Fermentation as Metaphor: A Conversation
Fermentation is more than just a food processing technique. Sandor Katz, today’s “godfather of fermentation,” expounds on the metaphorical significance of fermentation in his new book “Fermentation as Metaphor.”
“Fermentation is such a fascinating lens through which to look at the world and the incredible practicality of traditional cultural wisdom,” says Katz, fermentation author and educator, during a webinar hosted by The Fermentation Association. “In the English language, there’s a long tradition of describing things as fermenting that are not foods and beverages. We talk about a period of great musical fermentation, artistic fermentation, political fermentation, culture fermentation, we’ve applied it very widely. This book is really an exploration of that and a reflection of that.”
Katz spoke with his friend Mara King, chef and food professional, and they shared thoughts on how fermentation can be an unstoppable force for change.
“Fermentation is really teaching the world to embrace weird and funky things,” King says. “Take natural wines as an example. There’s a big movement in the world of wine making for using older techniques, using less chemical filtration and clarification methods. What you’re left with is a product that changes year to year and a product that has subtle notes of animal or leather, things you wouldn’t find before. We’re realizing a little bit of horrible is quite wonderful.”
Until the 19th Century, all wine was natural, Katz points out. Winemakers relied on organisms on the skins of the grapes for the flavor. Beer used to be a similarly natural product, but that’s changed as brewers today add yeast strains.
“It’s so much more interesting and complex of a flavor than the mass-produced beer where just a single organism is introduced. Fermentation really encourages people to expand their palates,” Katz says. “Funk is good. Funk makes things interesting. Funk is complexity. What I’ve learned by working with fermented tofu in food, working with natto in food, working with sumbala, the West African condiments that are natto-like, working with fish sauce, is [these ingredients on their own] might taste awful to you, but a little bit can introduce this je ne sais quoi into the flavor of a dish. Complexity is good and even flavors on their own that people might find scary or intimidating.”
The photography featured in “Fermentation as Metaphor” is unique — magnified microbes used in the creation of fermented food and drink. The images, captured with a scanning electron microscope, show the complexity of these microorganisms. Each structure is supported by a smaller structure, with membranes that are highly permeable.
“There continues to be a magic to fermentation, maybe in some ways even more so as fewer people have direct contact with their food. As there’s less wine making, cheese making, [or] baking in our lives that people actually see, these processes become more and more mysterious. [Mystery] has always been an aspect of fermentation because, until very recent times, there was never a clear, rational scientific understanding of what is going on. They were always seen as divine processes with lots of ceremony and ritual attached to them,” Katz adds. “Fermentation takes this neutral, plain food and gives it this really discernable, compelling flavor.”
Katz is already working on his next book, a fermentation travelogue book highlighting what he’s learning about fermentation in his worldwide travels. Katz and King previously filmed a series “The People’s Republic of Fermentation,” sharing the fermentation traditions of southwest China. They were supposed to travel to Taiwan and eastern China earlier this year, but the trip was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Next on Katz’s “to do” list — exploring the fermented cuisine of West Africa.
For anyone interested in purchasing “Fermentation as Metaphor,” visit Amazon or Bookshop.
- Published in Food & Flavor
“All You Need Is Kimchi”
LA Times focused on kimchi in their October 4 food section entirely dedicated to the subject. Articles included a feature on kimchi making with Emily Kim @maangchi (the chef dubbed “YouTube’s Korean Julia Child”), must-try kimchi spots in the L.A. area and a history of kimchi in Korea. The article reads:
“A keystone of the Korean diet, kimchi is an unmistakable star that rarely commands the spotlight and is instead relegated to side-dish status. But its absence is always glaring.
“If I run out of kimchi, I’m lost,” said Emily Kim, better known to just about anyone who has ever searched online for a Korean recipe as Maangchi. For 13 years, Kim has helped bring Korean cooking into countless home kitchens through her cookbooks and her popular YouTube channel, Cooking Korean Food With Maangchi, which has nearly 5 million subscribers.
On days she prefers to keep it simple at home in the kitchen, Kim sticks to the basics: kimchi, rice and soup.
“Sometimes, depending on my mood, I’d make more protein, like bulgogi,” Kim said. But kimchi is the linchpin of her meals. “Even if I have meat and I can make bulgogi, if I don’t have kimchi, I’m like, ‘What should I eat?’”
Such is the fervent faith many Koreans have in their culture’s iconic dish. There’s a willingness to believe kimchi can save — be it a meal or the spirit — because it has come through so many times before.
“As long as I have kimchi in my refrigerator, I don’t worry much,” said Kim.”
Read more (Los Angeles Times)
- Published in Food & Flavor
“Starting to See Food the World Has Never Seen Before”
Koji — the mold-innoculated grains — has become one of the superstars of the American fermentation scene, thanks to chefs experimenting with it in unique ways. Dubbed “Japan’s mold,” koji has been a cooking staple in Asian countries since the 1800s. In a webinar with Chelsea Green Books titled “Breaking the Mold: A Conversation with Fermentation Fanatics,” Sandor Katz, Rich Shih and Jeremy Umansky discussed how koji can be used for fermenting foods.
