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16 December 2024 · Consuming passions
James Read is the founder of artisanal kimchi brand Kim Kong Kimchi (a Nigella favourite) and the author of Of Cabbages & Kimchi, a bestselling book on fermented food. In this contribution to our Consuming Passions series, James digs into his obsession and highlights fermentation-related books and recipes from ckbk’s collection.
By James Read
Fermentation feels a little like cooking and gardening, though occasionally like owning a pet as well. The act of bringing something delicious to life carries the same hungry pride as watching tomatoes spring forth from their flowers, but waiting for the bubbles to jostle up through a jar of kimchi requires less patience or fertile soil. Truly, of course, whatever ingredients you ferment have already been alive, so it’s a kind of reanimation (and the fizzing jars do evoke a cosycore Dr Frankenstein aesthetic). It’s more than just a satisfying hobby though, but a way of investing time when you have it (a rainy Sunday perhaps) to create a hot sauce, vinegar or sauerkraut, which can then be used in the following weeks and months to uplift a rushed lunch. At the same time, you are able to seize vegetables at their seasonal best and preserve them, thus reducing food waste (two-thirds of all food waste in the UK comes from the home) - especially useful for short-lived delicacies like wild garlic, which ferments beautifully.
I started making kimchi in 2016 for a pop-up restaurant and became obsessed, making more and more until selling it seemed like the only way to clear space. Making tons and tons of the stuff didn’t cure me (though chopping all that Chinese leaf may have given me RSI!). Researching and writing my book, Of Cabbages and Kimchi, sent me into a full-throated fermentation mania, seeking out more fermentation history, science and lore. I found myself digging through rare books about the 1884 burlesque Opera of Tabasco (which involved a papier-mache hot sauce costume), academic papers on the microbiota of a garlic clove, and deep into Russian YouTube to find a Gene Simmons impersonator terrifying children in order to advertise kvass. Uses for ferments are not limited to merely the culinary - sauerkraut has been used as sheet music and kombucha has been experimented on aboard the International Space Station. It is a truly borderless food, with footholds everywhere from El Salvador (with curtido - which sits somewhere between coleslaw and sauerkraut) to Nepal (with gundruk - fermented and sun-dried leafy mustard and radish greens).
Fermentation asks us to take a unique and radical approach to ingredients - one that goes against everything else we’ve learned about making food. Instead of scrubbing away, bleaching out and expunging microbes from our kitchen, we must invite them in. It is a technique that is neither novel nor voguish, but one that has been around for thousands of years (indeed there’s genetic evidence we’ve been eating ferments for millenia). History has honed it into a very safe and reliable practice for corralling microbes to preserve and enhance our food. Today it is a constant presence in our diet, used to make everything from coffee to chocolate and olives to cheese. But I want to talk about living fermented foods - the kefirs, kimchis and kvasses that reach our lips still full of living microbes, electric, effervescent and alive.
The world of living ferments is a wild and eclectic menagerie, encompassing not only a range of flavours, but a variety of techniques. We can categorise most of them into a few groupings - the same bacteria and methods are broadly shared by each church, whether it be lacto-ferments (e.g. kimchi, sauerkraut, olives - essentially ‘vegetables with salt’, which are fermented by lactic acid bacteria), vinegars (most booze can be vinegared with the addition of an acetobacter-carrying vinegar mother), non-alcoholic drinks (kombucha, ginger beer, tepache etc) or koji-based ferments (miso, soy sauce, amazake). I’d usually recommend people start by making lacto-ferments, as they’re really easy and work very reliably. But if you don’t fancy kimchi then tepache (a fermented pineapple drink which uses only the peel—see the recipe at the end of this article) is incredibly easy to make, as is milk kefir (though, unlike tepache and the lacto-ferments, this does require obtaining a starter before you get going).
Even having said this, I know making the inaugural jar can seem a daunting prospect if you’ve never fermented anything before, especially with the worry of how you’ll know whether it's harbouring the ‘good’ bacteria or not, but there are some fairly simple rules which will set you straight.
Weigh everything (especially salt).
Make sure any ferment that has a brine or liquid element (e.g. sauerkraut) is fully submerged in it.
