Fermentation
Part of our story at Clara’s Creamery is homesteading-like content. After all, Clara’s Creamery goat milk soap came about because I had dairy goats, milked them, and made soap! Craft fair customer conversations often wander into the topics of gardening, baking, canning, chickens and goats!
I am interested in food preservation. I typically freeze green beans, fiddleheads, broccoli, zucchini, game meats, fruits and sometimes tomatoes and tomato sauce. Every summer I pickle beets, green beans and this past summer I added pickled dilly carrots. I enjoy making fruit jams and jellies, zucchini or cucumber relishes, canned pears, spaghetti sauce and pressure canned moose meat. I do not have a lot of experience with drying food, but my husband makes deer jerky and I make as much blackberry fruit leather as possible, as we love it, it is nutritious and lasts for months. Fruit leather is a favorite hiking snack of mine. The last time my husband and I were hiking in the 100 mile wilderness portion of the Appalachian Trail, we offered a bite of fruit leather to a fellow hiker and it grew into a conversation about food preservation, fermentation and Sandor Katz!
Like many, my new “quarantine baking” skill has been sourdough bread! Our local grocer, Tiller & Rye, offered free sourdough starters from Ellie Markovitch. (You can find her at www.storycooking.com). In the past two months I have made quite a lot of sourdough!! I grind my own flour from hard white wheat, using a Nutrimill and have found the whole wheat to work very well in a sourdough. In fact, I have two bowls of dough rising right now!
I find fermentation intriguing. I began with kombucha but perhaps you began with sourdough bread! I am not a fermentation expert however I have successfully fermented a variety of foods and drinks: kombucha, hard & soft cheeses, wine, beet kvass, yogurt, apple cider vinegar, and several versions (cabbage, carrots, onions and beets) of “kraut-chi” (a word Sandor Katz, author of the Art of Fermentation, made up, as a hybrid of sauerkraut and kimchi.)
Fermentation has long been a means to preserve food. Other reasons why fermentation is popular are the nutritional and health benefits, food safety, flavor, and energy efficiency. I would suggest we go beyond these practical benefits and take note of any hobby, habit or process that takes our attention in a healthy way and gives purpose (and gives tangy, crispy fermented cabbage!!!). Integrating these rhythms into our lives creates positive effects on all fronts- sustenance, mental health, healthy challenges, rootedness, and creative thinking.
One of my beliefs is that we should all get frequent opportunities to learn something and to teach something. This is one reason I enjoy listening to children. It is one reason I enjoy spending time with older people. There is so much I can glean from others! Learning how to make sourdough bread has been a great example of this! I reached out to those more expert than me and in turn, friends have asked me questions as well! When fermentation is new and we are not sure how to determine if what is growing on our kitchen counter is a good result or something quite amiss, it is lovely to have people who can answer our questions and give feedback based on their experiences.
Watching growth is fascinating. Observing babies growing older, Taking part in a student mastering a concept, nurturing vegetable plants, propagating succulents and yes, watching day by day as a SCOBY, (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), forms on a new kombucha. Daily observation and tasting of my ferments is perhaps one of my favorite parts of the process.
What have you fermented? What is next on your list? If you are starting out, I would suggest beginning with sourdough bread! You can make your own starter with just flour and water. I would also suggest making kombucha! You can do add flavoring and also ferment to produce carbonation. I make yogurt in my Instant Pot and then strain it through a nut milk bag, as we like it to be thicker. The options are endless.
“The rhythms of fermentation have become a part of my life in a way that is so deeply satisfying, I feel that they’ll stay with me for a long time. Fermentation requires cycles of us, to return to, to inspect, to refresh and renew. Just as Shabbat comes once a week, so too do I renew my batch of yogurt each Saturday or Sunday, and check whatever is brewing under my kitchen counter. I feel grateful for the rhythms because they help me feel rooted in a world without grounding, and they help me engage with a past where humans’ daily lives were suffused with awareness of the cycles of our climate and our seasons. I feel grateful for the opportunity to cultivate that awareness in an otherwise thoroughly modern world.” -Blair Nosan, The Art of Fermentation.