“I think one of the fascinating things is to see these microbial sets start to be viewed through different cultural lenses across geographic locations,” says Umansky, co-author of the book “Koji Alchemy” with Shih. “We’re honestly starting to see food the world has never seen before. It’s a really exciting time to be fermenting, to be growing koji and making the foods that are being made from it.”
Applying ancient fermentation techniques in new ways is a “game changer” to a dish, Shih added.
“You don’t need a lot to make it really mind blowing,” Shih says. “When I started thinking about how little of these umami-blasted product I added to make it delicious.”
“I think one of the coolest things that I discovered about working with koji is it’s just that little bit of breakdown that creates that umami that really brings the product to life. You need such a small amount of protein to make a big difference,” Shih adds.
Mold has a bad reputation as the fuzzy invader that grows on old food. But, Shih points out, everyone has tried mold. Koji mold is a driver for soy sauce, one of the most popular condiments worldwide.
“When people start, they have a perception of what mold is and this perception that it’s not good for you, it’s bad, and it should not be part of food,” Shih says. “Mold is a wonderful thing and it creates all these wonderful condiments and drinks that allowed us to be here today, to survive those times when it was tough and preservation was necessary.”
Katz, who is releasing a new book on fermentation “Fermentation as a Metaphor,” joined Umansky and Shih for their conversation (TFA is hosting a webinar with Katz and Mara King on October 7.). A fermentation author and educator, Katz has taught hundreds of workshops on demystifying fermentation.
“All three of us would say: experiment. You can grow koji on virtually anything,” Katz advises.
Today, there are powder koji starter cultures available to purchase for cooks to create koji dishes. Until the 20th century, there were no koji starter cultures, Katz points out, as cooks used mold spores in the air.
“We can order cultures to make this happen today. It’s very very much in our reach,” he says. Addressing Umansky and Shih: “You guys figured it out just by playing in your kitchen. None of this is that hard.”
However, Katz says koji is not a first fermentation project. Koji requires a controlled temperature environment and humidity. Vegetable fermentation is a beginner-friendly fermentation project because it merely involves vegetables and salt.
“There is a small, minute risk that something may go wrong,” Shih says. “We always encourage people when they’re first starting and thinking about growing koji in this fashion is to grow it in the most controlled way possible to be successful.”
Umansky encourages those ready to start fermenting with koji to buy a starter from a reputable producer. Especially important is purchasing spores from a location in the geographic area where the kojis were domesticated. In researching the book, Umansky found there is only one of seven companies left in Japan that still produces koji spores, Higuchi Matsunosuke Shoten Co., Ltd. Owner Koichi Higuchi is the head of the 7th generation company. Higuchi has a vault with hundreds of variations and specialties of different koji species.
“These are people that are really, really driving the preservation of kojis worldwide,” Umansky says. “Supporting them drives the preservation of this…they’re working really hard to protect the biodiversity that’s important for their individual cultural identities.”
- Published in Food & Flavor
Harnessing Fermentation for Sustainability, Part 2 of Our Conversation with Johnny Drain
In the second piece to our two-part Q&A with fermentation guru Johnny Drain, he details some of his recent fermentation consulting projects, as well as how (and why) more chefs need to use fermentation to create a sustainable global food ecosystem.
Drain works as a consultant for restaurants around the world, like Akoko Restaurant in London. Pictured, Drain poses with the team at Akoko. Akoko serves West African cuisine like dawadawa (fermented African locust beans) with ogiri egosi (melon seeds), a dish that shares similarities to natto.
TFA: The Cub Cave, where you’re currently working for Cub restaurant, tell me about it.
JD: That’s my “perma-lance.” But unfortunately, last week, we announced the Cub restaurant won’t be reopening after COVID, post lockdown.
The Cub restaurant is part of the Mr Lyan Group. So Mr Lyan (Ryan Chetiyawardana), he’s sort of this brilliant guy who typically operates in this world of cocktails and drinks, but also had this restaurant at the inception of food and drink. And Cub was really made to examine the inception of food and drink. The menu there was really this free-flowing journey through food and drink. So sometimes you’d have just a drink as a course, sometimes a food and a drink. It was really trying to break down this idea of why, even in the very best restaurants, have a food menu and a drink menu and they’re very separated. It was examining that intersection but also examining this intersection between luxury and sustainability. Why do you have to typically sacrifice sustainability when you have luxury and why do you have to sacrifice luxury when you have sustainability? So part of my time there, I set up the Cub Cave which was this R and D space literally below the restaurant in the basement, and I worked with chefs and the bartenders to essentially use that food waste, one, and in a deeper way examine ways that if there was an ingredient the chefs and bartenders wanted to use but perhaps they knew there would be a lot of trim or a lot of waste from it, I would go in and use my science smarts and find a way to use that trim. Basically to maximize the flavor that we extract from that produce we bring it.
