round off my last meal of the day though I also add it to lunchtime fruit & protein smoothies. I get a pot of Yeo Valley organic kefir and take two tablespoons to mix with a litre of long life milk, creating a litre of much cheaper kefir. That usually lasts till my next grocery delivery, but it looks like running out I'll use 2 tablespoons of the home made stuff to create another litre to see me through.
I used to buy kombucha from the supermarket, choosing the kinds that claimed to have millions of live organisms in every bottle, but always wondered if they were still alive, of if I was paying a ridiculous amount for what might only be fizzy pop, and most of them had sweetener in which I wasn't too keen on. Last year I ordered a kombucha scoby off Amazon, and haven't looked back. I also invested in a couple of 4.25 litre glass brewing jars that came with muslin cloths and rubber bands, 6 half litre glass bottles with swing top lids, a small funnel that fits inside the necks of the bottles and 3 kg of organic sugar. I already had plenty of organic black tea bags.
Every ten days I weigh 300g of sugar into the teapot, add 8 tea bags, pour in boiling water and steep the tea for 10 minutes, before removing the bags and stirring until the sugar has dissolved. I allow the tea to cool, then fill some water (filtered or boiled and allowed to cool because chlorine and heat would kill the scoby) and the pot of tea into the empty one of the two brewing jars. Then I wash my hands very carefully before transferring the scoby from the jar where it has been brewing for the past ten days and drop it into the jar with the sweet tea. I use some of the old liquid to top up the new jar, before covering it with the muslin cloth and setting it aside to brew for the next ten days.
Then the freshly brewed kombucha goes into the bottles, and they are left to stand on the kitchen counter for a couple of days, to continue brewing so that they are nice and fizzy. Then they go into the fridge to slow the halt process so they don't explode.
At first I added dried berries or freeze dried fruit powder to the bottles to flavour the kombucha. Till I found out that I actually liked the fizzy sour taste of plain kombucha and stopped bothering. There is never any doubt about the home brewed kombucha being alive, during ten days the scoby grows a new layer and the sweet tea turns into a fizzy amber liquid with a yeasty brewed smell. It fizzes and foams like beer when poured into the bottles, and continues to ferment in the bottles before they go into the fridge.
The stuff is so bursting with life that sometimes a tiny gel disc forms on top of the kombucha in the neck of the bottle, an actual baby scoby. I never got that in the stuff from the supermarket.
The fermented foods I have been eating every day since the end of February 2022 are kombucha, kefir, and either kimchi or sauerkraut or kimchi AND kraut. The four Ks!
There's a bottle of smoked sriracha fermented hot sauce in the fridge, and a pot of live Japanese miso, they don't get used every day, but at least once a week.
I'm a cheese fiend, the smellier the better, love Roquefort, Stilton, and any of the strong vintage cheeses. Sometimes I'll stand my homemade kefir in coffee filter so the whey runs out and leaves cream cheese in the filter. The whey gets used instead of water to make bread.
I get through quite a bit of Greek yogurt, organic cider vinegar, and sourdough bread. And marmite, that's fermented too, though it can't still be alive, not with all that salt surely?
According to the Zoe podcast coffee, tea and chocolate are all fermented foods as well. I drink black coffee before breakfast, then coffee and tea with milk during the day, and (since I don't like proper tea without milk) after 4pm I alternate between green tea, high altitude purple tea from Kenya, and oolong tea, as well as white tea, mint tea and camomile tea (but those last three don't count because they haven't been fermented).
I keep a stash of Lindt 90% a square of it dipped into hot coffee is delicious, I am the kind of pig who sucks the melty bit off and dips it again. I was given a bar of Montezuma's Absolute Black 100% dark chocolate for Christmas, impressive stuff, who knew you could make a bar of chocolate out of 100% cocoa and bugger all else? The first square tasted a bit harsh, and very grown up compared to the smoothness of Lindt's 90% dark chocolate, but it has grown on me, and it is going to be another regular treat.