In the Kitchen

Accidental Bounty
By Kristen Davenport

It's possible that I come naturally to the art of food fermentation because I'm good at making a complete mess.

That is to say: I'm prone to leaving the milk out on the counter instead of putting it back in the fridge. I hoard apples in the fall to the point we could never eat them all, and then they start rotting in the root cellar. It was probably people like me--absentminded, easily distracted, with a strong hoarding instinct--who discovered the magnificent ways that the invisible microbial life teeming and thriving around us can help us make good food. It's almost comforting: Because I'm a slob, I'm a real natural when it comes to kimchi and bonnyclabber cheese.

The names of the bacteria are confusing and--I believe--often unknown. But they are the friendly flora, good for your gut, often the lacto-bacilli of yogurt fame. There are bacteria that love milk, and bacteria that prefer apple juice, and bacteria that prefer salty cabbage concoctions. And typically, it's not just bacteria at work; there are fungi and yeasts in many fermented dishes, too. These microorganisms take something that you might think of as "rotting" and turn it into health food.

When our family moved to a farm in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico and started producing our own food, I became preoccupied with finding ways to preserve it all. Who wants to spend all summer slaving over a bed of zucchini, only to run out by late October? I needed a way to have zucchini even in the dull middle of February. I want cabbage until April and garlic through May. If I'm going to work 12 hour days all summer, I want my grocery bill to stay low all winter. Canning is good for this, but it's a lot of work, and requires a great commitment to cleanliness and heat--stirring apple butter for hours, boiling jars, sterilizing spoons in scalding water. Anything that involves sterilization typically isn't so attractive to me, anyway. Sterile, schmerile.

In other countries, and other cultures, and in other eras, pickling vegetables--allowing them to ferment with a bit of salt--was a common way to cure and store vegetables without so much worry directed toward sterilizing the spoons. The Germans have their krauts and the Koreans their kimchi. In fact, to this day many Korean businesses give their employees an autumn "kimchi bonus" (sort of like our American Christmas bonus) so they can go buy the traditional autumn crops--cabbage, daikon radish, garlic, ginger--to make their winter's supply of kimchi. Before the advent of massive international shipping operations, it was hard to find vegetables in winter.

I was very attracted to the idea of kimchi when I first heard about this spicy Korean condiment. We grow a lot of garlic at our farm--more than 10 gourmet varieties--and a garlic and ginger combination seemed like a great idea. Chop stuff up, put it in a crock with some salty water, crush it with a big non-sterile spoon and let it sit on the counter. There, sitting at room temperature, it picks up natural microbes that wander along and the concoction starts to bubble and fizz. A few days of this and it's done. As mentioned, I'm particularly good at letting stuff sit on the counter for days on end, and so my first batch of kimchi came out marvelously: It was salty, spicy and crunchy, with only mild overtones of sauerkraut--a flavor I wasn't sure I loved--and I ate it by itself and with just about everything I served. I was, to put it mildly, an addict.

Similarly, after getting our first milk goat several years ago, it didn't take me long to figure out that letting the raw goat milk sit on the counter at room temperature caused it to separate into, well, curds and whey. It seemed suspiciously like cheese. So when in my random travels on the Internet I came upon the concept of bonnyclabber--a process of making cheese that basically involves putting the milk on the counter and leaving it there--I was ecstatic.

For centuries, humans have been letting food ferment to preserve it and make it more healthful. Food that is fermented is more digestible by the human body, and fermentation can often eliminate poisonous compounds in plant foods. There's pretty much not a food that can't be fermented; lactobacillus aren't picky. Give it a little corn gruel, and make Cherokee sour corn drink. Give it soy and make tofu. Give it shredded cabbage, and it makes sauerkraut. Indeed, the list of fermented foods contains some of the greatest delicacies of our human pantry. For instance: pickles, cheese, miso and wine. What more do you need in life?

But fermented food is scary to Americans. We are an anti-bacterial culture, obsessed with being clean. We have sterile kitchens and are not comfortable with anything teeming with microbial life. Better bleach it first! Boil it! Heat it to 160 degrees for at least 20 minutes! Irradiate it! Recent studies indicate that isn't good for us; kids who grow up with a bit of grime and plenty of microbes have stronger immune systems. And cooking fermented foods? Crazy. It's plain sacrilege, in my book, that most of the "sauerkrauts" in the grocery store (even in the health food store) are canned; that means they've been boiled. That means they've killed off all those marvelous live cultures that make the food so healthy.

Becoming a fermentation chef feels almost, well, culturally rebellious--allowing food to rot all over the place with wild, reckless abandon! Let the invisibles have a heyday in my kitchen! Let them decide what to make of this leftover carrot! As fermentation guru Sandor Katz says in his marvelous book Wild Fermentation, "Sometimes I feel like a mad scientist, tending to as many as a dozen different bubbly fermentation experiments at once." Indeed, last fall, I think I had four gallons of kimchi going at once (testing recipes), two gallons of fermented pickles, several gallons of hard apple cider, a five-gallon vat of chokecherry wine, some mead, a sourdough starter, various jars of kefir, some sauerkraut and sauerruben (fermenting turnips) all bubbling in my little kitchen.

I began to think a lot about living in peace with all the creatures around us, seen and unseen. Take, for example, the black widow spider in my shower window. For several years, I'd killed or removed the spider--again and again--and dutifully removed her sticky, nasty web. And every time one spider left, another moved in and built a new web. Finally, under the influence of a good fermented crock of radish-and-root kimchi, I decided to let the spider be. After all, if I could live with microbes in my kitchen, I could live with spiders (even poisonous ones) in my shower. She was way up high, out of reach. So I let her be, and was treated to many mornings of shampooing entertainment when a stray fly flew into her web and she dashed out to eat it. I named her Charlotte.

I don't know where to get really good kimchi around Santa Fe--although our farm will be selling it at the Santa Fe market by the end of this summer season, assuming I get around to jumping through all the appropriate prepared-food licensure hoops. I know you can get a raw kimchi in the refrigerated sections of some health food stores which is pretty good.
But kimchi is a real kick to make yourself, in your own kitchen, preferably with vegetables you get at the farmer's market or that you grow yourself. And here's the truth of the matter: There's no necessary ingredient other than salt. You can shred and julienne and dice and grate and slice any vegetable you'd like, mix it with some spice and salt. The Koreans often add some kind of very spicy chile sauce, or some kind of fish product--fish sauce, little shrimp--but I've never bothered. An Internet search will turn up a dozen variations on the theme--recipes that incorporate certain spices like dill and cumin, for example.

Then you stuff it in a big crock (I use one-gallon wide-mouth glass jars) and sit it on the counter.

Then you kick back and wait for the bubbles.

(Kristen Davenport can be found at the Boxcar Farm booth most Saturdays at the Santa Fe Farmer's Market.)