FermenteaWhere food goes to change
Source-linked articles on foods, ingredients, traditions and equipment.
Koji takes three days to grow. The salted mash that follows takes months, in some styles two years, and the strength of the brine decides which microbes work in it. What is known about moromi, and what is not.
· 5 min read
Vinegar forms when bacteria and oxygen turn alcohol into acetic acid. This reference follows wine, fruit, grain and sap through that change, the ways of supplying oxygen, the measurements and the choices that finish a bottle.
· 17 min read
Seto and Russian foragers on the Estonian border still salt russulas and ceps and let them ferment for weeks. What grows in the jar, why it varies, and why the tradition is fading.
· 5 min read
A medieval Arabic recipe turns barley bread into a black seasoning with 40 days of sun. Around the Gulf, salted small fish still become sauce, and laboratories and health ministries now measure it.
· 7 min read
A raw olive is too bitter to eat. Curers have fixed that with lye, brine, water and salt, and only some of those methods involve fermentation. Here is what each one does to the fruit.
· 8 min read
A lidded box keeps moisture around a ripening cheese but cannot change the refrigerator’s temperature. Cornell’s Camembert lesson, the food-safety limits, and the humidity nobody has measured.
· 5 min read
Gut, stomach, bladder, caul and skin have held food for as long as recipes have been written down. Which part of the animal a cook chose still decides a food's shape, how it dries and smokes, and how it is eaten.
· 44 min read
A bottle of vinegar can carry the flavour of wine, rice, dates, palm sap or an orchard harvest. Its name becomes useful when you can tell what was fermented, how the acid developed, and what the maker added or changed afterward.
· 18 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
Cut the air to a vinegar tank for 60 seconds and acid formation stops. The story of submerged acetification: an Austrian patent, the machines built since, and why every number belongs to its own tank.
· 6 min read
Rejuvelac is sprouted-grain water that people drink and use to start cashew cheese. Two studies of the quinoa version found almost no bacteria in common, and neither shows that a home batch is safe.
· 7 min read
A machine can supply heat, cold, airflow, pressure or a vacuum. Many traditional foods also depend on sunlight, frost and running water, months of microbial work, or a tested kill step, and these are the places where an appliance stops.
· 19 min read
Monascus has coloured rice wine and bean curd in East Asia for centuries, and it also makes a compound identical to lovastatin. Food, dye and supplement carry different risks, as a contaminated batch in Japan showed in 2024.
· 7 min read
British cooks called their leaven barm, but it was bitter brewery froth in one kitchen, a malt-and-flour ferment in a Scottish bakery and a washed paste in a Victorian larder. A history of one word and three leavens.
· 7 min read
Usipa weigh about five grams, and the rainy-season catch will not wait for the sun. A 2019 beach trial on Lake Malawi weighed the wood, time, money and taste of three kilns and a frying pan.
· 9 min read
Which comparisons with living fish sauces, grain sauces and fermented fish pastes explain how garum was made, and which ones only look alike.
· 6 min read
Garum sits in a much larger world of seasonings made by turning fish, shellfish, meat, grain or seed into concentrated savoury liquids and pastes. This article sorts that world by method, use and documented history.
· 14 min read
From sour breads and milk to savoury seeds, cassava staples and living beers, African fermentation follows the crop, the community and the work of transformation.
· 28 min read
A slow cooker, a brewing kettle or a dehydrator can take over the hard part of many old food crafts, once you see each appliance as a set of physical functions and give it the right container.
· 14 min read
Cabbage, kimchi and olives ferment on bacteria they already carry. Korean kimchi makers have added a chosen strain since 2004; in some 16,000-litre olive vessels the bacteria did not last.
· 6 min read
A marula harvest, a rice mash and a bowl of fermented mare’s milk reveal different ways to make alcohol, and different kinds of knowledge behind the drink.
· 8 min read
A dehydrator turns fruit purée into leather and steamed sweet potato into hoshiimo without sun or wind; a freeze dryer works differently. Both stop microbes growing by removing water, and neither replaces a step that kills them.
· 14 min read
Most written accounts of Māori fish preservation describe drying and steaming. Smoke appears with eels, in a whānau learning story and in a Hauraki recipe. Here is what each record shows, and what it leaves out.
· 5 min read
Koji is grain or beans grown with a mould whose enzymes break food down. This guide separates the mould, the starter and the finished koji, and follows them into sake, amazake, miso, soy sauce and shio-koji.
· 16 min read
Before attiéké is pressed and steamed, a boiled cassava root has to ferment in a used bag. The bacteria that grow there differ by community and by batch, and nobody has turned them into a validated recipe.
· 7 min read
Hot air takes most of a day to dry a shiitake. Microwaves under vacuum can finish in an hour or less, and the same settings can scorch the mushroom. What the laboratory studies show about speed, texture and flavour.
· 7 min read
Montaigne saw cheeses wiped with salt-water linen in the 1500s. The wipe still decides which microbes settle on the rind, what the cheese smells of and what can grow on it.
· 8 min read