Publisher Description

Heads (of cabbage) are gonna roll! Learn how to make funky, flavorful ferments + tasty food that incorporates them. Fermenter is perfect for those looking to add some serious culinary wizardry and revolutionary DIY spirit to their vegan kitchen.Like The Noma Guide to Fermentation but with a punk, DIY aesthetic and a it's-OK-to-fail ethos, Fermenter provides the sought-after secrets and words of wisdom from top fermentation educators, Aaron Adams and Liz Crain.Based in Portland, Oregon (vegan capital of America), the Fermenter restaurant specializes in culinary fermentation to achieve their unique funky flavors. Learn how to handcraft local bean-and-grain tempehs, fresh and aged vegan cheeses, fizzy probiotic drinks, and koji ferments and revolutionize the flavor profiles in your home kitchen! They empower you to follow them down this highly addictive (and inexpensive) path, resulting in totally DIY food, free from mass-produced or corporate anything.Whether you're a pickle wizard already or a just want to level up your home-cook vegan cred, there are more than 60 tantalizing recipes, including-North Coast Kraut (made with seaweed!) is a great beginner's lacto-ferment, full of probiotic goodnessChickpea Miso- a more complex, longer-lead ferment & pantry stapleKoji Beet Reuben- put those koji skills to work with this umami bombCheesy Jojo Supreme with Tempeh Bacon- the perfect stoner food, like if stuffed potato skins were a nacho dishBeware- Vegetables will be slaughtered.

Author Biography

AARON ADAMS is a chef and fermentation educator based in Portland, OR. He opened his first restaurant in 2002, followed by restaurants that all in one way or another featured fermented food and drink. He zeroed in on and grew that love of fermentation at Fermenter, which showcases everything traditional, wildly experimental, and local and global ferments--from koji to kombucha--along with delicious dishes that incorporate them.LIZ CRAIN is a longtime writer on Pacific Northwest food and drink. She is the author of Dumplings = Love and coauthor of the cookbooks Toro Bravo, and Hello! My Name is Tasty, as well as 420-friendly Grow Your Own. She is also cofounder of the annual Portland Fermentation Festival.

Review

WIRED's Best Cookbooks of 2023 (So Far)
"I love showing up at a dinner or barbecue with a big batch of sauerkraut . . . ermenter is for people who have the basics down and want to try something a little more advanced, with a vibe that combines hippie, punk, and the scientific method."
—Wired.com

"Fermenter is a one-of-a-kind fermentation-driven vegan restaurant, with gorgeous and delicious food, and Aaron is a one-of-a-kind chef and human being. I'm so glad he teamed up with Liz Crain to share his adventures in flavor-building via fermentation. This cookbook is full of accessible and down-to- earth ideas for using ferments in a wide range of dishes, complete with recipes and fermentation techniques."
—Sandor Ellix Katz, New York Times-bestselling author of The Art of Fermentation

"Fermenter proves that cooking vegan need not be bland or boring. It's a wellspring of instructive and tantalizing recipes for ferments, and refreshingly, also for whole meals made with those ferments. You're going to love this food no matter your diet."
—David Zilber, New York Times-bestselling coauthor of The Noma Guide to Fermentation

"Reading Fermenter is like hanging out, nibbling on ferments, and chatting with Aaron and Liz. Its vibe is chill, honest, and rich with story with an easy conversational tone. They've knocked it out of the park here with all sorts of approachable and delicious vegan ferments."
—Kirsten K. Shockey, author of Fermenting Vegetables and cofounder of The Fermentation School

"With chapter titles like "eat your salty, sour vegetables" and "mold is gold," the most bold and adventurous will be called forth to the kitchen to experiment. Recommended for those who are eager to get serious about food."
—Booklist

"This book RULES! Along with Pietramala in Philly and Oakland's Lion Dance Cafe, Fermenter is part of a select new breed of restaurant severely altering and advancing the vegan food landscape in this country. Thrilling." 
–Brooks Headley, chef and author of Superiority Burger Cookbook

"I am excited for Fermenter to join the kitchens of every ardent vegan, plant-based, and plant-curious food lover. Aaron and Liz's creative force and understanding of ferments as foundational to deliciousness is amplified by their sense of humor, enthusiasm, and obvious care for how food and community are related."
—Karen McAthy, author of The Art of Plant-Based Cheesemaking

