>> stanley: hello. i'm benjamen t. stanley. iam a local chef from chicago. my day job--i'm a research development chef for a small flavoringcompany called bell flavors and fragrances. it's based on the northbrook. but when i comehome at night, i like to experiment. i like to do a lot of fun things. i like to kindof teach myself a lot of different things. so i'm basically going to do a run down onfermentation and my personal experiences with it, working with a--kind of learning how todo things myself and think different fermented products. and fermented food is just--it'sone of those products that a lot of people don't really understand the process for, butthey loved them. over, i think it's 1/3 of
the food consumers is fermented like anythingfrom soy sauce, tea, chocolate, coffee, sauerkraut, kimchi, any kind of cheese. we consume over15 million tons of cheese annually as a culture. over 22 million gallons of beer and otherfermented liquors like, you know, wine, any kind of bacchus, stuff like that. and thebasic understanding of why these things happen is generally unknown to the public. by definition,fermentation is an anaerobic process. so basically, it's the conversion of sugar or some kindof carbohydrate plus some kind of bacteria and it converts it into alcohol or combinewith energy along with other enzymes, other, you know, various chemicals. in a food sense,it doesn't have to be anaerobic. it can also be aerobic. so large processing situations,we'll add air, we'll add different temperatures,
we'll kind of control the conditions of theway things ferment help, kind of facilitate that fermentation to help the growth of organisms,to help them thrive, to help them feed. so this is the chemical reaction. it looks prettydifficult. it looks kind of weird. basically, sugar--any kind of sugar, glucose, fructose,sucrose. you add it to your microbial agent like yeasts, molds, other kind of bacteriaand they release alcohol, just basic ethanol, carbon dioxide and some kind of energy unitwhether it be heat, whether at the--some kind of different bi-product, co2 and stuff likethat. why this is an important process? fermentation is probably one of the oldest methods of preservation.there's quite a few different methods that are tried and true. first one is salting.what salt does is it basically draws moisture
out of your products and also inhibits microbialgrowth. so it helps inhibit, you know, different organisms from growing and stuff like that.but it's usually the fungicidal, spores, stuff like that, that it helps to prevent. so whatyou're doing is the salt will pull the moisture out. it'll pull out the water which is, youknow, breeding ground for a lot of different organisms, stuff like that. and then it willcreate this boundary between the products and the air. so the different organisms can'tpenetrate to that salt solution. another one is smoking--same idea. the smoke is antimicrobial.you're basically enveloping a product in smoke, you're creating this kind of crust that goesover your product and it's helping keep the air in getting into your product, it's helpingkeep those organisms from fermenting the product.
and then the other one is drying or dehydrating.again, you're pulling the moisture out and moisture is what helps facilitate this growth.fermentation is involved in a lot of other processes, kind of like ethanol preservationwhere the use of alcohol is used to inhibit growth. the high levels of alcohol would killorganisms, as well as lactic acid preservation which is what you see in cheese, the highacid levels, the same with vinegar, pickling. the high acid levels will only permit certainorganisms to grow but not others. fermenting a product--there's two different kinds oftechniques we used to get the process going to get it kind of started, facilitated, inoculated,you might say. the first one is wild fermentation which basically just leaving a product out,exposing it to air, exposing it to anything
that's flying around the room. a lot of yeastsare present in everyday flowers, on the outside are fruits and vegetables, an outer peel.anything that's really high in sugar, it will attract some kind of organism to come andfeed on. the other way is to have human input. basically, human input provides a more controlledenvironment that we can change and affect the final outcome of our product. so, whatthey'll do is they'll actually develop a certain product, let's say, yogurt. you know, theyhave this yogurt that they tried it through. they like the way it taste. what they cando is take their original base, [indistinct] heat it to kill all the organisms that arein there and then re-introduced that the yogurt had passed the flavor and the consistencythat they want to that heated base that basically
starts out with a clean pallet and only incorporatesthe organisms that they wanted. and they do the same method for making the yogurt thatwill come out, for the most part, the exact same way as the original one as they do followthe same process. wild fermentation is a little bit more unreliable. there's a lot of differentthings in the area that contribute to it, but that also will develop the most interestingflavors. stuff like sourdough breads. you can make a sourdough bread in san franciscoand it'll taste completely different than the sourdough bread in chicago because ofthe temperature or the environment, different yeast that are on the air, stuff like that.other factors in the end-product, we have temperature, environment, season, humidity,your experimentation basically. what your
type of processes and the flow at how thingsget done. ms. jo over here just kind of builds closer a little bit, to each one in wine makingclarification. if you take out some of the salads in your product, it will affect thefinal fermentation of the product and then you'll have less [indistinct], less yeastbecause the yeast kind of stay on the sides on the grapes till you pull the skins out,you're actually pulling out some of the actual organisms that are doing the fermentation.temperature shock, whether that organism has the right temperature to grow, usually aboutbio-temperature, the perfect temperature for the organisms to dry. if you make it go reallycold, they won't kill them, but they'll kind of go asleep. they kind of won't do anythingor get lazy. they won't actually ferment anything.
