Built off-grid homestead. Then became Fermented Foods' go-to expert

It goes right through. Sandor! Hi! Glad you finally made it. Beautiful back here. Yeah, come on in. Welcome. And so, you know, part of this was an 1820s log cabin. You can see the old logs. So like, you know, this room is pretty much an intact log cabin. So 1820s log cabin was, would have, this would have been the outside wall. Yeah, exactly. But by the time I got involved in this, you know, the, it had been built on too. So that right there is water capture from the roof? Yeah, yeah. So you're not connected to the water grid? No, no, no, there's no water. There's no water grid out here. Really? It's that far out? Yeah. I mean, where would it be? I mean, there's like a house every mile. So, but we capture the water and we have three tanks. One is up there off of the outdoor kitchen. And then the biggest one is here. And mostly I just use this one. Like, this is the one that we use for watering the garden. Sometimes, like in September, that's gone dry. And then I just have to get another length of hose and then we'll tap into it. Tap into that one. Oh, but you barely need it. Oh, so you really have plenty. Yeah. And then that's our, you know, that's our power. It's just what we get through those panels. You're completely off-grid? Completely off-grid. No, no on-grid option. Heat? Air conditioning? Uh, fans. Yeah, okay. This is how we heat the house. And so that's all the heating. You don't have any heaters besides? Well, in the kitchen, we just, maybe two years ago, put in a vented propane heater. But we hardly use that. Like, that wood stove is so good. This is the chimney that's also part of the original structure. That feels like a very large... Was it a cooking chimney at one point, maybe? Or, I don't know, why is it so big? So it was the two sides of the house. So there's two different flues. And this seems to be what the 19th century log cabin floor plan in this area was, is like two separate rooms. You have to go outside to get to them, but they share a chimney. And, you know, what I've always assumed is that, you know, one generation built the chimney in one side, and then the next generation built the other side. Those aren't microbes, are they? Yes. So great. So you're just, you've become almost a chemist in here. I look at you with your bottles and I'm thinking, this feels like an old school pharmacist or something. I mean, but does it look like a laboratory? I don't know. It's just a kitchen. Could we look at some of your fermentations? Yeah, sure. This needs no introduction. This is kombucha. And this is the mother of kombucha growing in some sweet tea. This is juice from some water kimchi that I use to make soups. That's really delicious. Gochujang is a Korean ferment. It's beautiful, like sweet and spicy. This one is a classic gochujang that I made. And then this is my friend who was here in April, made this one using sourdough as one of the bases, rather than sticky rice and soybeans. I'm going to just take some stuff out of the fridge. I got interested in fermentation. On one level, I was always interested because like, I love pickles and I loved yogurt. There were like foods that I loved as a kid that I wasn't asking questions about. Is this just a fermentation fridge or you just happen to have it? This is just the only fridge I have. But you know, I have a lot of fermented things in it. I started thinking about fermentation as a result of health stuff. I tested HIV positive in 1991 before there were any effective treatments. So I was still pretty young and, you know, I was just thinking about like, okay, are there things that I can do to try to keep myself healthier longer? I lightly sprinkle salt. Experimenting with diet and, you know, live fermented foods was part of that. Sauerkraut has traditionally been used as a means of preserving cabbage and other vegetables. In addition to preserving the vegetables, it actually enhances the nutritional value of them. It populates them with living bacteria that go on to live in our digestive system and enable us to effectively digest all of the other food that we eat. Let's go to the garden. So, you know, it was really gardening that got me interested in fermentation. I moved down here in 1992 and I got involved in gardening. So this is my garden. You can see some winter squash. You can see my corn plantings with patches of squash between them. And in the next few days, I'll be planting beans that'll climb up the corn. So this is my, like, three sisters action. This is turmeric, flowering turmeric. Which actually gets fermented at times, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, really, I would say that my path to fermentation was through cucumbers. You know, I grew up in New York City. My grandparents were all immigrants from Eastern Europe, from Lithuania, Belarus. And I grew up eating the Eastern European style of fermented cucumbers. In New York, we call them sour pickles. Outside of New York, they're often called kosher dills. But the first thing I fermented was not actually pickles, but rather sauerkraut. And it was because the first season that I was gardening, I had a nice abundance of cabbage. So I learned how