Encore: Fermenting Trash in the Kitchen: Using a Bokashi Composter

Today, we’re bringing you an episode of the podcast that originally went out in 2022. It’s about fermenting, but fermenting with a twist – fermenting your kitchen waste to make microbe-rich compost that, as we know from personal experience, will transform the plants you grow.

This fermentation process, called bokashi, can be done in the house, it has no smell and neither does it attract flies. You’ll get both compost and compost tea to use inside and outside the home.

In this episode, we’ll detail how bokashi works, talk about the bacterial inoculant that is used to ferment the food waste so efficiently, and then we will actually interview the US and Canada supplier that makes the two-bucket system that we both use.

In the US & Canada, check out the bokashi system here and use code AKP for 10% off.

In the UK, Wiggly Wigglers have a 10% discount for our listeners. Click here and when you checkout the discount will be automatically applied.

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One Earth Health make the grass-fed organ supplements we use and trust. Get 15% off your first order here and 5% off all subsequent orders here.

For US listeners, we recommend Grand Teton Ancient Grains. They sell regenerative, organic flours and berries that can satisfy all your baking needs. Stock up and get free shipping at AncientGrains.com

 

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Transcript:

You know Allison is always fermenting weird and strange things, but when she told me she was fermenting trash, it was a new level. I had to know more. A little over a year ago, when we were recording an episode, Allison offhand mentioned something she called bakashi. After we finished recording, I asked her, what was that? It turns out that bakashi is the Japanese word for compost, and Allison had purchased a tool that she used to ferment her food waste, bones, peels, fat scraps, anything that she didn’t use or that had gone bad, into compost tea and compost, which she was using in her porch garden.

As you have seen on her Instagram, she produced some incredible vegetables with the help of that nutrient-dense, lacto-fermented nutritional support for her plants. In this episode, Allison and I will explain the process of fermenting waste, the inoculant that is used to ferment the food waste, and then we will actually interview the U.S. And Canada supplier that makes the two-bucket system that Allison and I use. They also very graciously created a code for the U.S. and Canada podcast listeners to get the same kit we use at a discount. This episode will answer all your questions for those of you trying to produce compost tea, or compost for your garden or porch garden, or find clean, ethical, but also non-smelly ways to deal with the food scraps. And then after you finish this episode, you can get about your day fermenting your trash.

Welcome to the Ancestral Podcast with Allison, a European town dweller in Central Italy, and Andrea living on a newly created family farm in Northwest Washington State, USA. Pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating, cooking, and living with ancient ancestral food wisdom in a modern world.

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Hey, Alison. How’s it going over there? Good, Andrea. It feels like a long time since we spoke. Lots of podcast work going on, but I’m glad to connect with you again today. Yeah. No, this is awesome. We have finally gotten rain over here. Wow. Late for us. I mean, not unheard of, but later than usual. So it’s been rainy and sloggy outside which is kind of nice because uh hannah and i started doing gaps and as you know you basically live on soup for a while and it just feels so right like it’s rainy it’s cold and it’s all we want anyways we don’t even want anything else it’s not quite there yet here the sun is absolutely blastingly warm this afternoon but it’s really foggy in the mornings and the new olive oil is here and the grape harvest is over and things are certainly turning. So I’m feeling it. Have you had your breakfast yet this morning? Yeah, I actually had soup.

Everybody, I got so many messages on Instagram because I posted a picture of soup and I said it was breakfast soup. And I just meant I was having soup for breakfast, but everybody was like, what is breakfast soup? And I was like, oh, soup that you eat for breakfast. So I realized I I should have probably defined it better when I shared that, but I am finding how incredibly convenient it is because you chop, you dice, you mix everything up. You don’t have to saute anything for gaps because it just all boils, but everything goes in the pot and we can start it anytime during the day. And then we leave it on the back burner on a low simmer. and then the morning you wake up and walk out and there it is fresh hot soup and um i put sour cream in mine like a blob right in the middle we’re on stage two right now so a little extra dairy coming in um and then a handful of sauerkraut it’s pretty much perfect breakfast sounds delicious um and it was really good like there’s beef from my neighbor’s cows and turkey from our turkeys and broth from roasting one of our chickens and uh what else shredded carrots.

Pumpkins we went to a pumpkin festival and are not a pumpkin festival but just like a fall festival, And there’s this huge pumpkin that the chef had carved this face into, and he was there carving it when we were there, kind of like as the entertainment a little bit. And there was these giant chunks that he was pulling out of the pumpkin, you know, to make the face. And so I told Gary, I said, I want those chunks. I want those chunks. You would have done the same thing, Alice. Because you know, they’re probably just going to go in the trash, right? Yeah. So it was like at this big resort. And what are they going to do with it? Like they’re not going to use it in their kitchen. They probably can’t even legally use it in their kitchen.

So Gary asked him, can we have those? And he was like, yeah, sure. That’d be great. enjoy so now you know what’s coming next Alison um we put some of that into the soup but then we’re blending the rest of it up for you know what stage three pancakes yeah pancakes wow you’ve got to keep enough of that you’ve got to make them really big as well I told I told Hannah I was like you know what Alison said and she was like of course Alison did that she tried to make it as big as you could i couldn’t help it you know i did so many of them that by the time i could have you know i could have made one in those one of those big paella dishes that you see in spain that feeds like 80 people i reckon i could have made a pancake that big yeah i can just see you get spin get the spin get a spin and then flip it over the crowd goes wild did you eat allison.

