RV living: Fermenting kitchen scraps bokashi-style with home-cultured LAB

I began my first-ever LAB culture a few weeks ago, with an intent to better deal with our kitchen scraps. Since I live in a camper, I'm trying to keep this small scale. I think the culture has been successful: the curds and serum separated today. Then life happened as it does, and I am just hoping it won't go into a double ferment overnight until I can pour it off and stabilize it tomorrow!
I plan to document my progress here, but first I wanted to gather the main resources (mostly Permies' posts) that gave me the knowledge and confidence that this could be done within my constraints (limited storage space, limited refrigerator space, and little or no money invested). There are almost certainly other threads on Permies I haven't discovered yet, and probably more I've read but didn't bookmark or remember. I haven't even cracked the door on bokashi and biochar! Maybe the "Similar Threads" feature at the bottom of the page will pick up the slack for me, or fellow permies will chime in with their own favorite resources.

Threads that expanded my understanding of homemade LAB serum:
My Journey through Fermentation, LAB, Cheesemaking, Korean Natural Farming, Humanure and Bokashi A thread chock-full of helpful info and linked resources
Homemade Lactobacillus Serum The main LAB serum "recipe" I relied on
These are the stories that microbes tell A massively educational thread
Lacto Bacillus - growing it, using it on a farm

General fermenting threads which reassured me when I (a fermenting newbie) panicked over the potential for jar explosion but didn't want to encourage the aerobic beasties too much, either. (AKA having the "how loose is the lid?!" freak-out 2x/day):
Baggie & rubber band "air lock" seal on fermenting jars
Do you need an airlock to ferment vegetables? The answer is, of course not!
Fermentation Failure, What's Yours? This was moral support in case my ferment did go wonky somehow - a reminder that it's all an experiment at first, right?

Threads about the different aspects of the Bokashi method from which I gleaned info which also applies to what I'm trying to do:
Bokashi - Nutrient Cycling for Homesteads A quick overview of the method, with a video and link to an in-depth blog article
Bokashi Composting One of the first threads I read about the process, with pictures of the OP's set-up. Really helpful; this thread got me thinking it was doable at my scale.
Tell me about bokashi An old thread; especially interesting to follow one participant as they wrestle with whether Bokashi is a viable, scalable option to offer permaculture clients. Nitty gritty, detailed info. I don't have a thorough grasp of everything here yet.
bokashi, bigger scale Another discussion about scale, with videos (because Permies' staff is consistently amazing at digging up relevant info for us).
Just loaded up my first bin of bokashi A first-batch story that shares final results
Alternative Bokashi substrate... Where I first read about using coffee chaff. I would love to see this thread get fresh attention - I'd like to read more about all the different substrates that folks have used.

Offsite resources
The Newspaper Bokashi blog
Bokashi Bran Recipe - DIY with Rice Water This video from Fraser Valley Rose Farm makes a point of explaining the difference between commercial EM and home-cultured LAB.
Bare Mtn Farm - Making and Explaining LAB: Phase 1 and Bare Mtn Farm - Phase 2 Making & Explaining LAB I find Bare Mtn Farm's content to be consistently well-presented.
This video of theirs helped me understand why adding sugar to the LAB serum lets us store it longer.


So far, this is a very accessible process. If someone's on the fence about whether they can do this or not - I want to encourage you to go for it. I am not working in a sterile lab environment, nor am I working with precisely titrated measuring devices or perfectly calibrated equipment. My turkey baster dribbled, I almost certainly got top film and bottom sediment when harvesting the first ferment, the lid was loose and I burped the thing whenever I thought of it - so oxygen probably got in, and my ratios were only roughly what they call for in the recipes.  Guess what - the wee beasties grew anyway. To quote Raven in that "Do you need an airlock?" thread -

r ranson wrote:this blog entry was written in response to something I kept seeing elsewhere on the internet that breaks my heart.

Person gets really enthusiastic about something. Say, making sauerkraut.
The go to the internet to learn more and hopefully gain momentum for their excitement.
They read that they can't do such and such without all this equipment and education. Or they go to a forum and are bashed over the head with all these people saying "you're stupid for wanting to try something new, go watch some TV"
They go watch some TV instead of making sauerkraut.

I came across this kind of situation again recently. Someone told me, "I want to make miso paste, but I don't have the right equipment to do it properly, so I didn't bother." What? Not the right equipment? You got a pot? Got a bowl? A spoon? A bucket? The person answers "yes" You have everything you need. "Yes, but it's not the proper equipment." It worked for the last thousand years, why would you need something different? "Because the internet..." Sigh.

Don't let the "You can't"s win! Try anyway, and if you don't succeed, throw it out* and try again. Or try something else instead.

