Sports drinks are garbage. Energy drinks are garbage with caffeine. Given that their purported purpose is to replenish and revive our bodies, it’s sadly ironic that they’re so barren: synthesized flavor molecules and isolated extracts with none of the complexity of the plants they originated in. I know there are some higher-quality versions available at fancy stores, but the per-can price is ludicrous.

Fermentation to the rescue! Even a beginner microbe rancher can make everything needed to keep a permanent supply of actually healthy, genuinely delicious drinks on hand for rehydration and refreshment—for pennies a glass. I’ve been doing some hard physical work outside in the heat, lugging stones around and pickaxing select areas of yard to create an area for cooking and lounging. Versions of these drinks are quite literally saving my life every day, but I’m also kind of addicted and drink them even when I’m not a sweaty wreck.

From both a fermentation and prep/assembly perspective these drinks are among the easiest things you’ll ever make. You may already have everything you need in your kitchen right now, and you don’t need any specialized gear at all. You can also dial in your ratios so that you’re favoring real hot-weather athletic performance or just flavor and pleasure. There’s a ton of flexibility. Stop paying too much for empty, unhealthy corporate slop!

Here’s the list of everything you need to customize your own blend, with links to all the relevant recipes:

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Rhubarb’s strong acidity makes it a wonderful local (for me) substitute for citrus, especially when juiced. Fermenting it in any form adds more depth to this sourness, and the salt used in lacto-fermentation helps to bring out a savory umami edge that’s quite irresistible. I had an idea to use rhubarb to make a sort of umeboshi analog using stalks cut into small segments, so after chopping I added 2% salt and packed it all into a jar after tossing it thoroughly to disperse the salt.

Overnight, under the pressure of a stainless steel spring (see the photo in the last post) the rhubarb released enough water to cover all the solids. I let the jar ferment on my counter for about a week, at which point I tasted it. It was good, but not stellar—a bit one-dimensional. Texturally, the rhubarb pieces were a world away from umeboshi: crunchy and fibrous even though I crosscut the stalks into thin slices.

Happily, spring is in full effect so the rhubarb is not alone in my garden. A quick perambulation yielded three more ingredients that were exactly what I needed to turn this ok pickle into something stellar. You’ll notice that they all sit within a fairly narrow range of the color spectrum, and that’s not a coincidence—a lot of the choices I make when it comes to combinations derive directly from colors that will harmonize well together. These pinks and purples positively called out to be blended, so that’s what I did. And the result is as delicious as it is beautiful.

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This photo shows rhubarb I cut in the garden and sent in two different preservation-fermentation directions using sugar (in the form of honey) on the left and salt (in the form of salt) on the right. We’ll get to the latter version later, and I think you’ll like where it goes. Both sugar and salt methods result in solids and liquids, each of which has great flavor and utility despite one being the prestige product and the other generally being viewed as a byproduct. This post will deal with the jar on the left, made according to a Korean method for preserving fruit as a syrup known as cheong.

I realize that rhubarb is not a fruit, but it cooks and eats like one so we’ll bestow honorary status upon it. It’s such a wonderful ingredient, with bright acidity, a distinctive flavor, that gorgeous rubescent color, and—best of all from my perspective—it’s a nearly indestructible perennial that needs no maintenance apart from some compost and a little weeding. I’ve got eight plants in my garden and now, in their third year, they’re fully established and putting out plenty of thick stalks. If you do grow rhubarb, it bears repeating: only the stalks are edible. The leaves are toxic, but they make great mulch. When I cut them off I lay them around the base of the plant to smother weeds.

Fun fact:

This is brief etymological aside, but a cool one. In Ancient Greece, rhubarb’s wild Mediterranean ancestor was known as rha. At some point, superior rhubarb arrived from China via the silk and spice routes. This became known as rha barbaron, meaning “foreign” rhubarb, and that’s where the modern word originated. Here endeth the lesson.

Cheongs are typically made with a simple ratio: equal weights of fruit and sugar. This quantity of sugar exerts a huge amount of osmotic pressure on the cells in whatever fruit you’re using (sugar is even stronger in this regard than salt) so the result has a highly extracted flavor, with all the aromatic nuance of the fruit present in the result. This level of sugar is also a powerful preservative, since osmotic pressure also kills bacteria and other microbes. So you get a vivid, three-dimensional reproduction of the fruit in all its glory, and also a syrup that can sit happily in a jar or bottle or a long time without spoiling.

Honey averages about 80-82% sugar, which is generally about 4:3 fructose to glucose. Table sugar is 100% sucrose, which is a disaccharide made up 50/50 from fructose and glucose—I think that higher level of fructose makes it a natural fit for fruit ferments. Honey is one of the two local sugars where I live. The other is maple syrup, which I love for many applications—but because it has a more assertive, caramel-y character than honey it can dominate ferments like this one. Honey has a flavor, obviously, but it tends to recede and let the hero flavor shine, bathed in honey’s flattering golden glow.

Let’s dig into the specifics of using honey, and different facets of the cheong process—including, crucially, some uses for the fruit once you’ve strained your syrup and set it aside to age (or just used it because it’s already so freaking good and you can’t bear to wait, which is fine). I love these syrups because they’re much easier to make than jams and jellies, but every bit as preserved. And because they’re never cooked they retain more of the character and detail of the fresh fruit. This is an essential technique, especially if you live somewhere with winter.

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This is a drink I came up with about 10 years ago, not long after I created my own wild starter for fermented drinks. I was playing around with variations, discovering combinations of seasonal inputs that worked well together so I could develop a repertoire of flavors that would become my regular refreshments. I’ve made a jar of something in this genre just about every week since then. You can read about the basics for tepache, which is a perennial favorite, here—though more recently I’ve been using a lot less pineapple and much more local or local-ish fruit.