Yeah yeah um we had heart beef heart and it’s just so wonderful you know we cooked it last weekend it’s um today’s thursday and i kept a lot of it in the fridge afterwards but i also froze um a chunk of it maybe like um i don’t know a fifth of the heart and it comes out the freezer so well you would never imagine that it had been frozen so i just got it out the freezer sliced it and we had some broccoli kind of vegetable thing left over from yesterday which was onions and garlic and broccoli and chard and red pepper and then.

I put kind of a spice through some spices in coriander seeds and cumin and i put some of my ginger bug in it i’ve taken to doing that recently um and lots of other spices and that was left over from yesterday oh it may it really makes a difference i don’t know why it’s better than just grating fresh ginger and it’s in the fridge all the time so it’s just there no that’s yeah i was just thinking that like that would taste even better i mean fresh ginger is great but fermented it pops exactly more so so that was cold but it was nice and then i had um sourdough spelt or i’ve had sourdough rye with lard on some salt on the top and some sour cream that’s really good yeah we both had a good kind of fall lunch and.

Indeed. Indeed. So I’ve got something to read. Yeah, I was going to ask if you had that. In front of me. And it’s staring at me in front of me. I want to turn my computer off and just concentrate on talking to you. So I’m going to read it. It’s from someone who is a listener and who is also on Instagram. Her handle on Instagram is wolfdaughterdarling and her name’s Esther.

And it’s just such a wonderful thing. And I felt kind of, I resonated with it. Being the person, you know, who’s half of the podcast, let alone someone who’s listening. And I wanted to read it. And so Esther nicely said we could. And so thank you very much for saying this, Esther. I will read it so people can hear. She says, I’ve been lovingly binging every episode of your podcast, and it is marvellous how much impetus it gives me to trudge through the awkward bottleneck of shifting actions to align with long-held values. It’s so painful feeling like a hypocrite and experiencing that dissonance of how I wish to feed myself and those around me, yet the debilitating challenge it is to actually cut and run from convenience and the efficiency economy of industrial food networks. I have a long way to go, I’m only just starting, but your presence and pod has truly given me a crutch to return to when I find myself feeling overwhelmed. At the end of the day my body has brought me here clearly and lovingly showing me what is aligned and how to live with integrity and joy and sovereignty thank you for what you’re doing.

And just, I really felt for that because I recognize that dissonance of feeling like I want to do this, but it’s so hard. And if one of our episodes can just give a little help to smooth over that dissonance and give the impetus to move past it and move on with it, that brings me a lot of joy. Thank you ever so much, Esther. Yes, that was well said. And will listeners have your most recent interview by the time this episode comes out, Alison?

No, I don’t think so. I think it’s going to be after this one. I feel like when you talk in that interview about making everything accessible to everyone and all of us feeling like we’re part of it, that she kind of touched on that nerve right there. Like I don’t want to be a hypocrite in my head this is how I want to live in real life this is where I’m at but that’s part of just recognizing that you’re not a hypocrite you’re on the path you know you’re feeling it you know I think it’s so easy to use what we have around us in our modern day society to push those uncomfortable feelings down you know we could just go shopping or eat or watch television or do something that’s even worse for us and actually feeling those feelings once you’re there that is such a big part of the change you’re no longer oblivious, You’re not in the ignorance is bliss stage anymore. You’re in the knowledge is power stage.

That was very well said. I’m really glad that she said you could read that. Yeah. If you guys have thoughts also on the pod, drop them in the reviews on Spotify or iTunes. It makes, it’s insane now that I’m, the more I’m learning about podcasts, how much of a difference it makes to a podcast. Like if you have reviews, so yeah, drop them in there. And Alison and I, we read, we read, we screenshot, we send them back and forth to each other. We see them all and they mean a lot to us. So don’t think that they’re just going some mindless place where some like staffer, Alison, are your staffers going to check it for you? No, it’s me and Allison checking it. We’re like, is there a video? I have mice that do it in the night. Yeah. Oh, that’d be nice.

All right, Allison, what’s next? Okay, today’s episode, yeah. Yeah. Let’s talk about what we’re actually going to talk about. So, Allison, you’ve mentioned this before, Bakashi. And the first time you said it, you said it in passing. And I was like, what did you just? I’m sorry, that is a word I don’t know. And then I think I asked you about it after we recorded I don’t even remember when that was and then we talked about it more on another episode I don’t remember if it was a Patreon episode or a regular podcast episode but it’s such a brilliant way of using food waste and I know you love fermenting but you’re taking a little bit far with fermenting your trash. However, it’s the next step. I love that. I love that you do that.

So maybe you can say a little bit about what a cash is, explain it, how you explained it to me and we can tell everybody all the good stuff that we have for them. Yeah. Okay. Sweet. So, um… Bakashi has filled a number of holes in my life that I felt that dissonance around that we were talking about from Esther. I have a very small garden that is container only. I don’t have any soil access to the ground.

And I love to garden in the little space I can do that in.

And on our second year being in this apartment um I bought bags of compost to put in my pots and there were there were a lot of bags I mean there were a lot of litres each and they were I think I had to buy eight massive bags of compost and since then I’ve bought more pots and getting that compost was hard work um we don’t have a car so we had to go to the garden sent to buy it get them to bring it out and then I’m putting the compost into the pots and I’m throwing away the plastic bags that the compost is in and knowing that compost can exhaust itself over one season I thought well have I got to do this again next year really I don’t want to go and buy more compost I don’t I don’t want to to have an industry making compost for me and I don’t want to be bringing that plastic into the world there must be some other way to to deal with this and I heard about bokashi and at the beginning I was completely confused I I didn’t understand like you I didn’t understand what it was yeah so I heard the kind of the terms fermenting the term composting was in there the term em was in there it was something to do with lactobacillus and I just didn’t get it at all.

