New York Times Bestseller

Sandor Ellix Katz

Foreword by Michael Pollan

f e r m e n t at io n
An in-depth exploration of essential concepts and processes from around the world

The

a rt of

With Practical Information on Fermenting Vegetables, Fruits, Grains, Milk, Beans, Meats, and More

Fermented Herb Mix

Monique Trahan lives in western Massachusetts on a farmlet with gardens, dairy goats, chickens, and pastured pigs, within sight of the biggest shopping center in town.

I make fresh herb salad dressing mix in late summer and fall and use it all winter. I use whatever is growing in abundance, but my favorite is mostly basil, lots of oregano, parsley, scallions/chives, garlic, and a bit of hot pepper. Chop/mince (I use the chopping blade on my food processer), add brine (salty is good with this as it is used as a flavoring ingredient), and ferment at room temperature for three days or so. Then move it to the fridge for storage (although we are building a root cellar this year). It is so easy to plop a spoonful into a cruet with vinegar and olive oil for a quick dressing, or into some drained kefir for a creamy dressing or dip. It can also go into soups and such for a very quick jolt of summer. I call it Seasons of Refreshing, and it is a hit with guests.

Sauerkraut
The best-known style of fermented vegetables in the United States and much of Europe is sauerkraut. Sauerkraut consists primarily of shredded cabbage and salt. Often the shredded cabbage is spiced with juniper berries or caraway seeds. In some traditions, fruits such as apples or cranberries are added. I met a woman whose grandmother was from a town in Poland where everyone added mashed potatoes to their sauerkraut. The potatoes take on the flavor of the sauerkraut and lend it a distinctive varied texture. (Be sure to cool the mashed potatoes before adding.) I often mix red cabbage with the white cabbage to yield bright pink kraut. It is actually quite possible to add many varied minor ingredients while still maintaining the essential qualities of sauerkraut by making sure it is made mostly from shredded cabbage. The process is the generic kraut-chi method, with dry-salting. One iconic sauerkraut is the Bavarian style, in which the sauerkraut is made with caraway seeds and served sweet, typically mixed with sugar and warmed before serving. Another traditional German sauerkraut variation is weinkraut, made with the addition of sweet white wine. What a miracle that turned out to be, recounts Judith Orth, of New Hampshire. The fermentation process transformed a lousy wine into a lovely subtle elusive flavor... everyones favorite batch by far.

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Many traditions of kraut making (and fermentation more broadly) use the phases of the moon to determine the best time to prepare it. A woman who lives near me in Readyville, Tennessee, shared with me her grandmother Ruby Readys sauerkraut recipe. The secret, of course, is to make it in the light of the moonwhile the moon is growingand that way it will never shrink or get dark. Folklore traditions being widely varied, I have also encountered conflicting advice, suggesting that the best time to make sauerkraut is when the moon is waning.13 To be honest, I have made sauerkraut throughout the moons phases and have never observed any differences based on that. The techniques of sauerkraut have already been covered. I have been struck through the years by the number of stories people have shared about the significance of sauerkraut in their lives. For instance, Lorissa Byely of Indianapolis, Indiana, writes:
My parents were born and grew up in Russia. I learned from my dad that after WWII, he (age 8) and his family literally survived on sauerkraut and potatoes for a year. There really was no other food and he is still healthy today at 70 (and still loves sauerkraut).

Christina Haverl Tamburro, of Andover, Connecticut, reports that One of my great-grandmothers, who came to Bridgeport in 1908, was so kraut obsessed that a cabbage cutter was the only thing she brought with her to this country, besides a few clothes in a sack. My great aunt is still using the cutter. Many barns, basements, and attics hold similar old kraut shredding boards, and crocks, which were so vitally important to peoples lives in the past but have fallen into disuse. Find them, clean them up, and put them back to work!