"With Fermenter, experience the deliciousness of the renowned Portland restaurant but also the down-to-earth, roll-up-your-sleeves, DIY ethos and infectious spirit of the most generous and genuine human beings we've ever known."
—Kevin Farley and Alex Hozven, The Cultured Pickle Shop

Excerpt from Book

INTRODUCTION Oh, hello there. Most days when I''m behind the counter at Fermenter Workshop, right next door to Fermenter proper, I''ll get some eager person, wild-eyed and firing fermentation questions at me. They want me to explain the mechanism for all of the weird shit that is going on in all of these jars and crocks, and most of the time I shrug and say, "I dunno." This, of course, usually doesn''t go over that well, so I''ll wryly add, "I approach fermentation from a craft perspective." Indeed. Which is to say I''m a bit of a dum-dum who doesn''t really know what the heck I''m doing. I can''t imagine many old timey fermenters understood exactly what was going on when they were salting cabbage and storing it away in big mud pots either, bless them. Knowing that gives me the strength I need to carry on making things when I have zero idea what''s happening. That''s been a major theme in my life. As a moderately successful chef and restaurateur, who is pretty famous within the square block of Southeast Portland that Fermenter inhabits, I''ve always pushed forward into the inky darkness of not knowing. It isn''t fearlessness or courage, but rather a sort of advantageous dimwittedness that allows me to try all sorts of things out. Luckily, I also lack an ability to be too terribly embarrassed, which allows me to fail over and over again without slowing down. This is an important trait for a fermenter. When some time ago I was having major texture deterioration issues with some cabbage kraut, I asked the experts at Cultured Pickle Shop in Berkeley, California what I was doing wrong. Kevin Farley, co-owner there with his wife Alex Hozven, let me in on a little secret when he said, "I imagine you will find, as we have, that fermentation is a cruel collaborator, and will continue to fuck you over. Hopefully it will keep you humble." And there you have it. Even the experts make something awful from time to time. What I''m driving at here is when you approach fermentation projects, be ready to make some really disgusting things from time to time. Take plenty of notes so you can figure out what the heck happened, and then try not to repeat those processes and recreate those conditions. But, don''t ever ever feel bad about trying. I used to work for a chef who was a real asshole, but who did leave me with one gem. He told me, "I''m not better than you, I''ve just fucked up more than you have." So, go fuck stuff up, and make a million things. See which ones are good, and then hold onto those babies. Who the heck are you? I was raised in a fairly boring mid-sized town in the Bay Area named Livermore. After my parents divorced, we moved around a lot, landing in the great and noble city of Hayward in East Bay. I spent a good amount of time pissing my parents off there, running around and hanging with other kids who liked pissing off their parents, too. I was a fat, nerdy, somewhat androgynous, vegetarian weirdo, and I was unliked by most of my classmates. During my sophomore year of high school, I finally found a group of other weirdos who were having a hard time fitting in as well: punks. Oh punks, beautiful punks. Even they had their hierarchies of cool, still a goofball like me could find a way to wedge into their culture. I spent nearly every weekend at punk temple 924 Gilman in the early ''90s. When I got beat up by a bunch of Nazis by the truck trailers down the street from Gilman, I decided to join a group of anti-racist kids called SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice). After that I went running around pretending to be a tough guy. Of course, I''m not very tough, and I remained fairly terrified while hanging out with these insane people for the next five years or so. I continued my anti-racist skinhead gig when I moved up to Seattle, where I was very into wearing Levi''s Sta-Prest trousers and red socks for many years. I am, as the kids say, over it now. (I know, I know, if you''re not now, you never were. Oh well.) I think that the first time I knew I wanted to cook (that is, to be a cook more than wanting to actually cook) was when I saw some swarthy looking fellas in chef whites smoking cigarettes by a dumpster behind a restaurant. It had that same cachet as punk to me. Street tough and working class. I was instantly obsessed with kitchen culture, which I treated like any other subculture I obsessed over. I got my first kitchen job as a dishwasher at a terrible steakhouse where the chef wore cowboy boots and tried to impress the young waitresses by slinging kegs over his shoulder. I went on to cook at many mediocre