There’s a famous American scientist of the 20th century, Richard Feynman, and when he was talking about nanotechnology, things at the nanoscale which are things that are atomically slightly subatomic which was my focus when I was a chemist and physicist, he famously coined this term “There’s plenty of room at the bottom,” meaning that there were plenty more technological applications in chemistry and physics.I like to say “There’s plenty of room in the bottom when we look in our bins.” Often what we throw away, pardon my French, there’s still shitloads of flavor in much of the food that we throw away. And it’s such a crying shame. My real role working with people like Cub in the Cub Cave and a restaurant called SILO, which is the UK’s first zero waste restaurant, is to look at what we’re throwing away and see what flavors are left. Then, use science and fermentation techniques to extract all that delicious flavor. When we’re talking about flavor, we’re talking about all the hard work, passion and dedication that some farmer has put in, or with animal products, the life some animal has given up to provide this product. The shame is that, often in most restaurants and bars, we would throw away much of it. There is still lots of flavor in there and how do we extract that flavor? Typically using fermentation.
TFA: Tell me more about SILO. What are some of the sustainability goals there?
JD: SILO was founded by this incredible guy called Douglas McMaster. He won British Master Chef Jr. when he was like 20, worked in a few restaurants around the world, then he had this epiphany when he was out in Melbourne working with this guy Joost Bakker, this zero waste pioneer. Doug had this mad idea of setting up this restaurant that had no bin. Which is kind of haughty if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, you know how critical the bin is in a functioning restaurant or bar. The bin gets used several times a day. But Doug’s idea was to have a restaurant without a bin.
He set up a pop-up in Melbourne, then set up a brick and mortar restaurant in London called SILO. Really, Doug’s goal there is to be completely zero waste. A lot of that revolves around setting up relationships with the suppliers so that, when they drop off food or wine, either they drop off some type of pallet that goes back to get refilled or they drop it off in containers that can somehow be upcycled into some other product.
My goal in the SILO ecosystem is, if they do ever have trim, food trim usually goes to a composter, which is a viable and valuable use of food waste. But it’s a degrading, devaluing of the product. My role is to go in before the food has to go to compost, compost should be the last resort, and basically ferment it.
So we take things like dairy buttermilk when the guys make butter and we make this buttermilk garum, which is this incredible, golden-colored umami balm of a liquid, tastes of like blue cheese and toasted nuts, a little bit of caramel notes in there. We make this buttermilk garum and that goes on. Essentially buttermilk is a product that doesn’t have that great of value. But by fermenting it, the buttermilk garum has much greater value pound for pound than even the cream that started that process of making the butter. So we’re adding value back to the food chain and creating this phenomenal flavor profile that guests at the restaurants, even most chefs, no one has ever tasted because it’s a product no one else is making. The buttermilk, it went onto this slow cooked, aged dairy cow dish, and it also went onto this dish with brined tomato with sheep’s curd garnished with smoked grape seed oil, buttermilk garum and flowers. So we’re creating these incredible flavor profiles that blow people’s mind with this buttermilk garum which was born out of this necessity. How do we, if we’re going to make garum butter, which Doug wanted to do, we’re going to have lots of buttermilk. For every kilo of butter you make, you end up with about a kilo of buttermilk. It was born out of necessity and out of necessity, we’re creating this phenomenal, incredible, mind-blowing tasting ingredient.
TFA: Research shows that by 2050, when the global population is expected to reach 10 billion, we won’t have enough food to feed the growing population. How is our modern food system going to need to adapt to sustain our growing population?
JD: I think the first thing to point out is it will have to adapt. The course the industrial agricultural complex is heading, it’s completely not sustainable. It’s been based on this model of artificially-synthesized chemical inputs and fertilizers. Post World War II that was a necessity. It was innovative and smart and produced incredible yields, but it’s created a situation where the quality of the soil globally has degraded rapidly because of this, and we need to find different ways to nurture soil and produce or yield curves will just drop off.
We need to find ways to nourish soils, nourish ecosystems and create more resilient ecosystems and move away from this modern agriculture. But modern agriculture has been the prevailing paradigm for the last 30, 40 years. Sustainability has to be one of those cornerstones of the way we move forward. Sustainability has to be a tenant in all parts of the food system. We’re talking about from seeds, to how we grow food to the restaurant side, how can we take the foods we use and process it in a more sustainable way. That comes down to consumers being more savvy. They need to ask “I’ve got some cabbages in my fridge that look a bit funky and are starting to smell a bit, how can I use those?” Fermentation is one of those ways.
This is why fermentation popped up in the history of mankind. It’s a way of preserving the glut of food you had in summer and early autumn over the winters. Or it was a way of preserving, let’s say, dairy milk products. Milk sours off in 3-4 days, pre-refrigeration times, how do you preserve the very valuable nutrition that’s present in dairy milk for longer than that? So people started making butter, they started making cheese.
