A Arte da Fermentação By Sandor Ellix Katz

A Arte da Fermentação é muito mais que um livro de receitas… É bem verdade que o livro ensina como fermentar, mas, muito mais importante que isso, você conhecerá as implicações da fermentação e saberá por que um ato tão cotidiano e prático como fazer o próprio chucrute é nada menos que uma maneira de se engajar no mundo. Ou, melhor ainda, uma maneira de se engajar em vários mundos diferentes, um aninhado dentro do outro: o mundo invisível dos fungos e bactérias; a comunidade na qual você vive; e a indústria alimentícia que está minando a saúde do nosso corpo e do nosso planeta. Isso tudo pode parecer grandioso demais para um simples pote de chucrutes, mas a incrível façanha que Sandor Katz conseguiu realizar neste livro é convencer o leitor da verdade dessa alegação. Fermentar a sua própria comida significa fazer um eloquente protesto – dos sentidos – contra a homogeneização dos sabores e das experiências alimentares que hoje se estende como uma vasta planície indiferenciada por todo o nosso planeta. O ato também é uma declaração de independência de uma economia que preferiria que fôssemos todos consumidores passivos de suas commodities em vez de criadores de produtos originais para nos expressar e expressar os lugares onde vivemos.

CHARACTERS · E-book, or Kindle E-pub ☆ Sandor Ellix Katz

This is an astounding work, a magnum opus reference guide to All Things Fermented. It's not a cookbook, per se, although an experienced cook could use it to develop recipes. (For recipes to start my adventure in fermenting I will look to Katz's equally impressive cookbook Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods. If I begin fermenting foods with some regularity I will purchase Art of Fermentation, for now the library copy will suffice.)

From edibles to drinkables Katz covers the entire spectrum of fermentation as well as any one person can and he quotes liberally & often from experts in various cuisines which allows him to include good (and hard-to-find) information on many, many non-Western fermenting traditions. For me his brief discussion of Chinese 'pickle' was gratefully received: typically this is an area overlooked by Western authors in favor of focusing on Korean kimchi, which is similar to some Chinese pickles but is in no way the totality of Asian fermented foods. I've been munching stinky Chinese pickle from childhood and really appreciate that Katz included at least an entry into this world, in addition to a fine explanation of soybean fermentation from both the Japanese (hamanatto) and the Chinese (douchi) traditions.

There are many charming line drawings supporting the text, and there's a nicely curated series of color photos in the middle of the book showing all sorts of 'fermentalia': close-ups of bacteria, pictures of crocks, pickle markets, various finished ferments and even a demo of stuffing a jar with veggies.

For anyone interested in fermented foods, Art of Fermentation is worth at least a look-though and it likely should be on the shelf for any serious fermentation enthusiast. A Arte da Fermentação I went from “knows almost nothing about fermentation” to “fermenting everything I can get my hands on” in a week. And the finished results are delicious. Couldn’t recommend this more. A Arte da Fermentação ‘Biologists use the term fermentation to describe anaerobic metabolism, the production of energy from nutrients without oxygen. ....Bacterial fermentation processes have been part of the context for all life....Bacteria break down nutrients we would not otherwise be able to digest...intestinal bacteria produce certain necessary nutrients for us , including B and K vitamins...Bacteria inhabit all our surfaces, particularly the warmer sweaty places that stay moist, as well as our eyes, upper respiratory tract, and orifices; more than 700 species have been detected in the healthy oral cavity....Bacteria are such effective coevolutionary partners because they are highly adaptable and mutable.
“Bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus” explains bacterial geneticist James Shapiro...far from being simplistic “lower forms” of life, they are becoming recognized as highly evolved, with elaborate systems for adaptability and resilience.’
‘We know more about the stars in the sky than about the soil under our feet,’ points out soil microbiologist Elaine Ingram....Like us, plants rely on Bacteria for their survival and have elaborate mechanisms for attracting and interacting with them’ A Arte da Fermentação To do this well written and very interesting book justice, I should first spend a year (at least) in the kitchen making sauerkraut,kimchi,mead,yoghurt etc.,etc., before writing a review, but since I am already convinced that The Art of Fermentationwill be much read and used over the years, I'll just give it 5 stars and be done with it! A Arte da Fermentação Wow, what a huge book! Before reading this (okay, okay, skimming), I knew little to nothing about fermentation. I knew it had something to do with alcohol, cheese, and yogurt, but I also thought it was the same thing as pickling.

Did you know that you can submerge vegetables in their own juices and leave them on the counter for months and eat it and LIKE it? And it's more stable than refrigeration? I obtained this book because I kept reading in many different places that fermented food is incredibly good for us, that the nutrients are multiplied more than that of the fresh/raw version, even. As a prepper, I'm very interested in learning how to get all available nutrients into an off-the-grid diet. Whether I'm going to love the taste of fermented food still remains to be seen. Well, I know I love fermented dairy, so it gives me hope for the rest.

