Here I make Hummus from sprouted, fermented chickpeas with a ton of garlic and white cabbage using a magimix food processor. (You can use any kind of food processor. I love my magimix).

Some notes on the garlic:

*The garlic will become mellow during the fermenation process. The longer you leave the chickpeas and garlic to ferment, the mellower it will become.  You will need to experiment a little to see how much garlic to put in and how long to leave it to ferment to taste.  In the video I used a ton of garlic. It was still strong after 2 months.  So you might want to use less, or a lot less or even none at all.  Sprouted, fermented chickpeas without garlic will do just fine for our hummus recipe.

*Some people have a genetic fault.  The enzyme which breaks down cysteine, cysteine dioxygenase (CDO) is deficient.  These people have a sulphur intolerance and can’t eat foods like cabbage and garlic without an allergic reaction.  You will generally be aware of your sulphur intolerance if you have one. Both garlic and the cabbage in our fermented recipe are sulphur foods. So if you are sulphur intolerant you could leave these out of the recipe.  The cabbage is added to make the chickpeas ferment more effectively but you could just use a lot more whey (see the video) and leave out the garlic and the cabbage. If you have CDO deficiency I recommend taking Altrient brand lipospheric glutathione.

So first we have to make our stock of ferment and store it in Kilner jars. In part 2. (Next blog article and recipe video), I put some in my high speed blender, the vitamix with some sprouted sunflower seeds, juice of one lemon and a splash of olive oil.

Why go to all this trouble? Why not just open a can of chickpeas? Well anything that has been canned has been cooked to the nth degree to preserve it and make sure it does not give you botulism. Cooking food, particularly at high heat or for lengthy periods damages the proteins and our digestive enzymes don’t recognise them and can’t process them. So they end up putrefying in our intestines snd damaging the cells lining the intestine and making it leaky!  (Seignalet)

Sprouted chick peas taste just like cooked chickpeas. Sprouting gets rid of the anti-nutrients like protease inhibitors that keep the chickpeas dormant until rain dampens the soil or in our case until we put them in a sprouting jar overnight with some water.

Sprouting turns on the starch digesting enzyme amylase, turning the starch into more digestible simple sugars. (Does cooking do this? No!). Storage proteins are broken down by proteolytic enzymes into more digestible simple aminos and peptides. What’s more there is an increase in aminos by a factor of 2 to 5 and they tend to be the essential aminos that our body can easily use. (Does cooking do this? No!) Fats are converted into simple sugars. (Can cooking do this? No!). Trace minerals and vitamins are increased. (Can cooking do this? No!)
Sprouted Grains: A Comprehensive Review. Benincasa et al 2019

In the video I show you how to ferment the sprouted chickpeas and garlic with cabbage and whey.  Sauerkraut is traditionally made with just cabbage and salt but I follow Sally Fallon’s recommendation to make whey from yoghurt with active culture so that you need to use much less salt.

The fermentation process in addition to making the food easily storable for long periods without refrigeration, makes the nutrients even more bioavailable. The longer you store it the better tasting and more nutritious it becomes!

But don’t take my word for it – look up some studies.  Here is one:

…microorganisms contributing to the fermentation process have recently been associated with many health benefits, and so these microorganisms have become another focus of attention. Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) have been some of the most studied microorganisms. During fermentation, these bacteria synthesize vitamins and minerals, produce biologically active peptides with enzymes such as proteinase and peptidase, and remove some non-nutrients. Compounds known as biologically active peptides, which are produced by the bacteria responsible for fermentation, are also well known for their health benefits.

Among these peptides, conjugated linoleic acids (CLA) have a blood pressure lowering effect, exopolysaccharides exhibit prebiotic properties, bacteriocins show anti-microbial effects, sphingolipids have anti-carcinogenic and anti-microbial properties, and bioactive peptides exhibit anti-oxidant, anti-microbial, opioid antagonist, anti-allergenic, and blood pressure lowering effects. As a result, fermented foods provide many health benefits such as anti-oxidant, anti-microbial, anti-fungal, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic and anti-atherosclerotic activity. …..

Health benefits of fermented foods   Sanlier et al 2017

I consider this one of my star recipes.  I have to admit that I was stuck in a rut in terms of cooking before I decided to make a different recipe video every day.  I recall the words of the head of the ski school at Grenoble University 45 years ago:  “On apprend beaucoup en enseignant”.  (You learn a lot by teaching.)

Now I have the proof of concept I’m going to make a year’s supply of the ferment. It will take me a couple of hours to do that but then I have a store of the main ingredient and I just have to sprout some sunflower seeds in order to be able to make super delicious, super nutritions hummus at the drop of a hat in about 5 minutes.  I recommend that you do the same.  Make a small batch though to make sure that you are happy with the results first before you turn your kitchen into a ferment hummus factory.

