The Essential Book of Fermentation (3 page)

Within these regions, battles rage; populations rise and fall; affected just as we are by local environmental conditions. Industry thrives and constant defense is exercised against interlopers and dangerous aliens who may enter unannounced. Colonists roam and settle—some permanently, some only briefly. In general we have in miniature many of terrestrial life’s vicissitudes, problems, and solutions.

—LEON CHAITOW AND NATASHA TRENEV,
Probiotics

What is fermentation? It’s the process whereby microbes turn the stuff of one generation of plants and animals into food for the next generation of plants and animals. They do this by decomposing once living matter into its constituent nutrients to be taken up by living creatures, but also by enriching the plant and animal matter with their own bodies and metabolites.

Maybe a more appropriate question for us as humans is, Why not fermentation? As a way to preserve food and improve its nutritional qualities, the technique has been around for thousands of years. Actually, it’s been around for billions of years in wild nature. You can’t stop it. Milk curdles into cheese, grape juice turns into wine, and a mixture of flour and water rises—all on their own. Or, rather, by the action of unseen microbes.

When it comes to microbes, we’ve generally thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We pasteurize, sterilize, and can food by killing all the microbes that could spoil the food. These processes eliminate the microbes that spoil food, but also kill the microbes that improve the taste and nutrition of that food. My decades of experience learning about, writing about, and practicing organic gardening have convinced me that our lives are inextricably bound up with the lives of microbes, and that when their health is factored into our decisions, we all thrive.

You will find, as you read this book, that I often make reference to organic agriculture and gardening as a way to understand fermentation. Through my long association with organics, I’ve come to see profound similarities between what happens on the organic farm and in the organic garden and what happens in the fermenting vessel.

Canning food to preserve it is all about killing microbes and disease-causing organisms. Fermentation may involve some processes that resemble canning techniques, but it is a fundamentally different approach to food that encourages microbial growth rather than trying to squelch it. Conventional farming and gardening is all about killing, too, using pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and antibiotics. Organic culture, on the other hand, is all about stimulating diversity—the realization that good health in the garden or on the farm is a result of a strong and diverse web of life in the soil. The very word “health” comes from an Anglo-Saxon root meaning “whole,” and the whole system most definitely includes the microbes. Fermenting food for its health benefits is all about promoting a diverse ecosystem, too, only one that exists within us. Organic gardeners and farmers know that health is built from the ground up. They understand that if you feed the soil, the soil will feed the plants. This book extends that insight to say: Feed your intestinal flora and your intestinal flora will feed you.

The trick is to know how to produce fermented foods that are good for you, while preventing the growth of organisms that are bad for you. That’s relatively simple, as you’ll find out in this book.

First of all, knowing how to safely ferment foods is fun. It’s easy to find others who have this knowledge and share this passion (start online at www.fermentersclub.com). It’s geeky and it’s cool. But above all, it’s tasty and it’s good for you.

How good? Very, very good, in some surprising ways. The microbes that ferment foods not only make raw ingredients taste better and become more nutritious, they participate in the healthy web of life that lives within us and on us and coats every surface we touch. They float in the air and enter us with each breath we take, every swallow we make, and each bite of food we eat. And when they are happy, so are we. Many of the most delicious foods are fermented. Think of bread, cheese, and wine as examples. All are fermented and together they make a fine meal indeed.

More than that, fermentation involves fundamental processes that are at the heart of life itself in all its diverse functions. When leaves fall in the forest, they ferment and mold into soil-building humus. Yesterday’s leaves feed today’s trees, which produce tomorrow’s leaves, and so life begets life.

In nature, the whole is contained in every part, like fractals, which are shapes that can be repeatedly divided into parts that are smaller copies of the original shape. Think of the way water swirls down a drain and the arms of a spiral galaxy. A natural law or tendency is repeated through all creation, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. The laws and tendencies that create health in the soil of an organic garden or farm apply equally to human health, and to the health of the wild places, and even the health of the planet as a whole, and it has to do with the life that’s invisible to us because it’s too small—the world of one-celled microbes. We can see their effects in the bubbling of a fermenting tank of wine or in the blackening and steaming ingredients of a well-made compost pile, but they are out of our range of sight.

These laws begin with the simple recognition that all life must nourish itself. There are a few forms of life that find nourishment in inorganic chemicals—one thinks of the tube worms feeding on the ammonia and methane that erupt from volcanic vents in the deep sea floor—but almost all life feeds on the animal or vegetable flesh of other life forms that have decomposed through the fermenting action of microbes.