to make sauerkraut. Sweet potato vines. Basil. We've started harvesting basil. There's some parsley, celery, fennel. I was such a naive city kid. It never occurred to me that all the cabbage would be ready at the same time. All the radishes would be ready at the same time. So when I faced this reality, I realized fermentation was a strategy for preservation. At the end of the season, whatever basil is left, I chop up with garlic and salt. And I ferment basil. So I can eat pesto into the winter. You know, corn. I made corn miso. Last summer, I made tomato miso. These are long beans. Like the beans are beautiful to ferment. Soybeans are at the end of this row here. Yeah, like anything can be fermented. I mean, there's nothing you could possibly ever eat that can't be fermented. I have some things that I'm sunning. So out here is soy sauce. Two different styles of soy sauce. This is a Taiwanese style of soy sauce. And this smaller one, this is the Korean style. This one I can't keep outside because the top won't effectively keep out rain. But this top really keeps out rain. But I open them to the sun on sunny days. I like to give them a stir. So I'll go ahead and stir. That would be soybeans. Yeah, this is just soybeans that I grew a fungus on. And salt water. It almost looks like more of a chili or something at this point. Like you wouldn't think of it as soy sauce yet. No, no, no. Well, you know, the color of soy sauce takes at least a year to develop. It's this phenomenon that's getting a lot of press right now called the Maillard reaction. That we typically associate with cooked foods. But if you ferment foods for long enough, they darken up. So to get the dark color of soy sauce without adding some sort of a coloring just takes a long time. These are just like lightly fermented carbonated beverages. And so this one is called Mabi. OK, I bet we're going to get a nice hiss when I open this up. OK, so we can see some bubbles rising to the surface. So this is like a bittersweet beverage. And then this is ginger beer. Because a root beer was originally fermented, right? Well, you know what they call in Jamaica what they call root beer is roots beer. So it's just like a decoction of roots. If we look back, root beer was fermented. I mean, well, here's the thing is OK. So first of all, all the carbonated beverages that you can buy commercially are carbonated with like forced carbonation. Forced carbonation does not have a long history. And so any kind of carbonated beverage before forced carbonation had to be fermented. That's the only way. And all around the world, there are these, in addition to traditions of alcoholic beverages, there are these traditions of lightly fermented beverages. So, you know, ginger beer is one of the more famous of them. But in this case, the ginger actually is driving the fermentation because the starter is actually what I call a ginger bug. That's just grated raw ginger root in a little bit of sugar water. So you started it in another container with the air. OK, so you're trying to capture sort of the bacteria kind of like a. Well, you're not necessarily trying to. I mean, and that's a little bit of a misunderstanding that in bread you're catching it from the air. The good bugs are going to get here from the air. Yes. Yeah. Hi. You could, but it's on the flour. You don't need to catch it from there. It's on the flour. You know, generally, the fermentation comes from the food that you're fermenting. Like if you make wine, you don't need it to come from the air. It's already on the grapes. Basically, the ferment is coming from the material itself. Well, in different cases, like the way everybody starts their Mabi is with the old batch of Mabi. So every time I make Mabi, Mabi starter, do not drink. We have a very vivid word in the English language to describe this. When you take a little bit of the old batch of something to function as the starter for the next batch. And we call it back slopping. So you take a little bit of the old one and put it in a new one. So like yogurt, this yogurt culture. I mean, I've been working with this for more than 10 years. It actually came from Romania to New York in the 1860s. I never eat all the yogurt. I was on that same shelf. I always save one jar of yogurt that says starter. Do not eat the ones that are just labeled yogurt. We eat and then eventually we run out and I have the starter to make a new batch from. Is that a bread starter? Yeah, yeah. This is my wheat sourdough. So this started as a wild fermentation. Wild fermentation is like sauerkraut or kimchi or anything where you're relying on your ingredients to be the source of the organism. So I started this with flour and water, like in the 90s. I don't feed this every day. I go away sometimes for months at a time. But anytime I make bread, I use this as the starter. And then I have to keep feeding this, feeding it meaning more flour and water. And so I never use it all. But one of the confusions for people about fermentation is like, how does it start? Where does it come from? You know, certainly some of them like a packet of yeast. You can use a packet of yeast to make bread. You could make a packet of yeast to make beer or wine. But a packet