canning and preserving

With Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, And Craft Of Live-culture Foods as their guide, meal time dishes involving fermented and live-culture cuisines are not to be thought of as being restricted to gourmet class professional chefs. Most of us would recognize a great number of fermented foods (bread, coffee, chocolate, beer, wine, cheese, miso, yogurt, sauerkraut) that find their place in our kitchens and on our dining room tables. These are foods that depend on complex bacterial activity in order to be nutritional and palate-pleasing ingredients to our dining. What Sandor Katz has done is to compile a book that explores the history and politics of human nutrition, draws attention to world food traditions, and demonstrates the vital connection between natural, "live culture" foods and good human health. Wild Fermentation deserves a rightful place in any personal, professional, or academic Food & Nutrition reference collection -- and should be read by every dedicated kitchen cook in America!

This is the only cookbook that I know of that you will read from cover to cover. It is not the dry "do this in this order" kind of book, it walks with you on your culinary endevors like your mom or grandma would, telling you stories along the way, including the secrets that make not just sourdough bread, but unforgettable sourdough bread.

Sandor doesn't just tell us, he shows us, how to be self-sufficient about making and storing food (with little need for a stove or a refrigerator): making sourdough, cheese, miso, making tempeh, making wine, beer and, it seems, almost every other fermented food made the world over. And he gives you a list of resources where you can order the most mundane and exotic of starter cultures and even seaweed from our own Atlantic coast.

And your concept of "self" will never be the same again. He shows us how to reclaim and restore a part of ourselves that has protected us like the ozone layer protects the earth: the world of microbes in and around us, the protective cloak of the microecology that is meant to be a part of us like our skin.

Fermented foods restore a health balance like no probiotics and vitamins can. Happy reading, happy fermenting, happy eating!

I used to cringe at just hearing the words "pickles" or "kimchi," as they immediately brought to mind spoiled cucumber and cabbage. After reading this book, however, I decided to give them another shot. Now, I feast on gorgonzola and tempeh as readily as I do fresh vegetables. My only complaint about this book, and it is a very minor, nitpicky point, is that it ignores concepts completely. I have tried to branch out from the recipes and make some of my own inventions, starting with fermentation of a head of lettuce that had been sitting in my refrigerator for eight weeks. A stomach pumping later that night quickly taught me not to stray from the script. Who knew the black liquid pouring forth would have been bad for me?