How to make Bokashi Bran at Home

Curious to learn how to make bokashi bran at home? If your answer to that question is, “What is bokashi?” Then you should check out our previous post on bokashi composting so that you can fully appreciate the awesomeness of making bokashi bran at home.

Bokashi composting has been an integral part of our composting efforts. Not just because it eliminated the last bit of food waste we have to throw into the garbage. Which we are very thankful for because having a garbage bin that never stinks is just….AMAZING! But also because our plants love it. After planting over an area where we’ve buried our bokashi compost we noticed a huge difference. Most noticeably, the plants in those areas seemed more resistant to pests and disease.

The bokashi bran we purchased worked really well, but I wanted to learn how to make bokashi bran myself. So we researched and did some trials to find a DIY bokashi bran recipe so we could make our bokashi bran at home. There are 2 options, making it with an effective microbial solution, or creating your own.

Bokashi Bran Recipe: How to Make Bokashi Bran Without EM-1

While there are lots of bokashi bran recipes to make bokashi utilizing an existing microbial culture such as EM-1. You can make bokashi bran without it. The microbial cultures required to make bokashi are in our environment, all over the world. With this method, you will first have to attract the microorganisms needed, make the inoculating liquid and then make the bran. It takes a bit longer, but the materials are readily available wherever you are in the world. The end results are similar, although not exactly the same. Results will vary significantly as the microorganisms in the environment vary widely from one place to another.

Ingredients and materials

To make your bokashi bran you will need the following:

• Water
• Molasses
• Milk
• Rice
• Carbon base for your bran (shredded paper, saw dust, or any other dry carbon rich material)
• Several containers
• An old t-shirt or cheese cloth
• Garbage bags and/or zip lock bags

DIY Bokashi bran method

Step 1 Capture the bacteria:

• Wash a cup of rice with water
• Strain the rice and save the water
• Set aside for about a week

Step 2 Make serum:

• Add milk to the water
• Set it aside to ferment for two weeks.

Step 3 Making the Inoculation liquid:

• Using an old t-shirt or cheese cloth strain the solids out of the serum
• Mix the inoculating liquid (1 part serum, 1 part molasses, and 6 parts water.)
• Soak your carbon rich material in the serum, drain off any excess liquid and seal in plastic bag. Let ferment for two weeks.

Making Bokashi bran Using rice hulls	Making Bokashi Bran using newspaper

Step 4 Dry and Store your bran:

• Spread out the material and let it dry.
• Store it in a sealed container in a cool dry place

Bokashi Bran Recipe: How to make bokashi bran with EM-1

The biggest difference between this method (making bokashi bran with EM-1) and the prior method is you are more likely to get a consistent result, every time using this bokashi bran recipe. In the first method, you have to hope the desired bacteria are present in sufficient quantities. And, while the yeast and lactobacillus bacteria will likely be present the presence of other important microorganisms may not be present in the required quantities.

Ingredients and materials

• 40 parts Water
• 1 part Molasses
• 1 part EM-1
• Carbon base for your bran (shredded paper, saw dust, or any other dry carbon rich material)
• Garbage bags and/or zip lock bags

Semi-DIY Bokashi bran method

Step 1 Making the Inoculation liquid:

• Mix the inoculating liquid (1 part EM-1, 1 part molasses, and 40 parts water.)
• Soak your carbon rich material in the serum, drain off any excess liquid and seal in plastic bag. Let ferment for two weeks.

Step 2 Dry and Store your bran:

• Spread out the material and let it dry.
• Store it in a sealed container in a cool dry place

Good Anaerobic Bacteria

Generally, anaerobic bacteria are something we are taught to avoid. All of the soil food web teaching class aerobic bacteria as the good guys and anaerobic bacteria as the bad guy. But, nature is never that simple.

Anaerobic bacteria can be either putrefactive or fermentative. What this basically means is that some bacteria (or a combination of bacteria) can produce things such as methane which adds to greenhouse gas emissions, and phytotoxic compounds such as hydrogen sulfide that inhibit plant growth. The fermentative anaerobic bacteria found in bokashi systems and EM-1 produces sugars, alcohols and nutrients. These compounds are beneficial to plant life and remain in the soil providing a source of food for plants

How to Use Bokashi Bran

Once you’ve made your bran you can use it in many ways. Aside from using it in your bokashi compost bins, bokashi bran can also be used to make compost teas, If you are starting a fresh aerobic composting pile you can add it to increase the microbial activity of your pile.

Bokashi bran can be used to add beneficial microbes directly into the soil. By mixing the bran directly into your soil, you are introducing tons of microbes. This increases microbial activity and helps your plant to uptake nutrients at a higher rate and improves nutrient availability in your soil.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the process of making bokashi bran was worth the experience. To do this at home without an effective microbe solution was a six-week process. If the EM-1 solution was used it took just 2 weeks. And, while the homemade (6-week) version did work, it didn’t work as well as the store-bought version. We had to use more of the homemade (DIY Bokashi bran) version of the bran than the commercial option to stop the bokashi bin from being smelly. 

While making the bran from scratch was more time-consuming. We did manage to make a large enough batch that would last us for at least six months.  If you are in a hurry buying the bokashi bran will save a lot of time, and the results are much more reproducible. Hopefully, this article was enough to give you the confidence to give Bokashi a try and put an end to stinky garbage bins everywhere. Do you think you will be trying either of these recipes? Let us know in the comments.

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