What else goes into ferments? What gets passed around with the sharing of ferments?
Below is a relayed narrative that alternates between two fermentistas and their shared stories
by Emily Farr and Maya Hey
Montreal, for all it’s legacy and character, is a revolving door of people and restaurants. One of my chef friends moved to Hamilton, and I became the beneficiary of most of her commercial grade, industrial size odds-and-ends, including a 5 gallon bucket of honey. Having read the opening chapter to Sandor Katz’ Wild Fermentation, I knew that mead was a relatively simple affair: honey, water, and time. I diluted the honey with water (making quite the goopy mess) and let the ambient yeasts do the rest. As I was tying off a piece of fabric to the bucket’s opening, I thought about the rituals and environments that shape and surround fermentation. I started thinking about what else goes into ferments.
Living in Vermont in the summer lends to endless fodder for fermentation experimentation. I came home one September afternoon after a morning spent apple-picking and decided to try my hand at cider. Putting on a fiddle tune, I got to work peeling and chopping and pressing. I tucked one jar in the shady corner next to the kombucha, set another in the sun beneath the windowsill, and crossed my fingers that the right yeasts would work their magic. I covered both jars with cheesecloth and promptly forgot about them. Perhaps two weeks later, I went to bottle the kombucha and found the shady cider had turned to something resembling vinegar, and the sunny cider had bits of mysterious mold floating on top…
I recently had to save Gigi from a bout of mold after I’d left her unattended for a few weeks. You see, Gigi is the last living iteration of her human form; Gigi-the-human is no longer with us but lives on in kitchens like mine in her sourdough starter. Imbued with heightened stakes and a more grave sense of responsibility, I was keen on saving Gigi. Like a patient recovering from surgery, I was continuously monitoring her stats with my nose and neurotically checking for any mysterious bits floating on top. Just this morning, I spotted another bloom of mold on the jar’s inside, so I transferred her to yet another container, refed, and re-aerated.
I was leading a group of students through my baking process at a sourdough workshop when, unbeknownst to me, the baker from my favorite local bakery made a guest appearance. I sheepishly explained my sourdough starter maintenance routine: scoop a little bit out of the glass jar; add flour and water in equal parts; mix. The baker clucked his tongue and shook his head. You need to transfer the starter to a clean jar each time you feed it, he said. Baking is a science, he added, with every detail figuring into the do’s and don’ts of sourdough maintenance. My sourdough upkeep is more laissez-faire. My starter crossed the Atlantic ocean with me in the toe of my snow boot after I had originally adopted her in northwestern Italy. I feed her sometimes with bread flour, other times with ground up rye berries, sometimes with warm water and other times cold. When I see any bit of white mold forming on the sides of the jar, I transfer her to a new one to take on the character of whatever might have passed through that jar in its past life. She is constantly evolving, but always maintains a sort of sweet apple-y smell.
Wide mouth jars in Italy are hard to come by, so when I was bequeathed one from an alumna of the program I was attending, I accepted without hesitation. Like an initiation ritual, I brought the jar to my face. I could sniff out remnants of fish... And the smell of green. But the aromas were not unpleasant—more along the lines of capers and baccala than gefilte fish. I thought about the umami compounds left behind as resins as I gathered ingredients. I sliced some turnips and tossed them together with ginger, garlic, scallions, and chili peppers in a makeshift kimchi that I ended up sharing as part of my thesis project at the completion of my degree. When I graduated some months thereafter, I looked back on this wide-mouthed jar as a way to make the relay from one alumna to another, somehow bringing together full circles of food rituals.
When I inherited a beer brewing kit last winter, I couldn’t wait to start playing with it. But I only had four small burners, three medium pots, some second-hand hops, a big bag of barley, and a friend eager to help. We put on some folky jazz, threw open the porch doors to let the sunlight stream in, and meticulously (stickily, messily, haphazardly) boiled the wort in three separate pots. Then came time to cool the wort down, and we balked because we hadn’t thought that far ahead. We filled the small sink with ice and nestled the pots inside, laughing as the neighbor’s pesky cat rubbed against our legs and demanded our attention. The finished product—a sort-of-brown-ale—wasn’t very good (first beers never are, I’m told), but it was beer. It was more than beer: it was wonder and laughter and curiosity in a bottle.
On top of the pristine, stainless steel countertops of the R&D food lab stood an unassuming ceramic vessel which, to my surprise, contained heaps of oily fish and flecks of grain. Turns out this was a modern rendition of the Roman-era garum, or fermented fish sauce, with sardines and koji-inoculated barley. In other words, this was a double substitution: barley koji for rice koji, and today’s techniques for ancient praxis. I caught on to the idea of substituting fermentable ingredients by function and have been experimenting since. When I finished at the lab and moved to Montreal, I liberally used maple syrup as a fermentable substrate, tossing it into tepache, kombucha, and the like to jumpstart yeasts. When someone asked about the bucket of mead I’d made after my chef friend moved to Hamilton, I immediately started on a maple version of mead…
This piece was originally printed in Margaret's Mead, a zine by Culture & Agriculture & Friends. The full text of the zine can be found here.
Emily Farr is a Research Fellow at the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, where her work aims to engage fishers' knowledge in fisheries governance. She has milked goats in Vermont, worked on shellfish and seaweed aquaculture in Connecticut, and is an ardent baker of sourdough rye bread.
Maya Hey is a para-disciplinary researcher, foodmaker, and educator, combining her backgrounds in the arts and sciences to investigate ways that engage the everyday eater. She is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University (Canada).