Further catapulting fermentation into the culinary zeitgeist: Sandor Katz was a guest on the Rachael Ray Show, talking about fermentation and sharing a homemade sauerkraut recipe. 

“Everybody eats and drinks products of fermentation everyday,” Katz said on the show’s March 8 episode. “Fermentation, which is the transformation action of microorganisms, is so integral to how we make effective use of whatever food resources are available to us.”

Katz, author of six books on fermentation, stressed “bread is fermented, cheese is fermented, cured meats are fermented, condiments are either directly fermented or they rely on vinegar, which is a direct product of fermentation.” 

Katz demonstrated how to make a sauerkraut for viewers, encouraging them: “Don’t be intimidated by fermentation.”

Read more (Rachael Ray Show)

In a food industry where greenwashing is common, Local Culture Live Ferments doesn’t pad their sales sheets with faux environmental fluff. Sustainability is core to their business practices.

“I never want to stray away from the connections with our farmers. I never want to stray away from the quality of our ferments,” says Chris Frost-McKee, director of operations for the Northern California-based vegetable fermenter. Sauerkraut is their top seller. “We take a lot of pride from the fact that we don’t ferment in plastic. We are doing our part to be as plastic-free as possible and leave the smallest footprint that we can.”

The company began as a passion project of Chris’ sister, Sarah. She recruited her brother, a home fermenter since his early 20s, and they envisioned creating two Local Culture fermentation hubs on the west coast — one where Sarah lives, in Bend, Ore., and a second in Grass Valley, Calif., Chris’ home. True to their name, they wanted to ferment with local produce. But, with the colder climate in Central Oregon cutting Bend’s growing season short, this proved impossible. 

“In Grass Valley, we’re able to source cabbage eight miles from our facility, eight months out of the year. We’ve created partnerships where every year the farm is planting more and more acreage for us, rotating their cover crops. It’s a beautiful thing, it’s real regenerative farming,” Chris says. And Sarah is now creating a separate project, fermented salad dressings, under the Super Belly Ferments brand.

Local Culture started as a farmers market side hustle, but Chris and his business partners (wife Cristina and friend Elissa Wolf Blank, pictured with Chris) dove into scaling the business in 2020. They’re now in over 100 grocers in the west, including Whole Foods. Though sales boomed during the pandemic, 2022 is shaping to be their biggest year. At the recent Expo West, Local Culture was one of 40 brands selected by food distributor KeHe for the exclusive “Golden Ticket” at their TrendFinder Event This designation fast-tracks small businesses into KeHe’s product portfolio, giving them exposure to over 30,000 retail locations.

Below is a Q&A with Chris Frost-McKee, who spoke with The Fermentation Association on the Expo West show floor.

TFA: Congrats on the KeHe “Golden Ticket” win! What are you going to have to change about scaling?

Chris Frost-McKee: The tricky thing with scaling the way that we do, our fermenters are stainless steel, variable capacity fermenters. We currently have 66 of them. We’ll need to get more as we scale, but they’re only sold once a year during wine making season. They ship them over from Italy. So that presents difficulties for sure. Producing in the same size fermenters, that’s part of the integrity we’re going to keep, that’s very important to me. We ferment for a minimum of 4-6 weeks in a very regulated, temperature-controlled environment. That really helps with the consistency of our product. 

We are also keeping the values the same with our farmers, making sure they can scale while staying sustainable. We’re scaling up our acreage with our main farmer next year. They rotate three successions of a summer variety of cabbage for us and then one succession of winter storage. And with those four successions, we can work about eight months directly with them, never going into cold storage. 

You just returned from a planning meeting with the local farm that supplies your cabbage. Tell me more about the farmers you work with.

CFM: We’re trying to only work farmer direct. One of our closest connections is the farm Super Tuber. They are Nevada City-based. They focus on regenerative farming practices and they focus on staple root crops and cabbage. So from the very beginning, as we first started with these smaller products, we started buying cabbage from them. Twice a year we sit down with them with the planting planning: What do you think it’s going to look like this year? How many plugs on your side can you plant for us? 

