OmVed Gardens’ head chef Jo March caught up with fermentation revivalist and author Sandor Katz to discuss environment, tradition and fermentation as metaphor.

Jo March: How has your explorational journey into the diversity of microbes been in general? How has the role of microbes in your life changed since you started?

Sandor Katz: I first started really thinking about fermentation and microbes about 30 years ago. But that just tells me that, for the first half of my life, I wasn’t paying attention. Like every human being, like every multicellular life form, I was dependent on microorganisms for the functionality of my body, even though I wasn’t thinking about it. If we want to take a long-term view of evolutionary biology, all people, all animals, all plants, all fungi, all multicellular organisms are descended from simple fermenting organisms. All the more complex multicellular forms of life, such as ourselves, are hosts to elaborate communities of single celled organisms as well as other simpler life forms. Bacteria and other single celled organisms are the matrix of all life. We’re very much interconnected.

Science did not specifically know of the existence of microorganisms until the late 19th century. But just because we didn’t know about them, [it] didn’t mean that we weren’t working with them. People in every part of the world learnt how to work with microorganisms on food so that, rather than decomposing the food into a disgusting mess that nobody would ever put into their mouths, they would improve the food in some way - making it more flavourful, making it more easily digestible, producing alcohol, making the food more stable for preservation.

My own personal exploration of fermentation began in 1993 when I moved from New York City to rural Tennessee. A lot of things in my life changed at that time. I started gardening and in the first season, I realised that, in a garden, all of the cabbage is ready at about the same time and all of the radishes are ready at about the same time. I was such a naive city kid that this came as a little bit of a surprise to me. In retrospect it seems very obvious.

When I was faced with this for the first time, I decided I should learn how to make sauerkraut. I knew that it had delicious flavour. I knew that it had certain benefits in terms of digestion and immune function, but I never had a reason to make it myself before. I did a little bit of research in books and I learnt how easy it was to make sauerkraut. I chopped up some cabbage and salted it and added caraway seeds and packed it into jars. A couple of weeks later I had beautiful sauerkraut. That made me feel empowered to experiment more and try fermenting different kinds of vegetables, to try making yoghurt and start a sourdough mother. I learnt how to make kombucha and how to make a wine with blackberries. I became obsessed with all things fermented and I kept being reminded that this has always been part of my life. I already knew that I liked to drink wine and I already knew that I liked to eat yoghurt and cheese. Suddenly, I was learning about how these foods are made.

I’m still and will forever be a student of fermentation and traditional food practices, but I also started becoming a teacher of fermentation. Because we all grew up in the midst of what I call the war on bacteria - how easy it is for people to project anxiety about bacteria onto the process of fermentation. I became very interested in learning how to demystify fermentation, and how to help people move through these fears. Fermentation is 100% a strategy for safety in food.

Jo: Absolutely. And I’m sure you’ve discovered that throughout your travels and experiments with fermentation.

Sandor: I am a food explorer. I’m interested in exploring frontiers of flavour. I think that, to some degree, our tastes are formed by our experience and we can let the experiences we’ve had limit us and limit the tastes we have. But we also can make the decision to open ourselves to a broader horizon of taste. Especially in our present-day where so much food is mass-produced - sometimes the foods are produced with a very specific flavour profile. Now contrast that with traditional fermentation, wild fermentation, based on the organisms that are present on a given food and in a given environment and there’s much more possibility of a wider range of results.

Frankly, this is one of the reasons why “pure culture starters”, using a starter that’s been propagated in a laboratory and is very standardised, has become so widespread. In the context of mass food production and mass distribution, people want standardised flavours. But in the history of fermented foods – thinking about the history of wine, cheese and cured meats – there’s a lot of variation. [From] place to place, year to year, this variation is inherent to fermentation. A variability of organisms which results in a variability of flavours and aromas.

Jo: What was mind boggling, when you travelled, in terms of flavours and modern versus traditional fermentation techniques? Have you seen families and people keeping the same ancestral techniques and infrastructures and developing different tastes by using the same techniques?

Sandor: Ultimately that’s what everything comes down to: special family recipes. You could have some food that almost everyone in a region makes. I spent some time teaching in Poland and my mother’s parents are from Belarus, right next to Poland. The pickles that I grew up eating are very common in Poland, but not everybody makes them the same. My students got into a very heated argument one day about seasoning in pickles. Turns out people have very strong feelings about it, it depends what you grew up with.

