About That Time I Ate Nothing But Fermented Food For One Year (The Fermented Man Pre-Order)

In two months, on July 19th, The Fermented Man will finally be released, so I think it's time for a little update on the book. Many of you have no doubt been waiting for The Fermented Man these last few years as ravenously as the masses anticipate a new Star Wars film, so if you don't require any further elaboration from me, I'll here point out that the book is already available for pre-order. For more details, please read on!

In Case You Don't Know About the Book-
During the year of 2014, I lived off of nothing but fermented food for the entire year. Yes, an entire year consuming only things which were fermented. However, this isn't a new lifestyle diet I'm going to be endorsing on Dr. Phil, but more of an experiment (a thought experiment turned into a challenging reality), and a means to journey through the world of fermented food in an interesting and immersive way. I wanted to write a book that would be entertaining and informative for any reader, whether you know a lot about fermentation already, or absolutely nothing at all.

Even though fermentation is as old as civilization itself, studies into our microbiome and our relationship with microbes are only recently entering the public consciousness. One might be tempted to conclude that probiotic foods are just another new health fad, but fermentation is anything but. It is a fundamental element of the culinary world. So fundamental, you could even, just for example, live off of nothing but fermented foods. The influence of fermentation really does permeate just about everything.

There are many excellent guides to making fermented foods at home out there. In fact, that is primarily how the publishing world has dealt with fermentation thus far. I wanted to write a different type of book, one for hobbyists and general readers alike. Maybe you can't even pretend that you'll ever be motivated to go home at night and spend a few hours packing cabbage into a jar to make sauerkraut. That's totally fine — not everyone needs to be (or has time to be) a hobbyist, and fermentation is far more important (and interesting) than as just as DIY activity for foodies. Maybe you've spent most of your life convinced that you need to slather your hands in sanitizer gel to lead a healthy lifestyle, and are simply fascinated that anyone would risk eating food crawling with living bacteria, much less a whole year of it. After all, we go to great lengths to eradicate microbes in almost every area of our lives. Why would we want more of them?

This is a book for those terrified of microbes, and those who love them.


What To Expect From The Fermented Man-
The Fermented Man is a narrative non-fiction journey into the world of fermentation. Living off of fermented foods for a year posed a host of challenges and educational opportunities alike, and allowed me to structure the book as a walk-through of the entire world of microbe-made foods, as well as an exploration of the very nature of diets. You will hopefully learn a lot. You will probably read some thoughts about diets and health that you weren't expecting. You will hopefully be entertained, and get a few chuckles out of my ordeal, here and there. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be inspired to post passionate memes on Tumblr demanding a sequel. In the back of the book there is even a brief recipe section, so after traveling with me through this eye-opening culinary realm, you can try your hand making a few of my favorites at home, if you are so inclined.

When Does The Fermented Man Come Out?-
The book will be released (both online and in bookstores) on July 19th.

How To Get a Copy Of the Book-
The Fermented Man will be available through all the typical channels that books are typically available.

You may guess that authors generally take home more money when you order from the author directly, rather than, say, Amazon. And while I could probably make a few more bucks by setting up a sale for the book through my merch store and encouraging everyone that reads this blog to order the book that way, it's actually probably better for me in the long run if you just order the book from a regular store — either your local bookstore, or Amazon. While I might make less on each sale, Amazon is also a very powerful marketing platform, in a sense, and the more visible my (or any) book is on Amazon, the better it is likely to do. So, it's probably ultimately better if Amazon sees that my book is selling well, versus trying to squeeze out a few extra dollars by selling a bunch of copies myself. Likewise, your local bookstore can always really use your support, and their interest in my book is also supremely helpful. So, please visit them and ask if they'll be getting copies of The Fermented Man in. If they are not already, you can always request that they do so. A win for everyone!

One more thing: after you have read the book, please consider doing me a huge favor. I mentioned that Amazon also essentially works as a marketing platform. Along those lines, the more reviews a book has, the better for its visibility to other shoppers. So please consider doing me a major solid and adding a quick review to the Amazon page. Even a short review is immensely helpful to an author — especially a new, unknown author like myself.

How Many Copies Of the Book Should I Order, Just To Be Safe?-
At least four or five, but up to 10 if you really want to improve your social standing. Copies of The Fermented Man make excellent gifts for any family member, friend, significant other, or all 527 of your Facebook friends!

