I love it and want everyone to be enjoying it, but I’ve noticed that most people have never heard of boza. Hence this post! In it, I’ll explain what the drink boza is, its history, how it’s made and what it tastes like.

What is boza?

Boza is a fermented drink that is native to the European regions we now call Turkey, the Caucuses and the Balkans. Made with millet, it’s gluten-free, dairy-free and, thanks to the fermentation, probiotic. It’s thick, fizzy, tangy and deeply satisfying.

What is the history of boza?

The first time the word ‘boza’ is recorded as being used to describe a fermented drink was the 14th century, but, incredibly, fermented millet drinks have been made since the 9th century BCE, meaning that a drink really similar to boza has been around for 11,000 years!

The heyday of boza was during the Ottoman Empire. A 17th-century traveller to Istanbul reported that the city housed 300 boza shops that employed over a thousand people!

There are still shops selling boza in Istanbul, one of the most famous being Vefa, which was founded in 1876 and is now run by the original owners great-great-grandchildren. You can see the shop here.

As well as being available in shops, boza has a long history of being sold by street vendors, who would wander the streets of Istanbul carrying boza in metal containers hung on milk pail-style apparatus. They had a very distinctive call. You can watch a short clip of one here.

If you’d like to read more about the environment in which boza-sellers worked, the main character in Orhan Pamuk’s 2014 novel A Strangeness in My Mind (a book that was shortlisted for the 2016 International Booker Prize) is a Turkish boza-seller.

What is boza made of?

The earliest records of boza-style fermented drinks used the grain millet. As the drink has travelled to different geographies and been influenced by changing crops, it is now often made with other grains such as corn or wheat.

I use millet in my own kitchen to make boza which creates a drink which is not only dairy-free but also gluten-free and lectin-free. Students of my boza course have also made the fermented drink with sorghum, amaranth and teff (as you can see below!).

Why should I make boza at home?

Boza is a simple, inexpensive drink to make and one that is exciting, delicious and probiotic. It’s great to have in the fridge when you want a healthy snack to turn to. In addition, if you’re looking to bring more probiotics into your life, making and consuming boza is a way that you can do this without relying on dairy, gluten, lectins or, importantly, expensive shop-bought beverages or tablets.

How do you make boza?

To make boza, hulled, cooked millet is mixed with yeast and left to ferment. The microbes doing the fermentation produce acids which make the drink tangy along with small amounts of alcohol.

What yeast can I use to make boza at home?

Some people use packets of commercial yeast in the boza-making process (and this is how boza is made in shops today).

Some experiment with sourdough starter, but I find this creates a drink that is too sour.

I choose to create my own starter full of natural yeasts using a small amount of cooked millet and some sugar. I then inoculate a bigger batch of cooked millet with this home-made starter, which ensures delicious results!

“I’m so impressed with this course. I’d never even heard of boza and now I’m addicted to it!” Deb, student of my course Boza: The Probiotic Millet Drink

What does boza taste like?

Boza is sweet, fizzy on the tongue, tangy and slightly sour. The cooked millet adds a creaminess to the drink too. You can vary the thickness (by adding more or less water) depending on your preference but it is generally a satisfyingly-thick drink which can also be eaten with a spoon.

Boza has generally become sweeter over time. Historically it was a more sour drink. My own method produces a drink that balances the sweet and sour flavours – I think the boza in my home is probably much less sweet than the boza you can currently buy in Istanbul.

What is the alcohol content?

The alcohol content of boza is low. In Turkey there is legislation saying that it cannot be greater than 2%. In my experience, when making boza at home, the alcohol content is much lower. General agreement states that home-made boza is less than 1% alcohol.

How is boza traditionally served?

Historically, boza has been served in the winter. This is because without refrigeration it was difficult to stop the drink over-fermenting in warm summer temperatures.

In addition, traditionally boza is seen as a warming and nourishing drink (even though it is served cold).

If you go to Istanbul today and buy boza, it will be served with roasted chickpeas and cinnamon on the top.

What are some other ways of serving boza?

In my home, boza is most often drunk (or eaten with a spoon) as a snack. My husband and son love it when they return home after a walk or an energetic trip out.