We’re going to harness some of those fermentation techniques as a way to extend the shelf life of those products that we have access to.
TFA: MOLD magazine, tell me how that came about.
JD: MOLD magazine, the name is potentially a bit of misnomer because it’s not just focused on mold. Although the first edition was focused on the human microbiome. But MOLD started off as a website which was started by a woman, LinYee Yuan. She’s a native of Texas, but now lives in New York and she’s an industrial designer by background. LinYee set up MOLD as a website to explore basically that intersection of food and design and where those meet. Some people might think that’s a bit of a weird marriage. What does food have to do with design? But in terms of everything we eat and all the utensils that we use to eat and the spaces we eat from restaurants to cafes, how our food is grown and processed and how it makes its way from farm to table, there have been design decisions made in all of those things. This interaction between food and design is very rich. And there’s a very deep, profound overlap between those two.
LinYee wants to explore that. She set up the website and we were set up between a mutual friend at a seminar a few years ago. She was looking for someone to create a print version of the work she’d been doing with the website. We came up with the idea of MOLD magazine.
We basically had this idea we’d do six issues of MOLD magazine, we worked with this incredible designer, Matt Sam and Erica Ko, who are based in North America as well. It basically explores one theme every issue. We’ve explored seeds, the human microbiome, food waste. We really go deep and we explore it from all aspects of the food side, the design side. The visual language we use in MOLD is very rich, it’s led by these brilliant designers we work with. It’s created as this print magazine in this world where most media we consume is online and we really wanted to create an object that you would sit down and get to grips with and immerse yourself in the experience of reading. It’s a limited print run, approximately 3,000 of each issue. But we’ve won lots of pleasing claudettes for the work. We were mentioned in the New York Times as one to watch. And we’ve worked with lots of great people. Massami Batora and Dan Barber wrote an article for us, all these great chefs. The response in the food world and the design world and the food tech world has been very positive to the work we’re doing and the ideas we’re sharing.
One of our core principles is that we want to use MOLD to give a voice to people that often in these conversations don’t have a voice. We are passionate about giving a voice to people who are underrepresented, people of color, women, basically using MOLD as a vehicle to give underrepresented voices a voice within these very important conversations around the world of food.
TFA: You spent time at Noma, working in the Nordic Food Lab. Your focus was exploring whether you can age butter like you age cheese. What was your conclusion?
JD: How I ended up there was completely bonkers. I had just finished my PhD. At that point I had no kitchen experience. I started working in the restaurants starging, which is basically, in the chef world, a French word which is to go and work for free for a week or two. I had started emailing people at these high-falutin restaurants that had these R and D facilities. One of which was this thing called the Nordic Food Lab which, to a degree, has been airbrushed from the history of Noma because of various politics. It started off, it was on this beautiful, big, Dutch barge in front of the old restaurant, Noma 1.0, which you could sort of see from the dining room. It started off as this food lab and test kitchen, and it became this food lab, this not-for-profit thing. Its mission was to kind of research Nordic cuisine and really elevate and amplify the work that Noma had been doing and find ingredients that could then go back into its menu. Eventually they kind of separated, the point where I was working there, the food lab was still on the Dutch barge outside the restaurant. (The Nordic Food Lab is now part of Copenhagen University.)
It was this incredible opportunity to work at the food lab, at a time when Noma was No. 1, on the world’s 50 best restaurant list, two Michelin stars, seen widely for various reasons as the world’s best restaurant, doing incredible things. As this guy who had worked mostly in sciences labs, which are very different from kitchens, to then suddenly be thrust into this environment of a world’s best restaurant, anyone who hasn’t been lucky enough to go to Noma, it functions in this very eclectic, choreographed way. It’s kind of this cross between this sort of military operation and a beautiful ballet where everything works kind of seamlessly. It’s a very beautiful spectacle to see a restaurant working at such a high level. To witness that, to be a tiny cog of this body working side by side with the restaurant, was an incredible experience and very inspiring.
I think the food lab really was responsible for a number of really important things within restaurant culture in the last 5 or 10 years. Rene Redzepi, who has done wonderful things for not just Nordic food but the whole food industry, I saw him speak in person a few times and he’s this very inspiring guy, he has this very powerful way of leading people and an incredible vision.
To cut to the question “Can you age butter?” Yes, you can. Basically, you end up with something that tastes like blue cheese. So you have these fermentation processes, this breakdown of these lipids, these fat molecules, into what we call free fatty acids. They are basically what gives flavor to a 36-month aged parmesan, which we all know and love. If you do that to butter, if you age butter, you get some of those same flavor compounds, and they’re present in parmesan, in aged comte. If you do it at just the right level, you get these kind of aged, spicy notes of a blue cheese or a delicious aged parmesan.
Unfortunately, aged butter hasn’t taken off in a way I thought it might, but certainly people are aging butters in a way they were 10 years ago. Hopefully, my work has encouraged people to investigate that in some small way.
