I’ve been doing some thinking about fermentation lately. A copy of the book, Wild Fermentation has been floating around the kitchen lately, and I’ve been thumbing through it for a few weeks now. There is a wealth of great information and recipes inside, and it’s inspired me to look into doing more fermenting of foods.
In the Bobolink food co-op, standard yearly fermented foods include sauerkraut and pickles, and this year, we tried fermenting some squash due to the sheer abundance of it this season. The process is pretty much identical to pickling cucumbers, and the results are very tasty. Amy of Bobolink recently fermented some onions, which I tried yesterday, and enjoyed quite a bit. They are very sweet and make a great pizza topping. All it took was some salt, and time did the rest.
My own fermenting pursuits lie in kombucha and kefir. I made my first batch of kombucha the other day in over two months, and I enjoy having kefir regularly with a bowl of oats in the morning. But I want to try something new. Flipping through Wild Fermentation, I became interested in amazake, a fermented rice drink. It requires nothing more than rice and a koji culture, which can be purchased from G.E.M. Cultures. The drink itself is very sweet and can be used in baking as a sweetener. While browsing on the G.E.M. Cultures website, I noticed they have natto starter, which is combined with soy beans to produce a very unique, sticky, stringy soy ferment. I’ve had natto a few times in the past at Japanese restaurants, and despite the strange flavor, it’s pretty tasty and I wouldn’t mind giving a spin.
But yea, there is something very appealing about the process of fermentation. It’s like a magical transformation of food that usually requires nothing more than time and natural bacteria. It’s like a science, but not necessarily a precise one, and it amazes me that just about anything can be fermented with relatively simple processes.
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