The Noma Guide to Fermentation (Foundations of Flavor): Including Koji, Kombuchas, Shoyus, Misos, Vinegars, Garums, Lacto-Ferments, and Black Fruits and Vegetables

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With more than 500 step-by-step photographs and illustrations, and with every recipe approachably written and meticulously tested, The Noma Guide to Fermentation takes readers far beyond the typical kimchi and sauerkraut to include koji, kombuchas, shoyus, misos, lacto-ferments, vinegars, garums, and black fruits and vegetables. Brian stopped by after about a week and made sure everything was looking good, and discovered that the lacto pluots had developed a thin layer of harmless kahm yeast. I feel like this book could have been much smaller in format without losing any readership or any information or clarity. The lacto-ferments chapter did remind me that I've been meaning to make kimchi (and conveniently I received a napa cabbage in my CSA box on Saturday).

The Noma Guide to Fermentation by David Zilber - Waterstones

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. No one’s ever run up to René to let him know that they’d cooked that one special dish of cabbages and wild greens from Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. Lovely, clear presentation and easier to work from than Sandor Katz, but a bit much for me as a home cook. This is a book meant to bring some clarity to a hazy realm of cooking, full of confusing and unfamiliar terminology. In-depth Base Recipe: The first recipe of every chapter walks you through the basics of each fermentation method.Fermentation isn’t responsible for one specific taste at Noma—it’s responsible for improving everything . In their guide, Redzepi and Zilber encourage readers to build a fermentation chamber out of a speed rack (translation: make a temperature-controlled tent from a restaurant’s rolling sheet-pan rack, a little heater and humidifier, and a PID temperature controller), or make one out of a styrofoam cooler. The more people learn about fermentation, the more they realise these aren’t processes that need to kept behind closed doors, but can in fact be done by ordinary, everyday people. With a multitude of variations and applications for each recipe; corresponding visual presentation would have given an extra dose of excitement and motivation. Whenever we have cooked with artisanal aged cheeses, we’ve left their production in the hands of Scandinavia’s amazing dairy farmers.

The Noma Guide to Fermentation - David Zilber, Ren Redzepi The Noma Guide to Fermentation - David Zilber, Ren Redzepi

Redzepi has twice appeared on the cover of Time magazine (and been named one of Times 100 Most Influential People in the World); been featured in publications from the New York Times to Wired; and been profiled in two feature-length documentaries and countless national and international media outlets. When it came to acidity, instead of reaching for lemons, seafood would end up being seasoned with the flesh and juice of unripe berries.Once you’ve done the same and have these incredible products at your disposal—whether it’s lacto -fermented fruit, barley miso, koji , or a roasted chicken wing garum—cooking gets easier while your food becomes more complex, nuanced, and delicious. He has cooked from coast to coast across North America, most notably as a sous-chef at Hawksworth Restaurant in Vancouver. So we asked ourselves, “What main pillar of the restaurant’s identity is actually something you could do everywhere? Lacking either of those, I dribbled a spoonful on a sandwich with cheddar and fresh tomatoes, which gave the whole thing a lovely, deep mushroom-y flavor. We started a pair of kombuchas, and this was where I was particularly happy to have a fermentation buddy—I'd never before deployed the Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast known more commonly as a scoby.