BOKASHI FERMENTING AGENT
1. Get container, fill halfway with rice-wash. Rice wash is the water leftover when you rinse fresh
rice. For example, go buy rice, whatever kind, bring it home, put it in a pot with warm water,
swirl it a bit and then drain the [now milky colored] water. The water is now a rich source of
carbohydrates. In this step, you can substitute rice with another carbohydrate source if you
don’t have rice, as long as it is complex (don’t use simple carbohydrates like sugar, honey, syrup,
molasses, etc). You can use wheat, barley, kinoa, other carbohydrates as the base to make your
carbohydrate wash. This wash will attract microbes from the air, among them lacto bacilli.
2. Cover loosely and let stand for a couple days to a week
a. When is it done? When you see a light film on top (molds) and it smells a little sour and
forms 3 layers. This is indicating the rice wash is infected with various microbes. This
happens more quickly in warm temperatures because microbes are more active. Thus it is
all relative since we don’t do this in controlled laboratory conditions.
3. The layers are distinct.
a. Top layer: floating carbohydrates leftover from fermentation and possibly molds
b. Middle layer: Lactic Acid and other bacteria (cheese buffs will recognize this as a makeshift
“rennet”). We will use this layer.
c. Bottom layer: Starch, byproduct of fermentation
4. Extract the middle layer using a siphon. This layer contains the highest concentration of lactic
acid bacteria and lowest concentration of the unneeded byproducts
5. Get a new container, larger than the first. Take the extracted serum from the last step and
mix it with 10 parts milk. By saturating with milk (lactose), we dissuade other microbes from
proliferating, leaving L. bacilli. E.G. if you have 1cup of the serum, mix it with 10cups milk.
6. You want to keep this stage anaerobic as much as possible. You can use something like rice
bran, barley bran, wheat bran, etc sprinkled on top of the milk. I use a sealed container with a
one-way valve. Note: Beware of bubbling during this phase. It can lead to overflows if you filled
to near the top. It can go through the one-way valves so keep an eye on it and don’t do this
step around nice things.
7. After about 1 week (temp dependent), you’ll see curds (made of carbohydrate, protein, and fat)
on top of the milk. The water below will be yellow colored – this is whey, enriched with lactic
acid bacteria from the fermentation of the milk.
8. The water below (whey+lacto) is the good stuff. You want to extract this. You can either skim the
curds off the top, pour through a strainer, or whatever other methods to accomplish that
9. To preserve at room temperature, add an equal part sugar/molasses to the serum. So, if you
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