So I did a lot of research. I listened to webinars. I read blog posts. I read books.

It took me a while to kind of get my head around exactly how Bakashi worked and how it might help me in my garden and in my kitchen. And then about a year and a half ago, I took the plunge and bought two Bakashi buckets. And we, having spoken to Bakashi companies in the last kind of six months preparing for this, we’ve.

Managed to get a discount for customers for these buckets that I use. And we will give details of that when I finish talking.

So these two buckets are upcycled plastic. And what I do is I collect my food waste, just like you might collect it for composting.

But you’re able to ferment more with composting than you can with bakashi than you can with composting so there are certain foodstuffs that you can’t put in your compost outside which I don’t have room for anyway that you can put in the bakashi so on a daily basis I’m collecting all of my scraps my peelings the stems for things if I’m not eating them my eggshells little bones tiny bits of food that are kind of left on a plate any waste meat anything cheese little tiny bits of cheese tea grinds coffee grinds chocolate shelves it just goes on and on all of that I collect and I at the end of the day I put it in this bucket and I then sprinkle, um a bran over the top which has been inoculated with something called em which we have an interview a bit later on which is much more scientific than my home talk here which will explain what em is um because that was hard to get my head around to start with so i sprinkle that on squash it down put the lid back on my bucket and then do the same over and over again so i get layers of of kitchen waste a little bit bran kitchen waste a little bit of bran till the bucket is full.

The lid then goes on and that bucket stays for two weeks to complete its fermentation. During that time, the collecting and the fermentation time, I have a little spout, a spigot at the bottom of the bucket, which drains something called Bokashi tea, which I dilute and put on my houseplants and put on my plants outside as a kind of a natural fertilizer. When the two weeks are up that book that bucket’s been put to one side for two weeks of course i’ve got two buckets so i start with the second one carrying on with this process while that first bucket is doing its two weeks of of fermenting once it’s closed it’s um i see it’s an anaerobic fermentation so you put the lid on and no air is getting in there and then after two weeks that.

Bakashi which is a Japanese word is ready to put in soil in my case in soil it can go on a compost bin and it’s accelerated compost to help you with your compost I don’t have the space.

For compost bins so my bakashi then goes into one of my pots that doesn’t have any plants in I dig a big hole I literally dump the bakashi in the hole and I can still at that point see what the food was you know I can still see bits of eggshells I can still see oh that’s a carrot top or you know that’s a kind of a peeling of a pepper or something and I mix it all in so the soil is in contact with the bokashi and the bokashi is in contact with the soil and then I leave it and you can leave it I leave mine for six weeks at least you can’t plant in it straight away because it’s too acidic at that stage but after six weeks basically that’s broken down and so when I started this last year I did that and it’s enabled me this year to not get any more compost at all to not have to buy any soil for my garden at all I’ve got refreshed renewed soil that’s full of nutrients and the vegetables this is why I think we talked about it on one of the other podcasts The vegetables that I’ve been getting from that bakashi-infused soil have been amazing.

My beetroots, I was just using them as chard for the first, like, I don’t know, for about six weeks, eight weeks before I took the beetroot out. I was just getting loads and loads and loads of chard.

And then my beetroots are huge and they taste amazing. My carrots are better. All of the vegetables that have grown in that soil this year have been far better than the vegetables that I grew the last year and I spent no money on it at all, no money on that soil.

The Bokashi itself sits underneath my counter. The buckets sit under my counter because they’re sealed. They don’t have any smell. They don’t cause me any problems. I don’t have to take my waste and put it elsewhere, which is what I was doing before is taking it out to a kind of a town, organic recycling place. It’s all just, it’s this wonderful, And you’ll hear me talk about Jassa when I talk with Jassa later on, the lady who knows about this stuff incredibly.

It’s this wonderful cycle that, you know, I’m growing my veg and then parts of my veg are going back in my bakashi. And then that’s fermenting. And then that is going back in my soil. And then I’ll grow some veg and then I’ll do the same thing. I’ve got this sort of life cycle in my kitchen that is closed and wonderful. And just has, it’s brought me so much joy the last year and a bit to see where my waste is going, to know that I’m doing good things with it, to know that it’s a fermentation process, which is just fascinating and amazing.

And that it’s back in my garden and all that lovely, you know, green shining foliage that’s sticking out above the soil is getting all the nutrients from that bakashi. It’s just it’s absolutely wonderful and that’s why I wanted to do an episode on it yeah well I was really really stoked when we started talking about it and you had said well Andrew you have chickens so maybe you wouldn’t use one but I was like I don’t want that with cashew tea so then then the more I started thinking about it for one like you said when you’re in town um what you have to like either out here you can get special compost trash bin and then everything just sits there and goes to some municipal composting type thing um so you’re not even getting the use of that waste when you go to a farmer’s market and you’re carrying home your veg or whatever it’s kind of nice to know that every little scrap that you got is going into your property in some way.

But also, I remember when we lived in Virginia, talking to the farmer, and he was saying how people buy these bags of compost that are, in his opinion, they’re already inert. They’re dead. And he was like, a lot of times that compost isn’t even really living soil. A lot of times when you buy industrial compost, Excuse me, um then they.

Include like human waste.