How Can I Order Copies To Sell At My Store?
If you work at a bookstore, you'll be able to stock the book as you would any other. However, if you work at a store that isn't able to order this book through your usual distribution channels, you can email Ross Gerstenblatt at my publishing company (Overlook Press), who will set you up.

Will You Be Doing Events To Promote the Book?
Indeed I will. I don't have a ton of details on this front that I can announce just yet, so I'll save this stuff, mostly, for another post.

Will You Be Doing Any Events That Are On A Big Roof?
One event that I can reveal now is a fermentation workshop I will be doing with Brooklyn Grange, who operate the world's largest rooftop soil farms. That workshop will be on Tuesday, August 9th. This will be a really fun, very unique event, and you can sign up now by clicking here.

Will You Do An Event At My Venue, Please?
Possibly! If there is some place you know of, work for, or run that would like to organize an event with me, please get in touch with me at bearflavored @ gmail dot com.

What If I Donated To Your Indiegogo Campaign?
You are truly a hero, and thank you for helping to make a vital section of the book possible. If you were one of the supporters on my Indiegogo campaign back in 2014, I will already be mailing you a copy of the book directly. If you also got a t-shirt through the campaign, I will eventually ask you what size and stuff you want, or go ahead and just let me know now.

What If I'm Impatient, And Wish To Hear More Right Now, But In Audio-Only Format?
I'm glad to hear you are so eager. Go ahead and listen to a podcast I just did with Fuhmentaboutit, a lovely fermentation podcast that interviewed me on a broad range of book-related subjects.



Thank you all very much for helping to support my writing career and fermentation education efforts. July 19th will be here very soon! Until then (and after then), follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more regular updates.

Book Pre-Sale and Private Reading / Rare Beer Night Invitation

Here is a link for you to click.

A few weeks ago I had a realization: I really needed to eat rotten shark meat before the end of the year.

A month or so previous I had eaten some Century Eggs that I'd acquired in Chinatown. These mucus-green, gelatin-like fermented eggs were — while surprisingly innocent in taste — almost certainly one of the most horrifying-looking foods I'd ever consumed. But they were fairly easy to acquire, and they definitely didn't smell like death incarnate. As far as bizarre and unusual fermented food traditions, they were fitting as a marker of the halfway point of my year. But I'd need something even more bizarre and challenging to end on. After all, while much of the mission of the book is to educate people on the ways microbes impact us and our food on an every-day basis — far more than most of us realize — part of the goal also is to illustrate what fermentation is. And what better way to illustrate how deep the magic of fermentation goes than to personally gag my way through one of the most pungent, unique, and intimidating foods in the world? Rotten shark meat from Iceland, for example. Truly, I understand the fundamentals of education.

Hákarl is made by burying the poisonous flesh of a Greenland shark in the ground for months. After fermentation, it is theoretically fit for human consumption, but retains some delightful properties: the high content of urea is gone, but an overwhelming odor of ammonia remains. For unfathomable reasons that I hope to get to the bottom of, this food has become a cherished delicacy in Iceland.

Various notable eaters-of-things have described hákarl as one of the most horrifying foods on earth. It's reputation for smelling like something that should kill you while not actually killing you is fairly impressive. One of my favorite descriptions from a hákarl-tryer will have to be paraphrased: like encountering a Dementor in the Harry Potter series, the experience is not only a terrifying experience in the present, but from that moment onward robs you of the ability to ever feel joy again.

Sadly, in spite of its popularity, hákarl is unavailable outside of Iceland. But we can all agree, I clearly must try this stuff for the book, which means I must go to Iceland for a few days at the end of the year, which means I am doing a pre-sale of my book to raise the money necessary to go to Iceland (because I am a writer, and therefore cannot afford trips to Iceland). I am happy to try hákarl so you don't have to, but it's going to take some planning and effort.

Another thing we can all agree on: crowd-funding is pretty silly, so I want to keep this as straight-forward as possible. Consider this no more than a pre-sale, if you want — a pre-sale which happens to ensure that a very fun chapter of the book can be written.

You can, right now, pre-order a copy of The Fermented Man, right here. So go ahead and ease your future self's purchasing obligations and avoid the tedious, dangerous experience of shopping online for books at Amazon. Instead, I will sign a copy of the book just for you, maybe even doodle a picture of a bear or a little anthropomorphic lactobacillus or something, and mail the book right to your address of choice (when it's released, of course).