Check out the first part of our Q&A with Johnny Drain here. To find out more information about Drain, visit his personal Instagram and the Instagram of MOLD magazine.
- Published in Food & Flavor
A Venn Diagram of Food, Biology & Chemistry: A Conversation with Johnny Drain
Johnny Drain is the guru for helping chefs around the world innovate flavorful dishes. A chemist with a PhD from Oxford and a passion for cooking, Drain found fermentation was the optimal intersection of food and science.
“Fermentation was this focus of this venn diagram that incorporated food with some necessity to understand biology but also chemistry,” Drain says. “Fermentation was this sweet spot where I could apply my background in science with this passion and knowledge and aptitude for cooking, flavor and taste. I realized if I wanted to apply this rich educational history that I was fortunate to have access to, fermentation was this ideal sphere where I could do that.”
This cross-section is where Drain finds his diverse career — as an in-demand food research and development consultant. He’s currently advising chefs in renowned restaurants all over the globe and serving as co-editor of MOLD magazine.
The Fermentation Association spoke with Drain, who is based in London. Below is the first of our two-part Q&A with Drain. Part 1 focuses on his interest in fermentation, and how he sees fermentation transforming the culinary world. Part 2 features some of Drain’s recent fermentation consulting projects and his drive to use fermentation to create a sustainable global food system.
The Fermentation Association (TFA): What got you first interested in fermentation.
Johnny Drain (JD): I am a scientist by background. I did chemistry as an undergraduate, then I worked for a company in finance, which I don’t really talk about. It was on the cusp of the financial crash, 2006-2008, so it was quite an interesting time to be working in that sector. During my lunch breaks, I was reading recipe books and reading restaurant reviews and looking at the world of science. I was thinking about doing a PhD, and I ended up quitting finance because I realized this was not how I wanted to spend my life, for 12 hours every day. I went back and did a PhD in something called material science, which is a cross between chemistry and physics. Still nothing actually to do with food, I was looking at how atoms interact in types of steel, and building computer models of how to understand that and how to apply that to making car chassis. So still, it was very far away from the world of making food, but always I had this dream of becoming a chef or maybe having a restaurant at one point in my life.
At the end of my PhD, I was fortunate to study in Oxford in this very beautiful place in the heart of England in this very rich academic history surrounded by all these very clever people and beautiful buildings. I realized, instead of becoming an Oxford don with maybe a tweed suit and patches on my elbows, I would sack that all in, having climbed up a few rungs of that ladder, and basically start staging (unpaid restaurant internship) and working in kitchens for free. I even worked as a pot washer in one kitchen in London. I really jumped back in at the deep end and pursued this dream of becoming a cook or a chef.
I did that for a little while and realized first, becoming a chef is a young person’s game. And second, I’m 6’2’’ and have a bad back and, as a chef, you’re standing on your feet all day and that was not going to be a physically viable way for me to make a living. I had to combine my scientific nouse (intellect) with my passion for food.
For me, the interesting thing is I never see these things as mutual exclusive, they’re all related and interconnected. I ended up doing what I do now, which is helping restaurants and bars and food brands, consulting and teaching restaurants and chefs how to understand these things. As I see it, I’m unlocking their artistry and storytelling ability through this understanding of science. All of these things are interconnected. And fermentation is this particularly excellent example. It has to do with flavor and food, but it also has to do with people and tradition and culture, it has to do with artistry and storytelling, you can’t really do one without the other. Science, that biology and chemistry, is really integral to unlocking the creative, artsy-fartsy elements to these types of food.
TFA: When you partner with these different chefs and kitchens, what expertise are they looking for from you?
JD: Especially these days, it’s different from five years ago when I first started doing this type of work. Five years ago when you’d go into a kitchen, people really wouldn’t know what fermentation was. And often they wouldn’t be interested in it, or they wouldn’t understand why might a scientist be able to help me make better, tastier food or drink. But now, most people I work with, they know that and they’ve already dibbled and dabbled a little bit with some of these ferments. Let’s say they’ve made some kimchi or sauerkraut or some kombucha. Really what they want now, especially the high end places, they’ve dibbled and dabbled and they want to make sure that, A, what they’re doing is safe and isn’t going to kill anyone, which is very sensible. But secondly, they want that kind of X factor, they want the ability to unlock that real deep magic. That’s when I go in.
I was just in Lithuania last week working with this really great restaurant called 1918. Michelin doesn’t cover Lithuania, give it two years I expect, and they’ll get at least 1 star, possibly 2. It’s really high end, great quality food. And they’re trying to play around with egg yolks and koji, which is basically this aspergillus, this war horse of Japanese food culture that’s also present in Chinese and Korean cultures as well. They want to be able to have that scientific rigor and have someone to come in “Pick that lock,” as I describe it, and be able to unleash their creativity so they can put this into action in their dishes. They’re wanting to tell these stories about Lithatian food culture and use this food they’re growing on this farm about 50 minutes outside the capital.
