Meat, fish, dairy, bones, last night's curry. A backyard compost heap can't take any of it. A sealed bokashi bucket takes all of it, under your sink, without smelling.
of everything landfilled in America is food — more than plastic, more than paper. Sealed under the rubbish with no air, it rots and gives off methane. The EPA reckons food waste is behind well over half the methane escaping from US landfills, and that only about 5% of wasted food gets composted.
Bokashi is a Japanese word for fermented organic matter. You put food scraps in a sealed bucket, sprinkle bran over each layer, and press it down. The bran carries three kinds of microbes — yeast, lactic-acid bacteria and phototrophic bacteria — and they ferment the food instead of letting it rot.
That one difference is the whole thing. Rotting is what smells. Fermenting smells sour and sharp, like a jar of pickles. After two weeks sealed, the bucket holds pickled food scraps — soft, sour, and still recognisable.
That isn't compost yet, and it's important to be straight about that. What comes out of the bucket is pre-compost. It has to be buried, and then soil life spends another two to four weeks breaking it down and folding it into the ground. Bones and big pieces take longer. What you end up with is richer soil, not a bag of finished compost.
Even so, it's quick. A traditional backyard heap takes somewhere between three and nine months depending on how often you turn it — and it still won't accept your meat and dairy.
Uma plays this game with kids at events, using plastic food toys. Have a guess, then tap to see the answer. The surprising ones are the first four.
A backyard compost pile can't take meat, dairy, bones or cooked food — they attract animals and go rancid in the open air. Sealed in a bucket and fermenting instead of rotting, all of it is fine. That's the one thing bokashi does that a compost heap can't.
Food-safe, with a tight lid. Big enough for a family's scraps for two to three weeks.
Sits in the bottom and soaks up the liquid, so there's nothing to drain and no tap to remember.
Made by Uma with EM-1. Enough to fill the bucket once, a sprinkle over every layer.
One sheet on the fridge. Four steps, and what to do when it's full.
You'll want a small tub on the counter to collect scraps during the day, so you're not opening the big bucket at every meal. Any old Tupperware works.
Once a bucket is full it needs two undisturbed weeks. A second bucket means you never have to stop collecting.
Cut big pieces up so they ferment evenly. Tip them into the bucket.
A generous handful over every new layer. More for wet food, more again if it ever smells off.
Squash the air out. The microbes work without oxygen, so trapped air is what spoils a batch.
Press the lid down all the way round. If the lid pops off from the gas, just push it back on.
When it's full, stop adding and leave it sealed somewhere dark for two weeks. Don't open it to check. White fluffy mould on top means it worked.
Yes, really — meat, dairy and cooked food. That's the whole point.
Oily food is fine. A puddle of oil is not — it stops the microbes reaching everything.
After two weeks sealed, it smells like pickles, the food has gone soft, and there may be white mould on top. That means it worked. It isn't compost yet — it's pre-compost, and it needs to meet soil to finish. It's also acidic at this stage, so keep it away from plant roots for the first couple of weeks.
Dig a hole, tip it in, mix with a couple of shovels of soil, cover with at least six inches. Two to four weeks and it has broken down into the ground.
No garden? Layer a planter at least a foot and a half across: a third old soil, a third fermented waste, a third soil on top. Three to four weeks.
Bury it in an existing pile. The microbes give a slow or struggling heap a real kick, which is especially useful in winter.
Nowhere to put it? Call Superhero Bokashi and we'll pass it to a community organisation in growing vegetables. Nothing is wasted.
A bit, and we'd rather be honest about the size of it than oversell.
The clearest saving is soil. Bagged compost costs roughly $10 to $15 a cubic foot at a garden centre, and a bag of organic fertiliser runs $15 to $25. A full 5-gallon bucket is about two thirds of a cubic foot. Fill one a month and you're putting somewhere near $80 to $120 a year of soil amendment into your garden instead of buying it.
The second saving is your bin. Food is about a quarter of what most households throw out, and it's the heavy, wet quarter. If your area charges by bin size or by bag, taking that out of the trash lowers the bill. If your collection is a flat fee, it doesn't — it just means fewer bags and a bin that doesn't smell in July.
Against that, the kit costs $12 once, and bran is an ongoing cost of a few dollars a bucket. Most people are modestly ahead after the first year if they garden, and roughly even if they don't.
The real return isn't cash. It's a quarter of your household waste never reaching a landfill, and soil that holds water better every year you feed it.
Send this and it lands straight with Uma. She'll reply about handover and payment.
Not if it's sealed and you're using enough bran. When you open it you'll get a sharp, sour, pickly smell that goes away when you close it. If it ever smells rotten, add a lot more bran.
No — the lid stays shut. That's the main advantage over a countertop compost caddy.
Yes. The bucket lives under the sink or in a closet. The only catch is the last step: you need somewhere to bury it, so a planter, a community garden, or our collection round.
Two weeks sealed once the bucket is full, then two to four weeks in the soil. Compare that to six months for a normal compost pile.
Nothing happens. Fermenting is what it's meant to be doing. Leave it sealed.
Not with our bucket. The shredded cardboard at the bottom absorbs it. Shop-bought bokashi bins have a tap you have to empty every two or three days — ours doesn't.
Not to start, but most people end up wanting one. A full bucket has to sit sealed for two weeks, and in the meantime your scraps have to go somewhere.
They do. Both are plant fibre, and the microbes handle them. Only the plastic-mesh kind of teabag is a problem.
Yes, forever. You'll just need more bran, which we sell on its own.
White and fluffy is exactly right. Green, blue or black means air got in — start that batch again.
Superhero Bokashi is Uma Sharma's project. She's been at it since 2022 — making her own bran with EM-1, growing bokashi cultures on petri dishes to see the lifecycle, building a cycle wheel to explain it, and running presentations where she gets kids to guess what can go in the bin.
The point of all of it is simple: food waste rotting in a landfill is wasted twice. It makes methane on the way down, and the soil that grew it never gets anything back. Bokashi closes that loop in a bucket under your sink.