you raise it up too high, you'll kill themand then they can't do anything. other minerals, other things that can help facilitate thegrowth whether the oxygen, different minerals, different kinds of salt, some kind of phosphateor nitrate, and as well as, you know, the microbiological environment whether they'reyeasts and molds and everything are in the surrounding area whether what you're tryingto inoculate with is able to compete with what's already in the air. traces and history,i guess that is one of the oldest processes where preserving foods and it starts almostas old as 12 to 20--12,000 years ago. mead was one of the first products that originatedand it's basically just a fermented honey drink. honey collecting as early as 12,000years ago, in areas like egypt and samarian
areas and for most part, a lot of these thingswere discovered by accident. honey, for example, is high in sugar so, you know, it is an attractantfor these yeasts and molds and other things. they will collect the honey. they mix it withwater and make a drink and they didn't have refrigeration so they just let it sit out.while as it sit out, they started to notice, you know, little things, changes going onto it, they started to notice bubbles come out, they started to see discoloration, differentthings growing out. and this visual queue is originally how fermentation happened. justseeing a bout of change and tasting it as it changed, to kind of, you know, see thedifferences and see whether they liked it or not. soy sauce dates back to over 2,500years ago. until the 17th century, with the
creation of the microscope, it was generallyunknown why these things happened. people just started doing it in their homes, in theirbasements and they found that it tasted good and they just went off with that and startedmaking chesses and started making alcohols. they don't really understand why. and whenthe microscope was created, they started to notice these little organisms, different thingsinside of the foods. well, it's science and at the time, it was such a new concept thatit was generally disregarded. a lot of scientists kind of refused the fact that this could evenhappen, that there were some kind of small living organisms and the things that they'reeating and they just--they didn't even believe it and they completely rejected it outright.it wasn't even until about the 19th to 20th
century when louis pasteur actually decidedto make this connection between what was growing and the changes that were done. the way thathe came upon this process was that a company that was a making a beet juice alcohol washaving a lot of variations in his product. and he didn't understand why. he'd been makingit the same way for a number of years and it was just coming out different every singletime he was making it, it was very unreliable, it was affecting his business. so he gaveit to the chemist, louis pasteur to test stuff. well, upon looking at the microscope, he noticedthat from older samples of the alcohol versus newer ones, there were different things, differentorganisms, different small bacteria that were present. so he actually came up with a methodof pasteurization which we all know is just
heating a product to kill that microfloraand then you reintroduced it with the specific starter that you wanted. some benefits offermentation; preservation, it preserves not only the product itself but it also preservesnutrients. it will actually increase the way that the body--the body can kind of use someof the nutrients especially like vitamin b, vitamin c, calcium. it prevents them frombeing destroyed by sitting in for a long period of time. it kind of prevents the degradationof the product itself. the digestive aide, a lot of the products if they are not heated,they still have these live cultures and it still has its microflora and because thismicroflora can survive very acidic environments, it still is highly active in your intestinaltract, in your body system. so as you go through
your system and often kind of make a smallhome in your intestinal tract, it will actually help you digest foods, it will help you absorbnutrients better, it will help you absorb different nutrients that your body normallycan't breakdown, a lot of proteins, a lot of amino acids that your body has a reallyhard time breaking down. the organisms will do the work for you. flavor development, there'sa specific chemical reaction that happens when, you know, you're doing this fermentationand you're developing a lot of different flavors through the use of enzymes, through the useof creating acids and alcohols. it has antioxidant properties that actually opens up that antioxidantsthat your body can use them a little bit better. it's a fortifier. like i said, it createsvitamin b. it removes toxins. the process
