FermenteaWhere food goes to change
Source-linked articles on foods, ingredients, traditions and equipment.
In 1766 chilli entered a Korean kimchi recipe for the first time. Joseon households made winter kimchi in late autumn and kept it in onggi jars buried in straw, at a few degrees above freezing until spring.
· 9 min read
Freezing food is old. Freezing it fast enough to protect its texture, and selling it that way, is the 1920s idea that built an industry. The science explains why speed matters and where it stops.
· 5 min read
Miso, soy sauce and doenjang share one idea: let a first stage break down beans and grain, then add enough salt that only a few microbes can follow. In Korean doenjang, bacteria do most of the work.
· 6 min read
Rumtopf in Germany, cherries in Lisbon, green ume in Japan: steeping fruit in strong spirit makes a preserve and a liqueur at once. How it works, what is known of its past, and where the evidence stops.
· 5 min read
A picked mushroom keeps breathing and growing. A fridge 3 °C warmer than it should be can cut its life from a week to two days, and the cold that saves a button mushroom ruins a straw mushroom.
· 7 min read
A milk droplet meets air at 150–300 °C and is dry within a fraction of a second. How tunnels, belts, drums and spray towers remove water, what the heat does to food, and what dry actually means.
· 5 min read
Ice once came off frozen ponds and ships. Breweries, a Geelong inventor and a Munich professor built machines that replaced it, and a home refrigerator now shapes which bacteria work in a jar of kimchi.
· 6 min read