We consume it cold. In the summer, it’s really refreshing. In the winter, the thickness and fizzyness is very satisfying.

Here are some other ideas for serving boza:

• Top it with ground linseed or toasted nuts
• Use it as a yogurt alternative to top fruit or oatmeal/porridge
• Gently heat it up and sip it from a mug whilst warming your hands
• As a base for smoothies: Boza makes a brilliant non-dairy base for a probiotic smoothie. We like to add egg yolks, linseed, fruits or cocoa powder!
• Boza popsicles: Freeze boza in popsicle moulds for a delicious, healthy summer treat.

If you’d like to make boza in your own kitchen check out my step-by-step video course here

This recipe will walk you through a traditional cookie process – transforming a ‘fermented’ honey dough into festive cookies and also guide you through some precious moments of reflection during the often busy weeks of holiday preparation.

In order to bake these cookies, you’ll need a previously-prepared dough. You can find instructions for that here.

Go get your ‘fermented’ dough (it doesn’t matter if it’s had a few day or a few months maturing – all timescales will work) and let’s get to transforming your honey and oat dough into some slow spiced honey & oat cookies!

Why are these called ‘Slow’ Cookies?

Whilst developing the recipe for these cookies, I was aware that so much of the process was slow and manual. To start with this seemed like a negative: Doesn’t the whole world want everything, including recipes, to be ‘quick and easy’?

But soon I could feel how much I was enjoying the process because I had to slow down. And seeing that I was creating a festive treat, my mind turned to the holidays; I started dreaming of how I wanted my Christmas to be.

The cookies, slow as they are, were gifting me a few moments of meditation! Time when I could step outside the often frenetic Christmas build-up and revisit my deepest values.

So much about the festive season can push us into rushing. These cookies are an antidote to that; a slow process and one during which we have moments to focus in on our own heartfelt desires for the holidays.

I’ll hand hold you through this; at the end you’ll not only have 16 delicious cookies but also be much clearer and focused on giving yourself and your family a wonderful Christmas, those intentions brought forth during the process and literally baked in to your honey and oat spiced treats.

Slow Spiced Honey & Oat ‘Fermented’ Cookies

Will use half your dough and make 16 cookies

What you’ll need:

1/2 the original dough (this is around 220g)

Spices, I use 1 tsp ginger and cinnamon

Salt, pinch

Baking powder 5g (about 1tbsp)

Remember UK tsp and tbsp are slightly bigger than US ones, so for every 1 UK tsp/tbsp indicated here you’ll need 1.2 of the US equivalent.

23g butter, chopped

Rolling pin

Flour

Circular cutter 6cm/2.5inch

This is a slow process to be lingered over, so you might want to make yourself a cup of tea too!

• Chop your original dough in half (you’ll end up with about 220g of dough).
• Put the dough into a bowl and break it up into small breadcrumb-sized pieces with fingers.

Slow opportunity #1!

Here’s your first opportunity to think about how you want your festivities to be. Meditate on them as your fingers work (it’ll take 5-10 minutes to break up your dough).

What’s important to you over the holidays?

What do you value and what do you want to show up?

Is it peace, is it meeting people, is it spirituality, is it joy, is it slowness?

How do you want to feel?

How do you want people around you to feel?

What do you want to be able to say was true of your holidays when you look back on them?

The more you can get clear and detailed on this, the more it’ll help inform all your choices and decisions.

• Once your dough is broken up into small breadcrumb pieces, mix in the salt, baking powder and spices.
• Add the chopped butter and break it up/work it in to the crumbs using your fingers.

Slow opportunity number 2!

Take your time. Think back to your desires for the festive season.

How are you going to enable those wishes to come to fruition?

What do you need to do less of?

What do you need to do more of?

What do you need to remember?

How are you going to remember that? Do you need to write it down/draw it/set yourself reminders/commit to a festive season ‘practice’?

It can help to write this all out. Not now, but once you fingers are clean! Or you could set up a voice recorder and talk into it as you mix.