Or, if you wish, consider it an invitation to a very fun book preview event I'll be holding next year (most likely in May, but exact date and location TBA), during which we will all enjoy a lovely sampling of various fermented foods and destroy my extensive collection of vintage Bear Flavored beverages, as well as several Very Special Kegs containing even more delicious beverages. I will regale those select few in attendance with tales of fermented shark meat, and great times will be had by all. (You will also get a signed copy of the book once it's out, of course). I'm going to pull a lot of strings for this event to make sure it's something special.

More details, of course, over on my IndieGoGo page.

So, lock down your signed copy of The Fermented Man now (it's going to be awesome), consider joining me for an Evening of Good Times (also awesome), and sleep better at night knowing that I'm going to try to put one of the most foul-smelling foods on earth down my mouth at the end of December.

I'm getting closer and closer to the end of the year, and the next few months will certainly be interesting. Thanks to everyone for your support and interest in the book, I can't wait to share it with all of you!

How To Make Fermented Pizza

Your immediate, gut-level (pro-biotic pun intended) response to reading this headline was probably either "Oh god, why in the world would you want to ferment pizza?", or else it was: "Yes! Finally a way to ferment pizza!"

I, of course, have to eat fermented pizza. For one year, I'm living off of only fermented foods, and clearly I'm not going to give up pizza for an entire year. Why should you do it? Well, it's tasty. It's also fun to point out that you're eating an entirely fermented pizza. And fortunately, it's quite simple to prepare, so today I'm going to show you how.

Here's what I'm curious about, though: what was the first image that popped into your head when you saw this headline? What form, exactly, might fermented pizza take? How would one consume it?

Might one, for example, take some pizza — unbaked, so as not to kill off the naturally-occurring bacteria — and ferment it for 4 - 7 days in a salt brine?

Well, okay, no. Sorry. That header up there is a bit of a fake out; it was too fun to resist. Making fermented pizza at home is far easier and much less gross than that horrific pickled pizza slice vision you may have in your mind right now. The whole reason fermented pizza is such an awesome concept, in my opinion, is that most of the ingredients already are fermented. Yes indeed — that's the funny thing about fermentation, and half the reason I'm doing this book. So many staples of our everyday lives involve fermentation in ways we don't realize, because so much of our food is simply presented to us these days. Many of us don't understand the similar forces at work behind the varied foods we eat.

Let's walk through it, shall we? In a week or two — just in time for that big football game everyone is always on about — you can be enjoying fully-fermented pizza too.

1. The Dough

What is dough? Bread, basically. It rises through the action of yeast. This is fermentation; one major ingredient in your fermented pizza that's absolutely no different. You can make your pizza dough various ways, and you can make it 'more fermented,' so to speak, with some sourdough pizza crust. It will also probably be more delicious this way. But I'll sometimes just buy Whole Wheat pocket-less pita bread from the store. It's the perfect size, shape and consistency for pre-made pizza dough, and it tastes almost as good.

2. The Sauce
Here is the one core ingredient of a pizza that's not already associated with fermentation. Fortunately, fermenting tomato sauce is insanely easy. I don't want to get terribly in-depth with the basics of veggie fermentation today, since it's a sub-recipe for the overall recipe, but below is a quick how-to.





2b. How To Make Fermented Tomato Sauce (In Brief)
Take 4 - 5 lbs of tomatoes, some Italian seasonings (oregano, thyme, basil, bay leafs, etc.) and 1 tablespoon of coarse, non-iodized sea salt. Cut off the stem end of the tomatoes, chop them up into chunks, and mix with salt and seasonings. Stuff into a quart-sized wide-mouth mason jar (or fermentation vessel of your preference.) Leave an inch or so of room at the top, then press down with a flat surface (the bottom of a beer bottle or a smaller mason jar works well) to compact the tomatoes and form a brine. If the tomatoes are not fully submerged in liquid, add a small amount of filtered, de-chlorinated water to submerge. Twist on the lid almost, but not-quite all the way, to allow ventilation of CO2 during fermentation. (Or put an airlocked lid on the jar, or use another fermentation vessel of your choice.) Fermentation will begin in a day or two and should take 7 - 10 days.

Following fermentation, press down on the fermented tomatoes to squeeze out some liquid. Pour off excess liquid, then dump contents of jar into blender. Blend well. Pour back into jar. Screw lid on tightly; refrigerate. Continue to Step 3.