of yeast never existed until the 20th century. Like we've been using the word yeast for many hundreds of years in the English language. And until the 20th century, it never meant like a little packet. The yeast was something that happened. It wasn't a thing you could obtain. Now by yeast, we mean this particular fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae. And, you know, it was really beginning with Pester's work in the late 19th century that yeast began to mean a specific organism. And before that, it was just like the rising. However that came about, people in different parts of the world have had very different kinds of techniques. So for you, finding sort of new foods to ferment and new recipes, are you looking at cultural traditions? Is that a way to sort of find maybe things that have, that we're not as familiar with? It's less inventing new things and uncovering old traditions? Oh, yeah. No, I mean, I mean, sure. I mean, occasionally, I mean, it's not that I'm not creative at all. With respect to fermentation, I mean, I would say that nobody has invented any completely new fermentations for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. What people are doing is like taking ferments from a specific cultural tradition that have been done with specific ingredients, and then applying them with other kinds of ingredients. So, okay, a bunch of these are different styles of fermented tofu. Tofu roux is a Chinese word for fermented tofu. What are you seeing here? Because there's a lot of stuff going on. Well, what we're seeing is blocks of tofu, soybean koji. Koji is, it's a particular fungus, aspergillus oryzae. It's growing on the rice and on the soybeans here. These are called yeast balls, Chinese yeast balls. These are a very similar kind of fungus. So you would use this to make mijiu, which is like the Chinese equivalent of sake. It's the alcohol out of rice. So to make alcohol out of complex carbohydrates is never a direct process. Like from fruit, like you take grapes, you crush the grapes, the juice is very sugary and it will spontaneously ferment into alcohol. These are alcohol projects. This is turmeric, ginger, black pepper, mead, sumac, mead, elderflower, wine. You know, any kind of carbohydrate you can make alcohol out of. So to make alcohol out of grains, complex carbohydrates, always takes an enzymatic transformation. So in the Western tradition of beer making, that is malting. Malting is simply germination. So you have to malt barley to make Western style beer. In Asia, the culture just took alcohol making from grains in a different direction. And they use a fungus. So if you grow a fungus on rice or amaranth or millet, then that fungus will have similar amylase enzymes that can break down complex carbohydrates into simple sugar. So like Japanese sake making, you make rice koji, and then you add rice koji to plain cooked rice and water. And the enzymes in the koji break down the enzymes in the rest of the starch. Just like in beer making, the malted barley has enough enzymes to break down some more barley that you could add. And so it's these enzymes. But koji has such diverse enzymes that not only does it have the amylase enzymes that can break complex carbohydrates into simple sugars, it has protease enzymes that can break down proteins into amino acids. That's what's happening in soy sauce or in miso. It has lipase enzymes that can break down fats into fatty acids. So like koji could just break down anything. This here, this is a ferment called natto, Japanese fermentation of whole soybeans, but I'm dehydrating them. And I'm just trying to get them dry enough that I can store them in a jar. And then I'll grind them up and I make this seasoning with sesame seeds and salt. How long does that take? Well, it took about 36 hours to make. It's been in my fridge for a few weeks. And now I've dried it yesterday and I'm just finishing it off today. And this is all for you? Well, you know, I mean, I do share it. You know, I feed people quite a bit, you know, and then also I just give it away to my friends and neighbors. Yeah, I just put it in jars like here. This is a few jars that, you know, I have ready for when a friend comes over. Do you want some radish kraut? So most of these are fermented vegetables. OK, this is just last Saturday. I did a workshop and this is just a jar of kraut that I made there. It's just cabbage, carrots, salt and caraway seeds. This is from last October and this is radish kraut. They were in a vessel in my cellar until last week. One thing about them being this old is they're highly acidic. You know, the basic thing with fermenting vegetables or fermenting anything is that whatever the byproduct, in this case, lactic acid, it builds up over time. So this old kraut that is seven months old now is a lot more sour than this like barely a week old kraut. So a lot more lactic acid has been produced in this one than in this one. Then this is somewhere in the middle. This is kimchi that's about three weeks old. The bottom line for successfully fermenting vegetables is to get them submerged. Like if you just had a big bowl of loosely shredded vegetables, what would typically happen is that mold spores that