Maybe there's a shorter book, though? A Arte da Fermentação

This book completely thrills me in so many ways!

It is essentially an encyclopedia of what is known about fermentation, with stories based in the personal experimentation of the author and people he's encountered in his travels, as well as a ton of other research. But it is so much more than that.

Equally as precious to me as the vast amount of geeky information about fermentation processes and lore is the perspective. My heart leaps for joy that a queer, community-minded, politically radical, radical faerie-identified creature started sharing their explorations in a zine/pamphlet, expanded it into a beginner's book that became wildly popular, and now has matured the work into this TOME that is arguably the best resource on the subject in the world, AND that the author's radical perspective and personality clearly remain the heart and foundation of this work. What an incredible inspiration for just simply being who you are and doing what you love. Thank you Sandor Katz for teaching me and my community how to pickle, and for making this world a much better place to be.

p.s. It is probably not the best beginner's manual -- Wild Fermentation is a better place to start if you're new and want basic instruction.
A Arte da Fermentação Is it possible for a book to be both too detailed and not detailed enough? Maybe I would be better reading Wild Fermentation, but I felt that this book was lacking in details about how to actually execute these different fermentation items. The recipes and suggestions were buried deep within layers of excessive details about each item, most of which boiled down to there's lots of different varieties of this, mess around and see what you like. I appreciate that approach, but giving more clear details of a starting point for these recipes, then building from there, would dramatically help someone just starting out in these processes. A Arte da Fermentação I guess I haven't really read this cover to cover, but I do consult it now and then, which is probably how it was intended to be read. Awkwardly, it's not a book of recipes, so it's useless if you just want to make sauerkraut *right now*. It's perfect if you just want to wrap your head around what sauerkraut is, how it becomes sauerkraut, who makes it, what varieties there are, how it differs from kimchi, whether it will kill you if something weird grows on top of it, etc., which are all useful inputs to kind of figuring out a process on your own. A Arte da Fermentação The Art of Fermentation is, as the title says, an in-depth exploration of the processes and concepts of fermentation. Sandor Katz covers various types of fermentation that cover a wide range of fermentables (vegetables, grains, etc) and a diverse geographic region. In many ways this is the encyclopedia of fermentation. It is an excellent resource for those who want to know more about the process and how fermentated foods are used around the world and for those who would like to take their own fermentation to the next level.

With that being said, this is not a beginner book. There are few traditional recipes of the add X amount of salt to Y amount of water and use to very Z amount of vegetables, leave for N days. The methods are explained and from that someone who has made a couple of fermented foods such as pickles or sauerkraut could easily devise their own recipes. However, the lack of detailed example recipes could be daunting to a newcomer. Katz's previous book, Wild Fermentation is an excellent introduction for those new to this method of food preservation. Once you feel you're moving past the dishes presented in Wild Fermentation you're ready to jump to The Art of Fermentation!

EDIT 12/12/12: I'm not sure why I originally gave this book 2 stars. At first I wasn't thrilled, I expected more recipes, however as time as passed I find myself coming to the book more and more for ideas and inspiration when I want to try new things. My review above still stands - this is not a replacement for Wild Fermentation but it is an excellent next step once you're comfortable with the recipes/methods in that book. A Arte da Fermentação A lovely friend of mine presented me with this book. Realistically, I believed there wasn't much I'd learn about fermentation. Years ago, I was strictly macrobiotic and those familiar with the concept will know that a percentage of each meal consists of fermented food. My roommate has been fermenting sauerkraut for 22 years and I like to ferment fresh pickles using home-grown dill and cucumbers. We are lucky to have a nearby Asian market in our small town, so miso is plentiful and has never been on our list to home ferment. All this is to say that Sandor Ellix Katz is so thorough that I have been learning facets of this almost-forgotten dietary practice, completely in awe of his knowledge. Originally, I just picked out chapters to read: Cultivating a Biophilic Consciousness, Fermentation as a Strategy for Energy Efficiency, Substrates and Microbial Communities, Salting versus Brining, Jar Method, Crock Method, and then the various types of foods used for fermentation including alcoholic beverages, vegetables and condiments. I do not mean to turn this review into a list. You can certainly peruse the contents using the “look inside” feature. I have the Kindle edition and all illustrations are quite clear on the Kindle Fire HD7. So I skipped around and then suddenly realized how engrossing each chapter is, so I went back to the beginning and have been reading it like a novel, cover-to-cover. It is so much easier to buy a jar of pickles from the supermarket shelf, but fermenting one's foods and beverages brings about a spiritual connection, a binding of the earth with ourselves, that plunking down a few dollars for a jar of fermented food cannot begin to compare. Even if you do not grow your own vegetables, the elemental connection is there: earth producing the foodstuff, water as an almost amniotic fluid, and the temporary banishment of air and fire until the birth of the new, healthy offering to our body and soul.
A Arte da Fermentação