Super Tuber is really into this idea and I love it — they harvest in reusable bins in the field, then bring them straight to us in reusable bins. When you work with farms, produce comes in paraffin or wax boxes. Those go straight in the landfill. We are trying to have as little waste as possible. We’d love to never receive anything in wax boxes, and we’re there about 95% of the time. We compost everything that comes out of the kitchen.

Another thing, the cabbage isn’t wrapped in plastic packaging. We peel off the outer cabbage leaves as we prep in the kitchen. Those outer leaves are what I like to layer on top to seal everything. It weighs the ferment batch down and provides a nice layer if there’s ever an impurity — which really doesn’t happen — so if we ever discard anything, it’s those top leaves that would normally get composted. 

What was the biggest turning point for your brand to go from selling at farmer markets to getting in stores?

CFM: Honestly, as corporate as Whole Foods is, they have a wonderful way of supporting small brands. The west coast is filled with small ferment companies trying so hard and not succeeding at getting in. Whole Foods saw potential in us. That was really the turning point for our company. And they’ve continued to be loyal to us. Not all chains are pleasant to work with, but we made big moves through Whole Foods. It opened up this door to the Bay Area independents, like the Good Food Mercantile and the Good Food Awards. The Bay Area independents are so cutting edge in a way that I think a lot of these big chains strive to be as far as the products that they bring in and the diversity they really search for in craft products. At this point, we’re almost everywhere in the greater Bay Area that we’ve set out to be in — and I do think that started with getting in Whole Foods in 2020.

TFA: How were you distributing before that?

CFM: We were driving all over Northern California. We would drive five hours round trip to drop off like 10 cases of kraut. It did not make sense long term. Now we work with Tony’s Fine Foods to distribute to the pacific region. Tony’s has been supportive from the beginning. 

We still self distribute locally, but only whatever we can do in a 20 minutes drive. The local support that we have, that started with our stands at the farmers market and then our storefront, that support has been amazing. Like we honestly sell more in our local co-op then we do in 40 stores in the Pacific Northwest. That kind of local support will always be there.

TFA: That’s great that you have a big local fan base.

CFM: When we decided to get going in Grass Valley, we opened up a store front for a year-and-a-half and had this really great interface with our community. We were really experimental in those years. That was the year I was coming up with a lot of small batches. When we were invited to be in the Whole Foods, we had to move to a distributor and palletize. Things were not so small batch anymore. Right as the pandemic hit, we started being received really well in the west coast. We streamlined the products that people really wanted. We’ve got our favorite line of krauts, our different kimchis. We still do a lot of hot sauces and brine tonics. 

TFA: What is your favorite flavor?

CFM: Turmeric Ginger Jalapeno is my go-to, everyday. My body craves it. Our Beet Fennel though outsells anything we carry. People love it.

TFA: You’ve gone from fermenting in your home kitchen to distributing regionally. What do you think has been your biggest lesson in all of this?

CFM: Not giving up. Listening to the ferments — it sounds really weird, but I literally have studied patterns in the life within the fermenters. For example, we have these variable capacity lids that have an airlock on the top where the brine can spit out. In certain ebbs and flows, I think it’s astrological, all the fermenters will come to life, no matter how old they are. Or in a certain cycle of the moon, all of them will compact and leave an air pocket that I have to reset. It is crazy, witnessing the nature and patterns.

Through all the trial and error and discouragement, it’s the life of the microbiology itself that is really the inspiring thing. I could never get it right, it’s always going to be different no matter what. But I’m getting a lot better at creating that perfect environment for consistency. If you ask me — I’m living and breathing it because I digest this all the time.

TFA: Where do you see the future of fermentation?

CFM: I see it growing. It is beyond all the trends, it’s something that’s been around for ages, for centuries, and there’s a reason why it’s always been incorporated in our diets. There’s this sense of awakening that so many people in the mainstream are feeling — if it’s kombucha, if it’s sauerkraut, if it’s kefir, if it’s yogurt — people are really feeling the benefits. The pandemic has had a huge influence on that, too. I think everyone in grocery would agree fermentation is a big thing right now and it deserves to be a big thing. 

Big food companies are “eager to tap into the magic of fermentation,” says chef David Zilber. They’re hungry to hire culinary  experts who can use fermentation to enhance existing products or mold the flavor profiles of new ones.