3. Cheese
This should hopefully seem like an obvious one — of course cheese, a major component of all pizza, is fermented. Sadly, this is one you'll actually have to be careful with when you're shopping for ingredients. The go-to cheese for pizza for mozzarella, and most mozzarella cheese today is made quickly through an enzymatic reaction, rather than bacterial cultures. Traditionally, mozz was fermented as well, and this type of mozzarella is probably more flavorful too. When buying your mozzarella cheese, look for it to say something about "cultures" in the list of ingredients. If you aren't sure, I have no qualms with using other types of cheese. Softish cheeses like Monterey Jack (which is aged for about a month), work well.

Sidenote: it is curiously difficult to make cheese look appetizing in pictures. Which is weird, because cheese is the most delicious thing ever.

4. Toppings 
Add some fermented toppings. Get some veggies on there — you know, for your health. As you can see, I enjoy red onions, red peppers, and jalapenos on my pizza from time to time. Most veggies can be fermented just as easily as the tomatoes above.

5. Pepperoni
Oh, what's that? The most classic pizza topping of all is already fermented? My goodness, this is all just so convenient.

6. Bake That Pizza
You'll want to pre-heat your oven to 500 degrees in advance. Finish things off with some umami-packing Parmesan cheese or Balsamic vinegar, if you like. When the oven is ready, pop that pizza in and bake for about 10 minutes, or until the crust looks nice and crusty and the cheese is starting to form little almost-burnt bubbles.

Sorry, this pizza isn't pro-biotic. But if you eat a lot of fermented food as it is, not every meal has to be.

7. Pizza
Get yourself ready for the most savory, umami-rich pizza you have ever had. And it's totally fermented. Guys, when this whole crazy year is done, I just might open my own pizza restaurant. Or maybe... a brewpub that specializes in fermented pizza?

Hmm... this could go somewhere. Any capital investors out there want to get in on this?

And So Begins My Year of Fermentation

Hopefully by now you've caught my big news: that I'm living off of only fermenting foods for 2014. The book I'll be writing is (probably going to be) called The Fermented Man, and in addition to the longer write-ups I'm doing here at Bear-Flavored.com, you can follow along at my new Tumblr, www.thefermentedman.com. And as always, follow me on Twitter @bearflavored, or on Facebook.

Well, today was the day of reckoning, and so this crazy experiment is really now happening. I put my photography skills to the test over the last couple weeks and tried to document the journey up until now, which mostly involved staying up really late one night and cutting up a bunch of veggies. I won't be posting a ton of food-fermentation pictures (regularly) here on Bear Flavored, so if you're more into the visual thing, make sure to check in with that whole thefermentedman.com business.


Earlier in December, I spent a Sunday afternoon driving around to local farmer's markets and came home with a very nice bounty of veggies ready for fermenting. Food fermentation isn't really based on exact recipes like cooking — it's more of a general, adaptable process. Think two vegetables sound like they would be good 'pickled' together? Go for it. My cucumber pickles fermented alongside baby red potatoes may be super weird — don't know, but I'll find out soon.

My girlfriend Lena kindly helped me dice and trim veggies, which was very nice of her, because otherwise I would have been up the entire night. (I was still up until 2 AM, as it was, and didn't even finish everything.) While she got started on hard work, I enjoyed a California Lager from Anchor. It has a bear on the label, therefore: must buy.

An absurd amount of red cabbage went into this 1-gallon jug. With no advance plan of how much to make, I ended up going back to the store the next morning to buy a couple more heads of cabbage to fill the kraut up to the top.

 I had to do some pickles.

Some Napa cabbage, ready to be kimchi'd.

Fermented peppers, red onions, tomatoes, beets, and some other stuff.

Later today I’ll be trying them out. Fingers crossed they all turned out good, but there's enough fermented goodies in my fridge right now that a bad batch or two won't kill me. 

On Monday, the FermUp podcast had me on as a guest for their "New Year's Resolutions" themed episode. If you want to listen to me speculate about any possible super-powers I may develop, stumble / ramble as I attempt a succinct explanation of sour beer, and realize that there is a very real possibility some generous soul might ship fermented sharkmeat to my apartment so that I have no choice but to try it, give that a listen. And let me know how I did — it was my first podcast and I would be a liar if I said I wasn't a little nervous. After that, give the rest of the episodes a go too; there's lots of great info there on a variety of fermentation subjects.