• Once the butter is broken up and worked in well, bring the mix together into a ball.
• Roll it out on a floured board until it’s 4-5 mm thick and cut your cookies out.
• Place the cookies onto a baking sheet, squeeze the left over dough into another ball and do the process again (and potentially again) until you have used up all the dough. You should have around 16 cookies.
• Bake them. This is the only part of the process that is quick – you will need to pay attention to the cookies in the oven to make sure that they don’t burn. At 170C/340F my cookies take around 7 minutes.
• Remove the cookies to a wire cooling rack using a wide spatula. Be careful whilst you’re doing this – at this stage they are still soft and will bend/break easily.

Once they have cooled, the cookies are ready to eat! If you’d like to spend more time with them you can decorate them with melted chocolate and orange zest. Mine are decorated with home-made bean-to-bar chocolate; you can find out how to make this in my course here.

Keep the cookies in an airtight container, they are good for a week (though I’m sure they won’t last that long!).

Soaking oats potentially, depending on how you do it, performs several actions:

1. It hydrates and softens the grain, meaning your digestive system has an easier time with assimilation and you don’t lose water as that happens.
2. It imbues the oats and soak water with probiotics, meaning that when you cook your oats, they’ll be full of postbiotics and paraprobiotics which are incredibly health-giving.
3. It gifts the oats a tangy ‘sourdough’ flavour.
4. It can neutralise the mineral-stealing phytic acid, meaning that when you consume the oats, you’re maximising your ability to absorb minerals.

Soaking your oats in water will accomplish number 1 above – softening your grain and making it easier to digest.

Soaking your oats in water and an acidic medium with live probiotics (i.e. sourdough starter, milk kefir, apple cider vinegar) will achieve numbers 1, 2 and 3 above – you’ll have probiotic-containing, tangy, easy-to-digest oats. It may also go some way to step 4  – studies have shown that, in some conditions, yeasts and bacteria can work to neutralise phytic acid.

But, in order to achieve all four of the above; to do our best to neutralise the mineral-stealing phytic acid in oats, we need to include a freshly-ground, high-phytase grain in the soaking mix. To understand why, read my article The Low Down on Oats and Phytic Acid.

So let’s talk practicalities:

The Best Way to Soak Oats

What you’ll need:

• Oats, rolled or flaked
• Freshly-ground rye flour (or for gluten-free you can use freshly-ground buckwheat)
• Non-chlorinated water
• Acidic ‘live’ medium: sourdough starter, milk kefir, sauerkraut juice – anything that comes from an unpasteurised ferment

The amounts I use for breakfast for three people are 150g oats, 20g freshly-ground rye flour, 10g starter (I use rye sourdough starter) and 400-600ml of water.

What to do:

1. Put the oats into a bowl and add the freshly-ground rye (or buckwheat) flour
2. Stir the acidic ‘live’ medium into a jug of room temperature water then add the mix to the oats and rye/buckwheat, stirring well
3. Cover lightly and leave at room temperature overnight

In the morning, pour the entire contents of the bowl into a saucepan, add extra water/milk, salt, spices (whatever you love to include!) and cook.

After much research into oats, traditional methods and the science of phytic acid, this is the way I soak my oats.

• The water is softening and hydrating them
• The freshly-ground rye (or buckwheat) flour is providing phytase to help neutralise phytic acid
• The live starter is creating an acidic environment (which is optimal for phytic acid reduction), providing me the benefits of beneficial microbes and giving me that tangy ‘sourdough’ flavour that I love.

If you would like to be able to create freshly-ground flour in your own kitchen, I’d recommend the counter-top stone mills made by Mockmill. It was my research into phytic acid and oats that finally made me take the leap and invest in one, and I could not be happier! You can take a look at the range and hear more about my experience here, and if you would like to purchase a Mockmill (in the US or UK) and use the links on this page, you’ll be supporting the work I do without paying any more for your mill.

If you want to hear me talk in detail on soaking and fermenting oats, listen to Ancestral Kitchen Podcast #70 – Fermenting Oats

If you’d like to try something different with these oats, try my Fermented Oat Bake.

I started this tradition in my own kitchen many years ago. I put up a flour and honey dough in the autumn and then bake it into Christmas cookies in December (you can see the recipe for those cookies, made of grains other than oats, here).

I’m giving this year over to oat cookies. If you’d like to join me, here’s what you need to do now:

Make your dough:

250g oat flour

You can buy this from your local supplier or you can make it yourself by using a heavy duty grinder to grind up oat flakes. Make the flour as fine as you possibly can.

