Seasonal Fermentation: what’s it all about?

Like most of you i am confined at home, asking myself what to do next. Most of our activities are in standby (workshop, brunch, catering & production) so i had a look back at this wiki idea and how to make best use of it, now that i had time to spare. I came up with changing the whole structure towards a central calendar that would show which ferment you can do at what time in the year. I have two main reasons: i’m a city guy, so i suck at the nature clock & more seriously i think it could be a handy exercise to link fermentation even more to a tool for societal resilience.

In a time where we see the limits of classic consumption and temporarily of the (industrial) food chain, giving your vegetables, fruit and other products a longer time-seal through fermentation is a perfect thing to do to become more resilient and auto-sufficient. With this little tool i’m aiming to help myself and other ferment aficionados  to take seasonality even more in consideration.

How will it work?

My idea is to centralize all recipes we are using on a daily basis in production and add the favorite recipes of the community around us, categorizing every recipe under the following factors

– Periode for the main ingredients + best moment to ferment

This will be seen on the agenda as the zone in which to produce a certain type of ferment is best to be considered. Depending on the number of recipes, it could maybe become a general seasonal calendar by fruit and vegetable type

– Method of fermentation

This will be color-coded depending on the type of fermentation to make it easy to see which type of fermentation can be accessed now.

– Buying / Growing / Foraging

With the help of other people we could even go steps further and look into which things can be grown easily, can be accessed in the woods through foraging, or bought directly from local farms. Being in control of and having the knowledge over each step.

– Idea / Recipe By

As we are found of open source knowledge, we find it important to always cite your sources. So here we will put the name of the person / organisation / company / project that was at the insentive of the idea and was willing to share it with us.

– Testes By Fermenthings: Yes / No

We like to test every recipe, but sometimes we will not have the time, so even if we publish a new recipe, it could be that we did not yet tested it ourselves, or that it takes 6 months before we have a result (looking at you Miso)

– Needed Materials

Helping to oversee the logistic part in any recipe. Setting which type of vessel and such you will need

– Level of expertise

As i always say: it’s better to start with easy lactofermentation before tackling koji based recipes for exemple

If you want to participate to this, just send a little e-mail (info@fermenthings.be) and we can start looking at it in the next couple of days. I will be uploading one recipe a day at the moment to test out the system and better it at the same time. And for the rest: Stay Safe, Stay Home and keep fermenting!

P.S: i’m not a programmer, nor a communication wizard, so if you want to help out on that, feel free to join the discussion.