“We will pray with those old druids, ’cause they drink fermented fluids,
waltzing naked through the woo-ids, and that’s good enough for me.” from Pete Seeger’s version of ‘Old Time Religion’
Fermentation, our most cultural preparation of foods, goes back over 12,000 years in the archaeological record. It’s been part of the human diet in every culture, in every part of the world, pretty much forever. Some paleontologists believe that Neanderthal people ate fermented foods hundreds of thousands of years ago. Fermentation is the process where microscopic organisms that exist everywhere in the environment digest food, break it down for their own nutritional needs and, along the way, improve nutritional qualities of food for humans. And! they retard spoilage while they’re at it. Unlike pickled foods, fermented foods (that haven’t been canned or frozen) are full of living organisms. That’s why you find them in the refrigerator section of the store instead of on the shelf.
In a symbiotic relationship between us and the micro organisms, we try to create the ideal habitat for them while keeping out other kinds of microbes that spoil food.
Fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy products, meat and fish are on the list. An easy introduction to fermenting is sauerkraut.
Sauerkraut
Ingredients: 5 pounds cabbage, 3 tablespoons salt. Shred the cabbage, sprinkled salt on it as you fill the bowl, grind it down with your fist to release juices, put it in a crock to ferment for a few weeks at room temperature. Put it in jars, store in a cool place. See the Cooperative Extension video link below for particulars.
Bread: fermented flour: Sourdough is easy to nurture but you have to feed it regularly with flour-once a week or so. If you travel a lot or forget stuff like this, getting yourself a few cups of commercial yeast works fine. Yeast will stay dormant and happy in the refrigerator for years until you’re ready to use it.
Sourdough bread
A ‘Conch’ in Key West is a local who’s stood up to relentless sun, bikinis, and enough Fantasy Fests to earn the title.* In Alaska, if you’ve stood up to snow, dark winters, no bikinis, and working the slime line all summer, you’re a sourdough. Sourdough is a living, immortal, yeast and bacteria-based organism that feeds on grains. Humans have used it for thousands of years to leven bread. Back in the day, prospectors–who were coalesced of 36 trillion cells–rolled balls of treasured living one celled organisms into bags of flour and ventured forth across the north to seek their fortunes. These prospectors took on the name of fermented wheat that kept them going and called themselves sourdoughs. You can get a fabulous assortment of sourdough starters from all over the world, or start your own with wild yeast in your kitchen.
*Speaking of Key West, a friend of my brother’s, a baker with a dream, moved to the Conch Republic from New York City with a plan to sell bread at intersections until he could make enough money to get into a storefront. In those days before TSA, the guy brought his precious sourdough on board in a suitcase. Halfway through the flight he became so worried about how the dough was holding up he couldn’t stand it so he opened the suitcase. It went, ‘poom.’ as the expanding dough did what dough does. He spent the rest of the trip trying to look casual as stuffed dough back into the bag.
Fermented meat and fish: The big worry with fermented/putrified animal products is botulism. Some fad diets today encourage eating raw fermented meat. Citing the Inuit as examples, one conservative gadfly claimed to eat only meat, “And I never cheat.” which is nonsense and he eventually admitted to eating other foods. You wonder how many of his followers tried to emulated his farce. While most of the traditional Arctic diet is animal based, there are libraries of ethnobotany of the Arctic. People traditionally ate berries, roots, grasses etc. They ate partly digested stomach contents of caribou. They ate some animal parts raw which helped them because cooking denatures essential vitamins found in those parts. They also ate marine mammals which have a different nutritional profile than feed lot cows. They also fermented meat which adds nutrients and makes it more digestible.
The acumen to ferment meat and fish is a steep learning curve. Some fermented delicacies may be fatal for some, but not all, people .There’s an emerging body of research into why some people are more resistant to botulism than others. It may be a difference in gut flora and fauna. It may be that more modern diets insulate us from getting sick but, at the same time, prevent us from being able to digest what our ancestors would have been able to. Nearly all cases of botulism in Alaska in recent times have been due to fermenting in non-traditional glass, plastic, metal containers.
Even with traditional processes’ and even with a gut used to eating fermented meat, there can still be trouble. The great Arctic explorer Knud Rassmussen died from eating kiviaq, a traditional survival food made from several hundred auks (small sea birds) sewn into a seal hide which is then sewn shut with the seam swathed in grease to make it air tight, then covered with a stone and left for months or perhaps a year or more, to ferment in sub Arctic Greenland. https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2012/02/kiviaq-auk-fermented-in-seal.html
Beer, Wine, Kombucha, Yogurt… it’s a big world in ferment out there. I probably should mention that nobody’s really sure what will be the long term effects of this wide rage of probiotics wrestling it out in our gut. For now consensus is that it’s good for us.
Since the internet is becoming unwatchable because of commercials, you may find as I have that a few basic cookbooks make life in the kitchen much more pleasant. Here are three excellent books on fermentables. What they have in common is the authors’ contagious passion for good, healthy, homemade food and drink. They convince you that you can do it, too.
Sandor Katz is the Pied Piper of fermenting kimchi to kombucha, sourdough to saurkraut, it’s all here. Byron Burch, as much as anyone, launched the good beer movement in America. His small, straight forward, book has sold over 250,000 copies. Laurel Robertson’s Bread Book is a gold mine of methods and recipes for the staff of life. I learned to bake bread from this book. You could live on her black turtle bean bread, and kids love it. That recipe alone worth having it on your shelf.
Julie Cascio UAF Extension Agent, shows you how to make sauerkraut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfPigCqKnI&t=2s
