Latest news with #fermentation
The Guardian
3 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
How to turn unripe stone fruit into a brilliant Japanese condiment – recipe
Umeboshi is a puckeringly sour and umami-rich Japanese condiment made with ume, an Asian plum that's closely related to the apricot. It's usually made with ripe but firm fruit, which aren't all that dissimilar to the under-ripe and slightly flavourless apricots and plums found in most UK supermarkets and which make a great British stand-in for ume. Our global food system is a wondrous thing, but as a Slow Foodist, consultant and food systems thinker, I can't ignore the benefits of shorter food chains, from lower transport emissions and reduced waste to improved quality and flavour. Of course, food miles are only one piece of the emissions pie, but that doesn't mean they're inconsequential, and we ought to consider them alongside other contributory factors such as livestock production and deforestation. Many fruits such as mangos, bananas and apricots continue to ripen after harvest, so these delicate climacteric fruits are usually picked hard and green, and ripened in climate-controlled rooms filled with natural ethylene gas. It's an ingenious process, but it can produce floury, tasteless fruit with fewer nutrients. By comparison, local, seasonal fruits tend to be tastier and more nutritious, but if you're unlucky and end up with fruit that just won't ripen, you can either cook it or turn it into umeboshi, which is a fun fermentation project. Like most fermentation recipes, the essence of this one is very simple, yet it's still a scientific process that requires care and attention to detail. Everything needs to be very clean and sterilised with vinegar or alcohol. Also, due to their high sugar content, fruits such as plums, apricots and peaches are prone to mould during fermentatation, so keep your hands and utensils scrupulously clean. And make sure the fruit stays submerged in its brine, or 'plum vinegar', to help prevent mould forming; if at any stage specks of mould do appear, it's best to compost the entire batch. There are plenty of detailed umeboshi guides online if you'd like a more in-depth explanation. Firm apricots, plums or peaches A splash of white-wine or cider vinegar 18% sea salt – that is, 1kg fruit will need 180g saltA clean vessel with a lid A weight – a plate, fermentation weight or bag of salt, say) Soak the fruit in water with a generous splash of vinegar for a couple of hours. Using a toothpick or tweezers, remove the little stem from the fruit, taking care not to cut into the flesh itself, and save any bruised or blemished fruit for something else, because they're more likely to develop mould. Weigh the fruit, then measure out 18% of its total weight in sea salt (that is, 180g salt for every kilo of fruit). Wipe out a clean storage jar or fermentation pot with vinegar or alcohol, then start packing in the fruit in layers, scattering each layer with the salt. Put a small clean plate or fermentation weight on top, then weigh that down with a clean weight or a sealed bag of salt. Leave to ferment in a cool place out of direct sunlight for four weeks. Over the first three to seven days, the juices will slowly draw out of the fruit and submerge it. Make sure the fruit remains submerged, but don't crush it down. When hot weather is forecast, drain the fruit (save the brine for dressings), then lay it on a rack and dry in the sun for three to five days, until it shrinks and turns crinkly. Store the dried fruit in a clean, airtight jar. Traditionally, umeboshi is aged for one to three years, but to be on the safe side, aim to consume it within a month or so.
