Why fermentation?

Culture your Food

I started fermenting after reading Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, full of good recipes and tips and stories. He makes fermentation sound like fun, easy, delicious, and political—all of which it is.

Political: Because our food system is premised on mass production, which favors industrialization, sterility, uniformity, usually at the expense of nutrition and flavor, reclaiming food autonomy by making food ourselves is a political act.

Easy: And fermentation is easy! Mostly, what you need are ingredients + container + culture (what we call the mold or bacteria—I like to call them my beasties!) + time! Sandor says that fermenting vegetables is even easier than making yogurt, which is already pretty simple. I just need to find a large ceramic or glass jar. And patience to wait anywhere between 3 days and 3 years!!!!

Delicious: Plus, my kombucha, soy yogurt, tempeh, nut cheeses, strawberry honey wine/mead, preserved lemons are delicious! They are my babies! Actually, I take that back. I didn’t like the preserved lemons so much, but I may not have had the right recipes to help them shine.

Fun: I like having a more intimate relationship with what I eat. By making it, I can tweak it to my taste. But more than that, I like the rhythm it confers on my life. Making yogurt and kombucha every week gives my kitchen life a cycle. As spring wakes after winter’s hibernation, so relive kombucha and yogurt creation weekly or biweekly in my kitchen. I find certain comfort in making patterns in my life.

One of the most personally important reason is that, through fermentation, I participate in fertility—in the most extravagant understanding of the term. Other people may have plants and pets. I generate more life by feeding my beasties at the right temperature. Cultivating life in the right environment is easy. My beasties are resilient. In fact, they kill the germs that would make me sick. After I eat them in yogurt, they become a part of my internal microfloral landscape and keep me healthy and safe. I give to my bacteria communities and receive from them. Is it too much to claim that we are accountable to each other?

You can hear Sandor Katz speak on Awesome Pickle.

Nutritional tidbit of the day: I knew that table salt was bad for me. In the talk, Sandor tells me why: table salt is so cheap because they who make it don’t make money from selling it. How do the salt sellers make money then? They strip natural minerals from the sodium chloride and sell the minerals to vitamin producers! That explains why unrefined salt, though less processed, is more expensive than table salt. But it is better to get your minerals with your salt rather than in pill form. It is always better to eat whole foods rather than processed foods—and vitamins are processed!

Image from howsyrface (totally crazy image, no?)

Nuka and Narazuke Pickles

Photo from kyotofoodie

I have been reading about nuka pickles, which is a Japanese method of fermenting with rice bran powder, water, and salt.

It looks like so much fun! Like playing with mud, but you can actually eat the vegetables after fermentation!

Unfortunately, with my schedule, I can’t make the time to turn the pot twice a day. One more reason to live with another fermentator as collaborator…

But the more I learn about the possibilities of fermentation and pickling, the more amazed I am. For example, I just learned about narazuke, an alcoholic pickle made in Japan! After sitting in sake lees for 1-3 years, I guess the vegetables can’t help it.

Bottling Homebrew Beer

Last night I sterilized 36 bottles and helped my friend F. bottle his homebrew beer, which he made from ‘beer mix’ he brought back from Australia.

At first he thought that it was contaminated with mold on the top, but I convinced him that it was just yeast.

Check out the dregs at the bottom!

I got to take home the last bottle, because it had so much of the dregs that disgusted F.

We taste in two to eight weeks…if the bottles don’t explode first!

Getting to Done: 5 lessons from Public Speaking

I gave a 5-minute talk on Friday about fermentation. I was really, really nervous.

Plus, I broke my 5-month long coffee fast. Drinking coffee was made worse by having to drink bad drip coffee—ug. All buzz, no flavor. No, no, no one talked me out of it.

So, spazzed out on the ghost of coffee + super nervous = BAD .

At least, it is now DONE. And I can move on to my next projects…

Five things I learned about public speaking:

1. Entertain your audience.

Not everyone is a nerd like me. Not everyone wants to learn about something new. I thought that sharing something I thought was interesting would be enough, but a lot of people just want to be entertained.

The audience favorite was a talk about making strawberry jam. He didn’t emphasize his awesome recipe. He was just really, really funny, which leads to…

2. Delivery can be more important than the content.

3. 5 minutes can be two lifetimes.

My heart literally stopped twice during this 5-minute talk.

If you want to live forever, try public speaking!

4. Choose your audience wisely. Choose to speak only to people who share my values.

Speaking live is intimate. The feedback is immediate whether people care or not. The bond you create with your audience has to be sustained for as long as you are on stage. Preparing something to which your audience will pay attention is much, much easier if they already are receptive to it.

In my case, I have a niche audience. My message is not for everyone. I should have chosen to speak at a food, not general, event.

5. Surviving public speaking for the first time ever in front of more than 100 strangers makes you feel invincible.

Poster by Joshua Rothaas, from Bre Pettis' Cult of Done Manifesto