I "learned" to bake last year, by which I mean I no longer fly past any recipe that calls for flour. Now, while my eyes still grow wide and I stop breathing as I read through a recipe containing flour, I read through the recipe. Then I actually make the thing with flour. And my blood pressure still rises and I swear and things go wrong, but all of that to a lesser degree. Most importantly, I sort of understand baking now, why things are rising, falling, spreading, puffing up, become dense, shattering and collapsing at just the right moment, and that was where I wanted to get to with my baking experimentations. I'll continue to bake, perhaps more than ever before, but this year I choose to demystify...
fermentation.
You either got really excited just now or removed this site from your RSS feed. If you're still hovering over the delete button in consideration of the latter, wait for a minute! Sure, you're sort of right to wonder why people want to eat something politely named stinky tofu, and fine, you haven't tried natto but even the sound foreshadows the "no thanks" with which you might refuse it, but you love Morrocan tagine, right? And realize the quoi in its je ne sais quoi is the preserved lemon, right? You order extra pickles on your burger sometimes, and like pickled radishes with your falafel or lime pickle with your curry, yes? And even if none of these apply to you, look up "fermented salsa" in your browser, like right now. Seriously. People are losing their minds over the stuff. You want to get in on that, at least, I know it!
And for those of you who have been meaning to make everything from kimchee to kombucha for ages, we're going to do this right. As with the le sauce baking academy, I promise to research the hell out of the method and the recipes out there so we understand fermentation, but mostly so that we'll end up with the most ridiculously delicious, complex, in-your-face brined delicacies ever.