Which isn’t the end of the world except for the fact that most humans are consuming pharmaceuticals and then the pharmaceuticals turn up in the compost yeah the biggest the biggest problem i had with buying compost was that it’s all got peat in it in the uk there’s really been a big push to have peat-free compost but when i spoke to the gentleman at the garden center here in italy he was like peat-free what are you talking about well obviously he didn’t say that he didn’t he didn’t have a slightly cockney english accent he said it in italian he didn’t know what i was talking about and i i just thought i don’t i don’t want to buy compost that’s got peat in it you know peat is such an incredible carbon sink and yeah it’s just horrible so that that is wonderful the um the company called terragonics in the u.s sells the exact bakashi bins that i use now when i remember when i first researched you can make the cash bins yourself you can get old buckets you can drill holes in the bottom you can put something underneath to catch the tea you can find a lid you can do all this yourself and I did look for some time into how to do that and in the end I just thought I just I can’t do it this is going to be in my house yeah and if there’s a chance that I do it wrong and and the smell of fermenting.

Food waste is going to be in my kitchen it’s just going to be a disaster and I’ll spend hours on it.

I’m going to go to the people who know what they’re doing and have been developing this product for many years. And so that’s what I did. And I’m glad I did because the tea comes out like a dream. I just turn the little knob, the tea comes out and there’s never been any issue with smell at all.

This company, Terragonics, who are in the US and Canada, cover those two territories, have these Bokashi buckets and their site is terragonics.com, T-E-R-A-G-A-N-I-X. We’ll put links in the show notes. And they’re giving, listens to the podcast, 10% discount on the Bokashi bins. And also, if you go on there, you’ll be amazed about kind of EM and what it does and the other products that they sell. So that 10% discount is available for any of the products on their website, including the big cash bin.

The coupon code, the discount code that you use, you can just go to that website. And when you go to the checkout, put in the code AKP, all caps, stands for Ancestral Kitchen Podcast, AKP. and that will give you automatically your 10% discount. If you want to look for the bins that I particularly am using, I’ve got the essential Bokashi compost starter kit, which is two bins that are 4.4 gallons each and a bag of bran. And that’s all that you need to do a kind of a.

Non-stop ferment of your kitchen waste because while one’s fermenting for two weeks, you fill up the second one then you empty that first one into your garden and then you start with the first one again so with that you you can do this continually through the year and if you don’t have enough space for that bakashi in your garden like me you can give it to a local garden or a friend or your mom or anyone or whoever you’re shopping come at the farmer’s market believe i can tell you right now they go crazy for it yeah exactly that’s the one i’m getting is the two bins it’s not here yet but that’s what i’m getting is the two bins so for somebody to understand these like three terms you threw out there real quick bakashi is a japanese word for basically compost but bakashi is kind of what you’re producing yeah that’s correct the bins are the crock that you’re fermenting in yeah correct and the em or the bran that you referred to is kind of like koji rice where it’s yeah like yeah it’s something that’s been grown on a bran Some kind of a carb that carries the bacteria on it and can stay dry and can stay in a bag and you can sprinkle it in to re-inoculate. So it’s kind of your SCOBY, if you will, that you just keep adding in. So just so people understand, because I was so confused when you first started talking about it. I was like, what? Once you start going with it, it just, it’s like riding a bicycle. You’re like, how was I ever confused?

I know. I’m so excited too, because.

So for people to know, Alison was explaining this to me and I was like, Alison, this is like, this is amazing. And then we started talking about like, could we get like a discount code for the podcast and stuff like that. So then we actually asked, no, you, I think were the one who found out, Alison, who was distributing in the U.S. Because that was whoever I was going to have to go to. so it’s this this product and this branded brand that each country can have somebody who ships it out out there and in the usually if you find stuff in the u.s it’s like the u.s and canada yeah because yeah we’re pretty similar in terms of shipping so um we asked them if we could interview them and we did um two times so the first one allison was just you and me asking her a bunch of questions and then we asked her is there somebody like scientific who wants to be recorded and she said yeah interview jasa she’s like it so then we recorded that one but when we first talked to carolyn i was interested to see how i could use it on the farm i don’t think she knew i had a farm when we first started talking but right away i started hearing her say things and i was like i immediately knew where i could apply it so when she was saying oh yeah because I didn’t realize there was bran until we were talking to her and she goes, yeah, you sprinkle this bran on. And I was like, wait a minute.

Immediately. I was like, I could put that on the ground in the chicken pen. Right. And she was like, oh yeah, of course, because it breaks down and the birds can eat it and it’s good for them because it’s got the lactobacillus, like you said, and it’s good for their gut and they can peck at it. But it will also, I was thinking because we basically compost in our chicken pen because we put down bedding and then instead of removing the bedding.

Sometimes I sprinkle a little snack on it for the birds. Sometimes I don’t. They’re pretty good about scratching it up no matter what. But then I’ll sprinkle on additional layers. And as they continue to scratch and poop and scratch and poop, then the bottom layers start to break down, literally turns into crumbling soil on the bottom. So I was like, oh, I could sprinkle that in the chicken pen and start breaking things down. And so she’s sending us some of that. And then she was talking about using it in compost piles because we don’t have like a really, I don’t want to use the word official, but like we don’t go, okay, here’s a layer of green. Here’s a layer of brown. It’s more like. Here’s some junk, go throw it on the compost pile. And so it’s what you might call a very slow moving compost pile. And she said, take that bran and like shove it into the middle of the pile. And it will start to work its way out and break down the pile. And I was like, I feel like my whole life changed because the composting has almost been like our Achilles heel in a way, because we want to use stuff in the garden. And Alison, we have bought compost. We got it a dump truck load but we have bought compost and i don’t know if anybody else experienced this but in the u.s there was basically 2020 and 2021 probably 2022 also but i didn’t buy any um.

There’s this like compost um crisis every farm that i know out here and then i’ve heard about it on the Market Garden podcast and just tons of other podcasts, people mentioned that everybody went bonkers for gardening out here in the US. And because they’re like, oh, I’m home. It’s 2020. I work from home. I’m a gardener now, which is great. I think that’s what we should be doing. So I’m not bashing that. This is exactly what we want people to be doing. But soil and compost manufacturers couldn’t keep up. So they were selling compost that was coming out with like chunks of garbage in it, like steaming huge chunks of wood. It was like blazing hot, burning hot, acidic, still in process compost. It was like a year from being done.