The Independent
09-06-2025
- Health
- The Independent
I spoke to the man who wrote the book on fermentation – here is his golden rule for gut health
Gut health has become something of a golden goose in health circles recently. With the world turning to prebiotics and probiotics to placate stomach aches (and many other ailments), fermented goods such as kimchi, kefir and kombucha are now the order of the day. Few know more about this topic than Drain Drain – the man many Michelin-starred restaurants have on speed dial for all their fermentation needs. He has quite literally written the book on the subject Adventures in Fermentation, out on 12 June. Drain's route to some of the world's top kitchens was far from conventional. It began with a chemistry degree in Bristol, followed by 'a few years in the dark arts [finance]' and then a PhD at the University of Oxford in materials science – a field which, as the name suggests, explores the properties, composition and structure of materials. It was only when he had completed this that a career in food came into the picture. 'I'd always loved food and cooked a lot, and maybe dreamt of becoming a chef one day,' Drain tells me. 'So I moved back in with my parents in Birmingham and realised there was a place for me as this kind of boffin who understood the science behind the food we eat, why things taste good and how you can make them taste better using science.' This innovative approach quickly turned heads, and it wasn't long before he was working with a raft of top restaurants including esteemed Copenhagen joint Noma. 'Over the last 10 years I've become this sort of secret weapon of the world's Michelin-starred restaurants ,' Drain says. 'I'm this guy they call up, then I go in and set up research and development labs. I typically work with ingredients from close by the restaurant, teach the chefs how to ferment, and we create these beautiful tasting liquids, pastes and fermented goodies.' In the process of experimenting according to scientific principles, he as settled on a phrase he believes encapsulates a health-promoting approach to nutrition: eat your CAP. which stands for 'colourful array of plant-based foods', with this method advocating for a diet rich in wholefoods from across the colour spectrum. This formula, he believes, is effective for improving your health, and the many benefits it holds, from increased gut microbiome diversity to improved mental health and immune system function. What is fermentation and why is it important? Gut health is trendy in 2025, and fermented foods are rightly seen as a central pillar for achieving it – but fermentation is far from a new phenomenon. According to Drain, the earliest evidence of humans dabbling in fermentation dates back about 13,000 years, and much of our modern diet is dependent on the process. 'The key thing to know about fermentation is that it's done by microbes; bacteria, mould and yeast. These things, and bacteria especially, have been around on our planet for billions of years,' he explains. 'They're really ancient, and they're absolutely everywhere. They're on you, in you and on anything you touch – phones are caked in microbes. We really are living on their planet. So, when you know that, the idea that we use them to make some food shouldn't be particularly remarkable or alarming.' However, the earliest examples of fermentation among humans would have been an accident, Drain says. 'Our ancestors would have been picking up a peach that's slightly fermented, and it would have become slightly alcoholic, so they'd have been getting drunk off fermented fruits and thinking, 'Oh, that was interesting'. 'But it was about 13,000 years ago that we know for sure humans started directing ferments and working out, 'If we do this process in this particular cave or under these conditions, we'll end up with something that's either kind of tasty or safe, because fermentation sometimes breaks down toxins. 'You could eat a berry that might otherwise be poisonous – it might have killed your granddad and your uncle, but you realise that if you put it in a particular place and leave it for three days, you don't die when you eat it.' And the benefits don't end there. Fermentation can also make the nutrients in a food more bioavailable. 'For example, the way the nutrients are locked up in a soybean means our guts are not well-designed for getting every single ounce of nutrition out of it. Whereas, if we ferment it first, we can break down some of those macro molecules, as nutritionists would call them, into a form where we can get more nutrients from them.' Just like the fashion world, the fitness space has trends which tend to dominate conversation for a few years. Currently, gut health is front and centre among them, but why is this worthy topic only now earning some well-deserved recognition. 'I think it's a convergence of trends,' Drain says. 'We're seeing this growing awareness of the gut microbiome because the science in that field is becoming more abundant. Then I think there's this desire to push back against ultra-processed foods (UPFs). People want to know what they're eating, and they are looking to eat more wholefoods.' He also believes the Covid pandemic played a role in the rising curiosity around gut health, with lockdown sourdough experiments sparking curiosity in the fermentation process. 'I think that opened a lot of gates to this idea of microbes in the kitchen,' Drain says. 'And as soon as you plant that seed, people realise that if you take protein off the plate for a second, and maybe carbs, basically all of the world's favourite flavours come from fermentation. 