Okay, whew! I finished that book that got me so wound up last week (Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, by Michael Moss). Other than the fact that the major processed food companies actually try to come up with “healthier” formulations – once the chemical load approaches the food load you can’t really call them recipes anymore – there were no real surprises. The trouble is that when the more nutritious products are tested, nobody wants to eat them. They have the taste, texture, and mouthfeel (so I’m led to believe) of cat litter. The food companies always go back to the products that fire the same responses in the brain that heroin does and everybody – consumers, company, wall street investors, and health care professionals – stay fat and happy. I suppose this shouldn’t be a revelation as three of the four largest food companies learned their marketing skills when they were owned by Phillip-Morris.

But here on the micro-farm we don’t have the luxury of not eating something just because 1) it has an offensive taste, texture, or mouthfeel, or 2) because something else is trying to eat it at the same time that we are. Numero dos is not a problem because – in a large part of the garden anyway – we have whipped the soil into a nutrient filled organic sponge that in a few square feet produces more than we could possibly eat fresh.

For example, I can’t even begin to tell you how sick of freaking lettuce I am. Four or five heads a week and we’re just getting through the thinnings. We’re lucky that the spring veggies are almost spent and going to seed. Except that now we’ve got to rip them up and plant some more for the fall harvest. Kale? Don’t get me started. Who eats this shit? I mean really.

(To be fair to kale we do make some wicked-good kale chips which have the same flavor, crunch, and snackability as potato chips with only twice the calories. When you take the potato out of the equation you can double, triple, or even quadruple the junk you coat them with. Yuh-um!)

I digress.

What to do with this bounty has been and remains the problem of the home gardener. You can eat it, but one head of cabbage makes enough cole slaw to last a family of ten for a fortnight. What do you do with twenty heads? You can try to give it away. The first offer of a twenty-pound bag of zucchini is probably welcome but by the third one in three days you’ll find out what all your friends think you should do with your zucchini. Potatoes? Jeez, we’re gonna have so many potatoes I’m going to have to build a cannon to shoot some at the deer.

Which leaves two options. First, as with the eggs, some we’ll sell or give away. Some we’ll throw at the unmuffled, Harley-driving, baby-boomers trying to have a late-stage, misspent youth as they hurry to make the early ferry to Seattle. And some we’ll preserve against the coming dearth of winter. (Sadly, kale grows just fine in the winter around here.)

The current flush of berries will end up in the freezer or canned as jam, the ton-lots of snow peas and beans we’re getting also end up frozen. Onions will store just fine in an outdoor closet. And the potatoes will live in the ground over the winter. We’re also trying our hand at drying things, the mushrooms and herbs worked well, the nectarines might need some practice to get it right. And, as I hinted at last week, our remaining nineteen heads of cabbage are destined to be pickled into sauerkraut.

When you take a look at that list and remove any preservation method requiring technology less than 150 years old – freezing and canning – you can see that the January feasts of our not-so distant ancestors were boring, dull, and – until you piled on the kraut – tasteless. Those same ancestors worked around that problem by coming up with savory marinades and rubs to add some spice to the otherwise leathery hams and sausages they would salt, dry, and hang in the chimney to smoke. Even still – as the food companies know all too well – if you want to add flavor you’ve got to add salt and sugar in sufficient concentrations to be effectively toxic.

The reason for this is that – as we learned having to shake the earwigs out of the lettuce – we’re not the only ones who want to eat our food. Even absent mega-predators, our food is under constant attack by various microbes and whatnot with the sole goal of perpetuating their species with little or no regard to our own. To get around this entropic inevitability, humanity has developed a number of ways to keep the microbes at bay – at least for a little while – while at the same time keep the food safe to eat. Of the big ones – drying, salting, and fermenting – the last is my favorite because of the wide variety of products you can produce and that it’s reasonably safe to do in the privacy of your own home.

When you talk about fermenting most people immediately think of beer or wine. This is to be expected because, of the fermented preservatives, alcohol is the one that also provides a psychoactive effect to its human consumers. But fermentation is a much broader technique than just converting sugar into alcohol. At its simplest you can think of fermentation as any process in which microorganisms (the good bugs) are employed to create an environment in which other microorganisms which want to eat the food (the bad bugs) are unable to live.

When the good bugs are yeast and the food is sugar you get alcohol. When the good bugs are bacteria the preservative you get is acid (lactic, malic, or acetic). And, if you really have a strong palate, you can use fungus – or fungus and bacteria – to come up with some truly nasty treats like the fermented tea called kombucha or gorgonzola cheese.

I’ve been messing around trying to learn the ins and outs of fermentation for a while now. I started with sourdough for making bread while I was living on the boat but the bottle I kept it in exploded on a regular basis. I moved on to yogurt. Yogurt, which is bacterially fermented milk, is really a proto-cheese. It doesn’t separate to curds and whey so it maintains a pudding like consistency that is tart, tangy, and good for you. One of the big benefits of making your own yogurt is that you don’t have to eat store-bought yogurt. When you look into what is passed off as commercial “yogurt” you’ll find a milk product – which may or may not be fermented – carrying up to twice (two times, 2X, double, etc.) the amount of sugar as an equivalent volume of ice cream. The whole “tart, tangy, and good for you” thing kind of gets crumpled up and tossed in the bin.

But my holy grail is a New York, deli-style, full sour pickle. I gave it a shot last year making a couple batches of fermented (sour) pickles. I also tried vinegar pickles hoping to get close to a Heinz Dill (which are not available in these parts). The sour pickles weren’t sour enough and the vinegar pickles turned out kind of sweet. Don’t get me wrong, they were tasty and all got eaten, but they just missed the mark. Then the deer found the cucumbers and the experiment was shelved pending this year’s crop.

In pickling, the veggie in question – cucumbers in this case – are immersed in an acidic salt solution and left to their own devices to exchange fluids and ions and such for a couple of weeks. For vinegar pickles the acid is provided by vinegar (duh!) but for sour pickles the acid is provided by bacterial fermentation.

Yuck! You might say. But you’d be wrong.

The basic process is that the pickles are submerged in a salty brine which prevents the halophobic bacteria – AKA: spoilage organisms, bad bugs – from getting a foothold on your cucs until the halophilic bacteria get established and start churning out lactic acid which prevents the bad bugs from ever getting started. After the vegetable stews in this bacterial broth for a few weeks you are left with a pickle that is tart, tangy, and good for you.

You detect a theme.

With no access to cucumbers until they start growing a bit more, I decided to head back to basics and start with the simplest pickle of all: sauerkraut – AKA: kim chi, Hakusai no Shiozuke, curtido, etc. Made by simply mixing shredded or sliced cabbage with salt, it produces its own pickling brine and two weeks later, Voila! or – more appropriately – verschleiert!: sauerkraut.

How hard can it be?