The Noma Guide to Fermentation: Including koji, kombuchas, shoyus, misos, vinegars, garums

Book Preface

Our story with fermentation is a story of accidents.

In the very early years of Noma, we were caught up in a search for ingredients, looking to stock our larder with things that could keep our cooking interesting through the colder months of the year.

I remember one day in the early summer when our longtime forager, Roland Rittman, walked through the door with a handful of odd little flower buds, round but also somehow triangular, perfectly juicy, with a flavor like ramps—not garlicky, exactly, but with that same punch and depth. We’d never tasted anything like it. Roland mentioned that these ramson “berries” used to be quite common in Nordic cuisine, and that people would preserve them for use through the winter.

And so we set out to make our own caper-like pickle of ramson buds. If you’d asked us what we thought was happening to the tiny garlicky orbs as they sat in a jar packed with salt, we would have described it as “curing” or “maturing.” If you’d mentioned the concept of lactic acid fermentation, we would have cocked our heads and looked at you quizzically.

The ramson capers were a revelation. Suddenly we had this ingredient at our disposal that could bring little bursts of acidity and saltiness and pungency to any dish. And we didn’t have to import it from somewhere else. It had grown in our own backyard and become something more, merely through the addition of salt.

One accidental success led to another.

I can’t remember whose idea it was to salt gooseberries, but it was around 2008, so it must have been Torsten Vildgaard or Søren Westh. They were messing around with all kinds of things on the boat that was anchored in front of the restaurant.

No larger than a fishing vessel you might take out for a day on the ocean, the boat housed something we called the Nordic Food Lab. Its purpose was to investigate what could be done with the food in our region and share that knowledge freely with anyone interested. It was a place for long-term investigation, rather than a test kitchen for tinkering with next week’s dishes. One of our chefs, Ben Reade, used to sleep among the ferments on that boat—that’s the sort of character we had working in the lab.

One day, Torsten put a spoon in front of me with a slice of gooseberry that had been salted, vacuum-bagged, and fermented, then forgotten for a year. I tasted it and I was completely shocked. I know that probably sounds like an exaggeration—after all, we’re talking about a spoonful of pickled berry. But you have to try to put yourself in my frame of mind: You’ve grown up in Scandinavia eating gooseberries your whole life, and now there’s this thing in front of you. It tastes familiar but also like nothing you’ve ever had before, like an old comfortable sweater with bright new colors woven through the original fabric.

Today when I taste a pickled gooseberry, I recognize the unmistakable effect of lacto-fermentation, but that first time really changed everything for me and Noma. It was the beginning of a decade in which we would study fermentation with intense focus and enthusiasm.

I’ve forgotten so many details. I regret not taking more notes in those early days. Every week held a revelation of some sort, reached by the same basic train of thought: We need more things to cook with. We have these seasonal ingredients. What can we do to make them better? What can we do to make them last? At first, we had no idea how fermentation worked or when we were doing it. But year by year, as more ideas worked out and more smart people came into our orbit, we learned how to talk about what we were doing, and began to see the larger tradition we were part of.

In 2011, we decided to hold our first MAD Symposium (mad is the Danish word for “food”), a gathering of a few hundred people with a vested interest in seeing the food world get better: people from the restaurant trade, along with scientists, farmers, philosophers, and artists. We chose the theme “Planting Thoughts,” and we began thinking of potential speakers who could bring diverse thoughts about the plant kingdom.

I’ll be honest with you: David Chang immediately came to mind because of kimchi. He may not remember serving it, but I remember having an oyster topped with kimchi water at Momofuku Ssäm Bar and finding it absolutely incredible. He and his team were working a parallel track to our own, learning their way around fermentation and developing new products using age-old techniques. I asked him to come speak at MAD about fermentation. While onstage, he introduced the culinary community to the concept of microbial terroir.

Chang was referring to the largely unseen world of mold, yeast, and bacteria responsible for fermentation. They are omnipresent, transcending countless cultures and culinary traditions. What Chang was saying was that the microbes indigenous to any given region will always have their say in the flavor of the final product, in the same way that soil, weather, and geography affect wine.