of fermentation is used for ingredients likecoffee. when coffee is grown, it has a cherry on the outside of it, you pick the cherryand let it sit out so that fruit can ripen, kind of fall off and then you take the beansfrom it. and that helps removes some of the toxins that are associated with the cherry.same is true with like certain types of cassava. in africa, they have to take cassava and soakit in water to help pull that cyanide that is present in the vegetable out. once they'resoaked in the water, these toxins come out and they can actually cook the cassava andeat it. again, you know, there's a processing aide, tea is another example, when they pullthe leaves, they let them sit out to dry and ferment. this allows the tea to develop moreflavor, to have less moisture in it, lasts
longer. and now i'm going to go over somespecific examples. vegetable ferments. they're basically usually using a salt brine to helpprotect the vegetables from rotting. the salt will pull the moisture out of the vegetableand actually create its own shell for the vegetable. multiple changes occur in one thing.i use the example of sauerkraut. when you first start sauerkraut, you add salt to yourcabbage, the salt will pull the moisture out, it will create this barrier for your sauerkrautand then it will only allow certain organisms to grow. you're using just straight waterand salt, only the coliform can grow and once the coliform grows, it proliferates, it feeds,it will start taking the carbohydrates from the cabbage, you know, it will output a certainlevel of acid. once the acid starts to get
too high, it actually diminishes, you know,the coliform that's in the system and then it will leave the kind of stuff will comein and started feeding on that acid. again, it goes up, it proliferates, and it startsto die down and then finally, lactobacillus which is one of the most common, comes inand it will start to create lactic acid which is that sharp--kind of cheesy sensation thatyou get from a lot of products like cheese, sauerkraut, kimchi. this is a basic, a verytraditional prop for making sauerkraut. basically, what you do is you take your salted cabbagewhich can be--sauerkraut can be anything. any kind of vegetable can be made into sauerkraut.you take your vegetable and you mix it with salt, spices, you know, you use onions, apples,bay leaves, peppercorns, stuff like that.
you mixed it with the salt and now what you'regoing to do is you're going to take a very, very heavy weight, push it on top of thosevegetables. what the weight does is it helps to push the moisture out of the vegetablesand leave it at the bottom. if you want this to be an anaerobic environment so that airdoesn't affect how you think to mix as you want the molds, you want the actual sauerkrautto develop anaerobic environment. so once you weigh it, all you got to do is put a littlebit of salt water around the room of the kraut. and what the salt water does is, again, helpskeep the microbes into entering into your kraut and [indistinct]. and you let it sitfor anywhere from one week to up to a year when that sit, unrefrigerated, you want toleave it at the ideal temperature for growth
which is anywhere between 85 and 100 degrees.it's kind of dark, you can't really see it, but this is an example of sauerkraut thati made today that you guys are going to be trying. it's basically just white cabbage,it's got some onions and apples, some different spices and stuff like that. and this is–-iput in the bowl added salt to it, you generally add about 5% to 10% solution of salt to yoursauerkraut. and the salt will determine how long it sits for. if you get more salt, thenyou will take your sauerkraut and age it for a longer amount of time at a lower temperature.if you get less salt, then you're going to age it for a shorter amount of time at a highertemperature. kimchi, it's one of the most popular condiments of korea. it said that,every korean on an individual basis consumes
about a quarter pound of kimchi a day whichreally adds up by the end of the year. it's a very, very artisanal product. it's madeby almost every family, for the family. it's not really something that you go out and buyas often, that is traditionally nowadays with conveniences and stuff like that, you canget it mass produced. but, usually it was something that was a very home orientatedpart of the culture. they come home, they harvest their own vegetables, they make thekimchi out of whatever vegetables they had available. they mixed it with salt and spicesand generally, chili pepper is used, they use seafood, they use anything. the big differencebetween kimchi and sauerkraut is that when you make kimchi, you soaked your vegetablesahead of time in salt water. what this does