Don’t open the jar too much (retaining carbon dioxide gas inside will stop bad stuff from taking hold)
Try to keep temperature stable (within 2-3C)
Once you’ve got your first few ferments under your belt, you can get creative - while the weighing and percentages can bring to mind baking, fermentation is much more forgiving of additions and substitutions (but don’t skimp on the salt, where it’s called for). If you have some leftover mango skins going to waste, chuck them in your next batch of tepache and it’ll bubble along nicely. Hot sauce is a particularly workable canvas for adding whatever fruit takes your fancy - peach, kiwi, cherry or plum can all rub along nicely with the chilli of your choice.
Kimchi is the queen of versatility though. It is, in its very essence, a fermenting practice rather than a single recipe - there are around 180 varieties across Korea, so once you have the essential process down it’s ripe for experimentation. A lot of people who are hesitant to embrace kimchi fear its fieriness, and though the most exported version (baechu or chinese leaf kimchi) does indeed have chilli, the pepper didn’t arrive in Korea until the ‘Columbian Exchange’ of the late fifteenth century, and the earliest known Korean cookbook predated this and included 38 kinds of kimchi. Dongchimi or radish kimchi is a particular favourite of mine - it works fabulously with the long, white mooli variety, though if you find the shorter green-tinted Korean type that’s even better. As a bonus to the deliciously crunchy vegetables, the resultant brine makes the base of a very fine cold noodle soup.
Once you’re feeling adept at fermenting all the fruit and vegetables you can find, have a go at a miso or soy sauce. The recipe in Of Cabbages & Kimchi for making your own soy sauce is, I’ll admit, substantially more advanced than anything else in there, but it is very rewarding! I’ve got a jar of it still slowly evolving after 3 years, and its complexity is hard to match (a 2020 paper posited that soy sauce cannot be described by the 5 traditional taste categories and needs 2 more). You do need to soak and cook soybeans, then inoculate them with koji mold spores and incubate them in a cool box for two days, before finally brining them for 6 months - but you will create something wonderful, delicious and almost certainly microbially unique.
Recipe reproduced, with permission, from Of Cabbages & Kimchi
Heat 1.2 litres of water in a pan with the sugar until it is dissolved, then leave it to cool until it’s just lukewarm.
Remove the leaves and base from the pineapple, then peel it, keeping its rind in long strips, and remove the core. Wedge the core and strips of rind into the jar so they’ll stay submerged – arranging them in horizontal stripes around the sides of the jar works well. (Keep the pineapple for another use.) Add the spices, then pour over the sugar water, making sure all the fruit is fully covered in liquid, and seal the jar.
Leave to ferment in a warm spot (around 22°C) for 2–6 days, checking once a day until you see evidence of fizzing (be careful on opening, it can be very vigorous). Once fermentation is under way, try the tepache daily until it is to your liking (it’s likely to take around 3–4 days total unless it’s <18°C), and then strain into the bottle, being sure to leave a couple of centimetres at the top, and refrigerate. It will keep in the fridge for a week or so, but open it every so often (over a sink!) to stop it getting too fizzy.
100g panela/piloncillo (or dark brown sugar)
1 ripe pineapple
4 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
You will need: a large (minimum 1.5l) jar and a large (minimum 1.5l) bottle.
James Read is obsessed with fermenting things. He's the founder of Kim Kong Kimchi, a company that's made tens of thousands of jars of kimchi distributed through hundreds of stores. His interest in living foods was born from developing 'zombie brains' from the florets of cauliflower kimchi for a Halloween pop-up restaurant.
Kim Kong Kimchi has given James the opportunity to build his own walk-in remotely-monitored fermentarium, write an array of fizz-related spreadsheets and address audiences from London's Chinatown to Copenhagen on the wonders of fermented foods. James has also recently been appointed Chief Trading Officer of the UK Fermenters Guild.
Writing Of Cabbages and Kimchi brought together James' love of food, science and stories, and allowed him to indulge himself in reading research papers on microbiota, hunting out ingredient origin myths and running A/B tests on fermenting pineapple cores.
If you are interested to develop your own passion for fermentation, check out Fermentation by Asa Simensson, Can It & Ferment It by Stephanie Thurow, and Brew it Yourself by Richard Hood and Nick Moyle, all available in full on ckbk. Use discount code FERMENTATION to get an introductory 25% discount on ckbk Premium Membership, which gives unlimited access to these cookbooks and nearly 1000 more…
James’s own book Of Cabbages and Kimchi is not yet available on ckbk (we’re working on it!) but you can purchase a print copy here.
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