What is the chief function of fermentation? It’s a question that invites multiple answers, such as nutritional enhancement and promotion of gut health and microbiome diversity. There’s also food preservation, which was especially important before refrigerators and industrial processing were invented.
Occam’s razor would suggest an oft-overlooked factor that fermented food simply tastes good: Without fermentation, sauerkraut isn’t sour and bread is airless.
For home cooks, fermentation has always been one of the best methods to extend the shelf life of fleeting seasonal ingredients. The sweet spot, of course, is a mixture of all of the above.
In his debut cookbook, “Ferment: A Cookbook. Simple Ferments and Pickles, and How to Eat Them,” Kenji Morimoto, 36, provides exactly what the title promises as well as his own answer to the opening question above.
For those interested in fermenting at home, it can be hard to know where it is safe to wade into the brine to get your toes wet, metaphorically speaking, before diving into the deep end. Morimoto’s book provides easy guidance for such endeavors: From savory miso and kimchi, to sour kombucha and sweet cheong (Korean sugar preserves), the cookbook is full of achievable pet projects to spark inspiration. The summer side of cucumber snake-cut kimchi, for example, is a perfect dish to start with.
The second half of the book explores the use of fermented fruits to supercharge your cooking. For example, Morimoto’s Date & Miso Sticky Toffee Crepe Cake, an homage to British sticky toffee pudding, is easy to make even without an oven: The crepe batter, sweetened with dates, comes together in a blender and, once cooked in a pan, is simply layered with cream. It is then topped with a toffee sauce enriched with white miso.
Many of the recipes in the book aren’t Japanese in the traditional sense — they actually have a big Japanese-American slant. One of Morimoto’s favorite recipes is the Chicken Kimchi Masala, which is Korean-infused and inspired from his time living in India between 2011 and 2013, a period that sparked his fermentation journey.
Based in the U.K., Morimoto is a fourth-generation Japanese American — all his great-grandparents from Hiroshima immigrated separately to the United States in the 1880s, “pretty much as soon as the Japanese could leave Japan.”
Because of World War II and the internment of Japanese Americans, Morimoto says his family’s immigrant history is a little disjointed. But he thinks the fact that they remained Buddhist may have helped keep old traditions, including culinary ones, from being lost.
Growing up with his great-grandparents’ and grandparents’ cooking in Chicago, the familiar fermented flavors of traditional Japanese cuisine were a big part of his childhood. Describing himself as a “weird kid,” Morimoto recounts carving out his own niche in the family kitchen by saving up money to buy himself some plastic Japanese pickle presses when he was 8 or 9 years old.
“As a kid, I found (the pickling process) magical and transformative, and obviously very tactile as well,” he recalls. “Everyone had a role (in the kitchen) and no else pickled, so I decided to.”
It took until adulthood for him to fall into fermentation. After graduation from Brown University in Rhode Island, he moved to Mumbai in 2011 to work for a private equity group. The scarcity of familiar fermented food in India led him to make his own.
“It was quite an odd place to start making kimchi. But that lit a flame in me in terms of thinking about food through the lens of locality and access,” he says.
“Adapting recipes based literally on what I could have and thinking about how the product would evolve in a different environment was not dissimilar to the experiences that my own family have had (in America), as well as kind of how I've lived my life since India,” he adds.
Morimoto moved to the U.K. in 2016. His kitchen projects gained a large following on Instagram during the pandemic as he found his own reasons to ferment. The social media attention also led to the cookbook deal.
His book offers a perfect primer for beginning a relationship with fermentation and, almost more importantly, a counterbalance to modern, fast-paced lifestyles. The fermented dishes mature on their own timetable and not yours.
“The (expectations) of modern society and us hurrying things up and wanting everything immediately — fermentation is the exact opposite of those things,” he says.
He recalls patiently observing his jars of miso evolving with their tamari byproduct gathering atop, along with the “changing colors and hissing sounds from their lacto-fermentation.”
Morimoto says fermentation is an amazing platform to practice what he calls “learned intuition,” which can be applied to life in general.
“It taught me to have trust in the process, which is a lot of what Buddhism means to me,” he says. “You go in with intent and action, but once you do something, you let it go and just kind of believe and hope."
As if putting his own philosophy into action, Morimoto left his corporate job after the launch of his book to devote himself to food events and writing projects.
So why should anyone ferment food? Morimoto says the reasons can be entirely personal. “(You can do it) for gut health, connecting with your family history or just to play with flavors,” he adds. “That’s my ethos.”
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.