“These big companies are all waking up to the trend of fermentation and it is on us, on anyone who understands this craft intimately, to be the ones to engage them and guide them towards better solutions,” Zilber said at KojiCon. Fermenters could go the traditional route and open a local  shop to feed a small number of people. But “there’s also a lot to be said for working within an existing system and fermenting the change you want to eat in the world. The biggest food producers in the world are responsible for nourishing most of mankind.”

The former head of the Noma fermentation lab, Zilber co-authored The Noma Guide to Fermentation with Noma’s founder Rene Redzepi. In the fall of 2020, Zilber surprised the food world when he left his job at Noma to join Chr. Hansen, a global supplier of bioscience ingredients.

Zilber said he understands the push-and-pull between working in traditional fermentation vs. large-scale food production. Though he cherished his time at Noma, he realized fine dining is “a minuscule fraction of the amount of food people eat” and, if he wanted to influence any big change in the food industry, he needed to move away from restaurants. He compared it to being “the punk rocker that rails against the system” when instead “subverting it from the inside is an amazing way to effect change extremely quickly.”

“When you learn to speak bacteria or when you learn to speak fungus, the hardcore food scientists don’t have this intuition,” he continues. “They grow these things in petri dishes and with colony pickers in €20,000  machines. It’s not the same thing, and we are a little bit at a watershed moment where there is enough community knowledge…that we can start to broach these players and try and change it.”

Streaming into KojiCon from his state-of-the-art kitchen at Chr. Hansen’s Copenhagen headquarters, Zilber shared his latest project: a tomato sauce for a client, improved through fermentation. In his kitchen, he works with chefs and food companies to use fermentation to develop healthier and more sustainable products. Holding up a sample of tomato sauce to the KojiCon attendees, Zilber shared how he was able to amplify the flavor profile of the canned tomato sauce using fermentation. He eliminated added white sugar and created a flavor with hints of parmesan cheese. 

“We haven’t added anything but a culture onto it,” he said. “At the end of the day, should this tomato sauce go into production, millions of people overnight will be eating a tastier, probiotic (filled), more nutritious food on their pasta. And I never had to teach them how to lacto-ferment a single thing.”

Chr. Hansen is building one of the largest collections of cultures in the world, currently totalling 40,000 specimens. Zilber describes it as a seed bank, “the Noah’s Ark of Life for microbial diversity.” Chr. Hansen works with companies to select the optimal culture for their food item.

Smaller-scale producers, too, purchase cultures, often to mitigate risk. A fermentation mistake in a one-ton batch of kimchi could destroy thousands of dollars worth of product. Using a guaranteed culture strain will allow them to produce kimchi of consistent quality. But Zilber acknowledges there is no wild fermentation, no son-mat – a common phrase in Korean cooking that literally translates to “the taste of one’s hands.”

“There are aspects of the world of fermentation that are decidedly unwild, there are aspects of the world of fermentation that are nothing but wild,” he says. 

Zilber believes we’re in the era of the democratization of fermentation, where books and educational courses are teaching the public about fermentation. He mentioned the new Sex and the City reboot featured a scene where a character was angry that sourdough challah was “too hipster.”

“It’s funny that it’s permeated public consciousness that much where we can now make jokes about it in multi-million-dollar, prime-time television shows. It means that the idea of fermentation in that respect has reached fixation. The world has woken up to this.”

Noma launched their direct-to-consumer food products line in February with a smoked mushroom garum. Their vegan spin on a traditional fermented fish sauce is the first release from Noma Projects, the famed restaurant’s product line for home cooks. That garum, retailing for $24 per 250cl bottle, sold out in a day.

“At Noma they’ve turned to koji and mushrooms instead of fermented fish to create their umami-rich smoked mushroom garum. It’s not as intensely salty as some other garum-adjacent products, and the aroma and flavor reveal subtle smoke and mushrooms,” writes Florence Fabricant of The New York Times

Noma Projects — which launched last year — will include more pantry projects and community-based initiatives in the future, said René Redzepi, chef and co-owner of the Copenhagen-based restaurant. He hopes Noma Projects will him make more money. Noma has hovered around a slim 3% profit margin ever since opening 18 years ago.

