The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for cooking, brewing, feasting and festing.
The Brew It Yourself Ginger Ale kit is a great weekend project for the whole family. It comes with easy-to-follow instructions, ginger ale flavor extract, yeast, a funnel, and two blank labels. My kids enjoyed measuring, mixing, and heating ingredients, proofing the yeast, and bottling in two 2-liter bottles, adorned with their custom-made labels. After fermenting […]
Iced coffee is refreshing and delicious, but I’ve never been able to make it as well as I’d like. As it turns out, I was doing it wrong. Rather than prepare it with a traditional hot brew method, I should have been cold brewing it. This reduces acidity and produces a concentrated flavor that stands […]
You don’t have to depend on commercial growers or expensive powders to get your spirulina fix. With this kit, you can have it fresh and alive, anytime. I made a few modifications to help mine grow faster and prevent clogging, like replacing the intake line with rubber tubing and swapping the bubble wand for a […]
Who’d believe a sawdust log in a plastic bag could turn into a magical mushroom forest before your eyes! My first harvest was bounteous and the shiitakes delectable, but careful attention to growing conditions was required to yield multiple crops of mushrooms rather than mold. If you get 3–5 harvests, the kit is a bargain; […]
While not exactly a “kit,” Cultures for Health has everything you need for making sourdough bread: 15 starters from all over the world, clear instructions, and a great selection of useful bread-making tools, like cookbooks, dough scrapers, bread bags, and baker’s blades for scoring that classic ridge down the middle of your loaf. I experimented […]
To make sauerkraut, all you really need is cabbage, salt, and a jar with a lid, but you can make your life much easier with a mandoline slicer, vegetable starter culture, and fermenting crock from Cultures for Health. (A copy of Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz will only help the cause.) They carry charming crocks […]
There’s nothing like prying open a jar of gleaming, homemade strawberry jam in January. This kit is a classic and contains everything you need to get started. It’s worth it for the magnetic lid lifter alone! (How many times have I burned myself fishing around the pot for lost lids?) For smaller batches, I like steam […]
