🍯🧄 NATURAL MEDICINE - FERMENTED HONEY GARLIC 🍯🧄

amy-goodrich (70)in #food • 4 years ago

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Good afternoon beautiful people. Today’s post is for my not-so-strick vegan or non-vegan friends. Though I am sure this recipe might also work with maple syrup, I love wild Cambodian honey.

Next to the occasional egg of my geese or my friend’s chickens, wild Cambodian honey is the only other exception I make to my plant-based lifestyle.

It is something I feel comfortable with. Both my geese and the chickens of my friend freely roam our properties, they are not meant to be eaten. Sometimes, however, we need to eat their eggs or we both would end up with too many poultry in the garden.

I love my geese. Since we live in the jungle we needed something for our snake problem. Though I never killed a snake, we always relocated them, they are just not fun to have around all the time. Ever since we have the geese the snakes stay away… yeahhhh.

And for the wild honey, as an animal lover and vegan, I still feel comfortable using this medicinal, liquid gold collected straight from the jungle in the same way our ancestors did thousands of years ago. No commercial beehives or processed honey here!

This post, however, isn’t about bees, geese, and snakes…. Let’s talk honey and garlic.

I get my wild honey through an old lady that comes around on the street with a giant bucket full of pure, raw, jungle honey. She often passes by my pop-up bakery. Though every time she tries to convince me to buy the whole bucket, usually I end up filling a 1L jar, if I have one with me or a 1L plastic water bottle from the restaurant across.

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We always have a small chat, and during one of those chats, she told me her sons collect the honey somewhere in the jungles not too far off. It might be nice to go with them one day to see the process.

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FERMENTED HONEY GARLIC

Though I originally found this method when I was searching for natural cold and flu remedies, it is super yum to use in your daily cooking. You can either use the fermented garlic cloves when a recipe calls for cloves or use the honey to make a lovely marinade or dressing! Or use both.

If you are a garlic lover just like us, you may even try to eat a whole clove. We love it but it might not be for everyone hehe.

Furthermore, honey fermented garlic might be the easiest recipe you’ll ever make. The hardest work is peeling the garlic. '

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THE RECIPE

A clean glass jar
Garlic cloves
Raw honey

FYI: it is important to use raw honey. Raw honey still has all the bacteria and wild yeast needed for fermentation.

This recipe is adjustable to the size of the jar you have. You’ll want to fill it about ½ - to ¾ with peeled garlic cloves.

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Then pour in the raw honey. The cloves might float to the top but that is absolutely fine. Cover the jar loosely so fermentation gasses can escape. Put the jar in a dark place.

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One to two times a day, tighten the lid and flip the jar to make sure all the garlic stays coated with honey. After a few days, the whole kitchen or storage room will smell like garlic when you open the jar.

After a few days or a week, depending on your climate, bubbles will start to appear. This is a sign of fermentation. And then it’s up to you. Though you can start using it straight away, over time it will become so much yummier. We like ours after about a month of fermentation. By then the honey will be much thinner and the garlic will be nice and soft.

The longer you ferment to fewer times you need to invert the jar as the cloves will float less.

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After fermentation, screw the lid on and store it in the fridge.

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HOW TO USE

You can use it as a medicine to boost the immune system when you feel sick. Just eat the whole clove or take a spoonful of the honey, or use both. It works very well in honey garlic tea. A little longer than a year ago, my Khmer friend Vanna told me to have a garlic-honey tea to soothe my sore throat. So yum, comforting and healing!

Though I haven’t been sick since I have made garlic honey tea on occasion. Though it might sound yucky to you it is actually very tasty!

In food, there are many ways to start using honey-garlic. I use it in marinades, dips, sauces, dressing, and sometimes in stews too. I will post some recipes soon!