Food Ferments

[Auxin]

So I've been getting increasingly disenchanted with modern industrial western foodways. Our deviation from live and natural food is not for our benefit, its to fulfill and perpetuate someone elses greed to our own medical and cultural detriment. 'Foodways' is a significant component of any culture and too many cultures are loosing a rich tradition in exchange for wonderbread and mcdonalds. My own family lost all of our fermenting wisdom and culture with my great grandmothers, not even a recipe card is left.

For years I've intended to 'eventually' learn enough food fermentation skill to at least make kimchi without routine failure and this year I'm expecting an avalanche of vegetables from may through october and I have to preserve them somehow so in come the microbes.

I began by reading 'Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods', a rather interesting (and colorful) book. In it the author claims that in his many years of fermenting and arguably 'rotting' food for his and his communities consumption he never got food poisoning. For reasons probably related to cultural bias that surprised me somewhat. Has anyone here had contrary or supporting experiences? He also talks about scraping mold off liquid surfaces and not worrying about it, which somewhat unsettles me

I've now moved on to reading anthropological papers and books on indigenous foodways around the world and it amazed me how easy some fermentative processes are. It strikes me as odd that food fermentation is either not done or not talked about even in places like this, vegetarian forums, the nook, etc. So anyone got stuff bubbling in their kitchen? Any notes on good discoveries or disasters?

At the moment I have a successful kimchi (w00t) and got a wild sourdough starter begun, next is more kimchi (stuffs expensive here!) but as the season gets going I'mma try gundruk (like salt free and dried mustard leaf sauerkraut), sugar peas, zucchini, okra, radicchio kimchi, and greens from beans, peas, cowpeas, rutabaga, anything without a face really One goal is to develop fermented sauces without cultured asian molds. I'll wait to see how many failures I have before deciding on buying a Aspergillus oryzae starter.

I'll post some results here from my kitchen throughout the year

Thoughts?

[obtuse]

I wonder if the loss of fermentation traditions comes from the hygenic neurosis that has entered western culture at some point.

And I guess it also makes a lot of sense for some companies involved in food production to maintain that attitude towards food.

I have become really fascinated with fermentation as well, and now loving things like sauerkraut. and have gotten to the point where it doesnt bother me to scrape the scum off the top. Not that it really gets the opportunity to form ;) But i remember being a poor student and eating slightly mouldy bread, cutting moulds of cheese and scraping it out of yoghurts (even after being a poor student) so i dont have much of an issue about it.

I have wildcrafted sourdoughs quite a few times, and very much a convert now, even to the point of building my own woodfired oven in my backyard. Ive been a bit slack though and dont have a culture at the moment. so im buying sourdoughs, but isnt it amazing how much longer they last than normal bread.

I have no fermentation heritage in my family, coming from convict and irish settlement stock, where the only interest in fermentaion is alcohol based, so the idea of fermenting food is all new for me, but it tastes so good, and i feel so much healthier for getting into it.

I have always found that cheese that has gone past its "best by date" has a much richer and more interesting taste, now i deliberately search it out.

I should revisit the health issue of moulds though just to be sure, but at the moment i only feel benefits.

Have fun Auxin, its always exciting to hear others have made the change to explore fermented foods.

Cheers, Ob.

[random]

He also talks about scraping mold off liquid surfaces and not worrying about it, which somewhat unsettles me

bahahah, my mother has been doing that for years on unfermented food and hasn't gotten sick from it yet. I on the other hand, would get sick just at the sight of it.

Possibly it depends if you have guts of steel or not.

I know of someone who was brought up on a rubbish dump and ate all sorts of stuff til they eventually got hospitalised from food poisoning. However, this person will eat anything and everything, however old or inedible looking and never gets sick from it either. Possibly from early exposure to spoiled food, I have no idea.

Interesting thread, and I had been reading a little about this lately too, but yet to try to ferment anything myself other than sourdough either.

Would be great to hear if you have success with it.

