- My wife is Korean, and a lot of Korean food is fermented, preserved, or otherwise kept using a traditional pre-refrigeration method. There are a number of really beautiful traditions that come from the logistics of keeping stuff around for months, or even years. The idea of things being diverted off at various stages of fermentation for different uses was a massive revelation to my American mind.
- That being said, my Korean relatives are completely blown away by some old Western methods of fermentation especially around land mammal meats -- various sausages, smoked meats, salted meats -- and fermented milk products like cheeses.
- The best restaurant in the world, I think in Norway, featured a dedicated fermentation R&D lab as part of their core restaurant menu development process.
- The global trade in alcoholic drinks in based on truly beautiful and sophisticated battles between various micro-organisms.
- My friends in the bio-world recently (in the last few years) have taken an interest in fermentation as part of the thinking on long-term food sources for space habitability. Nothing produces the incredible complexity in microbiology, specifically ones good for food sources for humans, creates anything close to the complexity of fermentation. The thought it using stages of fermentation to produce all of the feed material needed for complete human nutrition. But it's perpetual.
Bonus - you might also divert some parts of the process into fuel, air, and other required processes. It's incredibly compelling, highly technical (informed by modern AI models) research.
It's beautiful and useful too!
<drum roll>
Chocolate
I have no idea WHY that should come as a shock to me, but it does
Honorable mentions also go to Tea and Coffee
Vanilla beans are also fermented before use. They start green, before they are processed and ultimately fermented, giving rise to the delicious aroma and flavor we're all familiar with.
The Western 19th and 20th centuries's approach to foods have been an incredible disservice to culinary and health history and modernist trends.
Examples, other than kimchi and probably some fish sauces? Don't know much about Korean food, but I liked what I tried, the few times I ate at a Korean restaurant.
From there you can continue to process and ferment them to produce a variety of sauces, pastes, soup bases, and so on - soy sauce is the most famous in the west, but the rest of the products have honestly mind-blowing, highly complex, tastes.
There's also a broad tradition of preserving and fermenting various seafoods, from the corvina to fermented skate (hongeo) [2].
If you are not british and want to understand britian's approach to food, then https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01klvhq is your programme.
Lobster is a famous example (though I am skeptical of the story that prisoners revolted over being forced to eat it too much; I have been unable to find a reliable primary source). A beautiful example is from the film Ratatouille, where the eponymous dish is contrasted between his mother's peasant stew and the $50 a plate Thomas Keller version.
Also lobster is really only good because they absolutely drown it in butter
I experience this with my sourdough bread, the smell of the sourdough and the bread vary and are subtle, deep and nice. The bread is dry and stale in a day though, so the bread is the family's favorite, but only when it's fresh. Although freezing it after it has been properly cooled is not half bad.
I enjoyed 'The Art of Fermentation' by Sandor Katz, but is wasn't guide/cookery book enough for me - 'Of Cabbages' hit the right note, and I've been working my way thorough it all.
I'm a little obsessed with fermented chilli sauces, and have been using the brine to make an excellent hot ketchup, than friends keep asking for more of.
