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STANLEY: Hello. I'm Benjamen T. Stanley. I am a local chef from Chicago. My day job--I'm
a research development chef for a small flavoring company called Bell Flavors and Fragrances.
It's based on the Northbrook. But when I come home at night, I like to experiment. I like
to do a lot of fun things. I like to kind of teach myself a lot of different things.
So I'm basically going to do a run down on fermentation and my personal experiences with
it, working with a--kind of learning how to do things myself and think different fermented
products. And fermented food is just--it's one of those products that a lot of people
don't really understand the process for, but they loved them. Over, I think it's 1/3 of
the food consumers is fermented like anything from soy sauce, tea, chocolate, coffee, sauerkraut,
kimchi, any kind of cheese. We consume over 15 million tons of cheese annually as a culture.
Over 22 million gallons of beer and other fermented liquors like, you know, wine, any
kind of bacchus, stuff like that. And the basic 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 kind of carbohydrate plus some kind of bacteria
and it converts it into alcohol or combine with 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 the way 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 pretty difficult. 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 bacteria and they release alcohol, just basic ethanol,
carbon dioxide and some kind of energy unit whether it be heat, whether at the--some kind
of different bi-product, CO2 and stuff like that. 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 microbial growth. 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 what you're doing is the salt will pull the moisture
out. It'll pull out the water which is, you know, breeding ground for a lot of different
organisms, stuff like that. And then it will create this boundary between the products
and the air. So the different organisms can't penetrate 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 goes over your product and it's helping keep the
air in getting into your product, it's helping keep 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 preservation where the use of alcohol is used to inhibit
growth. The high levels of alcohol would kill organisms, as well as lactic acid preservation
which is what you see in cheese, the high acid levels, the same with vinegar, pickling.
The high acid levels will only permit certain organisms to grow but not others. Fermenting
a product--there's two different kinds of techniques 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 yeasts are 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 and feed on. The other way is to have human input.
Basically, human input provides a more controlled environment that we can change and affect
the final outcome of our product. So, what they'll do is they'll actually develop a certain
product, let's say, yogurt. You know, they have this yogurt that they tried it through.
They like the way it taste. What they can do is take their original base, [INDISTINCT]
heat it to kill all the organisms that are in there and then re-introduced that the yogurt
had passed the flavor and the consistency that they want to that heated base that basically
starts out with a clean pallet and only incorporates the organisms that they wanted. And they do
the same method for making the yogurt that will come out, for the most part, the exact
same way as the original one as they do follow the same process. Wild fermentation is a little
bit more unreliable. There's a lot of different things in the area that contribute to it,
but that also will develop the most interesting flavors. Stuff like sourdough breads. You
can make a sourdough bread in San Francisco and it'll taste completely different than
the sourdough bread in Chicago because of the 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 things get done. Ms. Jo over here just kind of builds
closer a little bit, to each one in wine making clarification. If you take out some of the
salads in your product, it will affect the final fermentation of the product and then
you'll have less [INDISTINCT], less yeast because 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 about bio-temperature, the perfect temperature for
the organisms to dry. If you make it go really cold, they won't kill them, but they'll kind
of go asleep. They kind of won't do anything or get lazy. They won't actually ferment anything.
You raise it up too high, you'll kill them and then they can't do anything. Other minerals,
other things that can help facilitate the growth whether the oxygen, different minerals,
different kinds of salt, some kind of phosphate or nitrate, and as well as, you know, the
microbiological environment whether they're yeasts and molds and everything are in the
surrounding area whether what you're trying to 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 almost as old as 12 to 20--12,000 years ago. Mead
was one of the first products that originated and it's basically just a fermented honey
drink. Honey collecting as early as 12,000 years ago, in areas like Egypt and Samarian
areas and for most part, a lot of these things were discovered by accident. Honey, for example,
is high in sugar so, you know, it is an attractant for these yeasts and molds and other things.
