{We are excited to announce our first ongoing contributor to the site, Jesse Frost of Rough Draft Farmstead. Jesse has graciously agreed to share his vast stores of fermentation knowledge with our readers. Hope you enjoy!}
Although you may or may not be familiar with the term, you’re likely more acquainted with the results of fermentation than you realize: it’s the pickles on your burger, the kraut on your bratwurst (maybe even the bread you use for the buns), or the dressing on your salad. Fermentation is behind some of our most famous vices—coffee, chocolate, wine, beer—and the method required to create everything from yogurt to salami, kefir, cheese, kombucha, and kimchi. With books like Sandor Ellix Katz’s The Art of Fermentation recently landing on the New York Times’ Best Seller list, you’ve probably been hearing a lot more about it than ever recently, but what exactly is fermentation?
To keep things as simple as possible, fermentation is the act of preserving fruits and vegetables by utilizing bacteria and yeasts to transform raw ingredients into a living product. And yes, unfortunately, that’s the simple version. But don’t get discouraged just yet. If you picked a cucumber and left it on the ground, you could expect it to slowly rot and disappear into the soil. Place it in a crock filled with salt water, however—maybe accidentally spill some dill and mustard seed in there—keep it submerged for a few days, and you have a tasty sour pickle. That is fermentation—you have taken a raw ingredient (the cucumber), given beneficial bacteria (lactobacilli) an environment in which to thrive (salt water), created a natural preservative (lactic acid) and turned your cucumber into a healthy snack that will last for months (pickles!). That’s fermentation, or specifically, an example of lacto-fermentation.
The other most-common type of fermentation is alcoholic fermentation. When fresh fruit juice, or almost any sweetened, non-fatty liquid, comes in contact with yeast, the yeast almost immediately starts converting the sugars in the juice into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Wine, beer, and mead, if it’s not obvious, are all products of alcoholic fermentation. Again, if grapes had their druthers they would fall to the ground and rot. Fermentation helps preserve the bounty and boost its beneficial qualities, which brings us to our next question: If that’s fermentation, what is all the hubbub about?
Put simply? Health.
Foods are not always easy for the body to digest—grains and soybeans especially. Raw soybeans have actually been found to be detrimental to health, whereas fermentation helps “digest the bean’s prodigious protein into amino acids we can more readily assimilate,” notes Katz in his aforementioned best seller. That’s why so many eastern cultures have some form of fermented soy product—miso, tamari, soy sauce, etc.—because fermentation helps to pre-digest food, often detoxifying, preserving, and rendering its nutrients more available to us—an act called bioavailability, and something at which fermentation excels.
Yet fermentation isn’t just about making food healthy, but making our digestion stronger. “The enzymes in raw food, particularly raw fermented food,” writes Sally Fallon, in Nourishing Traditions, “help start the process of digestion and reduce the body’s need to produce digestive enzymes.” Fermented products boost your digestive and metabolic capabilities, aiding you in getting the most out of your food, and breaking it down more efficiently. This is possibly one reason behind our cravings for something fermented with our meals, making the wine we have with dinner perhaps a pairing of no accident.
Digestion and bioavailability barely scratch the surface, however. Fermentation has been linked to building a stronger immune system, reducing your risk of cancer as well as many other maladies. As Patrick McGovern remarks in Uncorking the Past, “…it should come as no surprise that sugar fermentation… is thought to be the earliest form of energy production used by life on earth,” and that ability has been tapped by scientist as an alternative energy source and biofuel. It has been a part of our culture since the beginning of time, and we wouldn’t exist without it: fermentation also plays a vital role in human and some plant reproduction.
In short, I believe it’s safe to say we all maintain a pretty intimate relationship with fermentation, one which we’ll try and explore throughout this series in hopes to further refine its definition, evaluate its health benefits and provide safe, easy and fun recipes with which readers can experiment for themselves. Please feel free to send us your own recipes, questions or topics you’d like us to feature, and we’ll do our best to cover fermentation from soil to stomach in as many ways at it occurs. You can drop me a line at info AT sustainablekentucky.com or post your question on the Facebook page for Sustainable Kentucky or my farm, Rough Draft Farmstead.
This is so fascinating! I learned a lot and look forward to your future posts!
Wonderful! Would love to try your recipe for kimchi, so hoping you post about that in this series 🙂 Have you ever tried Vietnamese-style pickled mustard greens? So yummy!
-Jaime
Thanks, Jaime and Amanda! Indeed, there will be a Kimchi recipe up this fall! Got the cabbage, diakons, peppers, and turnips growing and praying for some successful carrots this year! Never tried the pickled mustard greens, but we should have plenty of those to play around with as well this fall!
Thanks for reading,
Jesse