Preserving the Good Life

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“We went the traditional route at first, with a chest freezer, canning equipment and a canning book,” Ana says. “The first summer, we were pickling, freezing and canning, then eating kind of flat, limp green beans from the freezer.”

Roy describes the canning and other preservation recipes they found through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): “Basically you kill the food, then when it’s dead, you make sure you kill it a second time.”

The Antakis thought there must be a better way. “We asked, ‘What did people do before electricity and sophisticated canning equipment?’” Ana says. “Somebody mentioned lacto-fermentation, and I said, ‘Milk?’ Then I realized it wasn’t that, but preservation using Lactobacillus bacteria.”

“Lactobacillus will create lactic acid out of sugar and transform the food,” Roy says. The acidic conditions then preserve the food without canning or freezing.

They read two books about lacto-fermentation, Keeping Food Fresh: Old World Techniques & Recipes and Wild Fermentation, then found more recipes in ethnic cookbooks and through a Montville neighbor.

After having good luck with cucumbers, they moved on to sauerkraut, green tomatoes and apples in brine. The sauerkraut was a great discovery for Ana, whose only other experience with sauerkraut was in New York schools.

“I found the stuff revolting! It smelled awful and had an awful appearance,” she says. “I didn’t understand how people ate it!” It wasn’t until she started making her own that Ana realized how superior homemade sauerkraut is to store-bought.

They’d already been making their own tofu, which is not a fermented product, so they decided to try tempeh, a fermented soy food, and found great success.

In addition, they had some fermented Japanese pickles, which were “really good and different from anything I had tasted,” Ana says. “They were pickled in miso (Japanese paste made with soybeans and fermented grains), and I figured the only way I was going to afford to have any quantity on hand was to learn how to make my own miso, which I did.” (See “How to Make Miso & Kimchi” below.)

Now, she and Roy also make lacto-fermented dilly beans, carrots, kimchi (spicy Korean pickled vegetables), pickled/fermented cucumbers and tomatoes, as well as apple cider, apple cider vinegar and hard cider—which Roy uses to make cider champagne. They also make beer and wine, but “we’re sober most of the time,” Roy jokes.

He also notes that their kimchi is “real, fermented kimchi, not overnight kimchi. Ours contains enough of the elements that facilitate digestion so that some of our customers keep buying it for their digestion.”

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