This is one of the recipes I touch on when I do the “Herbs and Spices for Winter Wellness workshop”.
This is great for you on so many levels! And at any point in time – not only for winter chills and ills.
All three elements have their own brilliant nutrition and medicinal value, and when they come together, they create this delicious and good-for-you probiotic superfood.
Garlic is a powerhouse – antifungal, antibacterial, antiviral, immune building, and a circulatory system strengthener. It may prevent cancer, improve athletes’ performance, and is being studied in relation to Alzheimer’s and dementia, among many other things.
Honey has been a medicinal food for thousands of years. It’s has, through modern research, been shown to have an inhibitory effect on many bacteria, fungi and viruses. It’s nutritious too. And it is antioxidant. It’s good for digestion, good for brain health and soothes sore throats and coughs while healing wounds too.
Fermented foods increases and revitalizes the number of beneficial bacteria (probiotics) in your gut. Gut health is vitally important! Not only does good gut flora improve digestion, and build immunity, but there’s a strong benefit to your mental, and emotional wellbeing too because of the importance of the relationship between the gut and the brain.
Step by step: Fermented Garlic Honey
Ingredients
1 cup Freshly peeled garlic cloves
– organic where possible so that you are assured it’s not sprayed with anything to stop it from sprouting.
1 cup Honey – raw and local where possible, raw so that you can benefit from the natural bacteria and yeasts in honey and local so that you can benefit from allergens native to your area
Note: Quantity does not really matter, however try to keep to a 1:1 ratio of honey to garlic.
Tools
Glass jar with lid, washed and sterilized.
Note: My fermenting guru friend swears by true and proper Fido jars – and uses them for all her ferments because the rubber seal is designed to let air out, but not in.
If you don’t have a Fido jar, a normal glass jar will work too. When it comes to gas build up, as you’ll see in method, there’s two ways of dealing with it.
Method
- Peel garlic. You can crush/bruise the cloves ever so slightly to speed up the fermenting process, but whole cloves are fine too.
- Add the peeled garlic to the clean jar and pour honey over until all the garlic is covered with honey.
- Mix well, try to get rid of all the air bubbles.
- Leave to ferment
>> Option one: Seal loosely and flip the jar upside down. You can place this on a saucer to catch any overflow, but it’s generally not needed. As the fermenting happens, gas escapes through the loose lid.>> Option two: Seal tightly and flip the jar upside down. You will have to manually unscrew the jar every day to release gasses before sealing again (burping) and flipping over once more.
- You can tip the jar about every few days to ensure all the garlic is covered with honey. Generally, though there’s very little issue with mold or bad fungi of any sorts happening because both garlic and honey are antifungal.
More here: https://multicultured.org/fermented-honey-garlic-botulism-risk/ - After two weeks your ferment should be done and you can start eating your delicious garlic and honey. But you can let it go for longer too, after a month it tastes great.
Note: During fermentation you may see bubbles, that’s just the gasses building up. Your honey will also become runny, more like water than gooey and sticky, that’s totally fine and is simply the garlic juice mixing with the honey. Your garlic may turn green/blue too, don’t be alarmed it’s simply a chemical process where natural enzymes in the garlic reacts to the sulphur from the garlic in a mildly acidic environment.
Store
You can store your fermented garlic honey for a good few months, even up to a year. i
Use it
Eat a clove, with the honey, to help boost immunity in times when there’s lots of colds and flu going around.
Or let the soothing honey relieve sore throats and ease coughs.
Besides being a great medicine, this is tastes great too and you can use it as part of a marinade, or in salad dressings…yum!