is it pulls the moisture out, fuse the saltinto the vegetables and it also kind of helps keep the crisp texture of that kimchi. sothis is soaking some cabbage to make it for the kimchi. again, this is about a 5% saltsolution. once you're done soaking it, you pull out, chopped it, mix it with variousvegetables. i use radish, carrot, a couple of different kinds of greens, you generallyused ginger, garlic, red pepper. then you're going to take it and put it in--i use--thisis very similar to the sauerkraut prop. so you can do it at home and just put it in anykind of container. usually you want to use a kind of hard plastic. you don't want touse metal because the metal will actually react to the acids and kind of create a teenytaste your food. so any kind of plastic, any
kind of food crate--usually the big whitebuckets that you find as long as it's never been used is a good option. now what you'regoing to do is you're going to put a weight on top to bring that moisture level to helpprotect your vegetables. this is an example of a fruit kimchi. they are made the exactsame style. again, you take your fruit, cut them off and salt them. if you can't soakthem, brine them if you want, but it's not necessary. and you got to take them--weighthem down. bean ferments, a lot of people are familiar with soy sauce and miso, tempeh[indistinct] nattos which is a japanese [indistinct] fermented with whole soy beans. because ofthe protein content, they are very difficult for the human body to digest. so we use theprocess of fermentation to help beak down
these proteins so that they're are easilydigested by the body. this is kind of a simple diagram of how soy sauce is made. basically,you take your ingredients, the soybean, wheat, and some kind of mold that's already beenestablished from a different process. usually, the same molds that they use for making ricewine, sake is also as present in soy sauce. what we'll do is put in an open air containerand let proliferate, kind of grow and then after they do that, take it, put it in a container,let it sit for a specific time temperature for about six months. after it sits for acouple of months, they'll take it, they'll press it to get all the liquid out, strainit, that's how you have soy sauce. that's a nationally fermented soy sauce. they alsohave a method which is chemically induced
but much quicker. it usually takes about acouple of hours, but they'll take soy beans and they'll add hydrochloric acid to it. thishydrolyses the vegetables and then it creates that kind of meaty taste to it. you'll noticethat taste is very chemically, it doesn't taste sweet. there's a lot of flavors in that--kindof just don't exist when you have this chemically made soy sauce. tempeh is one of the moreinteresting products. yes? >> do you have any idea about the kikkomanfermented soy sauce, everybody has the stories about kikkoman?>> stanley: kikkoman is actually one of the few that are anturally fermented.>> okay. >> stanley: a lot of the--a lot of the stuffyou buy in the store naturally brewed. a lot
of the stuff that's in more industrious scale,the stuff that you buy, you're processing stuff like that, is not.>> okay. >> stanley: tempeh is another [indistinct]ferment which is basically cooked soy beans that are allowed to cool. they have starteradded to it and they sit in an open air environment. what happens is that the starter will proliferatewith the addition of air, warmth and it will start to spread, you know, create this kindof mold. what the mold will do is it will actually take all the soy beans and connectthem. mold will grow across the entire tempeh and actually pull it together to be this firmbrick. and actually, it will develop very earthy and kind of mushroom taste to it thatare often desirable for vegetarian community
because it has that texture to it and it canabsorb a lot of flavor, and it has that kind of meaty texture to it. dairy ferments, lactobacilliwhich is the common bacteria that are in dairy ferments. they eat the lactose present inthe dairy and they turn into lactic acid. lactose is basically an ingredient that'sin most dairy that a lot of humans have a hard time digesting because we do not havethe enzyme that breaks down this lactose. so, that's why if you're lactose intolerant,a lot of people that are lactose intolerant will find that if they eat an aged cheeseor if they eat a yogurt that's heavily fermented, it doesn't bother them as much that's becausethe fermentation--the lactobacilli are actually taking those enzymes that you can't processand do it for you. some examples; buttermilk,
