033 SMITH JOURNALWHEN IT COMES TO FERMENTATION,
THE WORD ‘ANCIENT’ BARELY BEGINS
TO COVER IT.
..........................................
A benign, controlled form of rot, the practice
pre-dates writing and may have given
agriculture a run for its money too. You can find
its roots in the very beginnings of civilisation,
when early humans discovered an alchemy that
allowed them to store food over the winter,
giving humanity a competitive advantage it
never looked back from. Almost every culture
on Earth practises fermentation in some way,
whether it’s making beer and wine – the first
deliberately fermented products – or bread,
cheese, yoghurt, chocolate, vinegar, soy sauce,
tofu, tempeh, kimchi... well, you get the idea.
Tasmanian chef Adam James has dedicated
himself to understanding this strange
culinary art. “There’s a kind of magic to
fermentation,” he says. “You make something,
you leave it for months or years, and when you
return it’s this fundamentally transformed
object.” Earlier this year, James received a
grant from the Churchill Fellowship to travel
around the world and explore first-hand the
curious history and craft of fermentation,
taking in everything from garum – an
anchovy sauce that dates back to Roman
times – through to the creation of a Sichuan
bean paste known as doubanjiang, natural
winemaking in Georgia, sake distilleries
in Japan and a whole lot more besides. The
common theme connecting them all is the
sheer weight of history behind them. “They’ve
been making wine in Georgia in these ceramic
eggs for 7000 years. That’s literally where
fermentation all began.”James’ own love affair with fermentation
started five years ago, in a small sake bar in
Kyoto. “I ordered some tofu and it arrived
topped with this minuscule bead of fermented
chilli,” he explains. “I put it in my mouth and
it just blew my mind. It was unbelievably
delicious. So many layers of flavour coming off
this one droplet. And I thought, ‘Man, I want
to know how to do that.’”Beginning with sauerkraut and kimchi,
James threw himself headlong into the world
of fermented foods. What began as idle
experiments quickly escalated into a large-
scale home laboratory. After he ran out of
regular jars and containers, he began buying
expensive, brightly coloured 100-litre ceramic
crocks from friends in the Huon Valley. “That
was the point where I realised this had gone
from a hobby to a full-blown obsession,”
James laughs. “There were just too many
weird things I wanted to try and make.”For James, the appeal goes deeper than the
purely culinary. “I love fermentation because
it’s about time,” he explains. “It’s a meditative
process. When I was travelling, I spent some
time with a nun in South Korea called Jeong
Kwan, and her entire philosophy is one
of patience. I tried a soy sauce she’d been
fermenting for 10 years, and it was one of the
most delicious things I’ve ever tasted. But you
have to be willing to wait.”For all the different styles and types
of fermentation in the world, the basic
biochemical process is a simple one. When
starved of oxygen, microorganisms like
yeast and bacteria consume sugar to survive.
This produces a change in how organic
matter decays, as the sugar is converted into
preservatives – either alcohol (in the case of
yeast) or organic acids and carbon dioxide.
Rather than crumbling into compost, the
base substance becomes something entirely
different: a living colony of microorganisms
that feed off and help produce a new type of
food. Kept in the right conditions, this process
can run for years, if not decades. “I tried a
40-year-old balsamic vinegar in Modena,”
James says. “One drop and your whole mouth
explodes with tingling sensations.”>>fermenting revolution
AS THE WESTERN WORLD REDISCOVERS THE STRANGE, GOOEY WONDERS
OF SAUERKRAUT AND PICKLES, TASMANIAN CHEF ADAM JAMES IS
EXPLORING FERMEN TATION’S MORE EXPERIMEN TAL SIDE.Writer Luke Ryan Photographer Chris Crerar