How to make Grain Rejuvelac?
- Soak wheat grains for 8-12 hours
- Pour off water and rinse until water runs clear.
- Pour out the water and let sit in the jar or wet cloth in room temperature.
- Rinse and drain every 12 hours (approx 2 times a day to prevent drying)
- Depending on your climate and season, sprouts should appear about 2 days.
- About 5mm long in roots, place sprouts into your glass water container and fill that to the top with pure water and allow it to sit for 48 hours undisturbed.
- Strain the mixture into a clean jar and you have Rejuvelac. If it smells and tastes bad, it probably is. It should smell like sprouts and taste slightly lemony and may be slightly bubbly. The longer you let it sit the more bubbly and stronger-tasting it will get. This also means there is more enzymatic action.
- For a second batch, repeat step 6, but only allowing this to sit only for 24 hours.
Sprouts are no longer useful, so throw them away or feed them to birds.
How to prepare Cabbage Rejuvelac?
- Blend together 1 cup distilled or purified water plus 3 cups of coarsely chopped, loosely packed fresh cabbage. Start the blender at low speed and then advance the blender to high speed and blend for 30 more seconds.
- Pour into a jar, cover, and let stand at room temperature for 2 days.
- After 2 days strain off the liquid-Rejuvelac. The initial batch of cabbage rejuvelac takes 2 days to mature, but succeeding batches take 24 hours each.
- Each morning after straining off the fresh rejuvelac, blend together 1-1/2 cups of distilled or purified water plus 3 cups of coarsely ground, loosely packed fresh cabbage, for 30 seconds at high speed.
- Pour it into a jar and add 1/4 cup of the fresh rejuvelac just strained off, cover, shake, and let it stand at room temperature until the next morning.
- Cabbage rejuvelac can also be made without using a blender. Just chop the cabbage very fine and use 2-1/2 cups replacing the 3 cups in the recipe above with the same amount of water.
- Good quality rejuvelac tastes similar to a cross between carbonated water and the whey obtained when making yogurt. Bad quality rejuvelac has a much more putrid odour and taste and should not be consumed. Avoid using tap water because chlorine will interfere with the production of the bacteria. Boiling tap water for 30 minutes uncovered will remove chlorine.
- Refrigerate rejuvelac if it is to be kept overnight. Discard any rejuvelac on hand 24 hours after it is poured off the cabbage.
- Taking Rejuvelac – Drink each day’s rejuvelac during the course of the day by taking 1/2 cup three times per day, preferably with meals.
To implant a healthy population of lactobacteria in the intestinal tract take rejuvelac for 1 to 3 months.
1. It is possible for Rejuvelac to go bad (as it is for sprouts and probably any fermented culture). You can generally tell if the rejuvelac is okay by the smell and taste. It should be acidic with a pH less than pH 3.9. It is good practice to observe, smell and taste the rejuvelac periodically to become accustomed to the changes that occur (as it is for any fermented culture). Rejuvelac should keep in the fridge for a week or more, and will gradually sweeten with time.
2. All bacteria and yeasts have an optimum incubation temperature. Refrigeration will inhibit the growth of some organisms but may give an opportunity for others to flourish. Hot weather or high temperatures, may encourage the rapid growth of pathogenic organisms before the beneficial organisms get started, in which case the culture will smell putrid. If your Rejuvelac culture goes off then discard it, sterilise the jar and wait for cooler weather. In hot weather, it is feasible that a slight acidulation of the water with a little lemon juice at the start of the fermentation, may provide an environment less suited to pathogenic organisms.
3. The value of rejuvelac should not be confused with that of freeze-dried acidophilus. Rejuvelac contains live lactobacteria but freeze dried lactobacteria die in a few weeks’ time. People who have candida are very sensitive to yeast so they should make a new batch every time, but they could start 3 jars 3 days in a row so they do not run out.