At the time, people were talking about Noma as the restaurant responsible for defining modern Nordic cuisine. From our perspective, we felt saddled with a tremendous responsibility. How could we claim to be cooking Nordic food if we used techniques from abroad? The notion of microbial terroir helped change everything for us. Fermentation knows no borders. It’s as much a part of the cooking tradition in Denmark as it is in Italy or Japan or China. Without fermentation, there is no kimchi, no fluffy sourdough bread, no Parmigiano, no wine or beer or spirits, no pickles, no soy sauce. There is no pickled herring or rye bread. Without fermentation, there is no Noma.

People have always associated our restaurant closely with wild food and foraging, but the truth is that the defining pillar of Noma is fermentation. That’s not to say that our food is especially funky or salty or sour or any of the other tastes that people associate with fermentation. It’s not like that. Try to picture French cooking without wine, or Japanese cuisine without shoyu and miso. It’s the same for us when we think about our own food. My hope is that even if you’ve never eaten at Noma, by the time you’ve finished reading this book and made a few of the recipes, you’ll know what I mean. Fermentation isn’t responsible for one specific taste at Noma—it’s responsible for improving everything.

It was with that in mind that in 2014 I asked Lars Williams and Arielle Johnson to build a space dedicated to exploring fermentation. Lars was one of our longest-tenured chefs, and Arielle became our resident scientist in 2013 while finishing her PhD in flavor chemistry. The two of them were responsible for taking our efforts to the next level, turning fermentation into a pursuit of its own at Noma—almost completely separate from the day-to-day activities of running the restaurant.

I was inspired by what the chefs at El Bulli had done in separating the actual creative part of their work from the service kitchen. Research and development weren’t just activities to be done in between preparing mise en place and cooking for service. There was a team dedicated to them. That changed the game for creative cooking, and that’s what we wanted to do for fermentation at Noma.

During the summer break at Noma, Lars and Arielle began planning what their ideal fermentation lab would include (within reason, of course). Up until then, we’d been fermenting wherever we could—on the boat, in the rafters of adjacent buildings, in old refrigerators, under desks.

They came back after a week or two and said the cheapest and most efficient way to do it would be in shipping containers. Things came together quickly. One day, three huge containers came in by forklift and crane. The team insulated the interiors and put up walls and doors. Lars went to Ikea, bought the second-cheapest kitchen, and merged it with equipment we’d amassed over the past decade. We started planning in June or July, and by August we had our fermentation lab.

I mention all this because I don’t want to over-romanticize fermentation. It can be a pain in the ass to get everything up and running. It’s work, but it’s incredibly gratifying work. It’s actually an amazing feeling to wait for something to ferment. It runs totally contrary to the spirit of the modern day.

And once you have your first ferments, it makes cooking so much easier. I really mean that. Some of these ferments are like a perfect cross between MSG, lemon juice, sugar, and salt. They can be drizzled onto cooked greens, added to soups, or blended into sauces. You can smear lacto-fermented plums onto cooked meats, or use the juice to dress raw seafood. And homemade ferments, packed into glass jars, make for unique and impressive gifts. Once you integrate these ingredients into your cooking, your eating life is going to be irreversibly better.

There are thousands of products of fermentation, from beer and wine to cheese to kimchi to soy sauce. They’re all dramatically different creations, of course, but they’re unified by the same basic process. Microbes—bacteria, molds, yeasts, or a combination thereof—break down or convert the molecules in food, producing new flavors as a result. Take lacto-fermented pickles, for instance, where bacteria consume sugar and generate lactic acid, souring the vegetables and the brine in which they sit, simultaneously preserving them and rendering them more delicious. Cascades of secondary reactions contribute layers of flavors and aromas that didn’t exist in the original, unfermented product. The best ferments still retain much of their original character, whether that’s a touch of residual sweetness in a carrot vinegar or the floral perfume of wild roses in a rose kombucha, while simultaneously being transformed into something entirely new.

