Fermentation Resurgence?
I saw this article the other day and found it rather interesting.
Most of us still let others do the fermenting for us—we buy our bread, our beer, our bratwurst—but Kelly is obviously one of a growing group of home-based bacteria wranglers who are willing and eager to dive into the unseen world of microbes and do the fermenting themselves.
“Well, you know, I really had an interest in getting back to more real, traditional foods,” Kelly says about her path to fermentation. “And that kind of led me on the journey to finding more local, natural, organic foods. And from there I just kind of kept learning and decided I wanted to maybe make my own yogurt, and then I discovered kefir, which is like yogurt on steroids.” That eventually led Kelly to the impressive array of fermented foods in front of us.
“This is what people have done for thousands of years,” she says with a true believer’s passion. “This is how they preserved their food. In that same way it also helped them stay healthy and, you know, all this beneficial bacteria that are in these foods, the body needs that, and we’ve pretty much eliminated that from our modern diet.”
There seems to be a renewed interest in home fermentation, especially in the home brewing realm but it’s not limited to that. Katz’s book Wild Fermentation is a pretty good resource if you can get past his weirdness.