Fermentation Education

I have a new hobby. This new hobby leaves my fridge full of jars, and it is not uncommon to see some of them cozied up by the warm pipes in the apartment or hidden under a paper bag in the corner of my room. I’ve gotten hooked on fermentation. Currently I have a crowd of two kinds of sauerkraut, kimchi (recipe coming!), yoghurt and sour oats in different mason jars hanging out in the fridge. It’s a party.

So what’s the deal with fermented foods? Well, simply put they are healthy, delicious and a good method of preservation. Basically a fermented food is a food in which microorganisms have been allowed to feast on the sugars and carbs, commonly producing some kind of acid. You probably eat way more fermented foods than you think. Some examples are vinegar, olives, kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles, tempeh, yoghurt, cheese, bread, wine, beer, coffee, tea and chocolate. So fermentation is a commonly used method to say the least. The making of all of the products I just mentioned use different kinds of microorganisms, some bacteria and some yeast, and fermentation is used for different purposes and at different points of production. I’m going to focus on products using so called LABs, that is lactic acid-producing bacteria.

LABs are a kind of bacteria that can produce lactic acid (obviously) from sugar. In the process, they also produce carbon dioxide. LABs are naturally present on vegetables as they can be found in the soil. Therefore they are the ones used for fermenting vegetables. Given the right environment, these bacteria will thrive. They like hanging out without oxygen, that is anaerobically, and can live in solutions with high salt-concentrations. So in a salty environment they go about producing their lactic acid and thereby creating conditions that they themselves love, but that most other pathogenic microorganism can’t live in. And this is historically the point of fermentation. People needed a way to preserve their food. The use of LABs was pretty perfect. They prevent microorganism that would spoil from settling down and at the same time make the food more nutritious. This is why the method used for fermentation today is essentially the same as back in the day; it’s foolproof.

Fermenting vegetables is not only a way to preserve them, even though that might have been the main purpose before. The bacteria work other kinds of magic on the food, which in some ways actually makes it even healthier than in its raw state. At this point it is important to differentiate between cooked fermented foods and uncooked ones. Both are good for you, and have several benefits over their unfermented counterparts. The difference is that the uncooked fermented foods are considered probiotic, as the bacteria are still alive. Examples are fermented vegetables (if you buy them in the store, it will be the ones kept in the fridge) and yoghurt with living cultures. It is not completely understood why probiotic foods are so great, but the benefits of them have been showed time and time again. Recall the post about the bacteria in your gut (or read it here!). The gut microbiota affects our health in so many ways, including improving out immune system. By eating probiotic foods with healthy, good bacteria, you’re helping improve that microbiota. The bacteria in the probiotic food will fill any empty spots that pathogens might otherwise decide to settle down on. The good bacteria will then help outcompete the bad ones, partly by producing antimicrobial substances, but also by lowering the pH. This is why probiotic, living fermented foods gives you a healthy gut and can improve your immune system. It has also been showed that they can help against diarrhea, hepatic disease, inflammation, arthritis, allergies, eczema, hypertension, high blood lipid-levels and certain types of cancer, such as colon cancer. I’d say those small guys have a pretty impressive resume.

There are other perks of fermenting your food. In the process of converting sugar to lactic acid, the bacteria partially digest or break down the food. Consider this: our digestive system takes 10% of our energy, and uses it to take up nutrients, vitamins and minerals from the food we eat. What if we could make this process a bit easier? You know how birds chew their food before giving it to their babies? Essentially that is what the bacteria are doing for us. They both start breaking down the food, but also produce enzymes that will make it easier for the body to digest it. Fermenting food makes it easier and less energy consuming for the body to absorb all the healthy nutrients. Put in fancy words, it increases the bioavailabilty of the food. But the kindness of the bacteria doesn’t end there. They can also synthesize certain vitamins that weren’t present in the food to start with. To sum it up, fermenting something can actually make it healthier and more nutritious than it was to start with!

You can of course buy fermented foods, but it is so easy to make them yourself! You can make your own yoghurt (see recipehere!), sour oats (check this out) and maybe my favorite, fermented vegetables. It is, as mentioned earlier, quite foolproof. The good bacteria ensure that no bad bacteria will grow and spoil the food. The process is super simple. Mix vegetables with salt or brine, stuff them in a jar and let that jar sit. The only things you really have to think about are getting the salt concentration right, and using salt without iodine. Give it a google and you’ll find loads of good recipes. I also have a great and really easy recipe for kimchi on the way; it’ll be up on the blog shortly! If you do choose to buy fermented vegetables instead of making them yourself, make sure to buy the kind that is refrigerated in the store. The canned versions that are kept at room temperature do not contain live cultures. You still get some of the benefits from fermenting from these, but why not go for all of them!

Microorganisms can be so great. Lactic acid bacteria are gallant enough not only to keep our food fresh but also to make it better than medicine. I want to end with a quote by Dr Michael McCann from conference at the International Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Immunology Georgetown University Medical Center in 1999:

“Probiotics will be to medicine in the twenty-first century as antibiotics and microbiology were in the twentieth century."