200g runny honey

The runnier this is the easier it will be to incorporate into your flour. If you can’t get runny honey, you can gently heat thicker honey in a bain marie (a bowl placed over a simmering saucepan of water) to make it runny.

Mix the honey into the oat flour. This will take quite a while and can be a rather sticky affair. Use a spoon for most of the mixing (you can transfer to hands at the end if it’s easier) and have another spoon available to scrape off the mixing spoon.

Once the two are combined, roughly shape your mix into a ball. Put this into a bowl that you’re happy to not have around for a couple of months. Cover this bowl with some aluminium foil or cling film/plastic wrap and poke a couple of small holes in the top (you could also cover with a tightly fitting plate).

Place the bowl with the dough in somewhere out of the way and cool. In my house that is downstairs and this time of year the temperature is usually somewhere between 10°C (50F) and 18°C (65F). Lower than 10°C is also fine (you could put it in the fridge if you have to), and higher than 18°C is probably fine too, though I’ve not tested it.

That’s it! Leave your dough to mature until close to Christmas…

…and then, when you’re ready to bake, follow the second part of my Slow Spiced Honey & Oat ‘Fermented’ Cookies here.

If you want to make your own bean-to-bar chocolate to cover them in, check out my course here

When they became popular in the 1700s, women had cottage industries selling the oatcakes to workers from their kitchen windows. And today they are still a regional staple, with dedicated shops opening their doors at 5am to feed locals.

These days, they are made with commercial yeast, but originally they were fermented in wooden barrels that were used for the batter over and over again – their sides becoming impregnated with wild yeasts and bacteria.

My recipe is a fun sourdough version that uses 100% oat grain. Here’s what Andrea, my co-host on Ancestral Kitchen Podcast had to say about them:

These oatcakes are magical, they are a dairy-free, gluten-free bread that you can keep a week supply of batter for in the fridge, they don’t need to be rolled out or shaped and they can be just HEAPED with stuff, and by some kind of oat alchemy they turn tiny bits and bobs into a real glamorous meal. Long live the oat!

Naturally-Fermented Staffordshire Oatcakes

Ingredients:

200g very fine oatmeal or oat flour (you can make this by grinding oat flakes in a high-powered grinder)

250g water

Tbsp sourdough starter (you can substitute any active starter – milk kefir, apple cider vinegar etc.)

Pinch of salt

Makes 4 pancakes – the method below is written for a cast iron pan that is 20cm/8inches across.

Get this, plus two more traditional British oat recipes in my Heritage Oat Collection. Enter your details below and I’ll send it to your inbox.

Method:

1. In a bowl, mix together the oats/oat flour, water and sourdough starter well.
2. Cover and leave on the counter to ferment. How long you leave is up to you – anything from a few hours to overnight. The longer you leave the mix, the more fermented and sour it will become.
3. When you are ready to cook, pre-heat your cast iron pan. Put it on medium/medium-high and allow it to get hot (for me this takes a good 10 minutes).
4. Add a pinch of salt to your batter and stir it well.
5. Add a generous knob of fat to the pan (I use lard).
6. Using a large spoon, ladle about a quarter of the batter into the pan, encouraging it to cover the pan by spreading it in a circular motion with the back of the spoon.
7. Cook until the upwards-facing surface looks dry (about 6-8 minutes) the flip the pancake and cook till golden brown on both sides.
8. Serve warm!

You can refrigerate the uncooked batter for a few days if you are not ready to use straight away. You can also reheat leftover oatcakes in a warm pan and enjoy later!

If you love oats, you might also like my other oat recipes:

Traditional Scottish Oatcakes

Sourdough Oatcakes

Fermented Oat Bake

And if you’d like to explore the way the Scottish traditionally fermented their oats into a creamy, easy-to-digest porridge and a tangy probiotic drink, check out my course Sowans: The Scottish Oat Ferment here!

Why I love milk kefir-leavened bread:

A sourdough culture includes both lactic acid (a by-product of lactobacillus) and acetic acid (a by-product of acetobacter). Both of these acids flavour the finished sourdough bread. That’s why sometimes sourdough can be really sour and other times not.

