This is a prelude to what will hopefully be many articles describing my experiments with fermentation: what it is, what I do, and why I feel like talking about it.
Fermentation is one of those things that has really grabbed my interest recently. It simply means letting certain bugs (microscopic ones!) into your food for a while. So what’s the big deal, you ask? Isn’t that just boring, and a little gross?
For me, part of the fascination comes from the “science experiment” feeling of putting the right ingredients together and watching what happens. But more important is that it’s a living process. I like giving them the right conditions to thrive in, and they enrich my food in return. Nurturing life is rewarding.
There’s also a culinary reason. Many, if not all fermentation processes create healthy by-products that you wouldn’t otherwise be eating. Besides reading some scientific evidence, I trust my instinct: fermented foods in general have some similar taste characteristics that appeal to me, and I have to assume that it’s because my body knows what’s good for it!
So, I’ve come to appreciate having these bugs in my kitchen. I teach them how to grow and behave properly, and they also “teach” me about their different flavours and behaviours. In this modern time when germs are stereotyped as “bad” and we live in over-sanitized environments, it’s nice to be counter-cultural and live in healthy symbiotic relationship with some friendly microbes.
What kind of foods are we talking about?
By far the most common is bread. Pick up a slice and look at all the little holes in it. Do you know how they got there? They were made by carbon dioxide exhaled by millions of yeast bugs! They like to eat the sugar in the wheat flour. In turn, they make the dough puffy and airy. Without them, the bread would be hard and solid as a brick. It’s not hard to surmise how this symbiosis began in prehistory, but I’ll save that for another time. The important thing is that this staple food for humankind hasn’t been the same since. Bacteria also like to live in bread dough, and I’ll say more about that when I get to sourdough.
Second to bread is alcoholic beverages: beer, wine, mead and cider. The unfermented source of these drinks are barley, grapes, honey, and other fruit juices. These also have sugars that yeast like to eat. If the carbon dioxide is trapped inside, it gets fizzy (like beer). If it’s allowed to escape, it’s not (like wine). However, everyone knows that something else gets left behind in either case, and that’s alcohol. (Of course the yeast in bread makes alcohol as well, but it quickly evaporates in the oven.) Today alcohol is thought of simply as a pleasure-inducing substance; but it has its roots as a by-product of humanity’s co-existence with our yeasty friends. Along with carbon dioxide and alcohol, anyone who drinks them will tell you that many other changes are happening in the liquid that you can taste and smell. A chemist could probably go into a lot of detail, but to me it is a strange and mysterious process that demands respect and appreciation.
Besides the above, I also make kombucha (fermented tea) and bean sprouts (a kind-of inadvertent fermentation). In the future I will devote one or more articles to all of the things mentioned above. I’ve also started a “Food” links section so you can explore on your own. Please post a comment on what you would like to hear about!
I hinted above that fermentation has an extremely long history. Perhaps that is the final reason why it appeals to me. When I knead my bread dough or drop some yeast in a batch of sugary liquid, I feel I am somehow connecting with a distant past, one that predates written language and civilization. Maybe part of me hopes that keeping these traditions will help me better understand myself.