And we had a truckload of that dumped in our garden and it didn’t work at all, obviously, because it needed like another year of composting, but it was already, it was like, oh my gosh. And the garden or the farm where I got the beef from that I mentioned earlier and we get our veggies from and stuff. She was showing me her greenhouse. She was like, look what happened to our plants. It was just horrible. Everybody had a hard time. So it made me like, yeah, you didn’t want to carry the bags. You didn’t want to have to buy it every year. I don’t want to have to buy it every year either. I don’t have the bag situation, but it made me realize Like, when we farmers can’t get our compost, it’s an immediate problem. And, of course, we should be doing compost piles. I think we should be doing composting all over, you know, little piles everywhere. Deal with your leaves and sticks and, you know, stuff like that. Chicken manure.

But there’s, with the Bokashi, I just feel like, oh my gosh, there’s so much more I can do. And it’s so much faster. I’m really excited to see. It’s not as scientifically complicated for me, the end user. Yeah. I’m really excited to see what happens in your space with it and what you think of having in your kitchen. Because I think you’re going to adapt to it like super quickly because it’s so. I already know I am. It’s just so easy. It’s just so easy. We already have a five-gallon bucket by the back door where we throw scraps. And then they eventually go out to the birds. But the birds don’t even actually eat all the scraps. Like they don’t love any peels, like melon peels, squash peels, onion peels. They’re not into that. They can’t have avocado. They can’t have citrus. So they don’t get that.

They’re not going to eat grape stems. You know, like there’s a fair amount of stuff that, yeah, sometimes it goes on the compost pile. Sometimes just ends up in the yard somewhere. Like, oh, that’s great. even how there’s like black banana peels in the yard. But anyway, sorry, I’m interrupting you. I’m just very excited. Well, I’ll tell you what else I’m excited about. Having spoken to Terragonics, they offered us a set of the essential two buckets that we were talking about. This one that I’ve got as a giveaway for this episode. So um if you if you are in the US or Canada and you would like to enter the draw to get um.

Two of those compost bins and a bag of em brand shipped to your door for free then either head over to our instagram if you’re listening in real time this is if you’re listening in november 2022 hop over to um either of our instagrams or um sign up for my mailing list and there will be a giveaway this week which will be open until the 29th of november i think where you can get your name in the hat for getting one of those. And I do hope that as the podcast goes on and time and resources allow, we will be able to find distributors for the Bakashi in Europe and Australia and the UK as well. And hopefully offer the same 10% discount on those suppliers. We’ve started with the one in the US and Canada because we’ve got a lot of listeners over. Your side of the pond um but hopefully we’ll be able to extend it and i know there are suppliers in in europe and australia and the uk so it’s not something that you you can’t do i mean i’ve got my buckets here no problem at all so yeah not only we have the discount but we have a giveaway as well which is and and it’s a it’s 126 dollars worth of giveaway which is not insignificant and i’m quite proud of that i’m excited for our listeners that someone’s listening later um.

If you’re listening later and you’re just going to use the discount code, then send me and I’ll send a message so we can be excited with you because I’m super stoked about it. And I mean, I don’t even know how much we’ve spent on bringing compost in, maybe $900 or something. And if we could just ferment this stuff every day and just every two weeks, somebody’s taking it up and pouring it. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Plus, my infamously withering Christmas cactus would probably love it. I saw a picture of that this week. Poor thing. All right. Do we want to roll the tape with Jassa? Because that was a really good conversation and helped me understand the science a lot better. Yeah. So she is literally was involved in the design of these buckets and has gone all over the world sharing the method and how it works with people. So she really was the one to talk to. So yeah, let’s head over to that interview. All right. So I am here with Jasa Ban. Hi, Jasa. Thank you very much for coming onto the podcast to talk to us.

Thank you for inviting me.

So Jasa is a Bokashi whiz who currently is working for Terragonics, who is the company who sells the Bokashi buckets we’ve been talking about in this episode. And they sell much more. Go over to the site and have a look. but Jasa also used to work for Skasa which is the company that design and make the Bakashi system that I use myself and I remember when I first came across Bakashi I was just overwhelmed by what it was, what was involved, how it worked so I wanted to get Jasa on to fire some questions at her because she’s the expert and hopefully demystify everything and simplify the world of fermented kitchen waste for all of us. So are you ready for me to fire the questions at you, Jessa?

Of course I am.

Thank you, thank you. So first one, simple question, what is Bakashi?

So Bokashi actually, the term means that it’s a Japanese word for fermented organic matter or fermented organic mass. But also Bokashi is also a process composting method that’s an anaerobic process and it’s fermentation. So the benefit of Bokashi compared to traditional composting is we are actually using organisms. We are fermenting the food and we are also speeding up the process.

Okay. And the thing that’s kind of fundamental to that fermentation, as I learned, is something called EM. Can you explain to us what EM is, first of all, and then how it works in Bakashi? Of course.

So EM stands for effective microorganisms. They were discovered or developed by Dr. Higa. He was actually a professor at the university in Japan. And that means that those are natural microbes and bacteria that are found in the environment and they together form a colony or like microbiomes and they’re key to good personal and environmental health. Why are they crucial for Bukashi composting is because they’re actually the ones that start the fermentation process. So EM or effective microorganisms you can find them in the soil they help improve the soil they make nutrients more accessible to your plants that is very important when you put the the compost or the bokashi mass in the ground and also they increase the number of diversity of microbes in the soil and speed up the decomposition process.