I will be posting up a new Seignalet legal recipe every day to all the video channels. I will post the rumble videos here.

Dr. Seignalet’s book

Here is my introduction to Dr. Seignalet’s book, not yet translated into English (will it ever be?), the perennial best seller in France, note the 650 mainly 5 star reviews: “L’alimentation – ou la troisieme medecine” which I translate as Nutrition – the third medicine.

What he meant by third medicine is this: there is orthodox (pharma) medicine (which I personally have little time for by the way), alternative medicine (herbalism, vitamins, therapeutic hyperthermia etc.) and there is nutrition which he thinks is the third medicine. I believe that he really thought nutrition was the first medicine and I share this belief. The basic idea is this: For tens of thousands of years our Paleolithic ancestors led a nomadic existence, hunting and foraging for food. He thinks that they ate food raw and that the image of cavemen sitting round a fire roasting meat is a figment of our imagination. See “The scoop on their poop”  in my article Your cavement ancestors did not have your condition . Milk and dairy is a recent innovation and a few hundred years is not enough for our digestive system to evolve to be able to digest this “modern” food properly.    Here is Dr. Seignalet on “Cooking and its problems“.  Translated by me.

How I stole from the best to make the recipes

To make the recipes I have used 3 books:

1. L’alimentation crue : 400 recettes – Une application pratique de “L’alimentation ou la 3e médecine”. Nutrition using raw food, a practical application of Dr. Seignalet’s book written by a doctor and a chef in 1999 (3 years before Seignalet died).  400 recipes.  If you read French, even at a rudimentary level, I highly recommend buying it. The recipes are not complete meals. You are given delicious recipes to make fish ceviche (fish “cooked” raw in lime or lemon juice) and meat as tartare or carpaccio and delicious salads and raw sauces. No actual cooking is used in any of the recipes.

2. The Flavour Bible amazon com – amazon uk. This beautifully produced American book uses Chef’s recipes as a springboard for how to combine ingredients.

3. The Flavour Thesaurus. amazon uk – amazon com.

Dr. Seignalet said that as we are all sedentary now we only need to eat animal protein once a day.  So that ties in nicely with an earlier therapeutic diet called “Food Combining”.  One of its tenets is that you should not eat concentrated protein and concentrated carbohydrates at the same meal.  The basic idea is that protein is digested in the stomach and carbohydrate is digested in the intestine and if you mix them in the same meal the digestive system isn’t able to digest either properly.   Read more here.

Super nutritious fermented foods

Sally Fallon gave me the inspiration to use fermented foods such as sauerkraut in the recipes. The Eastern Europeans in the UK virtually live on fermented food if the Polish etc grocers are anything to go by.  Their shelves are groaning with dozens of kinds of pickles in jars.  In an emergency you can compose a quick tasty and nutritious meal from some pickled borscht, sauerkraut,  pickled cucumbers etc.  Did you know that Poland was the only country in Europe that was unaffected by the bubonic plague in medieval times?  Did you also know that the Poles had been invaded by the Tartars who taught them how to make sauerkraut from cabbage?  Sauerkraut is a vitamin c power house.  So while other Europeans were scurvy ridden because they had no fresh food in winter, the Poles were getting plenty of vitamin c to fight off the plague.  A lesson for us!

Sauerkraut and sprouted pulses – a winning combination

I found that sauerkraut goes really well with sprouted seeds and pulses.  It acts as a sort of bridge to make the sprouts go much better with other salad ingredients like tomato and avocado.

I will upload my own sauerkraut videos here among the recipe videos.

So to compose my recipes I have looked first to the French book for inspiration.  I have combined the fish ceviche or meat tartare and carpaccio recipes with a salad for my “protein meal” or a salad and sprouted seeds or pulses for the “carbohydrate meal”.  Raw seeds and sprouts contain protease inhibitors which make them indigestible when raw.  The fact of soaking them and sprouting them neutralises these ant-nutrients and increases the vitamin yield by a huge factor.  Interestingly,  sprouted chick peas taste exactly like cooked ones but many of the beneficial nutrients are destroyed in cooking of course.

The Flavour Bible and the Flavour Thesaurus are mainly concerned with cooked foods of  course but I’m still able to find plenty of inspiration in them.  In Nikki Segnit’s Flavour Thesaurus for example she tells us under the heading “Brocolli and Beef” “A partnership forged on their shared ferrous tang as much as the bittersweet contrast”.   So I made broccoli coleslaw to go with my steak tartare. To die for!

I hope you enjoy my recipes as much as I have enjoyed making the videos of them and scoffing the results.