yogurt, butter, all sorts of cheeses, kefirwhich is another fermented yogurt product. yogurt, more so now than previously, startingto be promoted with having probiotics; as having these organisms in it that are helpingyour digestive tract or helping you process your food, they're helping you speed up yourmetabolism. this is not a new concept; this has been around for thousands of years. itactually went away with the invention of pasteurization because people were afraid of these thingsthat were in their food, they're afraid that they're going to make them sick. if you takeyogurt and you just make it normally, you actually have these probiotics, so they havethese digestive enzymes. as you pasteurize it, you're killing all those things; or, whatthat'll do is add the starters to it while
turning the yogurt, heat it after it's turnedthe yogurt to kill everything to make it safer human consumption as you know, safe as in--meaningnot exactly safer but more well received by the public. when you're making yogurt, youonly need to add a little bit of the starter to get started. if you add too much or actuallycrowd everything, you know, it will cause less of the bacteria to grow but more of theacid remains. you have a very, very sour astringent yogurt. it's a relatively quick product tomake; it only takes about eight to 12 hours depending on how long you sit at the temperaturewhere the bacteria proliferate at, it will affect how sour the product is. so, generallywhat you do is you heat your yogurt up, this is me heating the yogurt up. heat up to about180 degrees first, heat them out, sorry, start
out with the milk base. you can choose howmuch fat is in your milk base you're getting. a thinner yogurt will have less fat, verythick yogurt will be high in fat; will go up to 40% fat. still have correct fermentationof yogurt. add again by heating up the product to 180 degrees. this isn't necessary, whatthis does is it helps create a thicker yogurt; helps kind of loosen up the structure of theproteins so that when bacteria come, it will help tie them a little bit better. this isthe yogurt after it's finished; so after you heat up to 180 degrees, you're going to coolit down to about a 100 to a 110 which is the ideal temperature to make yogurt at. you'regoing to add your starter and then you just kind of try to leave it at that temperaturefor a long period of time. i guess, at eight
to 12 hours up to 24. the longer you leaveit, the more sour your product will be. so, if you want to less sour product, you leaveit for eight hours. you want a more sour product, you leave it for 20 hours. well, what happenedis, the enzymes will breakdown and will start to sour the product and it will make lacticacid, and it will actually thicken the yogurt up. cheese is a little bit different becauseyou don't actually need the fermentation product to make the cheese initially. you need thefermentation product to help ripen the cheese afterwards. so, what we're doing is we'readding acid to some kind of milk base and heating it to a certain temperature that willactually cause the milk to separate into curds and whey; the whey is a liquid and curd isthe solids. you can also use rennet which
is an enzyme as apparent, a lot of animalstomachs--a lot linings of different animals. and then what you'll do is you'll strain thewhey off, you'll leave the solids and then you'll just let them sit. and that's how you'llget the fermentation product of your cheese. you can add different strains of bacteriato get different kinds of cheeses and that's why there's so many different cheeses on themarket because depending on the area they're from, depending on what's in the environment,that's where the flavors are coming from. blue cheese is one of the most notorious.it's a very, very, rapidly growing organism that spreads very quickly. so, if you're inan environment that made blue cheese, you most likely will have everything else in theenvironment turn into blue cheese or have
that same mold on it within a couple of daysbecause it's that rapid, it takes over with that any other bacteria. grain ferments; alsovery popular, we're going to talk about sourdough breads. what happens is, when you add theaddition of water to grains, you're helping activate the yeast that are already naturallyon the grains, and you're helping to break down those grains to help your body processthem a little bit better. the addition of water will cause the yeast to activate; theywill actually start to eat the carbohydrates of the grain themselves and help loosen them,like they're converted into a more digestible product. this yeast are found pretty mucheverywhere, may be kind of sugar, if you've ever looked at some kind of plum or grape?that white film on the outside of your fruit