Okay can you explain how those microorganisms are put into the bokashi because I remember thinking at the beginning do I spray them on how do they get in there.

We have something that is called Bokashi bran. So that is the environment in which Bokashi, basically, affected microorganisms live in. And you just sprinkle it on. So basically, how you use the Bokashi bucket is that you put on a layer of organic waste, usually that in the kitchen that is food. Then you put a layer of Bokashi bran, a layer of organic waste, and basically just keep it closed. And it’s, like I mentioned before, anaerobic process. And basically, it starts the fermentation process inside of the bucket.

Yeah, I wanted to kind of talk about that, keeping it closed, because I remember before I bought the buckets, I thought, oh my gosh, I’m going to have this fermentation of waste matter in my house all the time and i was worried that it was going to smell but i have to say literally that the lid of the bucket it sort of clicks on all the way around and i cannot smell anything despite all this amazing fermentation happening right underneath where i chop my vegetables and close to where i eat my food there is no smell coming from them at all which i think is wonderful, yes.

It’s an airtight lid uh because the process needs to be airtight and also if we forget our organic waste in a normal bucket open bucket it starts rottening and we usually think of that smell and it’s completely different it’s not that smell this is a fermentation process think about beer for example

Yeah yeah completely when i open the bucket very often i smell really sweet smells like the sort of smell I would smell from you know some fermented vegetables or some fermented grains that I’ve got going on in my kitchen it’s lovely, okay um before we um have your interview here on the podcast I’ve talked with Andrea a little bit about how I’m using Bokashi in my kitchen now I’m a living in an apartment and I’ve got a small kitchen and a very small garden that is container only. But a lot of people who listen to the podcast are right at the other end of the scale from me household-wise. They have large setups like homesteads and they have grounds and they already have a compost bin going outside, which I don’t because I don’t have room for. How can someone who already has that setup and already has a compost bin and has a large property use Bokashi because I don’t know that side of it because I’m coming from the small end. Can you explain that to us?

Of course, Bukashi buckets, they come in very different varieties. You can have in your kitchen a larger bucket. You can have a smaller bucket. Basically, Bukashi as a bucket is just something that helps you collect and ferment organic matter in your kitchen. And we think that we produce a lot of food and a lot of organic matter. But actually, the fermentation itself reduced the volume of organic waste up to 25%. So you can actually fill it up for quite a while. And then if you have a traditional compost outside, you can put Bukashi on that traditional compost and additionally treat it because the fermented mass that you get outside of the bucket, it’s called pre-compost. So it’s not exactly compost yet. So you have different ways have to treat it. One is with traditional compost.

The second option is if you have, especially if you have a large garden, if you have a lot of big property, you can go and you can see what parts need to be more fertilized. You can dig a hole. You can put it in the hole in the soil. And then after like 14 days, it completely decomposes and you have organic matter with microbes that will do the work for you in the soil so basically the bigger the property the more you can use a bokashi because small apartments if they have like a small garden then maybe you will have one full bokashi or bokashi bucket every month and your garden needs just maybe two bokashi buckets per year so sometimes people then put it in organic ways or they use it, they give it to their neighbors, their family, and so on. So the bigger the property, the more you can use.

Yeah, I agree with you. So we’ve got two buckets. And for my little garden with my containers, I just use two buckets because I can’t move all of the plants. Some of them are, you know, small trees, so I can’t move them every year. So really with the containers that have my annuals in and my vegetables, two buckets are enough for me to fill up the small containers I have. And so now what I’m looking for is where else, like you said, can I give my bakashi too? There’s a local community garden and I’m hoping that I can carry on making bakashi through the year because it’s so easy. And it feels to me like a better thing to do with my waste than put it in the kind of council municipal organic bin. So I’m hoping I can send it to them. and it’s interesting what you say about the larger properties because I automatically think oh they’re going to have a compost they’re going to put their waste in there but your idea of well there might be a bit of the property that really is not so fertile or hasn’t produced so well so actually just like I’m doing in my containers you can dig a hole in there and put the bokashi straight into the ground and leave it and that will rejuvenate that particular area as well Then you’ve got the option to put it in the compost as well.

What does it do to the compost? Does it speed up the compost? Does it change the fermentation of the compost? Do the EM bacteria kind of proliferate in the compost? What happens? It will a little bit speed up the traditional composting.

Actually, the process itself, because it’s not anaerobic anymore, so the compost will not ferment anymore. It will start doing the normal heating compost process. But you still have those microbes that are taking care of the environment. So they’re making sure that you don’t get any bad microbes in. With open traditional compost it’s very easy to actually get access of bad

Microbes so.

Like you know like we know ecoli salmonella and stuff like that so what em does is they kind of neutralize or like they’re fighting the pathogen uh microbes so basically em if you put it there it will help make the environment healthier a little bit speed up the process but there won’t be no fermentation anymore so we’re just making different yeah it goes back to traditional composting but they don’t interfere

With each other and riches yes, yeah okay and of course the other thing is the bokashi tea the stuff that comes out of the bottom now my two bokashi buckets make so much tea that i can’t keep up with it i’m feeding my house plants with it and I’m feeding my vegetables and my plants outside with it but you need so little of it to have a big impact and so I’m then using the rest and I’m pouring it into my drains because it’s then introducing those EM goodies in into my drains around my house as well and if I had a bigger property I would be able to use that tea to make a drench or a feed for all of my vegetables for the whole place you know at the moment I’ve got so much of it I I can’t keep up with it, Okay. Talk to us about the rules and how it works, because I also remember at the beginning thinking, can I put this in? Can I put that in? And there are some benefits to Bukashi. You can put things in it that you can’t put in a traditional compost. So can you explain the process and what the rules and what you can put in are?

