Have you realized that almost all of the food we love is fermented?
Coffee, chocolate, bread, wine, cheese, butter, pickles, beer, yogurt, kimchi, salami, just about every condiment besides mayonaise …
The list goes on for the fermented food that we take for granted. Chances are, if it’s edible then humans have fermented it.
As cooking is becoming a lost art, within those of us still passionate home cooks, fermentation is becoming a lost art.
What is Fermentation?
Fermentation is many things to many people. It is a preservation technique. You keep milk from spoiling by making cheese. It is also a technique to add flavor to food. You make cheese. It is a way to change the nutritional content of food. The bacterial/fungal cultures that ferment food, are themselves eating the food and creating their own products. The bacteria used in cheese eat the lactose and make lactic acid.
It’s this final definition of fermentation that I like the most. Fermentation is a way to pre-digest food.
Fermentation is controlled rot
My Fermentation Journey
My journey started with a starter. Specifically a sourdough starter. I had just watched the Netflix series, Cooked, based on Michael Pollan’s book. That was when I learned that bread-making in the U.S. had dramatically changed in the middle of the 1900s.
I loved cooking from a young age. I had tried my hand at bread-making many times. When I was 17, I made an ex-girlfriend stay up with me all night as I tended to croissants that I was making from scratch and required 3-slow rises and about 24 hours of my attention. All my efforts were dependent on the success of an instant yeast packet. Usually foolproof, I managed to mess it up half of the time. I knew that packet was responsible for making my bread rise.
I didn’t know was that the yeast I bought at the supermarket was a rather recent human invention. Yes, perhaps unsurprising when you think about it, for all but the last 100-so years of human history there was no access to this perfect monoculture of yeast. So how then have we been making bread since well, the dawn of civilization right?
starter.
Starter or sourdough starter as most refer to is the way every piece of bread was made for thousands of years. Starter itself is a general term used in all fermentation contexts to refer to the culture of microorganisms that is used to “start” the fermentation of some food. Sourdough starter is the culture of yeast and bacteria that when added to flour and water will convert it into a loaf of bread. For most people, sourdough refers to a type or style of bread, but actually you should think of sourdough as a leavening technique. By that I mean that you can use a sourdough starter to make a french bread or wheat sandwich bread. The style of bread you make is independent of the leavening technique. That’s why there is no such thing as instant-yeast bread.
This recent and radical change I think must be linked to recent/current increase in gluten intolerance and allergy. Proof for this is rather hard to come by but it stands to reason that something had to cause humans to suddenly become allergic to the food they have been depending on each generation.
Going back to my preferred definition of fermentation as adding the nutritional value of food, my mind was blown when I learned that if you gave a person unlimited flour and water they would eventually die of malnutrition. But, if that person used the flour and water to make bread, they could subsist on that indefinitely. Fermentation really does make food more nutritious.
The lack of a real fermentation process for most modern bread is probably the reason that U.S. law required all bread to be fortified with vitamins and minerals.
Fermentation is about time and you can’t cheat time.