is actually yeast; they're feeding on thesugars of the fruit itself. so this is how you start a basic sourdough bread. all youreally do is just take flour and water and put them together, put a cover over it andlet it sit. what i did for mine is i actually used potato water. i cooked some potatoes,after i cooked the potatoes, i saved the water and i turned that into a sourdough bread.that extra starch from the potatoes just give something extra for the yeast to heat on.so what you'll do is, you mix those two products together, let it sit at the ideal temperatureagain from 80 to 110 degrees in an open air container. you want to leave it open air atthe beginning because this is where the yeast are going to come from, they're going to comefrom the air. you can add baker's yeast if
you want but that kind of defeats the purposeof having this sourdough that's made with things that are naturally occurring in theenvironment. you have that sit overnight with the temperature–-the ideal temperature,the next day you come back to it, you remove half of it, and then add the same amount offlour and water that you removed. it's introduced again, newer yeast helps add some more carbohydratesso that the yeast can feed up and proliferate more. you do this for about three to fourdays until you start to see a bubble. once it bubbles, then you have a solid starter.that bubbling means that the yeast are active, they're creating lactic acid which is wherethat sourness is going to come from, and it means that, they're going to continue to beactive as long as they keep being fed, as
long as you keep the phytonutrients of heatand sugar for them, they'll keep going. so these starters can pretty much be kept indefinitely.some of the sourdoughs from the san francisco are over a hundred years old because theystarted sourdough a hundred years ago. they take out half of it, make bread, add moreflour and water, and they just keep making it everyday using that same starter. and thenover time, it evolves a lot of different flavors from a lot of different organisms. this isanother fermentation practice which, if you watch my twitter, this is one of the firstthings that i have kind of experiments with, is fermented oatmeal. you take any kind ofoats, soak it in water overnight, and the yeast present in the oatmeal will actuallykind of breakdown starch and will result in
a very, very kind of creamy gelatins oatmeal.fruit ferments, we see this with wine. we see this with different kinds of root beers,we see this with–-i guess it would be grain, we see this is as normal beer, as well thatthe addition of fruit is normal in making normal beers. what are you doing is basicallyagain taking those naturally occurring yeast in the air and they're feeding off the sugarof the fruit. specific sugars would kind of help change for the final fermentation andadd the final flavor. so, if you're using honey, if you're using molasses, if you'reusing sorghum, if you're using brown sugar, each one of these sugars has a different flavorprofile and different types of organisms that be attracted to, let's say, honey then brownsugar. that's pretty much it. i have a bunch
of products here that we're all going to taste.i have a fruit kimchi that's made with pineapple, grapes, cilantro, ginger, some other spices;again, let it sit it for a week. i have a normal kimchi that's made in a very traditionalstyle, this has radish, some greens, chili pepper, garlic, ginger. i have homemade sauerkrautthat has the addition of apples and onions to it. i have some yogurts. i have a fullfat yogurt that's made of 40% fat. kind of comes out to the consistency of sour cream.i also have a normal fat, with a 5% fat yogurt. i also have some butter that was made withthe yogurt; let me talk about that process if you like. and i also have some--it's aginger beer recipe but i made it with galangal. basically, took ginger, shred it up, mixedit with sugar and water to have the environment
so that the yeast can grow. once they startedto grow, you add that to a base ginger and sugar. once you put on that base, you addthe starter that you made with the active cultures then you put it in an anaerobic environmentby putting into a bottle and letting it sit. this will start to create--they will eat thesugars and create alcohol and co2, and that's when the carbonation comes from because they'reconcentrating that co2 into the bottle; so, it can't escape, so, it's infusing itselfinto the water to create carbonation. so, yeah, if you guys want to come up and havea taste some stuff. that's pretty much it for the fermentation talk. in case you haveany questions you guys [indistinct].