Get on Board: The Fermentation Fascination
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Foodie culture has caught up with what we here at Chelsea Green have known for years: fermented food is where it’s at (see this, this, and this).
If you’re not convinced by its many health benefits, or the fact that fermented vegetables are actually safer to eat than raw vegetables (due to the peculiar tendency of fermenting bacteria to kick the ass of all other, possibly harmful, bacteria), maybe the taste will do it. Try some fermented pickles (aka real pickles, not the kind you normally find on a grocery store shelf). Sit down at a Korean restaurant and order something with kimchi. Trust me: you’ll be glad you did.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
The basic method used to create common foods like bread, cheese, chocolate and wine, fermentation is almost as ancient as agriculture itself. It’s simply the process by which yeast or bacteria transform sugar into acid or alcohol. While fermented foods like kombucha, kefir, old-fashioned soda and homemade miso are in the limelight, fermented vegetables - transformed from their raw form into pickles via lactic fermentation - have their own niche.
“There’s a renaissance of interest in fermented foods,” says Jessica Prentice, cookbook author and co-founder of the Locavores, the group who helped bring attention to using strictly local ingredients. At last month’s fermentation festival in Freestone (Sonoma County), Prentice demonstrated how to make kimchi and sauerkraut. She considers the amount of attention being given to fermented foods - including by teenage vegans and hip young urbanites - at the level of a “movement.”
The vast majority of store-bought pickles rely on vinegar for sourness, and most commercial sauerkraut is pasteurized at vast processing plants. Fermented pickles and unpasteurized sauerkrauts are made from raw vegetables that sit in a salty brine at cool room temperature for several weeks. This encourages the growth of beneficial, naturally occurring lactic bacteria, which destroys potentially harmful bacteria and creates lactic acid. Lactic fermentation causes the vegetables to become mildly, pleasantly sour and tender.
“I’m just fascinated by this bacteria. It’s like gardening,” says Kathryn Lukas, a professional chef who says she was first introduced to “real” sauerkraut more than a decade ago while living in Stuttgart, Germany. But Lukas’ new line of Farmhouse Culture sauerkrauts have less to do with oompah bands and beer halls than with healthy eating and local, sustainable produce.
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At the sleek West Berkeley Cultured kitchen, vegetables ferment in salt and their own juices - no water is added - for two to 10 weeks. They are held in steel fermentation tanks inside a walk-in refrigerator that stays in the low to mid-60s.
The health benefits of raw and fermented vegetables are what makes them one of the mainstays of the prepared foods offered by Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley. A cooperative kitchen that follows the nutritional philosophy of the Weston Price movement, it prepares traditional, “nutrient-dense” foods for weekly ordering and pickup, including a cultured raita and fermented radishes from River Dog farm.
Jessica Prentice, one of Three Stone Hearth’s five worker-owners, touts the high levels of vitamin C, beneficial bacteria and active enzymes in fermented vegetables in her cookbook, “Full Moon Feast” (Chelsea Green, 2006).
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Fermented foods are also known to aid digestion, which is why they’re traditionally paired with rich meats. Salvadorans pile curtido, a type of sauerkraut, on top of cheese-filled pupusas. But modern-day pickle aficionados see fermented foods as their own food group.
Kimchi certainly plays that role for Koreans, who eat at least 75 pounds a year per capita. As part of Critter Salon, a series of events that often explore food and fermentation, artist Philip Ross organized a kimchi contest last month that drew more than 30 entrants to the Mission district event. The winner, Connie Choe, had flown in from Los Angeles.
A professor of sculpture at University of San Francisco and former restaurant cook, Ross’ work often involves bringing people in touch with the biotechnology around us.
“It’s kind of magical. You have one thing and expose it to another process - maybe it’s a salt - and it totally becomes something else,” he says. “It’s amazing.”
There’s yet another part of fermentation that appeals to Bay Area cooks - it relies on wild yeasts and bacteria from the air or in the food itself.
“If you make sauerkraut at home or things that require wild fermentation,” says Sweet of Urban Peasant SF. “You can’t eat any more local than that.”
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