Read more (The New York Times)

Racist and sexist comments have long been hurled at food companies run by Asian American women. But in the modern tech era, where food brands have a social media presence, these cruel remarks from trolls are being dealt with in a variety of ways. Some fight back with humor, others aim to educate while some ignore it.

Kim Pham, co-founder (with her sister Vanessa) of Omsom (which sells Asian pantry staples), said it was difficult in the brand’s early days for her to read offensive comments. She came to a sad realization: “I think it’s par for the course when you are an outspoken brand run by women of color.” 

“For so long our community has been defined by this model minority myth, of being quiet, or docile, or submissive,” said Pham, “and we really just wanted to give a middle finger to that.”

Omsom’s social media policy is to remove insulting comments, but leave anything that “might generate a fruitful conversation.” 

Jing Gao of Fly By Jing (which sells Asian pantry staples, dumplings and hot pots) (pictured), though, takes a different approach. “We have no problem making fun of those people who are, you know, clearly disturbed,” said Jing Gao, the company’s 34-year-old founder, adding “We definitely troll them. … and our community seems to really love it.”

Meanwhile Sahra Nguyen, founder of Nguyen Coffee Supply, has zero tolerance for trolls. She doesn’t want her employees engaging in toxic behavior, so they don’t respond.

Read more (The New York Times)

Homebound during the Covid-19 outbreak, budding home bakers around the globe made sourdough baking their new hobby. Hailed as the “breakout star of pandemic-era kitchens” by The New York Times, sourdough became a national fascination as more people experimented with the microbe-enabled, tangy bread.

We asked three experts to share their thoughts on  the sourdough craze — educator Vanessa Kimbell (of The Sourdough School), bakery owner Azikiwee Anderson (Rize Up Bakery) and Karl De Smedt, curator of the world’s only sourdough starter library.

The question: How did the pandemic change the market for professionally-baked sourdough? Are more people making their own or are they buying from professional bakers?

Vanessa Kimbell, founder The Sourdough School

The pandemic changed the market in several ways. The first thing is, some of the large manufacturers that I’ve been talking to have been starting to appreciate and understand that people want real sourdough. And by that I mean sourdough that is genuinely long, slow fermented with wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria. They’ve also begun to appreciate the connection between bread and health. Authenticity and integrity are the two words that come to my mind when I think about how the pandemic has impacted the professional sourdough market. 

There’s no question that there was an exponential increase in home bakers making sourdough during the pandemic. It’s rather beautiful. I think when we were gifted the time to make those connections, so many of us used that. Will there be sudden change in behavior? People have now gone back to work and now I’d say there’s almost been a backlash against people wanting to take up sourdough. It became almost too trendy to the point where there can be a backlash. I have noticed there was a significant drop off as life has returned to normal. But that’s only to be expected. The joy of discovering we have a little freedom as a home baker making their own bread, I’d say it’s leveling back out again to pre-pandemic numbers.

 Azikiwee Anderson, founder Rize Up Bakery

I started baking like most of the world did during the pandemic. Normally we would all just go to the store and pick up whatever mediocre bread they had on hand, never thinking twice [that] it was full of preservatives and made with cheap industrial flour. Then all of sudden we had the thing that is always in short supply “TIME”! So we all tried to connect to the nostalgia of being self-sufficient since we had no real control over most things.

The sheer amount of people connecting to their food and what it is made of is what made it amazing for small new found bakers like me! The uptick in sourdough baking taught millions of people how hard it is and how good it could be. What more is there to say!

Karl De Smedt, curator The Sourdough Library, senior communication and training manager Puratos Center for Bread Flavour

Many consumers today are excited about sourdough bread. During the pandemic, many have started baking it at home and, on social media, sourdough reached a massive peak as a sign of consumer engagement. No wonder because it truly has a unique, rich taste. According to research by Puratos, 52% of today’s consumers know sourdough . Approximately 45% of consumers associate sourdough with “better taste” and nearly 30% associate sourdough with “Rustic,” “Healthier,” and “More Natural” – opening an excellent opportunity for value creation. 

