Direct link to this recipe:
If you have a vegetable garden and live in the South, then you know this beautiful relish. With the increased popularity of functional, fermented foods and harvest preservation I had to showcase old-fashioned chow chow around the world with this Protective Diet recipe. Protective Diet’s chow chow recipe preserves the last harvest of the garden with small batch fermentation. I’ll teach you how to enhance green tomatoes that will not ripen before the first frost. Chopped and tossed together with the season’s best onion, pepper, corn, and cabbage harvest. Fermented to multiply the protective tomatine found in green tomatoes, sulforaphane and anthocyanin in red cabbage, and quercetin in onions. With a hit of capsaicin in hot peppers this tangy, good on everything condiment is sure to be a Fall favorite. This is a flavor enhancing, powerfully populated, immune boosting garnish that will transform a plain grain bowl into an exciting functional meal. Every fruit and vegetable contains it’s own microbiome population and when we ferment them the protective microbes multiply. When we consume them raw or fermented our protective resident microbes thrive on the plant fiber. Microbes within raw fruit and veggies make themselves at home and become protective residents expanding our microbiome diversity and strengthening our immune system. Healthy plant-based microbes eat plant-fiber and expel short chain fatty acids that tighten our epithelium also known as our gut wall. With a tight gut wall on a Protective Diet we can eliminate food allergies, risk of viral infection, and inflammatory disease including cancer cell proliferation. If you think fermentation is too complicated please check out this recipe and you will see all you have to do is chop and in five days this relish will transform easy brown rice bowls into live, functional, protective, microbiome promoting meals. Protective Diet recipes are designed as weekly educational bites to achieve and maintain optimal health with a sustainable diet incorporating plant-based functional foods based on advances in microbiology and phytochemical research. Join us in the Protective Diet Education classroom where we discuss ‘we are what we eat’ and demonstrate how we make every meal protective.