The greater the number and kinds of microbes in a soil, the healthier that soil is and the more able it is to promote the health of the plants and animals that live from that soil. That’s because in a natural ecosystem, all the available environmental and food niches tend to be filled. The organisms that fill those niches coevolved over millions of years, and their lives are tied together like parts in a complicated machine. When a natural ecosystem reaches its climax state, it is sustainable in perpetuity as long as the environment doesn’t change. It functions to its maximum. In other words, the more diverse the ecosystem, the more closely it approaches its climax state, giving the soil more fermentation power than a state where the soil is disturbed and damaged by the application of toxic chemicals. The more fermentation power in the soil, the more dead plant and animal matter will be thoroughly decomposed into its nutritive elements, and the plants that grow there will consequently be better fed and healthier. The more fermentation power in the guts of animals, the healthier those animals will be. And that includes us. And as we saw in the preface to this book, the more biodiversity in the soil, the harder it will be for disease organisms to break out and do damage.

That insight spawned the modern organic movement when Sir Albert Howard published
An Agricultural Testament
in 1940. Howard made the discovery that cattle grazing on compost-fertilized pasture avoided diseases that afflicted cattle grazing on land fertilized with factory-made chemical compounds—fertilizers that did nothing to add actively decaying organic matter to the soil. The key to soil health and the health of the life that derives from it, he said, was this actively decaying organic matter, or, as we identify the essential process in this book, fermentation.

In 1960, most fermented foods found in the United States were ethnic specialties, such as the sauerkraut found among the German enclaves of the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers in Pennsylvania. If you wanted to eat organic food, you pretty much had to grow it yourself, and if you wanted to eat fermented organic food, you pretty much had to ferment it yourself. But by 1970, a huge shift in public awareness had occurred. The National Environmental Policy Act had recently passed. The first Earth Day was held on April 22 of that year.
The Greening of America,
by Charles Reich, would soon top the charts of best-sellers. The back-to-the-land movement took off, aided by the digest-sized magazine
Organic Gardening & Farming.
From 225,000 subscribers in 1970, the magazine reached 1.2 million subscribers in 1980, and the folks who put out the magazine threw themselves a big party when it finally, after forty years, turned a profit. Fortunately for me, I was in the middle of all this as the magazine’s managing editor.

If I was going to write intelligently about organic gardening techniques and back-to-the-land skills, I realized that I needed to learn them. We back-to-the-landers also did some fermenting, learning to make beer and wine, cheese, tofu, and sauerkraut, and learning that farming was hard work and serious business, requiring knowledge of a wide range of disciplines such as botany, soil science, entomology, ecology, plant pathology, meteorology, and more, all overseen by a knowledge of how to turn a profit. Most of us eventually scurried back to the city, where we bought business attire and engaged for the next twenty-five to thirty years in making money and raising families. I was doubly fortunate in that my paying job was to preach what I practiced at home on my two acres in the deep country.

And now the great wheel of time has turned some more, and the helix of life is welcoming a new generation of people back to nature. This time the entry point is less pie in the sky and more actual pie on the plate. Here is nature’s grand scheme writ small and doable. An ever-increasing number of people are finding that nature works her wonders in the kitchen and in the basement, in jars and tubs and crocks, and that the very air is charged with sparkling bits of life looking for raw materials to turn into edible gold.

You can build your own health one delicious swallow at a time, strengthening your immune system, working with nature to enhance the quality of your food. There’s little you have to buy to achieve this, but quite a lot to learn. Hence this book.

PART 1

The What and Why of Fermentation

In this section, we discover the world of microbes and how fermentation is one of their most central functions for the support and enhancement of life. We see how we are connected to all of nature through the operation of microbes and cells. We gain a new perspective on the health of nature and the nature of our own health. And we discover the amazing roles played by microbes within us and on us.

CHAPTER 1

Fermentation—The Engine of Life

Nature uses the nutrients from past life to create new life for the future using the technique of decomposition.

With the fermented foods we humans enjoy so much, we catch the process of decomposition while it is still new and fresh and wholesome, at its most delicious, nutritious, and healthful for us. Not only are the ingredients in our fermented foods being opened up so their nutrients are more easily available to us, but the bloom of microbes in the fermented foods provide added nutrients as their bodies finish their work and spill their nutritional cell contents into our intestines. They do this at a furious rate. One bacterium can split into two bacteria and the two can split into four, and so on, so that within twenty-four hours, there can be millions and billions of bacteria from just that one cell alone. Many of these bacterial cells take a beneficial place within our digestive tracts for more or less time, depending on the type of microorganism supporting our digestive function where the process of decomposition into usable nutrients is completed.