'Things like vinegar, miso, soy sauce, any alcohol, cheese, butter, tempeh – even chocolate and coffee are fermented. Our favourite flavours come from fermentation, it's just that we don't realise it because we've got divorced from making our own food.' '[Fermenting is] amazing for your gut microbiome, it helps you eat loads of prebiotic fibres and fibre in general, it's delicious, you can do it at home, it's really cheap and it's kind of fun – it's just a win-win,' Drain adds. What is the 'eat your CAP' approach to gut health and why does it work? If you want to eat a nutritious meal, you could do a lot worse than a colourful plate crammed with wholefood ingredients. But it's not just the usual customers of leafy greens and vibrant yellows that play a key role, Drain says. 'Basically, eat anything that's within the rainbow, then also add in things that are brown and black and white,' he explains. 'Obviously green is important, things like leaves, and red things like red cabbage and berries too. But it also extends all the way down to things like coffee and cocoa, which has an incredible amount of prebiotic ingredients. 'That's the stuff the gut microbes need to be fed in order to do their thing [such as aiding digestion and boosting the immune system].' However, Drain says UPF-heavy modern diets are often lacking in certain nutrients such as fibre. 'Even if you start with a diverse gut microbiome, if you don't feed the microbes the stuff they need, they're going to wither and die. So that's one of my takeaways from the book: eat your CAP. [You should] eat a colourful array of plant-based foods, which essentially means eating lots of different veggies, nuts, legumes and cereals is the way to keep your gut microbes happy.' For further gut health benefits, he also recommends adding fermented foods into your diet on a daily basis. But this doesn't mean you need to start necking kefir like there's no tomorrow, especially if you aren't convinced by the flavour. 'Start small and aim for consistency,' advises Drain. 'You could eat a spoonful of sauerkraut a day, or eat some sauerkraut one day, a little glass of miso broth the next day, a glass of kefir the next day, and some kombucha after that. 'Cycling through these things means it doesn't have to be this huge undertaking, because I know some of the flavour profiles can be a little bit strong for some people.' What are the benefits of using the 'eat your CAP' approach For most people, eating their CAP would result in a more diverse gut microbiome, and the myriad plus-points that come with it. 'There are associations between a more diverse gut microbiome and improved mood and cognition, improved mental health, improved immune function and improved digestion,' Drain says. This is an appealing list. To understand how improved gut microbiome diversity can offer these benefits, it is helpful to know the processes behind it. 'Humans are essentially a tube,' Drain continues. 'You put something in at the top, and other stuff comes out of the bottom. The game is getting as many nutrients from it as possible in the process.' For this reason, humans evolved to make use of microbes and their pre-existing expertise in breaking down proteins into amino acids, breaking down carbohydrates into simple sugars, and other functions. 'Your gut microbiome is this ecosystem of microbes that live in your gut, and everyone's is different,' says Drain. 'They get to live in a nice place that works for them, in the middle of your gut, and we get the benefits of them breaking things down and detoxifying things.' Research, such as this 2023 study from the University of Oxford, seems to agree that improved gut microbiome diversity is associated with better health outcomes, and vice versa. 'People that have some diseases, such as metabolic diseases, might have fewer diverse microbiomes,' explains Drain. 'Eating a multitude of fermented foods – things like kefir, live yoghurt, sauerkraut, kimchi and miso – that contain live microorganisms and might make it all the way down your digestive system into your gut, can help lead to that diversity. So that's one reason to eat lots of live fermented foods.' This is where the word probiotic comes in. You will no doubt have seen this term slapped on the packaging of supermarket stock claiming to be good for your gut, but Drain says it can be 'somewhat abused and misused'. 'It has a very specific scientific meaning, but fundamentally it's talking about live microorganisms that, in a known quantity, can have a positive health impact on the person that consumes them.' But probiotics are not the be-all and end-all for health benefits. Drain also wants to draw people's attention to postbiotics. 'Even if you eat fermented food that's been pasteurised, so there are no live microorganisms or probiotics in it, the remains of those organisms can also have positive health benefits,' he says. 'Sometimes, when you pasteurise something, it might break open the cell and the insides of the microbe can come out. Those molecules can also do really powerful things like trigger immune responses inside a human. 'There's been this obsession with probiotics [in recent years], but actually if you eat pasteurised fermented foods, the molecules that are left over from fermentation can also have amazing health benefits. We use the word postbiotics to describe that. So where, for the last two to four years, it's all been about probiotics, we're now talking a lot more about postbiotics.' Examples of postbiotics include supermarket-bought sauerkraut and kimchi, and there's a reason why their source is important. 'If you make it at home, it will be live and have lots of live microorganisms,' Drain says. 'But if you buy a sauerkraut or kimchi in a supermarket, it might have been pasteurised before it got shipped to extend its shelf life. Similarly, with some kombuchas, but not all, some kefirs, but not all, etc. 'People are passionate about live microorganisms, and they would say, 'Oh, you can't eat pasteurised sauerkraut, it won't do anything'. But actually the new science is saying you can, and these postbiotic elements can have a very profound and positive set of health benefits as well.'
