Kefir and kombucha: making macrobiotics with Dean Parker

Dean talks me through the ferments he’s using at the moment: rhubarb that’s shocking pink with a magnified flavour, kimchi made with heaps of black pepper, garlic and horseradish, fermented potato that has a pleasant salty, cheesy taste which Dean then uses to make flatbreads, sorrel, and an incredible powerful fermented nettle that is toned down in a sauce with black garlic, oil, roast parsley and apple juice.

‘Fermented dulse was one of the first things we made,’ explains Dean. ‘It’s the highest form of protein, but the human body simply can’t digest all of them in its unfermented state. We follow a process called lacto-fermentation which uses whey to speed up the process and makes the proteins digestible. Because it’s quite cheesy, we usually turn it into a sauce.’

One of the ferments that Dean is particularly well known for is his cocoa miso. ‘It’s made using koji, which is cooked barley that’s inoculated with a certain kind of bacteria,’ he explains. ‘It’s how the Japanese make soy sauce, miso and sake. We then add water and salt, leave it for four days at 20–30°C and that’s where the flavour comes from. We use cocoa to flavour it then use the miso in our desserts. While we can make miso in four days, traditional varieties made using beans in a traditional style are generally kept in the cold for months or even years before they’re ready. But we use less salt and more water, which speeds everything up.’

Dean is most famous for is his macrobiotic products; specifically, his homemade kombucha and the kefir (a type of eastern European fermented milk) that goes into so many of his sauces (which are usually flavoured with one of his ferments). They’re both made in a similar way; spores are added to the liquid which ferments them and develops their flavour. The spores are then removed to be used over and over.

‘We make our kefir with a mixture of ninety percent milk to ten percent cream,’ explains Dean. ‘You can buy the spores you need online and just have to wait for them to grow – it’s something you can easily do at home and it’s incredibly easy.’

Kombucha is made from sweetened brewed black, white, earl grey or lemongrass teas. The spore is much larger than the little ones used for kefir – it resembles a dead jellyfish and certainly isn’t something you’d want to eat on looks alone. But after encouragement from Dean I ate a little piece and was surprised to find it tasted like lychee. ‘The kombucha spore is a living organism, much like a mushroom or fungus,’ says Dean. ‘You just leave it in the tea for five days, then strain the liquid, bottle it and keep the spore back for the next batch. We use the liquid in anything from cocktails to desserts, and make lots of vinegars with it.’

The drink itself is delicious, from the light, sweet and floral white tea variety through to the intensely sharp and sour earl grey (‘the acids in the earl grey react with the spore, turning it very sharp,’ Dean tells me). There are some incredible flavours going on in everything Dean gives me a taste of, but what’s more incredible is the fact that he had no foundation to work from – much of this stuff, like fermented nettle leaves, was completely made up and had to be perfected through a system of trial and error. The added bonus that all these fermented, preserved and macrobiotic ingredients are also incredibly good for us is just the icing on the cake.