Yes. The most optimal way to use Bukashi is that you cut larger pieces of food waste into smaller ones uh you can put in basically all the food waste uh so all the you can also put in some food leftovers but it’s not the optimal that you put processed food in it but you can also put some part of that definitely vegetables definitely fruits you said you produce a lot of liquid that means you’re using a lot of fresh vegetables and foods like just the peels and the leftovers um so you could put in um dairy you could put in um the citruses um you cannot put that on traditional compost it’s not advised because they can have a lot of pesticides uh you can put in meat that’s also one thing that’s not uh put in traditional compost because especially chicken meat can have salmonella and then you contaminate the whole compost. You can put that in bokashi because you have microbes that are basically pulling on the good side, I would say.

And well, bones, they will not decompose. You could put small bones in, but not advised. They’re not going to decompose in the fermentation process. And you can also put in fish. So as I mentioned before, you put in a layer, that means you prepare breakfast, you put in a layer, you put in a layer of Bokashi bread, you close it, you keep it airtight, you make to, you have to ensure that there are anaerobic conditions. And then again, you prepare lunch, you put in another layer of organic waste or food waste, another layer of bokashi and so on and so on and so on and the fermentation process starts right away so with the first layer of organic waste and bokashi the fermentation process starts and you can fill it up for weeks or me when i lived alone for basically months before it was actually full

But you have to drain the Bokashi liquid regularly. So usually it takes like five, six, seven days for the first drops of liquid to come out. And then just every few days, just check, drain the liquid. And as you mentioned, you can use liquid as a fertilizer. So you can dilute it with water and water your plants, your garden, grass outside. And the extra liquid you can use as a drain cleaner.

Yeah, which is what I do. So yeah, basically the only thing that I don’t put in is my big bones. So very often I make stock with my bones and some of the little chicken bones, they’re virtually broken down because I’ve had them in the pot for a day cooking. And so some of the little ones I’ll put in, but my big bones I still put in the municipal kind of waste organic waste we don’t really have much leftover food we tend to eat everything but sometimes I’ve got a little bit of leftover cooked food so sometimes I put that in but I put in you know I’m putting in eggshells every day I’m putting in vegetables I’m putting in fruit and putting all my peelings I’m putting in, all the wastes from tea. I make loose tea quite a lot. And so when I’ve strained my tea through a tea strainer, I squash the water out of it and then I’ll put my tea leaves and my kind of bits of herbs I’ve made my tea with in there as well.

I think it’s quite surprising to people who are used to doing compost only that, you know, you can put the meat in there and you can put the dairy in there and it means that you’ve got far less waste you know virtually everything from my kitchen goes into my into my bucket it’s just wonderful, Um, what I wanted to also say was I’ve got a little kind of container on my, on my surface. Um, so I put my waste into there and then maybe once a day I empty that into my bucket and then I cover it with a Bukashi and the buckets come with a kind of a pusher. So you push it down and what you’re saying is completely true. It reduces in size. So I’m putting the layers in, I’m thinking, oh, perhaps it might be full next time. But by the time I come back to it, I push down, you know, my new waste that I’ve put in and it really does reduce underneath. So you can get far more in the bucket than you think you can because all that fermentation is happening and the liquids coming out and it’s reducing in size, which is which is lovely to see.

Okay um when i looked on the skaza youtube channel and you told me about a video on there, um which was set in dubai with a community using the bakashi and actually the lady in there used does the same thing she has like the bakashi daily where she puts her scraps in and then she puts them in her bin and i know personally you’ve got a lot of experience all over the world using Bokashi. How do you see from the projects that you’ve been involved in Bokashi making a difference to the current crisis we have around climate and food?

Yes, it goes all the way to waste management problems, food crisis. Right now, as much as 34% of mixed municipal waste is organic waste, and about 60% of that is food waste. And you would be surprised, the food waste is not coming from restaurants. Actually, it mostly comes from households, which is really, really concerning because it comes directly from us, from consumers. But it also means that we can do something about it. Right now, most of the organic waste is not handled properly, which means it ends up in landfills.

When it starts decaying, you have like a lot of organic material that produces greenhouse gases. Um and so on so this is like a really big problem and to if we want to solve this problem we need to start at the source and as i said before the source of organic waste is actually our household and bokashi helps you with that because right in the kitchen when you are producing the food waste You can put it directly in Bokashi.

You can already process it. And then you have different options how to use it. You can either use it in your garden. So you’re making your own closed loop. So you got food. You produce food waste. You turn it into a resource. You turn it into a compost. You use it in your garden. It helps you produce and grow more food. So you’re closing the loop in your own household. But not everyone has that option. Sometimes you produce more than we can use. Sometimes we live in condos, apartments, we don’t have any.

I don’t know, we don’t have garden, we don’t have any green land or anything where we can actually use it. We don’t have the soil. In that case, we worked with a lot of cities or like projects where they actually set up either a community composting, either a waste pickup, like curbside compost pickup. And you can join community composting. You can basically get a subscription for a waste pickup. And then it’s additionally treated to compost and they usually bring it to farms. And then they have basically compost again to produce organic fertilizer and then organic food. So you can close a loop in a community. So that’s how we see that Bokashi is actually helping with current climate or food crisis or even waste, yeah, waste management crisis. So we’re closing the food loop.