*(But please take pictures first, so we can sympathize while learning with you.)

Welcome to the world of Bokashi in an RV!

It can be done.

Actually, lots of unconventional things can be done in an RV.  I know as I lived in one for almost ten years.

Please post picture of your trial and errors!

thanks for pulling this all together, future bokashi peeps will be thrilled!

and please let us know how it goes. Traditional composting didn't work for me for various reasons and bokashi was a fabulous solution.

Very nice post linking all those threads in one spot. Rv at work is exactly how I got into bokashi. I bought premade up until recently. It got pretty expensive. This I’d definitely making me want to try to make my own lab / em1. A bottle goes pretty far but…it’s pricey.

Thanks for the motivation to tackle the last part to make it actually cheap!

(I plan to post each step separately to be sure the pictures are in order.)
Phase 1: prepare the initial growing/feeding medium
I went with quinoa rinse water for my first medium. Quinoa happened to be what I was cooking next (instead of rice).
I was conservative with how much volume I used in each phase, given the smallish containers I had on hand and being limited in storage space.
I kept the container covered but did not secure the lid.
(Anne and Joe - can you guess where I put the culture in our camper? For us, at least, it seems like there's one place where things always end up which need to be out of the way for a bit but don't have a home anywhere else.)
I'm assuming bubbles in the rinse water are from the naturally-occurring saponins on the quinoa seeds.

Phase 1 - Day 7: obviously different layers = ready to collect
I didn't worry about keeping the culture's temp steady. Our camper temperatures fluctuate a bit but (I would guess) mostly stayed in the high 60s during this phase. Sometimes the culture was in the dark, sometimes not.
The film on the top was obvious as was the sediment. The scent was definitely sour/acidic but.... bright? clean-smelling? Not putrid, not gag-inducing, not disgusting. It did not fill the camper with odor (a Very Good Thing), neither during the ferment nor when I opened the container and was working with it.

Phase 2 - Isolating LAB Days 1 & 6 and in-between
Day 1:
This was a tiny bit hectic. I knew going into this my ratios and measurements wouldn't be exact, but I wasn't prepared for how annoying the inexactness was. As I wrote above, I didn't get the turkey baster bulb sealed well, and trying to keep a steady amount of liquid in it to get even a ballpark measurement proved frustrating. Also, harvesting the middle section and only the middle section didn't actually happen. Some of the top film got poked down, and some of the starchy sediment got stirred up.
Oh, well.
We had got a bag of powdered milk in a food box a while back and I planned to give it away b/c I couldn't think of a way we would use it all. When I read you can use powdered milk for this, I plucked it right back out of the giveaway box. I reconstituted it according to the package directions. As I said, my ratios were not exact, either:
I ended up with about 1.25oz of culture. I added about 1.75C of milk.
Converted to mL, this is about 35.5mLs of Phase-1 culture and 414mLs of milk. That ends up being a little heavy on the milk.
Oh, well.
I popped a saved Parmesan cheese shaker lid on the quart jar (loosely!) and moved it to the fermenting cabinet bathtub as before.

Phase 2, ongoing:
This is where I panicked about my jar integrity. It's an old jar, and in all my reading I couldn't find a clear answer on how powerful the off-gassing might get. And, just to raise the drama a bit, I had an opposing concern about letting too much air in and encouraging non-LAB aerobic types. I originally was going to screw the lid fully on and set alarms to burp the ferment twice a day. That proved too worrisome on the jar-integrity end. I finally loosened the lid completely, letting it merely rest over the jar, and also (unnecessarily, I'm sure) burped the thing once or twice a day. (Feel free to enjoy my first-timer anxieties - I am!)
Again, camper temps were often in high 60s Farenheit but could fluctuate between mid-60s and low to mid-70s. If we kept the bathroom door shut it would warm up in there. After a couple days I wrapped a small towel around the jar to block light and insulate the jar. It seemed the process sped up a bit after that.
Occasionally there was a faint, pleasant-ish dairy odor in the bathroom. My husband never commented on it, and he's scent-sensitive.

Phase 2, Day 6: Separation of "cheese" and "whey"
Within a day (or a half-day?) after the towel-wrap, curds started forming. By Day 5, separation was obvious and distinct. The lighting gives a false sense of opacity - the whey was more transparent than it appears in the photo. I really could have pulled the LAB on Day 5, but life intervened.

Phase 3 - Collection & stabilization
Collection
This was as easy as pour and "Plop!" I didn't have cheesecloth, but I remembered some finely woven clean fabric I had on hand and re-strained everything through it. Then I was able to squeeze excess moisture from the curds. They went into the fridge.