Daily Mail
08-06-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE I've been arrested at the airport for eating fermented foods including 10-year-old butter and seal blubber - why I do it
The thought of eating any fermented food - let alone the likes of seal blubber or cheese - is enough to make anyone gag. But Dr. Johnny Drain, from Birmingham, has been doing so for years - having devoured everything from whale mouth and seal blubber to artichokes and stingless bee honey, all fermented. The chef's passion for fermentation - in which microorganisms such as bacteria and yeast convert the carbohydrates in foods to create a preserving effect - started as a child, when he and his grandma tried the process on yoghurt. He then took it a step further after getting a PhD in Materials Science at University of Oxford, combining his passions with food, working in Michelin-star restaurants all over the world. Ahead of the release of his debut book, Adventures in Fermentation, Johnny tells MailOnline: 'I had this real epiphany of like, f**k, everything delicious is fermented. 'And basically spent the last the 10 years of my life since researching fermentation, pushing pioneering new techniques within fermentation and also teaching.' But Johnny's love of fermenting food has got him into trouble at the airport on a number of occasions - due to the sheer amount of equipment he has to lug around, and he jokingly describes his suitcase as 'a cross between a drug smuggler and a bomb maker'. He explains: 'There are little sachets of white powders which contain spores for fungi that I teach people to grow that you can make soy sauce or miso paste with. The chef's passion for fermentation - in which microorganisms such as bacteria and yeast convert the carbohydrates in foods to create a preserving effect - started as a child, when he and his grandma tried the process on yoghurt 'And there's white powders, and then there's little machines that bubble air through things and temperature devices. So I look very dodgy.' Johnny admits he was even arrested at Gatwick Airport on suspicion of drug smuggling in 2020, on the way to Portugal, having just returned from Paraguay via Madrid. 'I got stopped,' he tells us. 'They told me they found traces of drugs on my on my bag, and then they had all of this stuff. 'And when someone asks you "So, what do you do?" And you explain to them, "Well, I just sort of go around the world eating food and helping people ferment things". 'They were like "Well, that's a that's not a proper job!"' Johnny continues: 'They were very polite. 'They said "Can we arrest you?" And I sort of said "Yeah, okay".' The chef was detained by police and given a full body scan to check if he was carrying drugs inside his body. 'I was formally arrested, and then they switched on this giant X-Ray machine,' he recalls. 'I went in there and obviously I hadn't swallowed any drugs. So they let me go.' With his connecting flight looming, Johnny was given a police escort to the awaiting aircraft, as his fellow passengers cautiously watched on. He laughs: 'I was flanked by these two policemen with machine guns, and everyone else on the flight was like "Who's this guy?"' Johnny has tried plenty of different fermented foods over the years, including tiny icefish in Japan, and canonical French cheeses in Patagonia. But it was ten-year-old butter that really left a lasting bitter taste for Johnny, when he tracked it down in Marrakesh. Describing the soured taste, he says: 'It really slaps you in the face, like a blue cheese, but with this bitterness and pungency. It's acrid. 'It's like this real spice that slaps the back of your throat. 'It's not for everyone, but definitely really interesting.' Johnny's debut book Adventures in Fermentation will be released on June 12 Although it's unlikely many people are going to follow in Johnny's footsteps of carrying around fermentation equipment, there's one must-have travel item he uses that actually makes things taste better. Johnny never flies without his Aeropress, a compact coffee maker, in his suitcase. He says: 'I just take that and a bag of good quality coffee grounds with me. 'And it means that I can be in the airport, I can be in the world's s**ttest hotel, and, instantly in the morning, all I need is a kettle and I can make an unbelievably decent cup of coffee.'
