Harrowsmith – September 2019

HarrowsmithFall 2019 | 97

AND FRUITY

FERMENTATION

FOOD & RECIPES: FERMENTATION

How two Toronto microbiologists

became cider mixologists.

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRAIG DANIELS AND BEN PAKUTS

EXPERIMENTS IN

F

ermenting foods is addictive.
Pickles, sauerkraut, bread,
yogurt, cheese and, more
importantly, wine and cider.
These cherished foods and
beverages would not exist without
the microbes—the yeast and good
bacteria that transform foods—
that extend usefulness, deepen
flavour and add nutrition.
Our journey with fermentation
began after reading Wild

Fermentation: The Flavour,

Nutrition, and Craft of Live-

Culture Foods by Sandor Katz.

A friend gifted it to us when we

moved to Granada, in the south of

Spain, where local vegetables were

plentiful year-round. The simple

recipes showed us how to turn

sliced cabbage into sauerkraut

or kimchi, and cucumbers into

pickles, using wild yeast present

on the veggies themselves.