Stabilization
The only investment I have into this so far is the molasses, purchased for this step. I think it was about $5 for a 355ml jar.
This time I tried getting my ratios by weight instead of volume. I think I would prefer that in the future. I actually didn't get the calculations right again, but I believe I got more molasses in than culture liquid, which was my goal. (I didn't know about supersaturation until watching the Bare Mountain Farm video embedded above.)
I added the molasses slowly and stirred gently. No idea if that matters.

Storage
Now I have a shelf-stable substance which can be further diluted and experimented with. I do have to find a safe place in the camper to put it.

Future steps
Season the cheese*
Purchase a spray bottle
Source granules (I have some good ideas thanks to that Alternative substrates thread!)
Inoculate and ferment granules
Begin using that mix to ferment kitchen scraps (I'm excited for this one!)

*Any pointers on this? Have any of you tried eating it?

Anne Miller wrote:Actually, lots of unconventional things can be done in an RV.  I know as I lived in one for almost ten years.

Haha, yes they can! Thanks for the encouragement, Anne. Nice to know someone else who's lived the life!

Tereza Okava wrote:Traditional composting didn't work for me for various reasons and bokashi was a fabulous solution.

That's really good to read. I'm hoping it turns out to be the answer for our situation, too.

Joe Hallmark wrote: Thanks for the motivation to tackle the last part to make it actually cheap!

Oh, good! - that's exactly what I wanted to do.
Please don't let my first-timer angst be a deterrent. I definitely over-worried unnecessarily. I would say the process is pretty forgiving, and with experience comes confidence.

Here are some ongoing thoughts & questions I have:

To Anne and Joe, and any other RV-living folks out there: do you all think this could be poured into our waste tanks after dilution? I've read you can pour it down toilets to boost septic tank activity.

Regarding the (super)saturated molasses/LAB solution: is there a possibility of this attracting ants?

Still not sure where I'm going to end up with this. Right now the most realistic endpoint I can think of is burying the bokashi-fermented kitchen scraps. But.... the dirt is getting harder and drier as we move into summer. Either I get better at shoveling, or I come up with a plan B. What did you all do with your finished bokashi? I don't expect to have a compost pile, unless it's a very small one.

Sarah said, To Anne and Joe, and any other RV-living folks out there: do you all think this could be poured into our waste tanks after dilution? I've read you can pour it down toilets to boost septic tank activity.

I see no benefit in filling up the holding tank.  Why not offer this to some nearby out-of-the-way plants? A little corner where it is out of the way

We have to empty the holding tanks way too often.

Sarah said, Regarding the (super)saturated molasses/LAB solution: is there a possibility of this attracting ants?

That is possible so keep a spray bottle of 50/50 vinegar and water to keep countertops clean and fresh and kill any ants.

Phase 4: LAB dilution for immediate/ongoing use
To keep my notes straight, I've been calling the result of this phase "LAB-3". The recommended dilution is 1:20.  Using the amazing internets, I found that 1 tablespoon = 0.0625 cups (1/16 cups). Therefore, 20 tablespoons = 1 1/4 cups. So,

LAB amt	H2O amt
if 1TB	then 1 1/4 C
if 2TB	then 2 1/2 C
if 3TB	then 3 3/4 C
if 4TB	then 5 C

Total volume of the last line is 84 tablespoons, or 42 fluid ounces.

I've been using this dilution in a spray bottle for various things. Being over-excited to experiment with it, I sprayed it on the soil around one recently planted commercial tomato plant, and likely got it on stem and leaves, too. Leaves soon (in a couple days, to the best of my memory) turned yellow and dry-looking. Closest leaves of nearby plants also reacted the same way. I think I proved a bit of wisdom from this Dr Redhawk post (emphasis mine):

Bryant Redhawk wrote:Stomata are located on the underside of leaves, which is were any foliar spray should be placed for the plant to efficiently take in nutrients sprayed on them, especially the waxy leaved species of plants.
That is why you should be careful about what you use as a foliar application in my opinion the risk to the plant outweighs the benefit, especially if you have built a good microbiome in your soil.

A more targeted, controlled application method (such as pouring into the soil) might have prevented this, and perhaps it would have been better not to use it at all. If anyone can add any more exact info to what happened here, I'd love to learn more. The leaves have recovered their green hue, and the plant seems to be doing okay now.

I've used it in better success for odor control in sink drains and our RV toilet, and on kitchen scraps while I waited for Phase 5 (next post) to finish. I do think I'll mix up another 4-5 cups' worth and pour into our black tank. I think that will not affect our dumping schedule, and I've been impressed with its effect on odors overall.

Life has gotten busier. Updates here are more sporadic for the time being.