About two years ago I went to visit a friend living in Boone, North Carolina. It had been a long drive, and with the sun going down in the mountains, I pulled into the uneven driveway to the cottage where he stayed with his girlfriend, feeling hunger banging at the walls of my gut.
Sensing my peckishness, my hosts asked if I wanted a sandwich.
“Sandwich for dinner?” I said, “what I need is a little more hearty than that! You got anything that’ll stick to ma bones? Like a cheesesteak?” Feeling faint, I stumbled towards the nearest chair.
“No,” they said. “This is Appalachia. We don’t have cheesesteaks here…but we do have…this.”
From my chair I stared in awe as from beneath what looked like a yellowed dishtowel was produced a clear, glass crock of about three gallon volume. Its contents, shredded strands of red and white cabbage, mottled with little pockets of air and garlic bits, was a batch of homemade sauerkraut, aged roughly four months. Not knowing this at the time, however, I saw this as less of a potential food-item than some strange artifact brought through time from a forgotten planet far far away…
“What means this!” said I, “Be these the filched intestines of some poor extraterrestrial!?”
“No, you imbecile!,” said they, “this is, like the best thing you could ever eat, now stay there and don’t touch anything. Dinner will be served soon. Patienccceee…”
So I sat and waited. Breaking the only rule they laid out for me, I reached for the book closest to me. Sacred Geometry Hrmm. Put it down. Picked up another. The smell of bacon and toasting bread filled the small room. Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Elix Katz…what is this?
I had hardly finished the prologue when a plate with something delicious was placed in my lap. It was a sandwich, for sure, but unlike any I had ever seen. Breaded with sourdough (spread with a lemon veganaise), between the slices were lovingly placed three strips of crisp Virginia flitch, one country-fresh egg (once over easy), some steamed kale (shredded, to ease the masticators), one slice of swiss, and drooping out with wavy electric purple and whitish green tendrils in all directions, the kraut. It was a bit intimidating. It also didn’t look quite dead enough.
“W-Wait, you put…that stuff, in this sandwich?” I said, gesturing faintly to the crock.
“You’re damn’d right I did!” he said, “Pretty picky for a starving man, arentcha? That book in your hand, Wild Fermentation, it got me into making kraut and fermented foods, it’s a world unto itself. Bon appetite.”
“…but…is that stuff rotted?” my voice cracking with fear of gastro-death.
“No, just trust me. Fermented foods are good for you; they helped the human race survive before there was refrigeration! It also keeps me regular.”
I watched as they took their first bites. Not knowing what else to do, I followed their example, and in those first couple chomps experienced flavors I didn’t know existed, that had been forgotten in an age of happy meals, hotpockets and the nasty intra-oral burns microwaveable, cheese laden foods give you when you try to eat them too fast.
And with that my olfactory sensors had been reset, recalibrated to be in tune with other tongues from another age, the age of fermentation.
The kraut’s briny, tangy, chewiness, with the odd whole peppercorn thrown into the batch, enhanced every aspect of that sandwich. It was as if my tastebuds were being woken up for the first time. I felt tempted to describe the kraut’s flavors in terms of having a “beginning”, and “middle” and an “end”, as wine snoots do–because yes, the flavors were that complex– but I didn’t, I just ate, focusing intently on chewing every morsel, hoping a hungry puma wasn’t watching from a nearby crag. It was atavism you could taste. So, if this cartoonish narrative hasn’t betrayed my enthusiasm for sauerkraut already, I can tell you that I have never had a better sandwich since. Why? Because of the sauerkraut. How was it better? Well, we’ll get to that.
Before leaving the mountains two days later, I was handed an extra copy of Katz’s book, Wild Fermentation; The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods. Skimming through it as soon as I got home, I turned to the book’s fifth chapter, “Vegetable Ferments”, and realized soon afterwards that I not only wanted to ferment my own vegetables, I wanted to grow them too.
By the end of that summer, I had completed my first batch of pink sauerkraut raised from red cabbages and kale in my kitchen garden, and have been krauting ever since. So, when I heard that Sandor Elix Katz was coming to give one of his fermentation demonstrations at Washington College (as part of their Locavore Lit-Fest weekend), I decided to tag along, toting my copy of Wild Fermentation with hopes for a signature. (Which I got, by the way.)
The book itself is a wonderful artifact in its own right, and well worth the read for anyone interested in reconnecting with their food. Before it is a recipe book, Wild Fermentation acts as a sort of manifesto to the underground food movement, inspiring a revolt against our hygiene-obsessed, processed food culture by embracing diets with a healthy batch of micro-organisms and phyto-nutrients that arise as a by-product of fermentation. Kraut, just like any other fermented food, is rich in “bio-preservatives” which in addition to helping preserve perishable foods, assist in the natural recovery of nutrients in the body. “Fermentation no only preserves nutrients, it breaks them down into more easily digestible forms,” writes Katz, “Soybeans are a good example. This extraordinarily protein-rich food is largely indigestible without fermentation.”
And it really only gets more engrossing from there, as Katz walks you through the recipes and histories behind miso, tempeh, and kimchi, not to mention beers, wines, meads, and various bread types from around the world. He is also sure to remind the squeamish all the while that “microorganisms not only protect us by competing with potentially dangerous organisms, they teach the immune system how to function.”
As a longtime AIDS survivor, Katz is also acutely aware of the importance of maintaining immune health, which was one of the factors that led to his interest in fermented foods after being diagnosed HIV positive in the early 90s. Regarding his diagnoses in Wild Fermentation, Katz writes, “My deepest gratitude is for being alive and healthy. This project has given me back a sense of the future as expansive and full of possibilities.”
Wild Fermentation was published in 2003, but Katz has published two others two date, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved (2006), and his forthcoming Art of Fermentation , due to be released April 30, which has a forward by Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan. (I knew those guys were gonna put their heads together one of these days.)
The following clip is an excerpt from a much longer talk given by Katz that night in WAC’s Hodson Hall, I tried to focus the video on just the simple sauerkraut making demonstration he gave, rather than get lost in the sea of information he dispensed about the joys of raw milk, kefir, and kombucha, among many, many other things dear to the underground movement of “fermentation fetishists”. Hope you find it useful. Kraut ya later.
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