Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (46 page)

The procedure for making sauerkraut is
slightly more involved. After quartering the cabbages and cutting out their hard cores,
you can either shred the resulting chunks on a mandoline or cut them with a knife. I
found shredding made life easier and produced more liquid more quickly than cutting with
a sharp knife, probably because the knife doesn’t leave as much surface area for
the salt to go to work on. Put the shredded cabbage in the biggest bowl you own,
sprinkling as you go with salt, and then, with all your fingers, press and squeeze and
generally bruise the cabbage leaves without mercy until your hands begin to cramp. Now
put something heavy on top of the heap to force the water from the leaves—a second bowl
full of rocks will work, or use the crock itself. Within twenty minutes or so, the
shredded cabbage will be awash in cabbage juice, magically beckoned out of the leaves by
the salt.

Pack handfuls of shredded cabbage, with its
liquid, into the crock
as tightly as you can, a layer at a time. Add
garlic and spices (for my first batch I used juniper berries, dill, and coriander) after
each layer, pushing the mixture down and squeezing out air as you work. If you’re
using a sauerkraut crock, it probably came with a heavy inner lid made from fired clay
or brick. Place this on top of the kraut and force it down until liquid rises high
enough to cover everything. Then fit the outer lid into the lip and fill with water to
create the seal. Keep the crock in the kitchen, where you can watch (and listen to) it
for the first few days.

The procedure for making kimchi is either
only slightly different, according to Sandor Katz and other American fermentos I
consulted, or substantially different, according to actual Korean people. Aware of, but
unperturbed by, the authenticity issue, Sandor calls his version
“kraut-chi,” and that’s what I tried to make first. With a sharp
knife, I cut heads of Napa cabbage into one-inch rounds. In addition to the salt, I
added enough red chili powder to turn the cabbage red, along with as much garlic and
ginger as I could stand to grate, and some fresh hot peppers. I also added slices of
daikon radish and apple, as well as a bunch of spring onions. You can pack this into a
kraut crock or an ordinary glass jar, making sure there’s some way for gases to
escape. But I found that an airlock is not critical when making kimchi, probably because
the peppers and garlic, both vigorously antimicrobial, keep fungi from getting
established. (In Korea, as I would learn, kimchi is made by soaking Napa cabbage in a
brine overnight; the heads are then rinsed before the leaves are individually rubbed
with a paste of ground-up red peppers, garlic, and ginger.)

Within a few days, and straight through that
fall, my kitchen counters were lined with an assortment of jars, bowls, bottles, and
crocks of various fermenting vegetables. In addition to the sauerkraut and kimchi, I
pickled cauliflower, carrots, cucumbers, chard stems, beets, ramp bulbs, garlic cloves,
turnips, and radishes. As the colors
of the vegetables grew more vivid
in their brines, and the brines themselves took on the pigments of the vegetables, the
jars and bottles grew more exotically beautiful. I was reminded of tanks of tropical
fish. And just like fish tanks, some of the crocks bubbled. Three days after filling it,
the big crock of kraut began to stir, every few minutes emitting a bubble of gas with a
resonant cartoony-sounding baritone burble. Fermentation had begun, which meant it was
time to move the crock to a cooler location in the basement, so that it wouldn’t
proceed too fast.

So what was going on in there, deep within
those thick brown ceramic walls? This sort of microbial cooking is invisible and
gradual—not much drama to observe, apart from the occasional bubble or bulging of lids
on the Mason jars. Yet there
was
a kind of drama unfolding in these containers,
a microscaled drama I had set in motion simply by shredding and salting some dead plant
parts. In doing so, I had created a very particular environment—an ecological niche that
was in the process of being colonized by new life. (In this respect, too, the crock
resembled a fish tank—only this was a microbe tank.) But what was uncanny was how the
niche had populated itself—spontaneously. I had done nothing to inoculate it,
^*
and yet on the evidence of the increasingly insistent bubbling, the kraut was now very
much alive. The necessary bacteria had been there from the start, dormant but lurking on
the cabbage leaves, waiting patiently for conditions to be exactly right—wet, airless,
saline, the leaves too badly
wounded to keep them out—to set about
their methodical work of destruction and creation.

As to the precise identity of the microbes
at work in my crock, it was hard to know for certain; temperature, place, and chance
play a role in selecting them. But according to the microbiologists I consulted, my
first fermenters were probably
Enterobacteriaceae,
a ubiquitous and rather
cosmopolitan family of bacteria that can survive in a great many different environments,
including in the soil and on plants. I was alarmed to learn that one of the environments
in which
Enterobacteriaceae
do well is (as the name suggests) the gut of
animals, and some of them (like salmonella and
E. coli
) are pathogens. This
seemed a good argument for not sampling my sauerkraut too soon.

The
Enterobacteriaceae
, which begin
the process of acidification, are soon succeeded by
Leuconostoc mesenteroides,
the first of several lactobacilli that will dominate the natural history of my
sauerkraut. Like the weedy species that initially colonize a disturbed patch of land,
the
L. mesenteroides
thrive under a wide range of conditions, including the
salty, sugary, partially aerobic, low-acid conditions typically present at the beginning
of a fermentation. Like many lactobacilli, these characters turn sugars into lactic
acid, acetic acid, and carbon dioxide—the gas bubbling out from my crock. The CO
₂
flushes any remaining oxygen from the ecosystem, preparing the
ground for the strict anaerobes, as well as preventing the plant matter from getting
mushy and preserving its color.