TFA: That sounds very rewarding, to help different restaurants create new dishes.
JD: It is. My role is this enabler, picking that lock, unleashing people’s creativity and helping these chefs. Really, fermentation is just a tool. In many ways, the way we see knife or a chopping board, it’s a tool. If you try and cook without those tools, you’re doing yourself a great disservice. You’re limiting what you can do, you’re limiting your creativity. Fermentation really is just another example of a type of tool. In five or 20 years, people will just see some of these fermentation techniques just as the way they see a knife. It’s just this tool. And by empowering these chefs with these tools, I’m helping to unleash that creativity. When you unleash people’s creativity they get very excited and very passionate.
TFA: Why do you think fermentation has become such a bigger interest among chefs?
JD: The funny thing about fermentation is we all eat fermented products, but we don’t realize it. You could read off a list that lasts five minutes. Bread, all booze, chocolate, coffee, vinegar, etc. It’s just that most of those products, we’ve become so used to them because there are these staples of everyday life that we don’t realize they’re fermented. Also partially because the way the food systems now work, that work of creating our own bread or beer or cider, it’s now been outsourced for most people in much of the world to some other party. So we’re not making these products at home where our grandmothers, our grandfathers, would have been. My grandmother would have understood that bread, wine, cider was a fermented product because she was making those or her grandmother was making those. Whereas I grew up in a household where we bought all of those things and somebody else made it. All those steps had already been performed.
First, there’s this awakening of realizing much of the food we know and love is fermented. And second, from a chef, foodie world, there’s been a renaissance in fermented food because they offer this exciting flavor profile that chefs always want. Chefs are looking for the new. Especially in the last 20 years, with that modernist cuisine movement, people reached science to kind of process foods. That’s where the novelness came. In the sort of last 10-15 years, we saw this move towards what new ingredients do we have on our doorsteps, foraging, this local-vore movement of people rediscovering what incredible food products are on their doorstep. Now people are asking “Where can we discover new flavors that are on our doorstep that are new, now that everyone has foraged everything. Where is the newness? Where can I reach out to access this incredible, novel flavor profile?” Fermentation is this toolkit that gives you access to these incredible new flavors. It’s the other frontier.
When you talk about what’s on our doorstep, we get into this idea of microbial territory.
What microbes are unique to Britain or unique to France or unique to Argentina? Actually, the microbes are as unique and defining of place and of the food culture in a place as the grapes that grow or the cheeses that we make or the strains of wheat varietals that might grow in a place. Microbes are sort of this hidden category of food that have shaped the food that we eat in the place that human beings live as much as any other kind of meat or dairy or fruit or vegetable.
TFA: What do you think is the future of fermentation in the culinary world?
JD: So the focus now is very much on people within the food industry looking for what produce they have in their backyard or in their country or their culture and how do they ferment those? I think, currently, the sort of toolkit of fermentation is dominated by a couple of prevailing techniques or cultures, microbiological cultures.
I think there is so much to learn from slightly undiscovered fermentation food cultures in the world. Ones that really haven’t had a bright light shone on them — like the Japanese, fermentation has had quite a bright light shone on them. And that’s amazing because Japanese fermentation culture is amazing and incredibly rich, so lots of people around the world have learned a lot from it. I think the next frontier for me is going to be people looking at fermentation in Sub-Saharan Africa, fermentation in the Indian sub continents. And those fermentation cultures are currently not that well understood, certainly by people outside those cultures, and they’re not documented in clear and concise ways in much of the way now that that Japanese food culture and Western European fermentation food culture has been documented. I think people are realizing there’s all these incredible, beautiful, rich ferments that we just don’t know about and don’t understand in Sub-Saharan African and the Indian subcontinents. I’m currently working on projects with people who are from those countries and cooking the food of those cultures. There’s just so much for us to learn.
TFA: What’s been the wackiest or funkiest food thing you’ve ever fermented?
JD: On the menu at one point at Cub (restaurant in London where Drain worked in research and development), we had a pest season where the head chef was trying to base the menu around things that are perceived as pests or invasive species.
In the UK we have this animal called the Reeves’s muntjac. It came originally from India. This guy called Reeves visited India as this colonizing force and came back and had, as a rich guy, a bunch of these species of flora and fauna as pets and novelties, one of which was this Reeves’s muntjac. It’s a very small, muscular deer. It’s bigger than a bulldog, but as muscular, then with a head of a deer and these horns. You see them driving along British country lanes at night and they look very scary, they basically look like devil dogs. They look like the harbingers of the apocalypse, sort of like something very bad is going to happen as you’re driving down the fog down this dark, British country lane. They’re very weird, scary and other worldly. They’re a pest and they outcompete the native species. So they are hunted to control their numbers.