They will collect the honey. They mix it with water 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 on to it, they started to notice bubbles come
out, they started to see discoloration, different things growing out. And this visual queue
is originally how fermentation happened. Just seeing a bout of change and tasting it as
it changed, to kind of, you know, see the differences and see whether they liked it
or not. Soy sauce dates back to over 2,500 years ago. Until the 17th century, with the
creation of the microscope, it was generally unknown why these things happened. People
just started doing it in their homes, in their basements and they found that it tasted good
and they just went off with that and started making chesses and started making alcohols.
They don't really understand why. And when the microscope was created, they started to
notice these little organisms, different things inside of the foods. Well, it's science and
at the time, it was such a new concept that it was generally disregarded. A lot of scientists
kind of refused the fact that this could even happen, that there were some kind of small
living organisms and the things that they're eating 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 decided to make this connection between what was growing
and the changes that were done. The way that he came upon this process was that a company
that was a making a beet juice alcohol was having a lot of variations in his product.
And he didn't understand why. He'd been making it the same way for a number of years and
it was just coming out different every single time he was making it, it was very unreliable,
it was affecting his business. So he gave it to the chemist, Louis Pasteur to test stuff.
Well, upon looking at the microscope, he noticed that from older samples of the alcohol versus
newer ones, there were different things, different organisms, different small bacteria that were
present. So he actually came up with a method of pasteurization which we all know is just
heating a product to kill that microflora and then you reintroduced it with the specific
starter that you wanted. Some benefits of fermentation; preservation, it preserves not
only the product itself but it also preserves nutrients. It will actually increase the way
that the body--the body can kind of use some of the nutrients especially like vitamin B,
vitamin C, calcium. It prevents them from being destroyed by sitting in for a long period
of time. It kind of prevents the degradation of 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 this microflora can survive very acidic environments,
it still is highly active in your intestinal tract, in your body system. So as you go through
your system and often kind of make a small home in your intestinal tract, it will actually
help you digest foods, it will help you absorb nutrients better, it will help you absorb
different nutrients that your body normally can't breakdown, a lot of proteins, a lot
of amino acids that your body has a really hard time breaking down. The organisms will
do the work for you. Flavor development, there's a specific chemical reaction that happens
when, you know, you're doing this fermentation and you're developing a lot of different flavors
through the use of enzymes, through the use of creating acids and alcohols. It has antioxidant
properties that actually opens up that antioxidants that your body can use them a little bit better.
It's a fortifier. Like I said, it creates vitamin B. It removes toxins. The process
of fermentation is used for ingredients like coffee. When coffee is grown, it has a cherry
on the outside of it, you pick the cherry and let it sit out so that fruit can ripen,
kind of fall off and then you take the beans from 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 soak it in water to help pull that cyanide that
is present in the vegetable out. Once they're soaked in the water, these toxins come out
and they can actually cook the cassava and eat it. Again, you know, there's a processing
aide, tea is another example, when they pull the leaves, they let them sit out to dry and
ferment. This allows the tea to develop more flavor, to have less moisture in it, lasts
longer. And now I'm going to go over some specific examples. Vegetable ferments. They're
basically usually using a salt brine to help protect the vegetables from rotting. The salt
will pull the moisture out of the vegetable and 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 your cabbage, the salt will pull the moisture out,
it will create this barrier for your sauerkraut and then it will only allow certain organisms
to grow. You're using just straight water and 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 certain level 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 come in and started feeding on that acid. Again,
it goes up, it proliferates, and it starts to die down and then finally, lactobacillus
which is one of the most common, comes in and it will start to create lactic acid which
is that sharp--kind of cheesy sensation that you get from a lot of products like cheese,
sauerkraut, kimchi. This is a basic, a very traditional prop for making sauerkraut. Basically,
what you do is you take your salted cabbage which 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're going to do is you're going to take a very,
very heavy weight, push it on top of those vegetables. What the weight does is it helps
to push the moisture out of the vegetables and leave it at the bottom. If you want this
to be an anaerobic environment so that air doesn't affect how you think to mix as you
want the molds, you want the actual sauerkraut to develop anaerobic environment. So once
you weigh it, all you got to do is put a little bit of salt water around the room of the ***.