to fair restaurants throughout Seattle before wandering over to cook in a resort in Guam. I went from there to Miami, then New York City, then Jacksonville, Florida, and finally here to Portland, Oregon. Lots of stuff happened in all of those places, but I''ve got to start talking about Fermenter here sooner than later, no? Fermenter isn''t a huge restaurant--we have just under 60 seats total inside and out, but we have really big hearts, and fermentation feeds so much of what we do. Fermenter''s ethos centers around accessible, local, seasonal, handmade, craft food made with local organic agriculture and goods. We serve food that is craveable, but that''s also really good for you. Isn''t that nice? Fermenter also aims to make people feel good when they come in. Hospitality is an important aspect of being human with other humans. Making food, without someone to make it for, is pretty dreary. I hope that you agree when I say that everyone deserves dignity and respect. Cooking can do that for people. It is super-duper intimate and you need to go about it responsibly. You are literally putting things into another person''s body. And, if you''re going to do that, you need to do it with consent. That is to say, if you say it''s vegan and organic, you better damn well make sure it''s vegan and organic. There are also some implied things in that consensual agreement like, you know, not serving things that fell on the ground or that have broken glass in them. If you think someone would be mad if they knew what you were feeding them, don''t do it. But do make people feel welcome and offer them tasty and healthy things to eat. Maybe cooked up from this rad new book that you''ve got. And, for the record, I fully believe in keeping the Y in DIY. Do it yourself. Please. Make things! 100 percent. I won''t hold your hand, you''ve gotta do the work, but I will give you a lot of advice, whether you ask for it or not. Ok, let''s make some tasty food! "Will I Die if I Eat It?" & Other FAQs Do you hate me if I''m not 100% vegan? Every night I say to my wife, "I love you, Jenny, but I also hate you because you''re not vegan." No! That''s not true. Of course, I don''t hate you. And, I don''t hate my wife! I don''t hate you if you''re zero percent vegan. I don''t cast judgment on anyone''s dietary choices. If you caught me 20 years ago, though, I would have been like, "Fuck you! If you aren''t vegan, then you don''t care about anything!" When we look at the gift and punishment of the human perception of time--it seems so slow, but relative to what''s going on in the universe, the billions of years that came before us, the billions of years that will come after--none of the shit that we do matters all that much. So, who cares? Half-joking aside, what feels good to me, at this point in my life, is to do as little harm to the planet as I can while I''m here, and that includes eating and cooking vegan. That''s makes sense to me, but if you don''t feel it, you don''t feel it. And I get that. There''s a huge historical momentous force that informs us to, and pushes us to, eat animals and to live and act a certain way--the CAFO meat, industrial food and farms way. It''s really hard to slow that train down. So, in the words of Bill Murray, in that sweet 1980s movie Meatballs, "It just doesn''t matter." Please enjoy the material pleasures of life, to the best of your ability. Until we all perish and enter the void. What are the easiest ferments to start with in this book, and which are most difficult for a newbie fermenter? I want easy. I''d say that the easiest ferments to start with here are the lactic acid bacteria ones, which are primarily in Chapter 1. The most difficult recipes are mostly in Chapter 2--the bean, legume, and rice ferments like tempeh and koji. You can do all of it. I believe in you! What if I forget about one of your ferments in the back of the fridge, and it''s been in there longer than you say it should be, can I eat it? We give you good-till times for most of the recipes throughout the book, ranging from days to months, but the truth is a lot of these ferments keep just about indefinitely. Those timeframes are simply for when the they are at their best. We don''t keep things all that long at Fermenter, because we''re busy as all get out, and we don''t stockpile, because in general, we favor fresh. We also just don''t have the room to. At home, you most likely can and will keep things longer. That''s great. Please don''t worry about it. I''d say that the biggest thing you''ll want to look out for is significant texture deterioration. Some ferments can get pretty soft and yucky after a while. In general, the nose knows. Use your senses. Organoleptic all the way. Does it smell good, does it look good, does it feel good? If it''s not stinky bad, or nasty looking, or slimy gross etc., chance

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