WIRED
07-06-2025
- General
- WIRED
Tech Up Your Sourdough With These Upper-Crust Baking Gadgets
Sourdough bread is one of the most wonderful things you can make with your hands, but it can be fussy and hard to get consistently right. These three new devices eliminate most of the guesswork. Courtesy of Sourdough Sidekick All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. I love making sauerkraut. I've almost always got a batch actively fermenting and another in the fridge, ready to eat. It's a project that can take a week or two, almost entirely hands-off once the veggies are cut and salted. To keep the active batch happy—it likes hanging around between 65 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit—I typically I keep it near the slider by my desk on the shady side of the room, closer to the glass if it needs to be cooler, a little farther away if it's cold out. Making sourdough bread, however, is a much more complicated process that involves different stages of fermentation that tend to like it hot. When you're starting a new batch of starter—the yeasty mixture that gives the loaf the bubbles to rise and the tang to light up your taste buds—it likes temperatures in the mid to high 70s to low 80s, what's affectionately known as the Goldilocks zone, not too hot and not too cool. Temperature control is key for the sourdough making process, and a group of new, recent, and forthcoming products that help coddle your starter and dough might just be enough help for people on the edge to become full-fledged sourdough people. In your home, finding consistently warm-enough spots can be daunting, especially for those of us who are newer or more casual sourdough bakers. While sauerkraut is pretty simple and forgiving, making sourdough is not. It is variables galore as you work to coax flour and water from separate states into a delicious risen loaf. This is particularly noticeable when you're in the week-plus project of creating starter, then keeping it happy for months or years. The variables of making and maintaining starter include weights of water, one or two kinds of flour, and the starter itself. It involves the temperature of that water and the temperature you store it at. Once you're ready to make a loaf, sourdough bread making is often a two-day process with multiple steps and techniques, wherein temperature control is critical in keeping the dough happy. A perfect sourdough boule. PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES Bread making isn't one skill or technique, it's a bunch of them, and each step depends on the success of the ones before it. Somewhere in there, insert a problem, or just a little doubt about what you're doing. Maybe your starter smells funny, or the dough doesn't look like it does in the recipe photo. Then what? Some problems could be the result of the last thing you did or a skipped starter feeding from a week ago or something else entirely. Happy troubleshooting! When you're an amateur or parachuting into it for the first time, failure or at least disappointment is part of the game. If this both heightens your desire to make sourdough and spikes your anxiety, you'll understand why pegging any variables in the process can help eliminate confusion. The first product that caught my attention is the Sourdough Sidekick, a collaboration between King Arthur Flour and FirstBuild, GE Appliances' prototyping and product development lab. The countertop device is available for preorder and is due out early in 2026. Keeping starter happy means feeding or 'refreshing' it, which requires you to combine a tiny bit of the existing batch with water and flour to keep the bacteria and yeasts in the mixture happy and well fed. Some experts even recommend doing this twice a day … forever … which is fine if you bake on most days and is way too much if you no longer work from home, are a busy person, or would just rather not be beholden to a little jar of yeasty flour and water on your countertop. The Sidekick's schtick is that you can program it to prolong the time between your interactions with it as it automates the feeding. It even has a mode where you tell it when you'll be baking and it will make sure that your starter is timed out perfectly for your dough and make a little extra to keep your starter refreshed in perpetuity. (Non-nerds, skip the following sentence: It can even turn your starter into levain for your bread and leave enough at the end to keep the starter rolling.) It also cuts down on waste and time spent cleaning by using tiny doses of flour and water during the refreshments. The Sourdough Sidekick Courtesy of Sourdough Sidekick I got a Zoom call walk-through on this from Rick Suel, engineering director at FirstBuild's Louisville, Kentucky, headquarters, and it's easy to see how the Sidekick could make bread making and starter maintaining easier. The machine looks and acts a bit like a fully automatic coffee machine with a flour hopper up top and a water tank in the back. The two ingredients are stirred together in the fermentation vessel, and the amounts are adjusted depending on ambient temperature. It's pretty slick. Brød & Taylor takes a different tack to achieve a similar effect. Its Sourdough Home ($119) looks like a shoebox-sized countertop fridge and it can hold starter anywhere between 41 and 122 degrees. For me, this meant I could hold my starter at 80 degrees, the