I didn’t know that, I knew the levels of food waste and how much it comes from home. But, you know, when it is taken away, when it leaves our house, it’s easy for us to forget that we don’t know what happens to that waste. And we don’t know if it actually is recycled. We don’t know where it ends up. It’s gone from our lives. and it’s easy to not take responsibility for that but that’s what’s got us into the crisis that we’re in now really. It’s wonderful that, you know, I’m seeing that closed loop that you talk about in my garden. I’m eating things that I’ve grown and then I’m chopping them, putting them in the cachi. I’m letting it ferment and then I’m putting it back in my soil so I don’t have to buy new soil. And then it’s growing vegetables that I’m chopping and putting back in the cachi. It’s just, it’s a wonderful circle. but then to take that wider as you’re talking about where you know curbside pickups and community kind of composting and then that going to farms so then farms get the benefits of all those microorganisms from their local community and they need to use less inputs and also the waste is not going into landfill it’s it just makes complete sense to me I think the whole world should be doing this i think you agree don’t you.

Yeah we totally agree yeah wonderful yeah and also it’s making it um convenient you’re not just doing something good actually bokashi is convenient in the kitchen reduces the food waste you don’t have to throw your food waste out every second day doesn’t smell uh you can use it as you can use the liquid it just makes everything more pleasant like the cleaning of of your food waste is just more pleasant because there’s no rottening there are no flies no worms forming

Yeah completely it’s a win-win is there anything else that you want to share that you think we haven’t covered that’s important to talk about.

Well i think we pretty much covered how bokashi works why em is important um we covered how we’re closing the bokashi loop um and yes maybe as i already mentioned we are addressing two problems at the same time and also making it making a convenient solution so we’re addressing the food crisis that we need to produce more healthy food i would say not just food but we’re talking about healthy food without using excessive fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides and all the chemicals and then the other side we’re basically turning food waste which is a big problem it’s a big percentage of our waste into a new resource so we’re closing the loop wonderful

Thank you ever so much for sharing your experience jessa i really wish you much kind of luck and energy and fortitude to go forward and take the cash even further thank you.

Thank you bye

That was great, Alison. That was a good interview. Yeah, she just knows so much. And she’s so enthusiastic, particularly about how you can, you know, outside the home, it starts in the home. But like we said before the interview, you know, if you’ve got a lot of this stuff and you haven’t got the room for it, you can start sharing it. And it’s just, it’s amazing to think about the possibilities for Bakashi in our own homes, but also for the world. I know. You asked really good questions and I hadn’t even thought about when you got to the end and you’re kind of like big scope, you know, and it is true, though, like so many things where we always say we’re changing the world one plate at a time or whatever.

And all these really big grandiose things do come down to just individuals wanting to and doing things differently and yeah um this is just one of them because when I heard her interview and then when we talked to Carolyn of course I was thinking about our interview with Nicolette Han-Nyman and reading her book and thinking about the mycelium and oh I don’t have cows you know like I don’t have cows on grass right now and so these are all ways that we’re contributing to that, huge grand picture of just like nature being supported and approved you know so when you get your bins I want to see what’s happening with your bins yeah what I was thinking um was So on your Instagram, you have the Akashi highlights. So if somebody’s listening, you could go to Instagram.com slash ancestral underscore kitchen. That’s Alison’s personal Instagram is where I met you back when you had like 30 followers. And me and my five accounts were five of them.

Now you’re, now you’re the big leagues, Allison. But if you go there, look in Allison’s highlights and she’s got the book Hashi there. So you can kind of see it. And then when mine comes, I’m going to take pictures as well. So you guys can see what’s going on. Great. I’ll post it in my stories and I’ll save it to highlights because I know you and Allison, you and I both, like we really make a good effort not to be on every single day, which means we miss good stuff sometimes. So I try to make sure that, But if I’m posting something that I really want people to be able to get, that I save it somewhere, like a recipe or something. Yeah, if you want to see the picture of my beetroot, go into my story highlight because they are there. If you want to see the picture of the beetroot I pulled out of our crappy compost this year, you can’t because I fed it to the chickens.

That was very pathetic. But maybe I should have got a picture so I could compare. Yeah, we could do a big beetroot, small beetroot thing. Before after yeah oh so if um you’re as excited as we are about the bakashi and you want to get yourself some buckets remember you’ve got a 10 discount um from the podcast the code is a k p all caps and the website is terragonics t-e-r-a-g-a-n-i-x dot com and if you are listening to this in November and 2022, and you want to enter our competition to win a set of two essential bins, then head over to our Instagram or sign up to my mailing list. The closing date for that will be the 29th. And like Andrea said before, when you get your bin…

Send us some pictures. Let us know what you’re putting in it. And then next year, or however long it takes for your growing season to turn around, send us a picture of your big beetroot too. Or just send us a picture of your Christmas cactus going back to life. Yeah, yeah, that would be nice. With the tea, with the bakashi tea. Yeah. I was thinking my houseplants are going to really benefit from this. Yeah, no, mine are too. Mine are definitely. They’re improving, having that as a drink. And um yeah i it’s just it’s just a win-win everywhere it really is yeah everybody loves ferments humans love them animals plants it’s good for us it’s it’s just a process that makes things so bioavailable and in in that sense more nutrient dense for us so yeah well this was a fun episode Thank you for coming along on the Bakashi exploration I started 18 months ago. Yeah. Well, I’m glad I finally understand because all of like terms kind of were throwing me off a bit. I was like, so this, this is, this is fantastic. Cool. Okay. Well, I’ll speak to you next time.

Andrea. Okay, Alison.

Have a good afternoon. Bye. Thank you. Bye. Thank you so much for listening we’d love to continue the conversation come find us on instagram andrea’s at farm and hearth and allison’s at ancestral underscore kitchen until next time we both wish you much fun exploration and satisfaction in and out of the kitchen.

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