Soaking seeds and nuts

The brine is fine.

A number of you expressed excitement about soaking pumpkin seeds in leftover cumin-infused fermentation brine, as mentioned in last week’s post.

I want to support your interest with more details on that method, which we’re making available to paid subscribers below, along with a printable .pdf version, also added to our recipe archive. If this encourages more of you to upgrade, we won’t complain!

Freebie subscribers, if you’re not opposed to doing a little research, here are three excellent resources that offer advice and background on seed and nut soaking. Below I’m linking to where you can purchase these books via affiliate links. We might earn a small commission if you purchase through the links, and that helps offset the fact that most of our content here is provided free of charge.

1. Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig

   Fallon is known in homesteading circles for her activism promoting raw milk, meat eating, and ancestral food ways. She covers the benefits and necessity of seed-and-nut soaking, including a basic how-to.

2. A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen: Homestead Kitchen Skills and Real Food Recipes for Resilient Health, by Kate Downham

   This book was featured in a past subscriber giveaway. It served as our first introduction to fermentation and is full of excellent recipes for healthy ancestral eating. Kate offers a basic recipe for soaked, dehydrated nuts and seeds.

3. Fermented Vegetables, by Kirsten K. Shockey and Christopher Shockey

   This spring we featured

   Kirsten K. Shockey
   ’s recently released update for the tenth anniversary of this book, which gave us a much-needed deeper dive into all things fermented. This book planted the ‘seed’ idea for repurposing the brine water leftover from a ferment.

Since writing last week’s post, I’ve been mulling over my valid distrust of elite society and the “experts” to whom we’re told we should pay attention, often at the exclusion of equally informed, but dissenting, viewpoints. I touched on this when I questioned the need for a recipe for salad at all. I suppose it’s ironic for me to now turn around and give you a recipe, as well as add to our own growing recipe archive. But I’m not against recipes. I just think we’ve, as a culture, lost touch with how to grow and prepare our own food. We’ve ceded it to authorities, whether those be the megacorps who extrude our processed foods, the celebrity chefs who plan the menus at the restaurants in which we dine, or the food influencers whose cookbooks we buy.

So my hope is that with this recipe, I’ll help foster in you a practice of soaking seeds and nuts, and that you’ll use the below as a jumping-off point to explore the technique further. I look forward to hearing about that when you do.

Now for the nutty-gritty. The exciting thing you should know off the bat is that you can soak your seeds and nuts in a variety of liquids. It doesn’t have to be leftover fermentation brine; that’s just a nifty reuse. I’ve soaked them in leftover honey-vinegar crabapple pickling juice, just plain sea-salted, filtered water, and others.