And what the salt water does is, again, helps keep the microbes into entering into your
*** and [INDISTINCT]. And you let it sit for anywhere from one week to up to a year
when that sit, unrefrigerated, you want to leave 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 that I 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–-I put in the bowl added salt to it, you generally
add about 5% to 10% solution of salt to your sauerkraut. And the salt will determine how
long it sits for. If you get more salt, then you 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 higher temperature. 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 which really adds up by the end of the year. It's
a very, very artisanal product. It's made by almost every family, for the family. It's
not really something that you go out and buy as often, that is traditionally nowadays with
conveniences and stuff like that, you can get it mass produced. But, usually it was
something that was a very home orientated part of the culture. They come home, they
harvest their own vegetables, they make the kimchi out of whatever vegetables they had
available. They mixed it with salt and spices and generally, chili pepper is used, they
use seafood, they use anything. The big difference between kimchi and sauerkraut is that when
you make kimchi, you soaked your vegetables ahead of time in salt water. What this does
is it pulls the moisture out, fuse the salt into the vegetables and it also kind of helps
keep the crisp texture of that kimchi. So this is soaking some cabbage to make it for
the kimchi. Again, this is about a 5% salt solution. Once you're done soaking it, you
pull out, chopped it, mix it with various vegetables. I use radish, carrot, a couple
of different kinds of greens, you generally used ginger, garlic, red pepper. Then you're
going to take it and put it in--I use--this is very similar to the sauerkraut prop. So
you can do it at home and just put it in any kind of container. Usually you want to use
a kind of hard plastic. You don't want to use metal because the metal will actually
react to the acids and kind of create a teeny taste your food. So any kind of plastic, any
kind of food crate--usually the big white buckets that you find as long as it's never
been used is a good option. Now what you're going to do is you're going to put a weight
on top to bring that moisture level to help protect your vegetables. This is an example
of a fruit kimchi. They are made the exact same style. Again, you take your fruit, cut
them off and salt them. If you can't soak them, brine them if you want, but it's not
necessary. And you got to take them--weigh them 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 of the protein content, they are very difficult
for the human body to digest. So we use the process of fermentation to help beak down
these proteins so that they're are easily digested 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 been established from a different process. Usually,
the same molds that they use for making rice wine, sake is also as present in soy sauce.
What we'll do is put in an open air container and 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 a couple of months, they'll take it, they'll
press it to get all the liquid out, strain it, that's how you have soy sauce. That's
a nationally fermented soy sauce. They also have a method which is chemically induced
but much quicker. It usually takes about a couple of hours, but they'll take soy beans
and they'll add hydrochloric acid to it. This hydrolyses the vegetables and then it creates
that kind of meaty taste to it. You'll notice that taste is very chemically, it doesn't
taste sweet. There's a lot of flavors in that--kind of just don't exist when you have this chemically
made soy sauce. Tempeh is one of the more interesting products. Yes?
>> Do you have any idea about the Kikkoman fermented 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 stuff you 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 starter added to it and they sit in an open air environment.
What happens is that the starter will proliferate with the addition of air, warmth and it will
start to spread, you know, create this kind of mold. What the mold will do is it will
actually take all the soy beans and connect them. Mold will grow across the entire Tempeh
and actually pull it together to be this firm brick. And actually, it will develop very
earthy and kind of mushroom taste to it that are often desirable for vegetarian community
because it has that texture to it and it can absorb a lot of flavor, and it has that kind
of meaty texture to it. Dairy ferments, lactobacilli which is the common bacteria that are in dairy
ferments. They eat the lactose present in the dairy and they turn into lactic acid.
