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While our first fermentations were
undoubtedly accidental – someone in the
Neolithic era drinking rotten fruit water and
getting the world’s first buzz on – the practice
quickly spread across the inhabited world.
China, India, Egypt, Iraq, Mexico, Sudan: all
have evidence of fermented foods dating back
at least 4000 years, often many more. From
these ancient origins a mind-boggling and
occasionally disgusting cornucopia of styles
and traditions has emerged. Phan pyut is a
dish from eastern India that involves leaving
potatoes to decay for six weeks; 12-week-old
rotting shark is a national delicacy in Iceland;
the Sudanese chop the vertebrae of gazelle and
other animals into small chunks, dry them,
pound them, mix them with water and salt and
mould them into a delicious fermented ball
called kaidu-digla.
In recent years fermentation has even made
headway in the fresh food-loving West. Once
the reserve of Korean restaurants, kimchi can
increasingly be found on hamburgers and
toasted cheese sandwiches, a sure sign that
tastes are changing. Still, even fermentation’s
most ardent fans are bound to find a dish that
pushes their palates to the limit. “The worst
thing I ate was this thing called narezushi,”
James recalls. “It’s the precursor to modern-
day sushi as we know it. It’s basically carp,
which gets fermented in rice and left for two
years. Then they scrape the rice off and you eat
it, bones, roe, and everything. It’s somewhere
between blue cheese, yoghurt and off fish, all
at the same time.”
But for everything that he’s learned, the
experience was tinged with a certain
“A LOT OF THESE
TRADITIONS – SOME OF
WHICH CAN BE TRACED
BACK THOUSANDS
UPON THOUSANDS OF
YEARS – ARE DYING.”
melancholy. “The main thing it made me
realise was that a lot of these traditions –
some of which can be traced back thousands
upon thousands of years – are dying.”
Families which have practised the same craft,
generation after generation, are being swept
away by big producers, and left behind by
their children. “I was in Shimizu, a small
town in central Japan, visiting a guy who
made kōji, which is a type of inoculated rice
that they use to make miso and amazake
and even certain types of sake. He’s a sixth-
generation kōji maker – even now he makes it
with his mother – but his two adult sons have
no interest in learning the craft. He knows the
line ends with him.”James’ mission is to take some of the
techniques he learned on his travels and
apply them to the produce we have here in
Australia. “There’s a preserved plum from
Japan called umeboshi. I’ve been following the
same process I was taught but substituting
local stone fruit, anything from apricots to
greengages to cherry plums.” He’s also started
making miso paste out of chickpeas and black
beans, and is using kōji to ferment and flavour
eggplant, broad beans and even garlic scapes.
His latest venture is a company called Rough
Rice that supplies ferments to various Hobart
restaurants, and runs workshops to bring
others into the fermentation family. Perhaps
the dream of that kōji maker lives on for a
few more years yet.Does he have any advice for people thinking
about dipping their toes in the brine? “Just
do it,” he says. “Be patient. Be willing. And be
ready to experiment. In the words of Jeong
Kwan, give things time. And if you’re not sure
about them, just give them longer.”