So we made a muntjac garum. Using this technique of garum, which is a Roman word for fish sauce, we created this umami-rich, meaty garum. And that got used to dress these various, wonderful, meaty dishes. We did deer faggots. A faggot in the culinary sense of a word is the the offal of meat wrapped in the coals, part of the intestines, and basically pan fried. It’s a very traditional British dish. We made these deer faggots and dressed it in this muntjac garum.
That was quite a weird but delicious example of that whole 360 idea of sustainability in not just the techniques that we use but the produce we’re using. How do we use invasive species?
The conversation with Johnny Drain continues in our September 16 newsletter. To find out more information about Drain, visit his personal Instagram and the Instagram of MOLD magazine.
- Published in Food & Flavor
Koji: Learning to Love Mold
What’s the difference between the fuzzy mold that grows on leftovers forgotten in the fridge and the mold koji that creates the umami-rich flavors soy sauce and miso? Controlled growth.
“That’s an important parallel,” says Rich Shih, the koji guru behind Our Cook Quest and co-author with Jeremy Umansky of the book “Koji Alchemy.” Shih spoke during a recent webinar hosted by The Fermentation Association, “Demystifying Fermentation — Learning to Love Mold.” “You create these very specific conditions where the components are food safe…they’re made in a fully controlled, clean environment…when you allow it to go through a fermentation process, it ends up being preserved in a way that is delicious and nutritious for us. That’s the key to fermentation in general. What’s nutritious and delicious to us is a result of these microbes that we persuade in this specific direction to create a circumstance that’s pleasing to us.”
Koji is also known by its scientific name, aspergillus oryzae. Incubating it, Shih says, creates a “blank slate” for the koji spores. He compares it to adding yeast to a bread or beer.
“We’re basically leveraging their ability to be able to do this work on an exponential basis to yield something for us because they’re trying to survive based on the food stuff we give them,” Shih says, explaining the koji fermentation process. “But we’re introducing them to this pool of wonderful, delicious things that they get to convert — and then we take the benefits.”
More chefs are experimenting with koji as a seasoning or marinade. It is empowering and easy to incorporate into dishes, Shih adds, noting: “Once people realize this, koji is really going to explode.” He recommends beginners start with a koji paste.
Alex Lewin, moderator of the webinar, author of fermentation books and TFA Advisory Board member, agrees. He compares koji to the medieval alchemy of the philosopher’s stone, which could transform lead into gold. Koji mold is transforming ingredients into flavorsome food.
“Where bacteria and yeast are very specific and narrow in focus, koji and mold in general have a much broader set of capabilities,” Lewin adds.
Shih shared one of his latest koji kitchen experiments: a cucumber sorbet. He added koji spores to the cucumber, then froze it for a texture similar to shaved ice. He stressed koji “can be a seasoning for any food, regardless of preparation, locale or cuisine. It’s easily translated.”
“Koji, basically it’s magic,” Shih says. “It really changes the game overnight in terms of the flavors you get out of it. It opens a whole world of possibilities.”
Most people are familiar with koji and don’t even know it, Shih says. Koji is an ingredient in soy sauce, a common condiment in home pantries. There’s a huge commercial industry for soy sauce. But Shih says people should learn to experiment with koji outside of a soy sauce bottle. He points to artisan cooks and chefs, who take control of their food by sourcing ingredients from local farms. By fermenting them, they create nutrient-dense food with a long shelf life.
“That’s the gap we fermenters are encouraging people to bridge. You have the power to create nutrition in a way that you enjoy ingredients in your locale,” Shih says. Follow some simple rules with koji and “it’s really hard not to make it taste good. If you know how to boil water and mix things, you can make something super delicious, and that’s empowering.”
- Published in Food & Flavor, Health
Bubbling Over: More Interest in Fermentation Workshops?
Consumer reports indicate a spike in interest from the general public in fermentation during the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine. But we wanted the experts to weigh in on whether or not attendance is up at their fermentation classes. We spoke with three chefs dispersed around the globe. Kirsten Shockey (chef and author at Ferment Works and TFA Advisory Board member) in Oregon, Nena Foster (chef at Nena Foster Food) in London and Ken Fornataro (chef at Cultures Group) in New York.
Kirsten Shockey, Ferment Works: “This is an interesting question. I do know that interest in purchasing fermented products is way up, however interest in workshops is less clear to me. As a fermentation educator, I can tell you that my full schedule disappeared by the nature of in person classes being no longer possible. I think there has been a shift, which was especially true during spring when people were at home and had the time and were focused on sheltering in place. The place that I saw a lot of interest in the spring was online live fermentation festivals on Instagram. Thousands of people dropped in because it was something to do, free and people are more interested in their immune system than ever before. This past month a European study came out looking at the “Association between consumption of fermented vegetables and COVID-19 mortality at a country level in Europe.” I have seen this pop up on both honest and not-so-honest clickbait headlines. Yet, as I write this, and the COVID cases are climbing, and we have something more concrete to point to, I am, personally, seeing less interest in learning. I suspect this is because people are trying to claim some normalcy of their summer and don’t want to spend so much time online. I think that when fall approaches, learning to ferment will take off.”