Milk kefir is dominant in lactobacillus. So when you raise a bread using solely milk kefir, the culture is much more lactic acid dominant than sourdough. This lends a creaminess to the resultant loaf is delicious! My recipe also includes a touch of honey, which rounds this nutty spelt flour loaf off beautifully.

Things to note about this bread:

You’ll need *live* milk kefir. You can make this yourself, using fresh milk and milk kefir ‘grains’ or you can purchase it. If you decide to buy it, make sure it states that it contains live bacteria, as without these, you will not be able to create a leaven.

It’s a high hydration bread and will need supporting in a loaf tin during cooking. I use a 1kg ceramic loaf tin with a lid to bake it. You can use any similar sized tin.

To make this loaf – both to raise the leaven and proof the bread, you’ll need a warm place (warmer than a ‘standard’ sourdough set up). Lactobacillus grow best at 28C/84.5F though I have successfully created the leaven at temperatures between 22C/71.5F and 28C/84.5F. In some environments, the bread might need some help – an airing cupboard or warm room. If you need it, click here to have me guide you through how to create a DIY proofing box.

This bread includes a overnight retard in the fridge. In total it takes a day and a half. My usual schedule is below.

Milk Kefir Spelt Bread

Timings:

Day 1 – 1pm – mix leaven

Day 2 – c. 8am – mix dough and set to proof

Day 2 – c. 2pm – pan the dough and proof a further couple of hours

Day 2 – c. 4pm – put the dough, inside the tin, in your fridge

Day 3 – c. 6-8am – bake the bread

So, if you’d like the bread on a Sunday morning, mix up your leaven Friday lunch time

Making the leaven:

Ingredients:

50g live culture milk kefir

50g wholegrain spelt flour

Method:

Mix the milk kefir and spelt flour well and place in a glass container. Level out the surface and mark the height on the side of the glass using an elastic band (or marker).

Cover the container loosely with a lid or muslin and leave in a warm place (ideally 28C/84.5F).

After c.18 hours the leaven should look very active, with multiple bubbles and have doubled in size. This means it is ready to use in your bread. If your leaven has not doubled you can leave it a little longer. I have sometimes left mine 20+ hours (along with sometimes having it double in 14 hours). Watch for white mould on the surface of the leaven – if this appears and your leaven is sluggish, throw it away and start again with a different milk kefir/higher temperature.

Making the bread:

Ingredients:

All of the above milk-kefir risen leaven

250g wholegrain spelt flour

250g white spelt flour

10g salt

35g runny honey

300 ml warm non-chlorinated water

Method:

Measure the flours into a large bowl and add the salt, mixing well.

In a medium bowl, combine the leaven, the honey and the warm water (make sure this water is not above 40C). Stir well until all the honey is distributed.

Pour the liquid mixture into the dry mixture and, using a spoon, bring it together.

As soon as possible, get your hands into the dough and mix well.

Work the dough for 10 minutes in the bowl. As you go on, its consistency should become more manageable.

Cover the bowl and place in in a warm place (ideally 28C/84.5F) to proof for 5 hours, stretching and folding at the end of every hour (I find it helpful to document these hours whilst I’m going, so that I don’t lose track). Do not worry that your dough is loose.

Once proofed (the dough will feel much more airy), grease and/or line your loaf tin, gently shape the bread and place it in the tin. Cover the tin and put it back in your warm place for another 2 hours.

After the total of 7 hours proofing, remove your dough to the fridge overnight.

The next morning, take the dough out of the fridge and set it somewhere warm while you pre-heat you oven ready to bake.

All ovens bake slightly differently, but these are my own tried-and-tested baking directions for this bread:

To bake in a lidded ceramic baker (I use an Emile Henry baker): Pre-heat your oven on the non-fan setting to 210C/410F. Spray the top of your dough with a little water and score, replacing the lid. Bake at 210C/410F for 15 minutes and then reduce the temperature to 190C/374F and bake for a further 45 minutes. Your loaf will be ready when it is golden-brown on the top, hollow-sounding when tapped on the bottom and has an internal temperature of 95-97C/203-207F.

