Alex Lewin - Real Food Fermentation: Preserving Whole Fresh Food with Live Cultures in Your Home Kitchen

Preserving Whole Fresh Food with
Live Cultures in Your Home Kitchen

ALEX LEWIN

To Mom and Dad,
who showed me how to eat and how to question.

INTRODUCTION:
FERMENTATION JOURNEY

INTRODUCTION:
FERMENTATION JOURNEY

I like changing things for the better. I am curious about how things work. And I think a lot about food.

I love the idea of transforming food, in harmony with nature, as it has been done for thousands of years. Sauerkraut, for instance, need contain nothing more than cabbage and saltno mysterious chemicals, no additives, not even any vinegar. So simple, yet so complex: Fermentation occurs because we seduce microscopic beings into doing our biochemical bidding, and they create sour acids that can preserve cabbage for many seasons.

I also love the process of making fermented foods. It is a checklist of gratifying activities. I go to a farmers market or a farm, chat with food producers, and pay them a fair price for their work. I think creatively about what food I want to make. I craft the food myself, using whatever tools are available, sometimes improvising, and I often wind up with something great. In time, I get the reward of eating itand sharing it with my community of friends and family.

When we make our own food, we regain some control over our livesespecially at a time in history when many of us feel at the mercy of events, governments, corporations, and industrial food producers. We also bridge the global gulf between the people who make food and the people who eat it, a gulf that perpetuates a grim litany of problems from famine and obesity to pollution, water shortages, wars over scarce resources, and deforestation.

I am delighted to share with you my passion for fermentation.

Take what you want from this book, experiment, and set out on your own food journey so that you might transform your food, your world, and yourself.

Each chapter has a specific focus. The first chapter is an overview of food preserving. broadens to other fermented vegetables. The remaining chapters walk you through fermenting dairy, fruit condiments, beverages, and meat.

Perhaps all you want to do is make fermented fruit chutney. With a typical cookbook, you might simply turn to the chutney recipe and follow it without reading the whole chapter. With this book, I encourage you to skim the entire chapter, or even the whole book, first! Knowledge is cumulative, and points made earlier in the book inform the recipes throughout.

People read books, especially cookbooks, in their own way. And many people dont want to be told how to read a book. But I do have reasons for making my suggestions.

If Ive done my job right, then the early chapters will give you information to help you understand why the recipes work, some peace of mind about why they are safe, a better idea of what to do when things go wrong, and tools to help you decide how you might or might not want to modify the recipes as you continue to make them.

Recipes in some chapters depend on ingredients that you make in other chapters. When this is the case, I point it out, so of course you can jump back and forth and read the relevant sections as needed. Fermented fruit condiments, for instance, require a starter, and making sauerkraut and straining yogurt are two good ways to get a starter. If youve already read about making sauerkraut and straining yogurt, you will understand the starters you need for making fruit condiments. If you havent, you might need to go back and read those sections again.

The more you have thought about the sources of your ingredients, the more satisfaction you may get out of a recipe, and in some cases, the better the recipe will workand the healthier it will be. For this reason, you may find it useful to read the chapter about selecting ingredients, , before you try any of the recipes. For instance, it is good to understand when chlorinated water can be a problem, along with ways that you can remove chlorine from water; when its most important to avoid pesticide-treated fruit; and the relative merits of different kinds of salt.

The world around us is in upheaval. News media report wars, pandemics, famines, financial crises, tsunamis, meltdowns, and other calamitiesnatural and manmade. No sooner have we digested one than we must attempt to swallow the next.

Our individual lives are in turmoil as well. Personal time has become scarce, as never-ending parades of distractions compete for our attention. The Internet grants us unprecedented access to information, communication, entertainment, and ever more compelling ways to spend our time and money. This same Internet erodes our privacy and quietude. Amidst all this, do we really have time to play with our food? Can we afford to spend hours in the kitchen and prepare our own food when there are real problems out there that we should perhaps be addressing? Or are we fermenting while Rome burns?

I believe that preparing food, with all that it entailsincluding thinking about it, playing with it, learning about it, preserving it, and particularly fermenting itis an exceptionally worthy activity, not despite the problems in the world around us, but because of them.