An aging alchemy

“Sure, I’ll try some Kombucha,” my roommate Wil Shulba says, thoughtlessly strumming his guitar. The room is quiet as the guitar strings cease to vibrate.

“Wait, what is it?” he finally asks.

His eyes squint, expressing equal parts intrigue and caution.

“Drink it,” I insist. “It is an ancient Asian health tonic fermented using a bacteria and yeast culture in brewed black tea.”

He takes the glass and watches me carelessly take down large gulps of the seemingly-questionable liquid.

“It tastes like a tart, tangy, slightly-carbonated apple cider,” I tell him.

He drinks the glass.

“With a kick,” I say, and smile.

Kombucha is a sweet-sour tonic beverage believed to have origins in ancient China, and more largely, Asia. Other records would suggest Kombucha came from Russia and the Ukraine in the 19th century. Its common consumption has had much resurgence in parts of the world at various times, including a large American health fad in the 1990s. But drinking Kombucha is only the final stage in a more healthy, fun and historical practice of fermenting your own foods.

My personal preparation of this tonic starts with sourcing non-chlorinated water, rich with naturally occurring minerals (wild water), then brewing a little less than four liters of black tea. Let the tea cool to just above room temperature (bacteria’s favorite), then dissolve one cup of sugar into the tea (yeast loves sugar). Next, place the symbiotic culture of bacteria (Acetobacter) and yeast (technically: brettanomyces bruxellensis, candida stellata, schizosaccharomyces pombe, torulaspora delbrueckii and Zygosaccharomyces bailii — affectionately called a SCOBY), into the tea.

The SCOBY is called a mother, and it looks like a gelatinous, gross pancake. In just over a week (up to 10 days), your Kombucha batch will form a daughter SCOBY on the surface of the liquid, modeled into the shape of your glass or ceramic container. It is now ready for bottling or drinking.

Kombucha was only the gateway drug to a larger more elaborate culture of fermenting that has established a small place in my heart and palate. Currently, I have three liters of vinegar oxidizing, a batch of fresh yogurt congealing and a gallon of fresh apple juice waiting to ferment into a hard, alcoholic apple cider. By the time this paper goes to print, I’ll be dancing under the curing deer leg hanging in my living room, drinking and bottling up my first batch of Apple cider while adding the final ingredient to the vinegar — time.

“It’s the gift that just keeps giving,” said my girlfriend Jesse-Finch, of whom I am thankful for the Christmas present of the hard-to-come-by SCOBY and the book that has become known as the bible of wild-fermentation done home-style.

Reclaiming fermentation with Sandor Katz

“For me, fermentation is a health regimen, a gourmet art, a multicultural adventure, a form of activism and a spiritual path all rolled in to one,” writes Sandor Ellix Katz, a self-proclaimed fermentation fetishist and author of Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods.

Along with many other fears, Bacteriophobia is one of the more common symptoms of a highly sanitized, centralized and hyper-safety-oriented culture. As a result of this highly regulated society, primitive, sacred and traditional recipes have been monopolized, homogenized and centralized out of the reach of the modern psyche of common food preparation — and, along with them, the practices, health benefits and culturally significant ferments.

Mass marketing and mass production require uniformity as a means of regulation and therefore efficiency of production. And, in this equation, the lowest common denominator is often diversity, culture and taste. Wild fermentation, along with the larger encompassing movements of re-wilding, local food, or the slow-food movement, is an attempt to once again gain control over the means of production — or the means of fermentation.

Sally Fallon, co-founder of the Weston-Price Foundation, and author of Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats writes, “Wild fermentation represents not only an effort to bring back from oblivion these treasured processes but also a road map to a better world, a world of healthy people and equitable economies, a world that especially values those iconoclastic, free-thinking individuals — so often labeled misfits — uniquely qualified to perform the alchemy of fermented foods.”

Airborne culture

The very application of wild fermentation, which requires the wild yeast floating around in the air that we breath, and on the organic fruits that we eat, brings about a resulting product distinct from any other. Every batch based from the same recipe (or not, as there are as many recipes for fermentation as there are people fermenting) may yield a unique taste and/or nourishment.

“God, that must weigh 50 pounds,” says the man working at Red Barn Market, pointing to my acquired loot.

I stared at the rain outside and looked at my bike resting against the bike lock, unlocked.

“I know, eh,” I say, sheepishly.

He gives me a five per cent discount for buying so many apples, and we stand there giving all the apples the ol’ country-eye-ball-estimate on how many it would take to create four liters of apple juice. We exchange stories and ideas regarding the various ways to enjoy one of the worlds most widely-cultivated fruits.

Heavy sighs emit from my mouth as I pedal the highland hills outside of Victoria all the way back to my humble home for the first phase of my apple cider experiment.