To bake in a standard loaf tin: Preheat your oven on the non-fan setting to 220C/428F. Spray the top of your dough with a little water and score. Bake at 220C/428F for 15-20 minutes and then reduce the temperature to 190C/374F and bake for a further 40-45 minutes. Your loaf will be ready when it is golden-brown on the top, hollow-sounding when tapped on the bottom and has an internal temperature of 95-97C/203-207F.

Ancestral cultures the world-over have routinely cooked their fermented foods. Yes, they have sauerkraut and beet kvass raw, but they also add them to soups and stews along with consuming fermented porridges, flat breads and sourdough.

I can understand cooking fermented grain products – we can’t digest them raw. And to some extent I can understand kilos of live microbe sauerkraut in a stew – fermentation was very much a way of preserving food in preparation for leaner times.

Yet, with all this, my researcher-mind is still not quite satisfied. I know there’s deep wisdom in ancestral cooking techniques – far deeper than science can often explain. And reports show that communities that eat both raw and cooked fermented foods consistently have better health markers than us who’ve forgotten fermentation.

There’s another reason I don’t buy the ‘dead probiotics are useless’ theory:

I am super-sensitive to probiotics. They stop me sleeping – like bolt awake at 2am night after night. Around 5 years ago, I’d had enough of this and started weighing out my sauerkraut every day. This way, I’ve been able to gradually increase my dosage from .5g a day in 2016 to 26g a day now. I’ve done something similar with kefir.

On top of raw probiotics, I love eating ‘cooked’ probiotics – including sourdough bread, porridge and pancakes. I’ve always been told that the probiotics in these foods are ‘dead’. And yet, with certain cooked fermented foods, I’ve noticed my sleep affected. It’s made me wonder, “What’s going on here?”

And this is when the word paraprobiotics jumped out of my Instagram feed at me. I did a double take. Paraprobiotics? Quickly the word postbiotics followed. Postbiotics? What are they?

I started digging.

I’m not a biologist, I’m a home cook – I’ve needed many hours reading and re-reading academic documents (thank you Christopher Shockey for pointing me to them!) to get my head around what ancestral wisdom and body have always known – there is so much more to fermented food than the probiotics we create when we’re making them.

Here’s what I now understand:

Firstly, let me briefly define my understanding of the two terms you most likely know:

Probiotics:

Beneficial bacteria created outside of us through the process of fermentation. These are present in foods such as sauerkraut, yogurt and kombucha. They enter the gut and are used by the resident bacteria there to help produce benefits to our immune system.

Prebiotics:

These are the compounds needed, as food, by the beneficial bacteria resident in our gut. You can find them in a host of vegetable foods, like onions, beans and cold rice.

With this understanding we can move onto placing the newer terms into context.

Paraprobiotics:

Probiotics don’t live a long time. Either through cooking (i.e. when you put a live bacteria starter into a bread and bake it) or by having been used by the resident bacteria in our gut, they ‘die’. In this ‘dead’ state, whether killed inside or outside of us, they become paraprobiotics. The structural cell wall components of these ‘dead’ bacteria have continued and diverse beneficial effects in our bodies.

Postbiotics:

Postbiotics are the waste material left behind after our resident gut bacteria have used the probiotics that we give them. Much of this waste isn’t waste at all – like compost we might make from our kitchen scraps, it goes to benefit other areas and creates change.

Current research shows us that many paraprobiotics and postbiotics have anti-inflammatory, anti-tumor, anti-oxident and immunomodulatory effects.

The research is in its very early stages…and that’s what scientists have found already! I am sure there is far more to be discovered regarding the marvel of fermentation.

For me, this research bestows a clear explanation of my years of puzzling: Probiotics affect our bodies even when they aren’t alive – through their remaining paraprobiotics components and through the postbiotics that are created by the process of breakdown in our guts.

Now I rest even more deeply into the wisdom of ancestral foodways – they knew things centuries ago that science is only just beginning to uncover now.

And I understand why heating up the Scottish ‘swats’ drink I’ve fermented at home has to be part of my probiotic ‘allowance’ for the day if I don’t want to wake in the middle of the night!