The Case of the Kraut Called Hooch

My friend D spent some time in a federal prison. D likes to eat well and decided to try to make sauerkraut. She did it by rinsing off the prison coleslaw, salting it, and weighing it down with an orange. Unfortunately, when it was discovered by guards, they accused her of trying to make hooch. Her mother wrote to me: They immediately confiscated it, tested and analyzed it for content and scent (the preliminary breath test registered nothing), but, still determined she was absolutely making hooch with illegal contraband, they wrote her up, required her to submit a written statement explaining herself, and charged with her with making liquor. At the hearing, D clearly presented her facts and intention and they understood her to be truthful, especially after reviewing all her previous dietary requests. Her charges were changed from a major to a minor offense (nothing to darken her prison record) and D was sentenced to 1 day of segregation. D has long since been released and can ferment to her hearts content (and her bellys) at home.

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Kimchi
Kimchi is the iconic food of Korean culture. I cannot think of a single food from any other country that is half as important to a nations culinary traditions as kimchi is to Koreas, writes Mei Chin in Saveur.14 A major South Korean newspaper called the 2010 failure of the cabbage crop there, and the resulting kimchi shortage, a national tragedy. 15 When the country sent its first astronaut to the International Space Station in 2008, he traveled there with a specially developed kimchi. Three top government research institutes spent millions of dollars and several years perfecting a version of kimchi that would not turn dangerous when exposed to cosmic rays or other forms of radiation and would not put off non-Korean astronauts with its pungency, reports The New York Times.16 Scientists feared that in space, radiation could cause dangerous mutations to the bacteria that inhabit kimchi, which are so beneficial on Earth. The key was how to make a bacteria-free kimchi while retaining its unique taste, color and texture, according to Lee Ju-woon of the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute. Meanwhile here on Earth, those bacteria and their metabolic products have been credited with curing the avian flu.17 I have received a steady trickle of email since the publication of Wild Fermentation from people frustrated that my recipes did not produce a kimchi they regarded as authentic. Kimchi is so hard! writes Elizabeth Hopkins. Ive tried at least four times and have never got a romping, spicy, fizzy, trulykimchi-tasting ferment. Ive followed your recipe in WF, and while it was a tasty jarful, it was certainly not kimchi. Never having visited Korea, my personal knowledge of kimchi is fairly limited, but one of the lessons I have learned is that kimchi is made in a mind-boggling variety of styles. In her excellent cookbook Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen, Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall describes some of that variety:
Korean kitchens create more than one hundred kinds of kimchi, using everything from cabbage to watermelon skin and even pumpkin blossoms in summer. Each familys kimchi has its own unique flavor, but the basic process is to salt the vegetable, firming it up by extracting its liquid, locking in the original flavor. A mixture of spices is then introduced and the vegetable is fermented, creating its distinctive character. The most important spices are fresh and powdered hot red peppers, which give the kimchi its biting zest and help seal in its freshness, and crushed garlic and green onions, which enhance its flavor and help to sterilize it. Additional flavor-builders may include ginger, fruits, nuts, and seafood such as salted shrimp and anchovies, fresh oysters, pollack, yellow corvina, skate, and live baby shrimp, or even octopus and squid. Green seaweed, chnggak, may be added to help retain freshness; in the mountainous region of the northern provinces, where seafood is not available, beef broth is used instead.18

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In Saveur, Mei Chin waxes:

I have tasted subtly flavored kimchis made from mushrooms or burdock root, light and crunchy ones made with soybean sprouts, meaty ones made with tender chunks of pumpkin, and luxurious ones made with young octopus. Kimchi can be mild, like tongchimi, or water kimchi, a combination of ingredients like cabbage, Asian pear, pine nuts, whole chiles, and pomegranate seeds floating in a tangy brine. It can also be eaten before it is allowed to ferment, as with geotjeoli, or salad, kimchi, which consists of raw leaves of cabbage dressed with kimchi fixings, a kind of coleslaw that heats the belly as it cools the throat. In all of these forms, kimchi is curiously refreshing, not just because of its heat, which shoots straight to the brain, but also because it effervesces on the tongue. Kimchi serves the same purpose in a Korean meal that palate cleansers serve in a Western one: when you are tired of eating, you take a bite of it, your eyes and mouth water, and you have the energy to begin eating again.19

