By Sandor Katz, author and fermentation experimentalist
The following excerpt appears in Wild Fermentation:
I recently met a Tennessee neighbor, Nancy Ramsay, and when the conversation inevitably turned to fermentation, I learned that she loves to eat and make kimchi. She knows kimchi well, having spent 13 years living in Korea as a missionary (though her perspectives have changed radically since that time, and she now is busy writing a book critical of missionaries and the negative impact they have on the cultures they attempt to convert).
Nancy talked about fruit kimchi as her favorite variety, which she has never seen in the U.S. The next day I went to town, bought a bunch of fruit, and improvised. The sweet fruit melds beautifully with the sharp kimchi flavors, and makes for a surprising and memorable taste sensation, different from anything else I’ve ever eaten.
TIMEFRAME: 1 week
INGREDIENTS (for 1 quart):
1⁄4 pineapple
2 plums
pitted 2 pears
cored 1 apple
cored 1 small bunch grapes
stemmed 1⁄2 cup/125 milliliters cashews (or other nuts)
2 teaspoons/10 milliliters sea salt
Juice of 1 lemon
1 small bunch cilantro, chopped
1 to 2 fresh jalapeno peppers, finely chopped
1 to 2 hot red chilies, or any form of hot red pepper, fresh or dried
1 leek or onion, finely chopped
3 to 4 cloves garlic (or more), finely chopped
3 tablespoons/45 milliliters (or more) grated ginger
PROCESS:
Chop fruit into bite-size pieces. Peel if you wish. Leave grapes whole. Add in any other fruit you want to try. Add nuts. Mix fruit and nuts together in a bowl.
Add salt, lemon juice, and spices, and mix well.
Stuff kimchi mixture into a clean quart-size jar. Pack it tightly into the jar, pressing down until the brine rises. If necessary, add a little water. Weight down and ferment*. As this sweet kimchi ages, it will develop an increasingly alcoholic flavor.
*Weight the fruit down with a smaller jar, or a zip-lock bag filled with some brine.
Sandor’s new book, The Art of Fermentation, is due out in April 2012.
Sandor Ellix Katz, a self-taught fermentation experimentalist, wrote Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods in order to share the fermentation wisdom he had learned, and demystify home fermentation. Since the book’s publication in 2003, Katz has taught hundreds of fermentation workshops across North America and beyond, taking on a role he describes as a “fermentation revivalist.” Through these workshops, Katz met many different food activists—varied in their specific projects but united by a passion to bring food back to earth—who inspired him to write The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements. Newsweek called Wild Fermentation “the fermenting bible,” while the New Yorker wrote that Katz’s books “have become manifestos and how-to manuals for a generation of underground food activists.” For more information on fermentation and Katz’s workshops, visit WildFermentation.com.
Sounds great, although is there something you can do to avoid it turning to alcohol.
Or put a different way how do you know it’s fermented but not in to alcohol yet.