are always present on the vegetables, and we all see these if we use like if we use half of a cabbage. Actually, I have a quarter of a cabbage in my fridge right now. I mean, this has just been in the fridge for like probably two days and we can just see the beginning of this phenomenon. The cut surface gets something growing on it. You just get like a darker film that grows. That's a mold. Is it really? Yeah. So everything we eat has spores of molds on it, especially if it's on that cut surface, because the spores out here can't access the nutrients. As soon as you cut the surface, then the knife is spreading the spores to the places where the nutrients are oozing out. And so as long as there's a presence of oxygen, the molds can grow. Now, if you want the lactic acid bacteria to grow for fermenting vegetables, what you have to do is press them down to eliminate the air pockets, because without the oxygen, the molds can't grow. And the lactic acid bacteria will always dominate. You can see at the very top where there's air, you can see some mold. Now, mold wants to be where there's air and where there's nutrients. So when you're fermenting vegetables, like the key manipulation of the environmental conditions, and that's what fermentation is all about. You know, there are always going to be lactic acid bacteria. There are always going to be bacilli, another kind of bacteria. There are always going to be spores of molds. This is years old daikon radish. This is too salty to just eat. You would soak it in water before you would eat it. And so the idea is to create conditions that are hospitable to the kinds of organisms that you're trying to encourage while simultaneously discouraging the growth of other kinds of organisms which are not as desirable. Like, you know, there's no history of food poisoning or illness from these kinds of foods because nothing that we would regard as pathogenic can survive in a highly acidic environment. And then there's other ferments that are alkaline, and high alkalinity does exactly the same thing. There are? I didn't, I thought everything was going to be an acid, like a lactic acid. Well, a lot of people think that. What's an alkaline one? What would be? You happen to have it. Okay, well, I'm drying out the big batch that I had that I made in November. I have a little jar of a commercial one from Boston. But this is natto. This is a Japanese soybean ferment. Oh, okay. It's really lost the stringiness that it had. No, it still has some stringiness. So you see this biofilm that it produces, this intense stringiness. Yeah. So that's characteristic of this. So it's not lactic acid? No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. So this is a, so it smells a little bit like ammonia, right? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So anything that smells like ammonia, assume you've eaten brie cheese, those also have alkaline byproducts. The Japanese natto is the main tradition I know of where people eat this in its wet and sticky form like this. But it's, you know, foods like this are eaten in a lot of different places. You know, almost all condiments are fermented. You know, like this is a soy sauce. Oh, here, this is one that you'll never see anywhere else. This is eau de kraut. So this is kraut juice cooked down, like 10 to 1. And what does it become? Like, why do that? It becomes much more stable. You know, this is very prone, here's another jar of it, to like growing a little fuzz on the top. Okay, so it's like acidic, but still the place where it meets the air, like funky stuff. Is that a problem? Or do you just... No, you just skim it off. But you know, over time, it will influence the flavor of things. But this is much saltier and much more sour. And you'd use it for? Anytime I'm cooking or making something and I think like, oh, this just needs a little bit more. Whoa, that's good, I like it. Yeah, a little dab will do you. And then here, one year when I was doing this, I cooked it down too far and it became like a tar. So I call this one kraut tar. If you dare. Let's see here, oh, my Brazilian friends were visiting a couple months ago and they brought molho inglês. That's the Portuguese way of saying Worcestershire sauce. You know, mustard always has vinegar. That's mustard over the counter. This is just like mustard from the supermarket, yeah. And that is fermented? Well, the vinegar is fermented. If you go to a contemporary supermarket, you know, they're not all literally fermented, but what they all have is vinegar. So if you want to buy ketchup, if you want to buy mustard, if you want to buy mayonnaise, they all rely upon vinegar, which is this important product of fermentation to stabilize them. If we think about like what are old world condiments, chutneys and salsas and things like that, they all use vinegar. I mean, you can certainly ferment mustard. A lot of the businesses that are making kraut, like if you take your kraut brine and soak your mustard seeds in it, it does very much the same thing as vinegar. So you keep your kraut brine? Oh, yeah. No, you would never want to throw that down the drain. Like I use it in salad dressings, sauces. It's like a braising liquid. People are doing crazy things like, OK, these are crystal salts made by dehydrating brine. This is from the Netherlands. The guy who does this calls these pickles out. So, yeah, I mean, you can like just the brine the way it comes out. You can enjoy it that way. I have different. This is fishy, shrimpy kimchi brine. So, you know, I save them. I use them in other food preparations. But you can also do other things like cook them down or recrystallize them as salts. Wow. Oh, I was talking about the dehydrated natto. This is we call it special sauce. But this is just natto and sesame seeds and salt. And the natto is what you have out there, right? Yeah, exactly. It's got a little bit of an ammonia smell. Oh, does. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But it's just like a beautiful, savory. I mean, I put this on my eggs this morning. Veggie medley. What even is this? Yeah, I mean, sometimes I feel like my house is a food museum and people bring me things. But, you know, fermentation is not finite. Fermentation is really infinite. And, you know, you can make, you know, you can make anything. There is in the Southeast United States where we are, there is a kind of a cured ham called a country ham. Incredibly salty. Like you could not just eat it. Like you always have to like soak it in water to desalinate it. Then you could eat it raw. You can cook it. People do all kinds of things with it. But I have heard that there was a tradition of people making a country ham when a child is born. That they would eat at the child's wedding. This is a little outdoor kitchen. This is our pond. I like the frogs just like suspended. Is it really? Oh, that's a real frog. Yeah, those are real frogs. So outdoor kitchen is important in this kind of weather. I mean, I guess you don't want to be cooking in the summer heat. I mean, really, we built this primarily as a roof for this oven. But it's turned out to be, as you say, incredibly wonderful to have an outdoor kitchen. You know, whether it's for like canning tomato sauce or rendering lard or, you know, things like that. And we have our pizza oven, which is, which is wonderful. So you make your own bread often because you have the starter. I mean, do you actually? Yeah. No, I mean, I just, I just made bread a few days ago. Yeah. And you do canning as well? A little bit. Yeah. I mean, I don't think you have to like commit yourself to one kind of food preservation. Like, you know, you can do a little bit of canning and fermenting. I mean, for canning and fermentation are sort of diametrical opposites. In the one case, you're like, I mean, canning is your attempt to sterilize food within the jar. So, and in fermentation, you're trying to cultivate specific organisms within the food. I mean, not all fermentation has to do with preserving food. As a broad stroke, like nobody's ever fermented a grain or a bean in order to preserve it because those foods are so stable. Nice and dry. It's good weather for. Yeah. I mean, actually, mostly I've done this in a dehydrator. No, I'm working more and more with the sun. In Taiwan, I learned about, for making koji, after you cook the soybeans, drying them in the sun for a day before you try to grow the fungus. And it works so much better. Always something to learn. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and this is the thing about fermentation is it's really ultimately so infinite. Anything in this fridge? This is not a fridge. Oh. I mean, this was at one time a refrigerator, but this, I use this as an incubator. So that light, like when I make koji, when I make tempeh, up here, this is a little temperature controller designed for a greenhouse. And then I set my target temperature and then I plug this old inefficient incandescent light bulb plugged into this temperature controller. So if the temperature in here gets below that 85 degrees, 30 degrees Celsius, then it turns the light bulb on. Once that generates some heat and the heat up here gets to the target temperature, it turns the light bulb off. So this is just to keep this a stable temperature. Do you see it as a science? No. I mean, I have become increasingly interested in science as a result of getting interested in this. This is my collection of my book. Wild Fermentation. The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved. The Art of Fermentation. Fermentation Journeys. But the people who figured out these processes, the people who are the everyday practitioners of these things, they don't know the science. You don't need to know the science to do any of these. Oh here, this is what we were just talking about. This is a recipe for Mabi. I'm here, I haven't even shown you my bookcase full of just fermentation books. So these are all fermentation books. And then this shelf over here is all like various kinds of microbial natural history books or books about microbes. I contain multitudes, entangled life, the curious world of bacteria, the wildlife of our bodies. So your science says the foundation for fermentation. It's the foundation for fermentation fervor. That was my neighbor's misunderstanding of business. It's the foundation for fermentation fervor. But he didn't get the fervor part, he just got the foundation for fermentation.