Some people feel like a pickle has to have dill. Some people say: “A pickle never has dill, it has to have allspice.” [Others say:] “No, it has to have garlic.” People grew up with different notions of how a pickle should taste depending on who their grandmother was and how she learnt how to make them.

I just got home a few days ago from the Faroe Islands, which is this small group of islands with 50,000 people living on them about halfway between Iceland and Scotland. There’s a lot of fermentation there, certainly, the traditional diet there. They use fermentation to preserve meat from sheep, to preserve fish and also birds and whales.

But what they’re doing is very simple. They’re not even adding salt. They have this very windy, cool climate and everybody has this little structure outside their house that they call the the hjallur. The hjallur has wooden strips with little gaps between them so the wind can blow into there and enable the food to slowly dry.

Because it’s these tiny islands in the sea, the wind is carrying salt from the sea. So, the wind is slowly salting the food that they’re trying to preserve. But the drying is very slow, so it’s fermenting. In the meantime, the salt is narrowing the range of what organisms can grow.

It’s a really elegant solution for fermentation. But if I tried to do that where I live in Tennessee, it could never work – it’s too humid, it’s too hot, it’s not windy enough. A lot of the techniques that emerge in different places can be very, very particular to the climate conditions of those places. And, of course, the food we have in abundance in different places depends entirely on the specific climate.

So, it’s not just fermentation, it’s every aspect of food. What we have to eat and how we can preserve it is largely determined by the climate of a particular place. Now, because of information being shared, because of technology that we have, people can, in certain cases, simulate the environments of other places to make foods that they’re interested in making.

It’s wonderful that we can experiment, but I think it’s really good to just bear in mind that the traditions derive from conditions that exist in specific places. And if we want to think about using fermentation as part of larger regenerative strategies, it’s not about creating incubation chambers so that we can simulate any environment anywhere.

It’s about really tuning in to our environment and [thinking]: “Well, OK, what foods are plentiful here?” If the climate conditions are shifting, how can we experiment in our gardening and our food production to see what might be easier to grow in the sort of new climate conditions that are emerging and how can we use these climate conditions to our benefit in thinking about fermentation and preservation?

Jo: At OmVed Gardens we’re trying to make miso, but it’s never going to taste the same as in Japan. It’s great to explore, but exploring your local environment is even more important because that’s something we’re often completely disconnected from.

Sandor: I would absolutely agree. But also, we’re living in this world of migration and, so many of us are also bringing the tastes that developed in our upbringing. I think we can work with the environments we’re in it to figure out how to incorporate processes from the places that we’re from to create hybrids.

These processes are extremely versatile. One can make kimchi with vegetables grown in the UK perfectly well and it might not be exactly the same as a kimchi made in Korea. But then, no two kimchis that are made in Korea are going to be exactly the same. I think that it’s fine and it builds on the overall diversification of flavours and cross-pollination of cultures.

Jo: There’s also something that opened my mind in your book Fermentation as Metaphor. I never thought of this idea of the state of agitation and excitement and bubbling. It’s this world that we don’t know about, of microorganisms, but it relates to our world.

Sandor: Since I first started getting interested in all things fermented, I would see the word “fermentation” used to describe a period of artistic expansion, a musical innovation, political change or cultural transformation. I always took notice of it.

In the English language, we have this expansive understanding of the word “ferment”. It can describe any kind of bubbly, expansive, transformative phenomenon and I thought that was very exciting. Beyond the significance of the food or beverage that’s being transformed by this literal phenomenon, any aspect of our thinking, our collective ideology, the ways that we express ourselves, any of these things can ferment.

Just as it’s such an important underlying phenomenon in the foods and beverages that we rely upon for our sustenance, fermentation is really a foundational aspect of our cultural life. Our culture needs this force of transformation.

Jo: Where do you think fermentation is going to lead us in 10 years?

Sandor: The most hopeful place fermentation can lead us is a place of greater engagement with the environment - that doesn’t stop at fermentation - that helps people become more interested in plants, in the soil and in the process of growing. And if they’re not going to have some sort of garden themselves, that at least makes them feel motivated to get to know some farmers, support some farmers, buy directly from farmers.

To me, fermentation is a way of becoming more connected to the environment. But it’s [only] “a” way. We need to connect to our environment through plants or animals, through microorganisms, through opening our eyes and taking it all in, through appreciating it, through engaging with it, through getting our hands dirty.

That will certainly lead us to bigger changes.