For professionally-baked sourdough, there are immense opportunities. The most considerable evolution we see is that it will not matter who makes the bread in the future, but how it’s made — going from fast processes in two to three hours with only baker’s yeast. Or long processes with sourdough from 12 to 48 hours. A project like the Puratos sourdough library aims to discover more about the use of sourdough in all its aspects. We are sharing knowledge, preserving, and protecting the biodiversity of sourdough and bringing back the tradition used by more than 250 generations of bakers who used sourdough as their most precious ingredient in bread baking. That’s why, at Puratos, we believe the future of bread lies in its past. 

More international fermented foods and beverages are entering the American food scene, an exciting development in an expanding market. But the origins of many of these traditional dishes get blurred  by western producers. 

In a panel on diversity and cultural appropriation  during TFA’s conference FERMENTATION 2021, BIPOC food professionals encouraged fermenters to innovate with food from different countries, but to be mindful of their approach. A dish’s culture must be respected, its history acknowledged and  negative stereotypes eliminated. The talk “Is Fermentation ‘So White’…or Not?” included panelists Miin Chan (educator and writer working on her PhD), Jiayang Fan (staff writer for The New Yorker), Mara Jane King (director of fermentation for IE Hospitality), Kheedim Oh (founder of Mama O’s Premium Kimchi, and TFA Advisory Board member) and Sebastian Vargo (founder of Vargo Brother Ferments).

Last year, two articles helped propel a conversation on diversity among fermenters. One was  Fan’s New Yorker article “The Gatekeepers Who Get to Decide What Food is Disgusting,” which highlights how a western view of “disgusting” food requires immigrants to assimilate to local food cultures. Another was Chan’s Eater article “Lost in the Brine,” which explores cultural appropriation in fermentation.

Oh expressed his frustration watching companies produce kimchi without any cultural ties to or acknowledgement of its Korean history. Vargo agreed.

“Whether it is financial or just overall exposure, you really can’t deny the fact that oftentimes…a white face or a white person borrowing off the culture will oftentimes achieve higher amounts of success,” Vargo says. Kimchi has exploded in popularity in the U.S. the past few years – and some white producers receive more funding than traditional Korean companies. “They’re overshadowing the people that actually deserve to have their stories told in the first place.”

Traditional ferments can get watered down, tailored to follow food trends instead of staying true to their historical roots. Chan pointed out that, in Australia, there’s no regulation around labeling certain foods. Pickled cucumbers could be labeled as kimchi, appealing to western consumer tastes.

“Whether it’s in fermentation or the food industry or just any industry that we exist in within this capitalist system, there’s systemic racism and there’s some historical forces that mean that BIPOC basically often have less access to social and financial capital,” she adds.

Cookbook author Alison Roman came under fire when she released a curry recipe she labeled as a stew. There was no history detailing curry’s Southeastern Asian roots and no context of where the recipe idea originated.

 “She literally whitewashed all of the culture out of it and made it into something that she could sell,” King said. “Labeling something to suit you and to suit your benefit and your profit can be harmful to people of color.”

It’s a problem in restaurant reviews too, Fan pointed out. Food critics tend to draw a western comparison to more exotic cuisines, comparing an Asian rice dish to a pasta, for example, offering their own translation. She recently wrote a review on a hot pot restaurant in New York and felt compelled to compare it to fondue. She had a limited word count and wanted to be succinct. But a coworker asked: Why not just explain what it is? 

“In the process of being a writer, a critic, (I need) to introduce those words in the cultural lexicon so that the western standard isnt kind of the defacto comparison for everything,” she said.

Who decides French cuisine is more elevated than Chinese, Oh questions.

“I think that’s the huge problem is that there’s so much inherent cultural bias that even we as minorities too will have within ourselves that keeps getting perpetuated,” Oh says, noting people of color are not pigeonholed to only cooking their traditional food, too. 

Society needs to value traditional cooking arts so food history and knowledge – especially from more rural parts of the world – isn’t lost, Chan adds.

“I think we’ve come around now, the work that (the panelists) and many other fermenters do shows we want to be connected to our traditional food system, we don’t want to lose these tastes and we want to understand our microbial heritages,” she says. 

