A Festive Ferment: Books & Arts

COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS
CH E MISTRY
A festive ferment
Harold McGee surveys a seething array of microbially transformed treats —
from beard beer and grasshopper sauce to extreme herring and armpit cheese.
R
are is the holiday meal that does not thrive on sugars in nutrient-rich materi- by breaking down flavourless macromol-
CUCUMBER: WESTEND61/ALAMY; SALAMI: MARC WUCHNER/CORBIS; CHOCOLATE: OKSIX/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM;

KIMCHI: IMAGEMORE/GETTY; NATTO: TAKAO ONOZATO/AFLO/GETTY; SOY SAUCE: EMMANUEL LATTES/ALAMY
owe many of its pleasures to invis- als such as plant tissues and animal secre- ecules — starch, proteins and fats — into
ible cooks with tongue-twisting tions. As these first exploiters multiply, their component sugars, amino acids and
names. Do you enjoy charcuterie and pick- they release a number of chemical weapons fatty acids. These building blocks have
les? Bread with cultured butter? A drizzle of that suppress their competition, and so can flavours of their own and serve as precur-
vinaigrette on this or that? A bit of cheese? delay or prevent the growth of microbes sors to a host of other small molecules
Some chocolates? Wine, beer or cider? that spoil foods with disgusting or toxic that we can taste or smell. The food’s own
Then raise a glass to Saccharomyces cer- by-products. The weapons include antimi- enzymes can do similar flavour-generating
evisiae, Leuconostoc mesenteroides and crobial peptides, lactic and acetic acids, work from within in the extended time that
their ilk, the fungi and bacteria and alcohols, all harmless to us in fermentation buys them. Eventually these
that do the real work of turning moderation and some addic- changes go too far and the food becomes
blandness into piquant delight. tively appealing. So shredded unappealing — effectively spoiled. That
As a technology rather than cabbage and milk readily point is hard to define, and foods such as
a metabolic mode, fermenta- turn sour, crushed fruits get Chinese stinky tofu and Swedish surström-
tion is the managed micro- heady, and instead of the ming, or extreme herring, delight fans by
bial transformation of raw putrid and inedible, we end flirting with it.
plant and animal materials up with sauerkraut, clab-
into foods that resist spoilage. bered milk and wine. MICROBIAL TEAMWORK
Above all, it has been a method Today we easily preserve Food fermentations generally involve a
of preserving the bounty of a har- raw foods simply by chilling community of various microbes growing
vest or hunt for nourishment in leaner or freezing them, which slows all at the same time or in succession, but it is
times. Peoples across the planet have applied biological activity. Yet fermented foods convenient to group them loosely by domi-
it to nearly everything edible, from fruits, remain popular because they offer inten- nant organisms. By far the largest group of
vegetables, meats and milks to animal hides sified, complex flavours. Stilton is more fermentations uses the lactic acid bacteria
in the Sudan and fish heads in the Arctic. savoury than a spoonful of milk, chorizo or LAB, most of which associate with plants
The most common food fermenta- tastier than steak tartare. The microbes and secrete pleasantly tart lactic acid. The
tions develop spontaneously, because the themselves generate complexity by turn- LAB produce an impressive array of our
microbes responsible are ubiquitous and ing sugars into acids and alcohols, and favourite foods. Among them are yogurt,
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© 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT
Delicacies in which fermentation plays a part include, left to right:

pickled cucumber; salami; chocolate; Korean kimchi, or pickled
cabbage; Japanese natto, or fermented soya beans; and soy sauce.
cheese and cultured creams such as crème leavened breads, from Ethiopian injera to do-it-yourselfers
fraiche; sauerkraut, Korean kimchi and other Italian panettone. have kept home
pickled vegetables; dry-cured salamis and A third group is based on an Asian fermentation alive,
similar sausages; Asian fish sauces; and the method for fermenting starchy foods, and in recent years
rice–lentil batters for two South Indian and mainly the seeds of grains and legumes, foodies and artisans
Sri Lankan specialities, the crêpe-like dosa which yeasts and LAB cannot utilize have been rediscovering
and plump idli. directly. Some time before the second cen- its magic. Pickles and vinegars
A second main group of food fermenta- tury bc, Chinese brewers domesticated are especially straightforward to
tions stems from the yeasts, pre-eminently a species of Aspergillus mould to convert craft, and their variations and labels
S. cerevisiae, which produce alcohols and the starch into fermentable sugars, at the seem to be growing logarithmically — as
carbon dioxide from fruit juices and other same time generating its own distinctive is the baffling popularity of kombucha,
sugar-rich liquids: hence wine and beer aromas. It is with the help of this Aspergil- sweetened tea fermented with what is
and their distillates, brandies and whis- lus culture, called qu in China and koji in known among enthusiasts as a SCOBY.
kies. If given the chance, certain bacteria Japan, that sake and other alcohols are made These symbiotic communities of bacteria
will feed on alcohol, produce acetic acid, from rice. It is also how miso paste and soy and yeasts are solid cellulosic aggregates
and turn wine into vinegar — or transform sauces including tamari are made from soya that have been found to include as many as
bland and astringent cocoa beans in their beans and grains. Because Western brew- 20 microbial genera. In my experience, too
fermented fruit pulp into the makings of ers have always prepared grains very dif- many cooks. I am partial to flavoured sau-
richly flavoured chocolate. In thick doughs ferently, by ‘malting’ or partly germinating erkrauts (beets and ginger, Indian spices)
and batters made from grain, which con- them to develop their own starch-digesting and local fresh natto, soya beans fermented
tain enough sugar to support only limited enzymes, the koji fermentation has been lit- and made slimy by Bacillus subtilis, much
yeast growth, the alcohols get cooked out tle known outside Asia until the past decade. superior to frozen imports.
and it is the gas that Professional cooks have also caught
NATURE.COM matters. It turns the MODERN REVIVAL the fermenting bug, with restaurants now
For a Nature Podcast dense mass into a Today’s manufactured versions of fer- proudly offering their own distinctive pick-
on fermented foods, light foam with a mented foods are often just approxi- les and cured meats. And a handful of pro-
see: structure that is stabi- mated: many ‘pickles’ are just vegetables grammatically innovative restaurants have
go.nature.com/elfmp6 lized by heat to make drenched in acids such as vinegar. But successfully adapted koji fermentation
1 9 / 2 6 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 3 | VO L 5 0 4 | NAT U R E | 3 7 3
COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS
to Western ingredients. In New York
CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIB.

City, the Momofuku restaurant group’s
Culinary Lab has focused on miso- and
tamari-like pastes and sauces made from
non-soya bases such as cashews, pista-
chios, chickpeas and spelt. Copenha-
gen’s renowned Noma and the affiliated
Nordic Food Lab have had good results
with a yellow-pea ‘peaso’, a barley koji
roasted to a chocolate brown and ver-
sions of fish sauces made from grasshop-
pers and from koji-treated beef.
These experiments with fusion fer-
mentation are probably just a taste of
things to come. The James Beard Foun-
dation, a New
Yo r k - b a s e d “Provocation
o r g a n i z a t i o n rather than
of professional flavour has
chefs, gave its motivated
award for the experiments
best reference with what
book of 2013 might be called
to Sandor Ellix personal
Katz’s 500-page fermentation.”
The Art of Fer-
mentation (Chelsea Green Publishing),
a jaw-dropping survey of possibilities
from abará (Nigerian steamed or boiled
fermented cowpeas) to zur (Polish sour
rye porridge soup).
Outside the restaurant world, provo-
cation rather than flavour has motivated
experiments with what might be called
personal fermentation. After the Rogue
Ales brewery in Newport, Oregon, failed
to find beerworthy wild yeasts in its hop
yard, it turned to a different local niche:
a strain cultured from the brewmaster’s
hair follicles now goes into the making
of its speciality Beard Beer. And not-
ing that we regularly devastate our own
microbiome to suppress its produc-
tion of the same odours that we enjoy
in fermented foods, biologist Christina
Agapakis and artist Sissel Tolaas have
developed an exhibit to help us to bet-
ter appreciate our unsanitized selves:
cheeses made from milk inoculated with
swabs of volunteers’ hands, feet, noses
and armpits (see A. King Nature 503,
196; 2013).
After a centuries-long stationary
phase during which traditional food cul-
tures slowly developed in isolation from
each other, the world crock has been
stirred and things are really bubbling. A forest of the Carboniferous period as depicted in The Fairy-Land of Science.
Will new fermentations grace our future
holiday spreads? Even the possibility is ED U CATI O N
Fairylands of science
worth toasting. ■
Harold McGee is the author of McGee

On Food & Cooking and Keys to Good
Cooking, both published by Hodder &
Stoughton. Melanie Keene revisits two Victorian children’s science
e-mail: [email protected] primers that harnessed interest in the supernatural.
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COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS

CUCUMBER: WESTEND61/ALAMY; SALAMI: MARC WUCHNER/CORBIS; CHOCOLATE: OKSIX/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM;

Delicacies in which fermentation plays a part include, left to right:

to Western ingredients. In New York

CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIB.

Harold McGee is the author of McGee

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