The objective of all these bugs is to render
the environment safe for themselves and inhospitable to competitors. In the case of the
lactobacilli, this is accomplished by producing copious amounts of acid, rapidly
lowering the pH of the environment. But the
L. mesenteroides
eventually go
overboard, acidifying the environment to the point where they have, in effect, fouled
their own nest. (Remind you of
anyone?) Yet what is foul to one
microbial fermenter is fair to another: the
L. mesenteroides
inadvertently
create the perfect conditions for another, hardier lactobacillus to succeed them, a more
acid-tolerant species such as
Lactobacillus plantarum.

I’m not sure exactly which of these
characters were ascendant when, after three weeks, I first opened my crock to assess the
progress of my kraut, but the scent that wafted up from the fermenting pinkish mass put
me back on my heels. It was nasty. “Note of septic tank” would be a generous
descriptor. In view of the off-putting scent, I wasn’t sure whether sampling the
sauerkraut was a good idea, but, trying my best to channel Sandor Katz’s
nonchalance, I held my nose and tasted. It wasn’t terrible and I didn’t get
sick. That was a relief, but … well, this seemed kind of a low bar for a food.
Judith compounded my disappointment by requesting that I get the crock out of the house
as soon as possible. I wondered if I should throw out the whole batch and start
over.

But before doing anything rash, I decided to
check in with Sandor Katz. He advised me to stick with my kraut a little longer. He
explained that some ferments seem to go through “a funky period,” during
which certain unpleasant-smelling microbes temporarily predominate. Some of the bacteria
that show up to ferment vegetables are “sulfate reducers”: they obtain their
energy by turning sulfur into hydrogen sulfide—the odor of rotten eggs. I definitely had
a few of those bugs. But my sulfate reducers would eventually be succeeded by other,
more benign microbes, he suggested. In all likelihood my ferment was just going through
an awkward stage.

Sandor was right. A month later, when I
dared to open the crock again, the stink was gone. Whichever the bad bug had been, by
now it had been supplanted by the acid-loving climax species that ultimately dominates
nearly all vegetable ferments,
L. plantarum.
When
L.
plantarum
arrives on the scene, you’re out of the woods. The ferment is
sufficiently acidic to kill off any pathological or otherwise undesirable microbes.
L. plantarum
establishes a bacteriological regime so stable and low in pH
that it can endure more or less unchanged for months, even years.

Yet, truth be told, the sauerkraut
wasn’t very good. The septic stench may have left, but a disconcerting beard of
gray mold had sprouted along the perimeter of the cabbage. I heeded Sandor’s
advice, carefully shaving it off while trying to override the visceral, possibly
instinctual, disgust rising in me. But the mold had obviously been there for while,
because my kraut had lost most of its crunchiness. Some filamentous fungus had sent its
fine tendrils deep into the kraut, dispatching enzymes to decompose the plant cell
walls, turning them nearly to mush. I had been warned that summer sauerkrauts often
suffered this fate, which is why Germans traditionally make kraut from cabbages
harvested late in the fall.

I had much better luck with my kimchi, or
kraut-chi, which after a month of fermentation was still crunchy, its spiciness bright
with acid and ginger. As for the dill pickles, the cucumbers tasted just right but had a
slightly grayish cast and suboptimal crunch. The carrots and cauliflower pickled with
Indian spices were excellent, the carrots marred only slightly by a thin, barely
noticeable slime coat. (Probably a bloom of yeast, another challenge of fermenting in
warm weather.) But by far my favorite pickle was the chard stems, which after two weeks
were crunchy and a brilliant ruby red, lightly inflected with coriander and juniper.
They were delicious, particularly with eggs.

As a mode of cooking, pickling plants was at
once remarkably straightforward—
cut, salt, and season vegetables, then wait a few
weeks
—and yet borderline magical: the way these common microbes just show up
and utterly transform the vegetables, creating whole new flavors
and
qualities. And yet it wasn’t so easy to pickle really well. To an extent you can
guide or manage the microbes, by adjusting the temperature and salinity of their
environment, but in the end you can’t control them. That’s why most of the
serious picklers I talked to agreed this was not a craft for the control freak or
obsessive.

“You do your best preparing the
ferment, but finally you have to be able to let go,” Alex Hozven, a local
artisanal pickler, told me, “and let the microbes do their thing.” The
fermenters I met cultivated a relaxed and genuinely humble attitude to their work, which
they regarded as a collaboration between species. It helped to have the kind of
temperament that could tolerate mystery, doubt, and uncertainty without reaching for
rule or reason. Instead of the pH meter, they trusted their senses. And they were
willing, with a shrug and a rueful smile, to throw out a bad batch every now and
then.

The phrase “live-culture foods”
is of course a euphemism: for fermented foods teeming with living bacteria and fungi.
“Live-culture” sounds a lot more appetizing than, say,
“bacteria” for breakfast, in the same way that calling a cheese
“washed rind” goes down more easily than “coated with a biofilm of
bacteria and mold,” which is what a washed-rind cheese is. Enjoying my
“live-culture” pickles and kimchi, I gave some thought to the billions of
microbes I was ingesting along with the vegetables, wondering what in the world they
might be doing down there. But somewhere deep in the coils of my intestines one
community of microbes was presumably encountering another. I hoped for the best. At the
time, I had no idea what that best might be.