Derek Dellinger - The Fermented Man: A Year on the Front Lines of a Food Revolution

This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2016 by

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Copyright 2016 by Derek Dellinger

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ISBN: 978-1-4683-1346-8

ON JANUARY 1, 2014, homebrewer and writer Derek Dellinger began a journey that would change nearly everything he thought he knew about fermented food and beverage. For an entire year, Dellinger ate and drank only products that had been created by microbes. Exploring the vast world of fermentation, Dellinger became the living embodiment of its cultural and nutritional powerhe became the Fermented Man.

In this highly entertaining narrative, Dellinger catalogs his year spent on this unorthodox diet, revealing insights about the science of fermentation, as well as its cultural history, culinary value, and nutritional impact. He goes beyond yogurt and sauerkraut to show how fermentation occurs in foods we might never have expected, and is at the root of many unique delicacies around the world. From foraging for living bacteria in the modern American grocery store, to sampling mucousy green Century Eggs in Chinatown, to an epic quest to Iceland for rotten shark meat, Dellinger investigates a realm of forgotten foods that is endlessly complex and surprisingly flavorful. With bonus recipes for readers who are eager to get off the page and into the kitchen, The Fermented Man is an adventure story, culinary history, and science project all in one.

To John Landis Mason

S TANDING IN MY KITCHEN ON J ANUARY 1, 2014, I STARED AT CABINETS full of food I wouldnt be able to eat for the entire next year. In the back of the pantry were cans of beans, jars of jam, boxes of pastathe same staples that haunt most pantries in America. Some of them may have first joined the shadows in the back of my pantry years ago, like the cans of various beans I never knew what to do with. All of them were now off-limits for my diet in their current form. The beans might be worth saving for some wild experiment, at least, and their powers of long-term preservation were worth noting. The pasta I tossed.

Everything I ate from that point onfor the duration of 2014would have to be fermented. With the exception of water, my sustenance would consist 100 percent of fermented meals and fermented drinks. For the next year, I would make myself the embodiment of the preservational and nutritional power of microbe-made foods, one of the oldest culinary traditions in the world. I would live off the stuffor at least tryuntil I overdosed on sauerkraut.

A few other containers remained in my lonesome cabinets: some slivers and kernels of various nuts, a bag of sunflower seeds. I wasnt sure if Id want to eat vintage seeds in a year, but I left them anyway. Maybe, I thought, I could throw them in some kimchi. The spices I left untouched. Spices would help season and preserve those foods I could still eat: the jars and jars of gurgling vegetables lined up on my shelves. Other cabinets and shelves, including most of those inside my fridge, were already well stocked with the many krauts and preserved oddities that would sustain me for my year of fermentation. These jars were far more colorful than the cans I was sorting out and discardingbubbling, alive, and vibrant with the colors of carrots, peppers, red cabbage, and garlic, which had for some reason turned blue.

It was the simple color of an unusual jar of sauerkraut on a grocery-store shelf that launched this whole project of mine. Many months earlier, I had been browsing at a natural food market with a small sectiona couple of brands, reallyof fermented veggies. I liked sour beers and kombucha and poured vinegar and lemon juice in my water sometimes just for the taste. I enjoyed sour flavors, but the diversity of fermented foods out there had never really occurred to me before. Lately, Id been cooking a lot of braised red cabbage, which gets a pungent, tangy character as it slowly simmers in its juices and a generous amount of vinegar. And on the grocery-store shelf was this jar of red-cabbage sauerkraut that dared to be a little different. Though not so fundamentally strange, after a moments thoughtwhy not make kraut out of a different type of cabbage? It seemed like this jar might contain an array of flavors I would doubtlessly enjoy, arranged in ways I had never experienced before. And unlike almost any other food Id ever seen, this jar was so very proud to assure me that it contained still-living microbes. We are so afraid of mysterious germs, of microbes we dont understand, and here this weird sauerkraut was boasting of their presence.

I had to try it out. At best, I figured it would just taste much like the braised red cabbage I already made. At worst, it would be another forgotten curiosity in my fridge. Im a collector of condiments, of any novel flavor I stumble across, though half of them go unused. Im always game for something new.

In the back of my mind, before I even opened the jar, everything was starting to connect. The same bacteria in some of the sour beers I brewed at home was in not just yogurt, but also sauerkraut? And kimchi? And cheese? Id thrown dozens of different ingredients into my experimental homebrewed beers to see how these new elements would affect the flavor of the liquid, but somehow, the urge to take the bacteria out of the liquid and dump it into other ingredients themselves, fermenting them exclusively, hadnt really occurred to me. The possibilities were fascinating. And endless. If sauerkraut could be so diverse and just about any vegetable could be fermented and there were all these fermented meats and dairy products out there well, you could almost live off the stuff, I thought.

I tried the red-cabbage kraut the night I bought it. It wasnt just the best sauerkraut Ive ever had, it was unlike anything I had ever tasted before. I was hooked.

From my struggles to find a fermented meal while on vacation in New Orleans to sampling mucus-y green Century Eggs in Chinatown to my quest to visit Iceland and consume the rotten shark meat that remains a national delicacy, Ive found that the world of fermented food is fascinatingly complex and endlessly flavorful. And while most of us may never wish to consume the really extreme examples of fermentation, the ultimate significance of learning about the microbes that make our food goes much deeper. As if creating new and exciting flavors from cabbage and dead sharks isnt enough, fermentation also unlocks all sorts of nutrients, makes foods easier to digest, destroys pathogens and toxins, and sends probiotic reinforcements to restore balance to our microbiome, the unique ecosystem of symbiotic microbes inside us.

At first, I didnt come up with the idea of an all-fermented diet intending to actually go through with it. It started merely as a thought experiment that I couldnt get my mind off of. With research, it evolved from a thought experiment into a real-world challenge. An extreme yet temporary dieta hard year, January to January. I felt that it would be fascinating for someone to examine the culinary world in this particular light, something that possibly no one had ever done before but which should be perfectly possible, if the supposed health-endowing benefits of fermented foods I kept hearing about were true. I wasnt attempting to address a specific medical issue. But for years I had been questioning much about the general America diet and floundering when it came to understanding what we were supposed to be eating and how we were supposed to be eating it.