Seasonal and local are both fine and admirable goals, and focusing on them as a way to limit options and increase inspiration is in fact the center of my culinary practice. But certain ingredients are pretty non-negotiable for a lot of us (the so-called Standard Exceptions), and most of us would agree that list includes coffee. So if you’re a regular coffee drinker, in whatever form (though you do have to make it yourself with real ground coffee beans) then this technique is for you.

I realize that the “cha” in kombucha refers to tea, so I’m using the term advisedly because I’m not sure what else we could call it. Semantics aside, this is a seriously great beverage that will make your iced coffee game the stuff of legends. Best of all, it’s possible to make this in a very low waste (and therefore very inexpensive) way. It’s wonderful straight, and gets even more exciting when you combine it with some other fun possibilities—like an incredible espresso martini remix. Let’s break down the components, and the method, and then what you can do with it (besides change your life).

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Right now a significant percentage of my yard is covered in big tufts of dark green chive-looking plants. They’re field garlic, Allium vineale, which is a ubiquitous invasive now found over large swaths of North America. Unlike its cousin the ramp, this plant grows and spreads quickly, and even regrows in the fall—so you can harvest it without compuncti…

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I wanted to check in with a fun project that followed my foray into dashi garum and miso. The garums and misos are all happily ensconced in my pantry and fridge, and I use them often in all the ways you’d imagine and then some. Recently I used some of the miso plus a few cubes of the dashi reduction in a cassoulet that I made in my donabe, and it worked…

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Here’s a fun and easy one I came up with recently, taking advantage of my overwintered carrot bed before everything sorts and turns bitter. Jaimon wrote recently about nukazuke, and we talked about it some more during Kojicon—including good options to use instead of rice bran, which can be hard to find sometimes. Oat bran and wheat germ both work well, …

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A short walk outside the coastal Breton town of Douarnenez one comes upon a large ruin, the interior of which contains 15 square masonry basins. This site constitutes the remains of Plomarc’h Pella, originally a complex of at least four buildings dedicated to the processing, salting, and fermenting of sardines to make garum. The factory was built around…

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As a follow-up to the yogurt post, I wanted to talk about this sauce that I make a lot. Since spring lurks around the corner, ready to mug us with verdant splendor, knowing how to preserve herbs can come in pretty handy. Drying works well for the woodier end of the spectrum (thyme, rosemary, et al) but tender herbs tend to lose most of their appeal when…

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Yogurt is incredibly easy to make. You bring a pot of milk to 180˚F/82˚C to pasteurize it, then cool it to around 110˚F/43˚C, stir in a spoon or two of some store-bought yogurt or a yogurt culture, jar it, and then hold it at that temperature overnight (about 12 hours). That’s it!

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There’s an even easier way, using various heirloom cultures that can set …

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On Kojicon’s last day I joined chefs Jeremy Umanski and Ernest Foundas for some practical applications of koji in cooking. My portion focused on oatmeal, because I’ve spent some time digging into its potential on both the sweet and savory ends of the spectrum. One of the things I talked about is this delectable concoction, which works equally well in sw…

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Remember, Kojicon starts next week! Find all the info here. It’s going to be an incredible lineup—and your ticket gets you access to all five previous years of lessons and demonstrations. We can’t wait to see you!

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I wanted to check in quickly about this nifty new toy I got. Historically I have strained my various ferments through jelly bags hung over a b…

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First off, a reminder that Kojicon 2026 starts soon, on February 16, and runs for two weeks. You can find the schedule here, the list of presenters here, and you can buy tickets here. It’s an all-star lineup, and it’s going to be fascinating and inspiring in equal measure. We’re excited to see you all there, and to share knowledge and further expand thi…

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We’re super excited to announce Kojicon 2026, the foremost online gathering of fermentation fans and experts in the world, co-founded by our very own Rich Shih. Rich and I will both be presenting, along with many other fermentation luminaries, and we’ll have the full schedule for you when it’s up.

In the meantime, you can get your tickets here.

Your tic…

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I’m a big fan of leftovers, even though all too often they just get reheated and fall short of their freshly made selves. There are exceptions, of course: anything cooked low and slow like braises, soups, and stews. Somehow temperature and time melds the comforting flavors making them taste even better the day after.

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The deep flavors of these dishes are…

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When he visited recently, Rich also brought me a bag of sugar kelp from the Stonington Kelp Company, which he had harvested with them back in the spring. It’s not often that I get fresh seaweed to play with, so I pulled out the big stock pot and made a huge batch of dashi using some of my homegrown shiitake and a n…

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Rich was here recently (cool projects afoot) and he brought a pile of stuff from his freezer that I’ve been playing with. I’m very excited to write about one such experiment, but it’s not ready yet so in the meantime I want to focus on this delightful jelly I made from the big bag of autumn olives he brought, which he foraged back in the fall. Autumn ol…

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It’s been super cold this winter here in New England and I’m feeling it. There’s definitely not enough sunlight warming my face when I walk the snow covered trails these days. I recently passed by the spot where I collected super fruity spicebush berries this summer, and I broke off a branch from the grouping of shrubs so I could experience the citrusy …

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Hi all,

Today’s guest post is by Jaimon Westing, a Seattle-based chef with a long list of accolades and accomplishments. Most recently, he launched Amino, an experimental pop up centered on modern fermentation techniques, and co-founded Symbiotic Cultures, a koji-based fermentation shop with his wife, Michelle Westing.

You can find all three on IG: @jaim…

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Most fermentation methods are defined by a highly favorable ratio of rules to possible permutations. This makes them wonderful sources for inspiration, with a low bar for entry and great flexibility depending on what ingredients we have in front of us. The same ingredient and method can easily be steered in lots of directions based on supporting flavors…

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