Wow, there are just so many, effuses Chris Calentine, an email pen pal of mine from Indiana who married into a Korean family, when I ask about varieties of kimchi he has encountered. Although kimchi is made in diverse styles and with varied ingredients, there are some common patterns. Kimchi recipes typically call for pre-soaking vegetables in salty brine (3 to 6 hours in a brine of 15 percent salt by weight, or 12 hours in a 5 to 7 percent salt brine20). Often, vegetables are turned or stirred a few times during their soak. Alternatively, chopped vegetables may be dry-salted, fairly heavily, and left to sweat a few hours, turned, mixed, and agitated; followed by a thorough rinse to remove excess salt. The Kimchee Cookbook, the most comprehensive book on the topic that I have found, explains:
Salting is a process that allows the seasoning to penetrate the food gradually. Today, salting is done in one day; in the past, it took place over a period of three, five, seven, or even nine days. The vegetables were moved from container to container of salted water, each with a brine solution of a different strength. It was considered that the longer the process took and the slower the salt was absorbed, the deeper the taste of the kimchee.21

Another feature that distinguishes kimchi recipes is the use of hot pepper in dried flake or powder form. Furthermore, pepper and pureed ginger, garlic, onion, and any other spices are typically mixed with a starchy base into a paste. The starchy baselike thin porridge or gruelis a mixture of flour (usually rice flour, but wheat or other flours work fine) and water, mixed together cold at a proportion of around 1:8, or 1 cup water to 2 tablespoons flour, then gently heated and simmered for a few minutes, with constant stirring, until the liquid begins to thicken. You could also soak rice (or oats or other grains)

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and cook with extra water into a thin congee. After cooling rice paste to body temperature, add pepper flakes and pureed garlic-ginger-onions. Mix thoroughly. Taste and adjust the seasoning as desired. Then mix the sauce with rinsed vegetables. After the ingredients are well mixed, taste and add salt or other seasonings as desired. Taste and adjust again after a day or two. While kimchi may be extremely spicy, it is also made in varieties with little or no spice. Not all kimchi is hot, writes Chris Calentine. Many varieties, called mul or water kimchi, have no hot peppers, or very little. Echo Kim emailed to tell me about her white kimchi, with lots of radishes and no hot pepper at all in the starchy base. Its considered a cooling summer kimchi, its sweet. Of course, every rule may be broken. My mom puts in a little red pepper flakes so that it has a zesty tang and it turns a light milky pink. Thats her special touch/flair. A further quality characterizing many popular styles of kimchi is limited acidity. This requires a shorter fermentation time and/or fermentation in a cooler spot. Tests show that the best taste is attained after 3 days of fermentation at 20C [68F] with 3 percent salt, report a team of Korean academics. In the succession of organisms that characterize vegetable ferments from the early-stage Leuconostoc mesenteroides to the later, more acid-tolerant Lactobacillus plantarum (see Lactic Acid Bacteria earlier in this chapter), kimchi is typically associated with the early-stage activity. The data indicate that L. mesenteroides is the important microorganism responsible for kimchi fermentation, whereas Lactobacillus plantarum, which is considered to be responsible for making sauerkraut, deteriorates the quality of kimchi.22 The fizziness associated with some kimchis is a result of heavy carbon dioxide production in the early stages of fermentation. As the environment becomes more acidic, continued fermentation produces less CO2. A good way to get a fizzy kimchi is to ferment it in jars for one to three days at room temperature; then seal the jars and store in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks, where fermentation continues slowly and the kimchi accumulates trapped CO2, resulting in effervescent release when the jars are opened.

Chinese Pickling
Kimchi, sauerkraut, and most other styles of fermented vegetables are widely recognized as having been inspired by practices that originated in China, where diverse traditions of vegetable fermentation continue. In that vast nation, each province is associated with specific vegetable ferments. Some of the styles call for starters, including chiang, similar to Japanese miso, and chh, the Chinese mixed fungal and bacterial culture essential to rice beverages and many other ferments (see chapter 10, Growing Mold Cultures). Some styles are dry-salted, while others are fermented in brine. Some vegetable ferments use thin rice gruel (congee) as a medium, or add starchy water that has been used to wash rice.23

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