Fermentation is cloaked in mystery for many — it’s bubbly, slimy, stinky and not always Instagram-ready. In The Fermentation Association’s recent member survey, this lack of

understanding of fermentation and its flavor and health attributes among consumers was cited by 70% of producers as a major obstacle to increased sales and acceptance of fermented products.

“We get so many questions from our readers about fermentation. People are very interested, but have very, very little knowledge about it,” says Anahad O’Connor, reporter for The New York Times. O’Connor has written about fermented foods multiple times in the last few months, and those articles were among The Times’ most emailed pieces of 2021. “I think there’s a huge opportunity to educate consumers about fermented foods, their impact on the gut and health in general.”

O’Connor spoke on consumer education as part of a panel of experts during TFA’s conference, FERMENTATION 2021. Panelists — who included a producer, retailer, scientist, educator and journalist — agreed consumer education is lacking. But the methods of how to fill that gap are contested.

How to Tell Consumers “What is a Fermented Food?”

There are differences between what is a fermented product and what is not — a salt brine vs. vinegar brine pickle, or a kombucha made with a SCOBY or one from a juice concentrate, for example.

“I can tell you that the majority of our customers do not even know [what is a] fermented item,” says Emilio Mignucci, vice president of Philadelphia gourmet store Di Bruno Bros., which specializes in cheese and charcuterie. When customers sample products at the store, they can easily taste the differences between a fermented and a non-fermented product, Mignucci says. But he feels the health benefits behind that fermented product are not the retailer’s responsibility to communicate. “I need you guys [producers] to help me deliver the message.” 

“Retailers like myself, buyers, we want to learn more to be able to champion [fermented foods] because, let’s face it, fermented foods is a category that’s getting better and better for us as retailers and we want to speak like subject matter experts and help our guests understand.”

Now — when fermentation tops food lists and gut health is mainstream — is the time for education.

“This microbiome world that we’re in right now is sort of a really opportune moment to really help the public understand what fermented foods are beyond health,” says Maria Marco, PhD, professor of food science at the University of California, Davis (and a TFA Advisory Board Member).

Kombucha Brewers International (KBI) created a Code of Practice to address confusion over what is or is not a kombucha. KBI is taking the approach that all kombucha is good, pasteurized or not, because it’s moving consumers away from sugar- and additive-filled sodas and energy drinks. 

“That said, consumers deserve the right to know why is this kombucha at room temperature and this kombucha is in the fridge and why does this kombucha have a weird, gooey SCOBY in it and this one is completely clear,” says Hannah Crum, president of KBI. “They start to get confused when everything just says the word ‘kombucha’ on it.”

KBI encourages brewers to be transparent with consumers. Put on the label how the kombucha is made, then let consumers decide what brand they want to buy.

Should Fermented Products Make Health Claims?

Drew Anderson, co-founder and CEO of producer Cleveland Kitchen (and also on TFA’s Advisory Board), says when they were first designing their packaging in 2013, they were advised against using the term “crafted fermentation” on their label because it would remind consumers of beer or wine. But nowadays, data shows 50% of consumers associate the term fermentation with health.

“In the last five to six years, it’s changed dramatically and people are associating fermentation as being good for them, which is good for my products,” he says.

Cleveland Kitchen, though, does not make health claims on their fermented sauerkraut, kimchi and dressings. Anderson says, as a small startup, they don’t have the resources to fund their own research. They instead attract customers with bold taste and striking packaging.

“We’re extremely cautious on what we say on the package because we don’t have an army of lawyers like Kevita (Pepsi’s Kombucha brand), we don’t have the Pepsi legal team backing us here,” Anderson says. Cleveland Kitchen submits new packaging designs in advance to regulators, to make sure they’re legally acceptable before rolling them out. 

O’Connor says taste is the No. 1 driver for consumers. This is why healthful but sticky and stinky natto (fermented soybeans) is not a popular dish in America, but widely consumed in Japan. 

“Many American consumers, unfortunately, aren’t going to gravitate toward that, despite the health benefits,” he says. 

Crum disagrees. “Health comes first,” she says. As more and more kombucha brands emphasize lifestyle, and don’t even advertise their health benefits, she feels they are doing a disservice to the consumer. “Why pay that much money for kombucha if you don’t know it’s good for you too?”