recommended temperature in the recipe I used, and keep it there during the 10-plus days of starter creation. I wasn't finding anything warmer than 77 degrees next to my fridge, so when I was troubleshooting on day six or seven, I stuck it in the freshly arrived Home and didn't have to worry about the temperature being a factor anymore. The Sourdough Home Courtesy of Brød & Taylor The Home also has the ability to space out your sourdough refreshments, not by Sidekick-style microdoses but by cooling the temperature of your starter. Fermentation will happen at preferred speeds, but cooling the starter slows the process down, allowing you to refresh less. The first time I tried it at a lower temperature, following two weeks of daily refreshments, I set it to 50 degrees and walked away, sort of stunned to see it bubbly and happy 48 hours later, compared to how spent and flabby it would have been if it was held that long at 80 degrees. It was easy to see how something like this is appealing to both beginner and experienced bread bakers. Controlling the temperature is also extremely helpful once you start making bread. SourHouse, which came out with the starter-coddling Goldie a few years back, just released the DoughBed ($280), a heated, happy place for dough to rise, if you can afford that hefty price. Sourdough loaves often have two separate fermentation periods. The first, 'bulk fermentation,' is where the dough rises and develops flavors. Later, after a bit of shaping, it proofs in a vessel—often a basket—that helps it rise and ferment a bit more while formed in the shape of the loaf to come. The DoughBed is a pill-shaped glass bowl that fits over a heating pad and under an insulated cork lid. It helps keep bulk fermentation on track by holding the dough between 75 and 82 degrees. The bowl's long, flat bottom allows for more dough to be as close as possible to the heat. I usually do bulk fermentation in an eight-quart Cambro container, at which point it's either at the mercy of the ambient temperature in my house or I tuck it into that warm spot next to my fridge. I call it ready when it is notably risen and is both a bit smoothed out and bubbly. If you like that readiness on more of a schedule, the DoughBed's consistent temperature helps get the dough where you want it, when you want it. If you are on a schedule, you'll appreciate this predictability. The DoughBed Courtesy of SourHouse Of course, I put this stuff to the test, following Maurizio Leo's starter-creation instructions and his beginner's sourdough recipe. It really enveloped my life, becoming an oddly emotional roller coaster for someone like me who was not on the lookout for new hobbies. Leo breaks bread making down into eight main steps, in addition to the daily care of your starter. There is a lot to learn for each part of the process. When you're busy learning or getting better at a bunch of consecutive new steps, errors can compound, potentially not even presenting themselves immediately. Controlling a few variables helps keep you on the right path and I appreciated both the Sourdough Home and the DoughBed because they clearly helped keep things moving in the right direction. In the end, it was not bakery-quality bread I made, but it was surprisingly good and something I was happy to share. I have no doubt that using both helped make for a better final product. It's definitely possible to approximate the temperatures you're looking for with these new devices by putting your starter in a warm spot in your home like on top of the fridge, next to the rice cooker, or, the herpetologist's favorite, on top of a $13 reptile heating pad. (Hat tip to Paul Adams at America's Test Kitchen who turned me on to that one!) If you can get the right temperature consistently using one of those options, go for it. But if you are new to the game, like the process, want to keep some uncertainty out of it, and are perhaps on a bit of a schedule, you might want to take a closer look at them. They will take some of the guesswork out of your baking and get you to better bread sooner.
Irish Times
01-06-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Ten things you need to know about wine
Wine is made by fermenting freshly gathered grapes. It can be red, white, rosé, sparkling or fortified. There are no rights and wrongs. Nobody insists that you like carrots; it's the same with wine. You like what you like . Price is not always an indicator of quality. But if you spend €10-€20 on a bottle, it will probably taste a lot better. Good glasses make a difference. Large tulip-shaped glasses make wine taste better. Temperature matters. Serve a white wine too cold and you lose flavour (about 10 degrees is good). Warm red wine can seem soupy and alcoholic (aim for 18 degrees, cooler than most house temperatures). Learning about wine should be fun and not feel like an exam. Work out what you like and what you don't, and take it from there. Start by trying wines made from the most popular grape varieties and the best-known wine regions. That will give you a good idea of what you like and what you don't. Taking a few notes is a good idea. Matching food and wine can make both taste better, but don't get hung up about it. Not all wine improves with age. Most wine is ready to drink the day you buy it. Wines with screw caps are not inferior. Sometimes they are better than wines with corks.
