hckrnws
The article mentions salt only twice, and sort of looks down on canning (aka, pasteurization), but the fact is that before refrigeration and pasteurization, salt was pretty essential for the long-term preseveration of many foodstuffs, from fish and meat to fruits and vegetables. People who try to do fermentations without adding the necessary salt (which allows the lactobaccillus type strains to win the microbial competition) end up with rotting gunk. A lot of online fermentation guides gloss over this, but that's why salt was such a valuable trading commodity in the past.
Another common claim is you shouldn't use iodized salt - this is apparently a myth as this article discusses, and that way you don't get iodine deficiency:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30166176/
And as far as this line in the article:
Stir up to three times a day, preferably with your hands: get those skin microorganisms in there.
I'm going to vote strongly against this mentality, because there's something called the fecal-oral contamination route which modern microbiology has discovered, and which we don't need to encourage. If you want starter culture, go to a store, buy some raw fermented whatever from a reputable supplier, and use a little bit of that instead - while wearing those blue food-service gloves. Come on...
As I understand it, lacto fermentation works so well because it’s very low tech.
Using your hands doesn’t matter. For the same reason that fermented stuff should be washed or sterilised before being canned (well, rinse the soil and dirt but that’s it). Once you’ve started eating them though (so after they’re done fermenting), you should use clean utensils, no double dipping, etc because it has a higher risk to spoil as you’ve introduced air in the vessel.
The organisms that ferment come from the air and the surface of the food you’re fermenting. If you use sealed jars that can outgas (so they don’t explode), the fermentation generates CO2 while eradicating all other bacteria. Mold cannot take hold because there is no air.
It’s a self caring process where you virtually can’t intoxicate yourself. Just use your eyes and your nose: if you somehow didn’t seal them properly they’ll go bad. And if they’re bad you can very easily tell: they smell and look wrong.
I’ve been lactofermenting all sorts of food and it’s a great source of vitamins, probiotics. It’s very very easy to do and it’s been done for millennia in societies where refrigeration didn’t exist and where we didn’t have access to sterile kitchen and utensils. It can also be done anywhere as you don’t need heat or energy. Only water, salt, and food. You can even use water jars instead of sealed jars (not sure how they’re actually called, they have a water layer to keep air from touching the fermenting food so it doesn’t mold)
> Maybe a thin tendril of mold sprouts out from the strawberry’s body. At this point, you can still eat it, simply by cutting off the moldy bit.
Nope, you can eat it like fresh Amanita, but you should not. Mold shows on the outside when the mycelium "saturated" the host. Cutting of mold is only fine on hard cheese.
> I'm going to vote strongly against this mentality, because there's something called the fecal-oral contamination route which modern microbiology has discovered,
Well that’s ironic given how fecal transplants are rapidly seen as a possible cure/medicine for many ailments. What we probably don’t want to encourage imo is an ultra-clean sterilized environment everywhere we go. Both are equally bad.
Fermented foods have been around for millennia, long before modern microbiology and food hygiene practices.
That tells me the microbial colonies are resilient to any harmful pathogens introduced by getting your dirty hands involved. Isn’t that precisely the point?
And for millennia people died from contaminated food even when it was fermented. Fermenting isn't a perfect 'kill anything possibly toxic' preservation mechanism[1], and even non-toxic contamination of fermented foods can make it taste awful/inedible. Given 'modern microbiology and food hygiene practices', why would you not mitigate getting things you know are possibly an issue (like shit) into your food.
I don't know about fermentation in general but there are at least three kinds of lactic fermentation that I have a few years of experience with and that do not need any salt to avoid getting "rotting gunk".
One: yogurt. Yogurt is boiled milk fermented with mainly two lactic acid bacteria, Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacilus bulgaricus. During fermentation the milk is held at ~45°C (the optimal temperature for thermophilic bacteria).
Two: kefir. Kefir is fermented milk with a consistency that ranges from a loose drink to a thick yogurt, depending on how it's made. It is fermented with a rich culture of bacteria and yeasts found in "kefir grains" (in truth, an exopolysaccharide that houses the community). Kefir is fermented at room tempeatures (around 25°C).
Three: cheese. Cheesemaking begins with a fermentation step where lactobacili and lactococci are used to increase the acidity of milk to speed up its coagulation by rennet enzymes in a subsequent step. Some cheese recipes include an additional fermentation step where milk is "cooked" to a temperature favoring thermophilic bacteria. In all cases, the bacteria of the fermentation culture remain alive in the body of the cheese and impart flavors to it as it ages.
In none of those cases does fermentation without salt result in "rotting gunk". Cheese in particular can be made without any salt at all and such cheese can be preserved for at least a year in a temperature of 16-18°C, well within the range of tempetarues one can find in natural caves, cellars or mountain creameries. My reference for this is my experience with making saltless hard and soft cheeses for the last trhee years.
Obviously, if you leave yogurt, or even cheese at room temperature for a prolongued period of time, they will go off, but that's not what you're saying, correct?
Kefir, btw, can "hold" at room temperatures perhaps indefinitely. Although it does tend to go a bit stinky, probably because yeasts begin to dominate.
Last year I experimented with fermenting chili peppers after watching the It’s Alive video series from Bon Appetit [1]. In particular I would spend time finding and photographing the gas buildup in the jar. A fascinating process overall.
[1]: https://www.bonappetit.com/video/series/it-s-alive-with-brad
I've come to believe that multicellular life is an art form. What we see as individual organisms in relationship are really extensions or dreams of the unitary cellular mind. We are Solaris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)
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A fascinating article but there doesn't seem to be any mention of alcohol?
Fermentation is a easy way to create your own fuel. (E.g. see https://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com/ It seems they have updated their website since last I looked.) It's easy, carbon-neutral, etc.
> Fermentation is a easy way to create your own fuel.
Not that easy. The problem is the crop growing and processing you must do beforehand, to get your feedstock for fermentation. I'm from Brazil. Here we have a large industry built around ethanol production from sugarcane. To this day problems like boiler explosions and people falling in sugarcane crushers are not entirely unheard off, and also poor working conditions in sugarcane fields. Not that easy.
Large agri-industrial ethanol production has lots of problems, yes, but small scale local production integrated with regenerative agriculture, as described and promoted in the example link, is a different system. It used to be common for farmers to "grow" their own tractor fuel.
Fermentation is a great way to create cheap or free fertilizer and garden amendments. Look up the works of yungsang cho or hankyu cho.
Crafted by Rajat
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