Wild Fermentation
Bread. Cheese. Wine. Beer. Coffee. Chocolate. Most people consume fermented foods and drinks every day. For thousands of years, humans have enjoyed the distinctive flavors and nutrition resulting from the transformative power of microscopic bacteria and fungi. Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foodsis the first cookbook to widely explore the culinary magic of fermentation. "Fermentation has been an important journey of discovery for me," writes author Sandor Ellix Katz. "I invite you to join me along this effervescent path, well trodden for thousands of years yet largely forgotten in our time and place, bypassed by the superhighway of industrial food production." The flavors of fermentation are compelling and complex, quite literally alive. This book takes readers on a whirlwind trip through the wide world of fermentation, providing readers with basic and delicious recipes-some familiar, others exotic-that are easy to make at home. The book covers vegetable ferments such as sauerkraut, kimchi, and sour pickles; bean ferments including miso, tempeh, dosas, and idli; dairy ferments including yogurt, kefir, and basic cheesemaking (as well as vegan alternatives); sourdough bread-making; other grain fermentations from Cherokee, African, Japanese, and Russian traditions; extremely simple wine- and beer-making (as well as cider-, mead-, and champagne-making) techniques; and vinegar-making.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2010–2019years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For those interesting in fermentation in general, I can recommend the book "Wild Fermentation" by Sandor Katz.
- I just checked McGee's _On Food and Cooking_ (highly recommended, especially if you like Good Eats), and he's uncharacteristically vague about the effect lighter and darker roasts have on caffeine content. (The 2004 edition just mentions the weight loss during different roasts, pg. 443.)
I'm pretty sure you're right, though AB has been stubbornly wrong about enough things before that I prefer to fact-check him.
Also: If your love of kitchen science extends to mad science, you might also like _Wild Fermentation_ by Sandor Ellix Katz. Making sauerkraut, sourdough, mead, beer, tempeh, miso, etc. Best cookbook, ever!
- Yes traditionally oatmeal is soaked overnight, but how many of these producers of oat "milk" products will take the time to perform this extra step?
I first found out about soaked oats from _Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods_ by Sandor Ellix Katz, but interestingly it is an older practice, we now know improves digestability (excerpt from page 118):
> Oatmeal (or "oytmeal", as my father always calls it, in imitation of his immigrant grandmother) is the quintessential comfort food. It is soft and mushy, harkening back to that long ago time of infancy, when all our food was of such a consistency and lovingly spoon-fed to us. In early modern Europe, according to an article by Elizabeth Meyer-Renschhausen in the anthropology journal _Food and Foodways_, porridges were generally fermented and eaten as a "sour soup"[10]. Fermenting oats before cooking them not only makes them more nutritious and digestible, it makes the resulting oatmeal much creamer as well. For the freshest, most nutritious oatmlea, coarsely grind whole oats yourself when you are ready to use them, though steel-cut oats or rolled oats will work fine, too.
[10] _Food and Foodways_: "New Chapter Health Report", Elizabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, 2000
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