Lactose is basically an ingredient that's in most dairy that a lot of humans have a
hard time digesting because we do not have the 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 cheese or if they eat a yogurt that's heavily fermented,
it doesn't bother them as much that's because the fermentation--the lactobacilli are actually
taking those enzymes that you can't process and do it for you. Some examples; buttermilk,
yogurt, butter, all sorts of cheeses, kefir which is another fermented yogurt product.
Yogurt, more so now than previously, starting to be promoted with having probiotics; as
having these organisms in it that are helping your digestive tract or helping you process
your food, they're helping you speed up your metabolism. This is not a new concept; this
has been around for thousands of years. It actually went away with the invention of pasteurization
because people were afraid of these things that were in their food, they're afraid that
they're going to make them sick. If you take yogurt and you just make it normally, you
actually have these probiotics, so they have these digestive enzymes. As you pasteurize
it, you're killing all those things; or, what that'll do is add the starters to it while
turning the yogurt, heat it after it's turned the yogurt to kill everything to make it safer
human consumption as you know, safe as in--meaning not exactly safer but more well received by
the public. When you're making yogurt, you only need to add a little bit of the starter
to get started. If you add too much or actually crowd everything, you know, it will cause
less of the bacteria to grow but more of the acid remains. You have a very, very sour astringent
yogurt. It's a relatively quick product to make; it only takes about eight to 12 hours
depending on how long you sit at the temperature where the bacteria proliferate at, it will
affect how sour the product is. So, generally what you do is you heat your yogurt up, this
is me heating the yogurt up. Heat up to about 180 degrees first, heat them out, sorry, start
out with the milk base. You can choose how much fat is in your milk base you're getting.
A thinner yogurt will have less fat, very thick yogurt will be high in fat; will go
up to 40% fat. Still have correct fermentation of yogurt. Add again by heating up the product
to 180 degrees. This isn't necessary, what this does is it helps create a thicker yogurt;
helps kind of loosen up the structure of the proteins so that when bacteria come, it will
heat up to 180 degrees, you're going to cool it down to about a 100 to a 110 which is the
ideal temperature to make yogurt at. You're going to add your starter and then you just
kind of try to leave it at that temperature for a long period of time. I guess, at eight
to 12 hours up to 24. The longer you leave it, the more sour your product will be. So,
if you want to less sour product, you leave it for eight hours. You want a more sour product,
you leave it for 20 hours. Well, what happened is, the enzymes will breakdown and will start
to sour the product and it will make lactic acid, and it will actually thicken the yogurt
up. Cheese is a little bit different because you don't actually need the fermentation product
to make the cheese initially. You need the fermentation product to help ripen the cheese
afterwards. So, what we're doing is we're adding acid to some kind of milk base and
heating it to a certain temperature that will actually cause the milk to separate into curds
and whey; the whey is a liquid and curd is the solids. You can also use rennet which
is an enzyme as apparent, a lot of animal stomachs--a lot linings of different animals.
And then what you'll do is you'll strain the whey off, you'll leave the solids and then
you'll just let them sit. And that's how you'll get the fermentation product of your cheese.
You can add different strains of bacteria to get different kinds of cheeses and that's
why there's so many different cheeses on the market 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 in an environment that made blue cheese, you
most likely will have everything else in the environment turn into blue cheese or have
that same mold on it within a couple of days because it's that rapid, it takes over with
that any other bacteria. Grain ferments; also very popular, we're going to talk about sourdough
breads. What happens is, when you add the addition of water to grains, you're helping
activate the yeast that are already naturally on the grains, and you're helping to break
down those grains to help your body process them a little bit better. The addition of
water will cause the yeast to activate; they will 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 much everywhere, 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 the sugars of the fruit itself. So this is how
you start a basic sourdough bread. All you really do is just take flour and water and
for the fermentation talk. In case you have any questions you guys [INDISTINCT].