There’s a need to change our general understanding of probiotics, so share this information loud and wide. Let’s get fermenting! And yes, let’s eat our ferments raw, but, for even more profound health benefits let’s cook our ferments too. More fermented pancakes, more sauerkraut in stews, more kefir cream desserts and more sourdough. Who’d complain at that? These foods not only taste great, but are full of paraprobiotics and postbiotics, which, when offered to our bodies, are doing amazing things deep inside.

Our ancestors knew of garlic’s medicinal power long before science explained the hows and whys. For centuries it has been lauded for its miraculous healing properties.

We now know it’s full of healing and health boosting compounds, including amino acids, minerals and detoxing agents, along with anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial and anti-viral agents.

The most powerful of these is Allicin, which is a protein-digester. This combines with our food making it easier to digest and is also an anti-biotic. It kills bacteria by invading and breaking down the proteins inside them.

But Allicin, which gives garlic its pungent odour, is destroyed during the cooking process.

Our ancestors instinctively knew that eating raw garlic was important. Throughout Europe you can find age-old dishes that were made with raw garlic. These show us that getting the benefits of raw garlic needn’t be preceded by downing a clove and grimacing. We can serve raw garlic at our tables and make it a pleasure.

Here are 4 ways:

1 – Ferment it

Fermenting raw garlic is culinary magic; the health properties are maintained (studies show some benefits are actually increased) and the strong flavour is softened and sweetened.

Fermented garlic can be used as a condiment to accompany your meal, chopped up and stirred into salad dressings or sprinkled over the top of vegetables or even enjoyed as a health tonic just prior to eating.

It’s easy to make: You need a glass jar, salt and water. Three-quarters fill your jar with peeled cloves. Make a brine by mixing 5 grams of salt per cup of non-chlorinated water and pour this over the garlic cloves. Feel free to add spices. If you have a cabbage or lettuce leaf available, cut it to the width of the jar and place it on top of the garlic clothes to help keep them under the brine (you can also add glass weights to aid this further). Leave this to ferment for at least six weeks.

If you don’t want to do a whole jar of garlic, add single cloves to other ferments – there are countless examples of ferments such as the Polish Beet Kvass, Romanian Bors and German Sauerkraut being flavoured with additional raw garlic cloves.

2 – Fettunta

Fettunta is a simple Italian dish traditionally served at the celebration of the new olive oil harvest in November, but in practice eaten throughout the year.

Toast some good bread. Peel a garlic clove and rub it vigorously over the surface of the bread. Drizzle olive oil on top of this. That’s it – now enjoy the warm bread with its crunch, the strong garlic and the unctuous oil together in each bite.

3 – Allioli

Allioli is a garlic sauce made from raw cloves and bread crumbs. In the Catalan region it pairs with fish and meat and in France it is served with snails.

Pulverise some garlic cloves in a mortar and pestle or food processor. Add good quality olive oil slowly and mix well. Soak breadcrumbs in lemon juice or vinegar and then squeeze them out (but not completely). Add them to the garlic and combine well. Chop a generous amount of parsley and grind this into the mix.

Serve allioli with meats, spread it on roasted vegetables or use it as a dip.

4 – Chocolate-coated Garlic

I first read about this in an Oxford food symposium essay from the 1980s, where it is referred to as having Sicilian origins. Despite further searching, I’ve not been able to confirm this. But I can tell you that my husband thinks it pairs very well with coffee, so maybe there’s truth in its Italian origins!

I have made this with both raw garlic cloves and fermented garlic cloves. It really is much nicer with fermented garlic.

It’s as simple as melting some really good quality dark chocolate in a double boiler, then spearing your garlic cloves with toothpicks before dipping them into the melted chocolate. Put them aside to set, then munch away…seriously, everyone in our family likes these.

We are living through a time when staying as healthy as possible is very much in our psyches. Garlic can help us do this; it is literally a miracle food.

In case you need any more convincing, I want to leave you with instructions for a raw garlic-infused vinegar that dates back to the time of the European plague. It is a concoction that was made by thieves entering the houses of the dead, to rob them. It reputedly protected them from being affected by the bacteria.

Strong stuff! It’s still available to buy in France today.

Food should be about enjoyment and pleasure and I truly believe you can experience these while eating raw garlic. Use one of my four suggestions above and you can benefit from the incredible components in raw garlic without the need to down a plague-resisting vinegar!