[ajna]

yeah i'm a bit of a ferment freak these days

lots of kefir and kefirised cheeses, saurkraut (fave has red cabbage, carrot and ginger), ginger beer, sourdoughs...

love the flavour and digestive heallth and immunity has never been better.

surface moulds do not bother me much, some are good sourdough starters themselves. i just trust the nose really - if it smells really offensive then chuck it. think i remember reading that black and pink moulds are ones to be very cautious of, never come across pink in my eperiments, have had black on a very old and neglected sourdough mother tho, chucked it and the jar it was in

[Piers Gibbon]

I've been really enjoying the resurrected Ginger Beer Plant I've been tending

check out the Ginger Beer Plant group on yahoo for some suppliers who ship worldwide

but this original paper from 1892 suggests (right at the end) that you may well get the plant growing just by using unwashed ginger...

http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/INOeT9w8RONmjVJls3SaycB22ftXdkSdJpR4vcuuZs8CEO5c4OE_dpZUmeu0Y4XHeKjWTsTQ6OZay37Gf3r7MwNAW_d-84gE4dY/Ward%20Phil.%20Trans.%201892%20B.pdf

[J Smith]

Sorry to bump but I've just put down my first ever sauerkraut in an old beer fermenter. Cabbage was dirt cheap at the farmers markets today and I'm excited!!

[Anodyne]

I've done a bit of reading about this but haven't experimented much so far. One interesting tip I read was to use whey from raw milk (I figure the water that seeps out the top of pot-set yoghurt would do just as well, or the juice from any unpasteurised fermented pickle) as a source for lactobacillus, etc when making sauerkraut or kimchi or whatever. I think many traditional fermented foods are made in unglazed clay pots which retain bacteria, so the starter-culture for the next batch just stays in the vessel itself. So when you're fermenting in clean glass jars, it helps to have another source - my worst fermenting failures have been when I haven't used any kind of starter.

[Auxin]

Right on, madhouse. I bet your gonna enjoy it.

Whey. IMO some people go WAY overboard with whey. A (mismatched) starter like whey or sauerkraut juice can be worthwhile for things lacking much of a lacto-bacterial compliment. But, instead, using a pro-starter seems to me to make more sense, even if it changes the end product. Like I just got a liter and a half of grated and slivered watermelon rind fermenting. I peeled off the waxy cuticle so I was just using the light green to white stuff and I added some unpeeled grated carrot to get it inoculated. Worked fine. Sure it distinctly changed the product but so would have whey. Another example was when my sourdough starter got too vinegary from mismanagement I started a new one with fresh whole wheat flour and a big shred of fresh cabbage leaf. Worked like a charm.

I think the modern trend of adding large amounts of whey to everything was the fault of Sally Fallon, the meat crazy extremist that started the so called Weston A Price Foundation (which bares no relation to Dr. Weston Price).

In the last 16 months I've fermented everything but the kitchen sink (well that too, but I started cleaning it more now)

Nearly everything was a success to some degree or other

The one marked failure was salt free fermenting of mashed up squash leaves. .... dont ask.

A good tasty and frugal trick I invented was on cabbage plants, take away the head and your left with outer leaves that people usually compost or feed to hogs. I fermented those without salt (salt could be added) and with as little added liquid as was reasonable, then I drained it- used the juice as the liquid in making sourdough bread which was great, dried the cabbage leaf solids (which made my house smell like butter biscuits for days) and I use it as.. well half way between a vegetable and spice in making sour breads. It could probably be adapted into strongly flavored meat dishes too. Who knew cabbage was hiding a spice in its leaves.

[watertrade]

i used to do lots of fermented foods but don't have the time to do it now. I have had a few exciting fermentations where things go wrong and you wonder how you will ever clean it up. I had a soy sauce fermenting in my cupboard a few years ago. I was using a 20 liter carboy - it was smelling pretty bad which put ms WT off from the start. two weeks into the fermentation ( which was planned for several months) something went wrong and the carboy blocked. !boom! the pressure build up spewed soy beans all over the cupboard and its contents, clothes etc. I still find the odd soy bean every now and then.

things I have fermented include kefir, all kinds of cheeses, yogurts, soy sauce, miso, tempeh, tofu, sake it used to be my thing!

[Sallubrious]

I've fermented a lot of stuff over the years.

I tried Sauerkraut and Kefirkraut, but I really struggled to get that shit to go down when I tried to eat it, I must be lacking the appropriate taste receptors for that fermented cabbage. It smelled pretty wicked too.

My favourite was fermented salsa, I did it both with kefir whey starter and just with natural airborne lactobacillus and both are great.

I used to use tomatoes, capsicum, onion,lemon and parsley with a few spices.

I tried fermenting Natto too but that stunk like someone with a severe foot odour problem had used their socks to wipe a skunks arse and then left them in a sealed plastic bag to rot for a few weeks. I just don't get that shit, it might be good for you but fuuuuck