Nena Foster, Nena Foster Food: “I can’t say for certain, but I do think more people are starting to take an interest in making their own fermented foods. Maybe it’s because Lockdown has given people more time in the kitchen and more time — more time to use up what’s knocking about in their fridges, time in the kitchen and time to plan meals and waste less of what comes in their weekly veg boxes. Or maybe it’s because, the fear of a virus that seems to prey on those with pre-existing health conditions as well as those who are seemingly healthy, means people are taking more notice of and interest in maintaining their health. I also think the links between the gut and mental well-being have sent a few people to my sessions, as emotionally and mentally this has been a tough time for most and even more so for those who already struggle with their mental health. I think fermenting also takes us back to a simpler, slower pace of life and reminds us to slow down, something we all desperately needed to do and was forced by the pandemic.
Based on my own workshops, I seem to be getting a slightly younger, more kitchen-curious demographic than when I ran face-to-face sessions. I think the reasons they come to my sessions very much mirror the above. I was very conscious of being able to move my work online because I knew that the support in terms of health-focused cooking and fermented foods was needed more now than ever, and I am pleased that I have.”
Ken Fornataro, Cultures Group: “It’s been a long time coming. Are more people buying fermented foods because they want to believe they can prevent or even treat Covid-19? Maybe they are bored with the food they have BEEN eating, and have decided to try out that fermented food thing that keeps trending on social media.
A lot of it may be due to long term marketing efforts finally hitting home. In addition to fermented products, some just inferior products mixed with microbes, people are snapping us lots of things with perceived health benefits.
It’s impossible to avoid examination of one’s diet, and one’s health status during this international pandemic. People seem to get that processed foods typically are lacking if not harmful.
But do they like what they are trying? Or is this about the desire to establish a normalcy and feeling of safety that their grandma’s strange smelling foods, once considered embarrassingly ethnic, and to go to a time and place they call home? Tasting home, tasting freedom?
People are desperately looking for alternatives to the current reality.
Sales of raw ginger, turmeric, roots and wild forged plants to make teas and elixirs – almost anything that is believed to be acidic or cleansing to assuage the psychological anxiety that comes from feeling threatened but not knowing what to do about it – have also skyrocketed during this pandemic.
Do fermented foods actually contribute to someone’s health, especially their immune system health? Directly? Highly doubtful. Indirectly or holistically, without a doubt.
If eaten in the context of healthy living patterns including getting adequate rest, access to a clean environment, not smoking, and eating moderate amounts of any fermented such as kimchi or sauerkraut or natto that replaces some processed, chemical and additive laden food you used to eat is of definite benefit.
Fermented foods should be considered as the ultimate condiment or accompaniment to whatever ingredient you have. They can add intense flavor dimensions to otherwise plain tasting foods while adding prebiotics and probiotics and increased nutritional value and increased digestibility.
A couple of tablespoons of sauerkraut or kimchi or natto or miso or shio-koji on top of a bowl of noodles or rice or beans or mixed into a salad is easy.
But fermented foods can also be served on the side, an extremely important consideration when eating with people with different tastes and different sensitivities.
Fermented foods are tasty, sometimes an acquired taste. And healthy, especially if it gives you time to do yoga or exercise. Which surely helps you sleep better. Which helps you maintain your health.”
- Published in Business
Fermentation is what happens “when rotten goes right.”
Fermentation is what happens “when rotten goes right.” – David Chang, founder Momofuku restaurant group and “Ugly Delicious” TV host
- Published in Food & Flavor
What’s the Harm in Eating Moldy Food?
A food science professor weighs in on the Sqirl restaurant mold scandal. The trendy Los Angeles eatery is famous for serving toast on a housemade jam without preservatives. But allegations surfaced that Sqirl was making the jam in an unlicensed kitchen where buckets of jam were covered in mold. Dr. John Gibbons, an assistant professor of food science at University of Massachusetts Amherst, is an expert on beneficial and detrimental molds. He says: “Because I study this stuff, and I’ve seen some of the really bad effects of different toxins, I don’t really take chances with it. That being said, fungal-fermented foods are some of my favorite foods — I just don’t trust it happening spontaneously.”
Read more (Grub Street)
- Published in Food & Flavor, Health, Science
New Fermentation Lab Director at Noma
World-famous restaurant Noma is getting a new head of their fermentation lab. After four years as director of the fermentation lab, David Zilber is stepping away and will be replaced by Jason White.
White most recently was head of the food research lab at Audrey restaurant in Nashville. A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, White began a career as a fermentation consultant for restaurants and distilleries in Texas. He worked for two years at Noma before returning to the U.S. last year.
Zilber has helped to define modern fermentation. A creative with a love of science and arts, he’s become a mentor for a new wave of fermentation cooks and enthusiasts. In 2018, he co-authored the book “The Noma Guide to Fermentation” with Noma founder and director Rene Redzepi.
- Published in Business