This book is a comprehensive tour of the ferments we employ at Noma, but it is by no means an encyclopedic guide to all the various directions you can take fermentation. It is limited to seven types of fermentation that have become indispensable to our kitchen: lactic acid fermentation, kombucha, vinegar, koji, miso, shoyu, and garum. It also covers “black” fruits and vegetables, which aren’t technically products of fermentation but share a lot in common as far as how they’re made and used in our kitchen.

Notably absent from this book are investigations of alcoholic fermentation and charcuterie, dairy, and bread. (Bread could take up—and deserves—its own separate discussion.) While we dabble with the fermentation of sugar into alcohol, it is almost always en route to something else, like vinegar. We’ve always worked closely with incredible winemakers and brewers and cannot pretend to be masters of their domain. Charcuterie is something that has not yet played a large role in our menus, though over the coming years we intend to dive deeper into fermenting meats as we celebrate the game season each fall. While we do make cheese at the restaurant, it’s often served fresh and unfermented (though we’re no strangers to yogurt and crème fraîche). Whenever we have cooked with artisanal aged cheeses, we’ve left their production in the hands of Scandinavia’s amazing dairy farmers.

Each chapter tackles one ferment, providing some historical context and an exploration of the scientific mechanisms at work. Many of the ideas and microbial players behind different ferments are interconnected, so you’ll see some concepts revisited and developed over the course of the book. For example, in order to make shoyu, miso, and garum, you’ll first need to understand how to make koji, a delicious mold grown on cooked grains and harnessed for its powerful enzymes. That being said, you should feel free to dive in wherever your interests lead you. You’ll still get a thorough understanding of each ferment without reading the rest of the book.

Included with each chapter is an in-depth base recipe, where we put ideas to work and walk you through the steps of making a representative example of each style of ferment. In most cases, there’s no single “right” way, so the recipes are written with multiple methods and possible pitfalls in mind. We go into quite a bit of detail—more than you may need in some instances—but we want you to feel as comfortable making these ferments as one of our own chefs would be if tasked with making one for the first time. Even though it may require a little patience and commitment, you can and absolutely should produce your own shoyus and misos and garums. Once you taste the rewards of your effort, it’s hard to imagine cooking without them. Plus, it all gets easier the second time around.

After you’ve read the in-depth base recipe for a ferment, you may feel ready to apply the same process to other ingredients, but to give you some inspiration, each chapter also contains several variations, which may illuminate other facets of the same technique. In some cases, these variations diverge in method from the base recipe, but rest assured, we’ll detail these changes and explain why we’re making them.

Finally, following each recipe, you’ll see a few practical applications for the ferment in your day-to-day cooking—many of which are inspired by preparations we make at Noma. Think of them as things that a cook from Noma would make for dinner at home using the ferments in the book. We’ve written these short recipes in a more informal manner, taking a cue from the naturalist Euell Gibbons, who wrote beautifully about foraging—another preoccupation of ours. In his book Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Gibbons details how to identify and harvest wild plants, and then provides recipes in a fluid, conversational format—suggesting rather than prescribing what to do with the incredible ingredients you can find outdoors. It’s the same approach we’re trying to take here. We don’t go into step-by-step detail when it comes to how you can employ the ferments in this book, because the specifics aren’t nearly as important as the possibilities. Even if you don’t feel up to making your own ferments, you’ll still find all manner of new uses for store-bought versions.

This is a book meant to bring some clarity to a hazy realm of cooking, full of confusing and unfamiliar terminology. We’ve spent the past decade investigating and unraveling fermentation for ourselves, and we’ll try to share what we’ve learned with you. But more important, we want you to come away from this book with the same feeling of exhilaration and wonderment that we have whenever we make and use one of the miraculous products of fermentation.

---

Download Ebook	Read Now	File Type	Upload Date
Download here Download Now here	Read Now	Epub	November 17, 2020

---

How to Read and Open File Type for PC ?