Fermented Sushi

In Japan, one family has been making funazushi — the ancient, fermented predecessor to modern sushi — for 18 generations. Instead of using raw fish, funazushi uses  fish aged for three years.

The funazushi-making process at Kitashina — which opened in 1619 in the small Japanese town Takashima — is labor intensive. A chef removes the fish’s scales and, without cutting into its flesh, removes the gills and innards through its throat. The fish is then packed with salt, layered in a wooden tub, weighted with over 65 pounds of stones and left to cure for two years. Then the fish is rinsed, dried in the sun for a day and fermented for another year before being ready to eat.

The microorganisms in the wooden tubs (called kioke) “naturally produce the fermentation that gives Kitashina’s funazushi its authentic flavour.” Mariko Kitamura (pictured), family owner of Kitashina , says those beneficial microorganisms would die if the tubs were ever emptied.

Though modern sushi includes ocean seafood, funazushi uses fresh water fish, particularly funa (carp). The fermented sushi technique is an adaptation of what has been used in China for thousands of years.  The Chinese make narezushi using the freshwater fish that live in rice paddies.

Read more (BBC)

An interesting indication of how quickly and decisively fermentation is moving into the U.S. food mainstream is a recent online event organized and offered by American Express and restaurant booking service Resy, “A Fermentation Workshop with Noma.” For $50, one could sign up for an hour-long Zoom — introductions from Noma’s René Redzepi and Jason White, and demonstrations of making lacto-fermented tomatoes and a juice-based kombucha, all moderated by renowned food writer Ruth Reichl — and a copy of 2018’s  “The Noma Guide to Fermentation.” The event sold out in minutes.

Redzepi (Noma chef and co-owner) and White (Noma’s head of fermentation) were in their fermentation lab at the restaurant, and gave concise, compelling comments on the long history of fermentation and its importance. They noted the healthful aspects of the process but emphasized its ability to produce delicious flavors. 

“One of the most important things for me as a fermenter is definitely having a closer look at nature, and also being able to create new and interesting flavors that can have beneficial effects on humans, meaning it can make us healthier, it can make our dinners more exciting and also we can teach future generations how they can interact with nature as well,” White says. “The power of fermentation is a really good bridge to that because, in one way or another, in every culture, in every place on earth, there are people who have been doing it for thousands of years. I think it’s important for us to carry the torch. And I think carrying the torch of fermentation is definitely my biggest dream, to carry it for another thousand years.”

When Noma opened over 18 years ago, it was in the dead of winter and they struggled to deliver meals made from Nordic ingredients. “We were really desperate to find food,” Redzepi continues. By spring, they began foraging, “it grounded us and gave us direction.” A few years into foraging, they wondered how they could take the abundance of spring and summer ingredients and use it in the long winter season.

“That’s when we started dabbling into fermentation,” he says. “And from that moment on, a whole new world opened up for restaurant Noma. You could even say fermentation eclipsed foraging because we found out, through the yeast and the mold and the bacterias, we could simply create such new flavors that would transform our kitchens forever. We started tapping into the community worldwide of fermenters and traditional fermentations, adapting them to our ingredients and our region and thus creating a new set of tools that has really engrained itself into every single Noma dish. You don’t eat anything at Noma that doesn’t have ferments in them.”

“Instead of food waste, you can ferment it into something delicious,” he adds.

They made the recipes seem easy to execute (though I suspect the presentation of SCOBY might have put off some participants). And, to ensure at least a small dose of titillation, they proffered a container of one current project in the lab, “Reindeer Penis Garum.” They used this as an example of how fermentation can minimize waste by finding applications for what would otherwise be scrap or trash. 

The detailed discussion of kombucha was illuminating, including an interesting contrast with vinegars. Noma makes numerous kombuchas, both for direct consumption and for use as an ingredient. Redzepi expressed his personal perspective, which helps explain why. He says he has yet to find a commercial product “that’s worth buying” — and it’s easy to make yourself. 

It was great to see fermentation as a front-and-center topic, but there is still work to be done. The literature that was sent to all participants to accompany the presentation included references in the kombucha recipe to “backstop” and “backdrop” liquid — though they meant “backslop.”