Though I felt confident about getting into the world of fermentation, I pondered at length the hazards of home-brewed alcohol and haunting images of highly-technical equipment, temperature gages, bubbling vats, sterilization techniques and large factories.

“My advice is to reject the cult of expertise. Do not be afraid… Remember that all fermentation processes predate the technology that has made it possible for them to be more complicated. Fermentation does not require special equipment. Anyone can do it,” consoles Katz.

Recalling knowledge and working more for less

I can feel the streak of street water/mud drenching by jeans and back, sprayed up by my sleek tire speckling my face with dirt-dots. My mind drifts to a previous conversation with my grandmother as she recalled growing up on a farm in Balmoral, Alta. in the 1920s.

“We always had vinegar fermenting,” she told me. “We kept making it simply by adding water. It was a continual process done in a big crock with a little slimy thing in it.”

That little slimy thing is called the mother of vinegar and is composed of acetic acid bacteria and soluble cellulose. It’s non-toxic and often speeds up the fermentation process if added to a new batch of future vinegar.

It seems this wild fermentation practice is not so much a food “movement” as it is a return to our traditional practices of preparation and consumption, from a tangential moment in history of the mass consumption of convenience. Likewise, foraging, local, organic, re-wilding, food recovery (dumpster diving) and slow-food movements are simply a return to a longer, more prevalent, historical dialectic of food.

It takes me over 80 apples to juice about three liters of strained apple juice fit for fermentation. My hands are sore simply from chopping, coring and pumping apples through a juicer. The jug now sits contently out of direct sunlight, with cheesecloth over the open lid. I sit smugly across the room, staring at it as if I am under the spell of a Grade 5 crush.

More importantly, I am fully immersed in the processes that brings about the foods that (we assume) are conveniently available for cheaper than it is possible to produce.

“My grandmother used to make her own vinegar all the time,” says my roommate.

“Mine too,” I reply, as I place all 80 or so apple cores and scraps in to a giant metal bowl.

I pause.

“Why is it that I’ve learned everything from how to convert .jpeg images to .tif format, through how the socio-economic paradigm of modern society is inherently patriarchic, to the navigational skills needed for the Toronto subway system, but I have never learned how to make vinegar?” I ask in the kitchen, humming along with my roommate’s guitar strumming. “All you do is leave apple juice out for a couple weeks.”

The oldest story ever told

A honey wine called mead is generally understood to be the oldest, most primitive fermented beverage, and the foraging of honey precedes even the cultivation of soil. Pure honey is a preservative discouraging microbial bacteria, but when mixed with water it is exposed to natural yeasts in the air commencing the fermentation process.

There is no need for heating or fire in this process, so it’s been theorized that the consumption of this beverage may have pre-dated fire as our ancestors drank the curious liquid bubbling from a hollowed out tree trunk, and experienced its light-headed intoxication effects and sweet taste.

Levi-Strauss, cultural theorist and anthropologist, suggests that mead marks “the passage of humanity from nature to culture.” In his book From Honey to Ashes, he notes this transition regarding the role of the hollow tree, “which, as a receptacle for honey, is part of nature if the honey is fresh and enclosed within it, and part of culture if the honey instead … has been put to ferment in an artificially hollowed-out trunk.”

I pour three liters of warm water (with one and 1/2 cups of refined sugar dissolved in it) over the apple cores, and proceed to mix it vigorously and place it in the corner of the living room with a towel over it. This grants it open access to wild yeast, yet covers it from particles and insects with the same intentions as the yeast — to feast on the sugars simply waiting for time.

I pick up my guitar and join in with my roommate as I ponder what fermentation elation I might attempt next. How can I go to school to learn about Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of natural man, when I can be making sour dough starter, rejuvelac, kvass, berry t’ej, buttermilk, meads, rennet cheese, multicultural polenta, switchel, hooch, ginger beer, savory rosemary-garlic sourdough potato pancakes, sauerkraut, borscht, miso’s, kimchi’s, tempeh, coconut chutney, kefir, yogurt, apple cider, Kombucha, or moonshine — or perhaps even moving into the realm of fermenting meats.

It is all part of the do-it-yourself culture that has been reemerging in cascading phases since consumer-convenience culture has seen the writing on its own wall.

Personally, I have pledged to embark on a humble, mild, and wild restoration project with hopes of recovering conventionally-traditional knowledge and reestablish a relationship with my long-lost microbial friends. I pledge to resist the culture of fear pervading my very cellular composure, and seek to diversify and de-centralize the homogenized, over-regulated, pasteurized production-based market place.

Please join me, and expect to be offered wild fermentation beverages when you come visit me at my home. And do, please, come to visit.