Now, catching up to the present — I started my adventure on New Year's Day with a light breakfast of yogurt and coffee (black), got in a few hours of reading to prepare for my next round of ferments, and then, at long last, had my first fully-fermented meal of 2014. I kept things simple: bread with labne (a spreadable cheese that’s somewhere in between yogurt and cream cheese), Beemster goat gouda, Spanish olives, and naturally fermented pickles. Washed down with some homemade kombucha. All tasty, all impossible without fermentation.

Of course, this is only the beginning. Thanks for reading the blog in 2013; it proved to be a great year. I've got a number of new and exciting projects in the works for 2014. Here's to an even beerier, bearier, and fully fermented year!

Cheers!

The Awesome Symmetry of Self-Fermentation - And How It Applies To Beer

A couple weeks ago when I announced that I will be eating only fermented food in 2014 — which I will write a book about, as an insane experiment to educate people about fermentation — one thing I promised was that I would try to learn as much as I could from the weird and wild world of food fermentation and apply it to the world of beer... and vice versa.

Well, one thing already stands out to me — in fact the first thing that truly surprised me about food fermentation. I haven't come across an exact term for this process / phenomenon, so unless someone can point the right word out, I'm calling it "self fermentation" (maybe "self inoculation" works too?) What I mean by this: in the world of food fermentation, the matter being fermented very commonly is already host to the microbes best suited to ferment it. Most foods, introduced to an anaerobic environment, will ferment themselves. The ideal bacteria best suited to those flavors and conditions are already there; the fermentation creates its own best-case scenario. It really can't get any easier.

This fascinated me when I first read about it, because it is quite foreign from how we beer brewers approach fermentation. While cleanliness is always important, sanitation with products like Star San is almost unheard of in food ferments. Is it that we brewers are extra paranoid control freaks, or is it that the world of food and booze ferments are more of a Venn diagram than a free-flowing continuum? The more I thought about the concept of self fermentation, the more it made sense. Why wouldn't the ideal bacteria already be those adapted to live on a food? Nature tends to follow a certain symmetry, and perhaps it's over-thinking our importance to assume that fermentations are meant to taste good for our benefit. We are simply reaping the spoils of a natural mini-ecosystem. An Ouroboros.

But as always, I have to come back to beer. Why doesn't beer follow this self-fermentation trend? Or, to pose a(n easily solved) riddle: can it?

The big difference between beer and other ferments is, in my opinion, complexity. And this isn't meant to sound like a beer snob putting down everything else: making beer is simply more complicated than fermenting vegetables, or even wine, mead and cider. For starters, these other fruits and vegetables can be fermented in their raw state, with very little human engineering necessary. Beer requires malting and mashing to unlock the sugars necessary for fermentation. Very few other ferments include so many factors, ingredients, and variables of process to determine the desired flavor profile. Even down to the fermentation itself: if you are fermenting vegetables, you aren't really thinking about the characteristics of the bacteria fermenting them — they're simply there, and they either do their job or they don't. Yeast seem to express a lot more versatility in their flavor profile. Therefore one strain of the generally-desirable Saccharomyces genus may create unpalatable, medicinal off flavors, while a host of others will turn out beer that is pleasantly clean and fruity, or enticingly funky and wild. When fermenting vegetables, you will end up with the right bacteria as long as you set up certain conditions for the ferment. With beer, a lack of control is more a game of chance.

So, yes, brewers are control freaks, to an extent. But this isn't a devotion to chemical-cleaning paranoia: brewers have spent thousands of years crafts hundreds of styles of beer based on the dominance of unique local strains, and now, with the ability to put those strains into vials and send them across the world, we can recreate any beer from anywhere. These strains may now be "commercial," but they were not first born in a lab — they have grown with us. The microbial landscape is a war zone (or at least a very competitive game of Risk) and we have formed alliances with a small set of Saccharomyces strains. They don't have the killswitch enzyme that their siblings in the wine world possess. They don't have the ability to drown their foes in acid, like lactobacillus. We have made a bargain with them: they will create flavors never tasted before outside of beer in return for their own exclusive playground. It is a compromise, and a small betrayal of the natives of the land. But they were all natives somewhere.

Fortunately, microbes don't hold grudges (as far as we know...), and we are able to form new alliances whenever we want, to create a totally different beer from the very same ingredients. Saccharomyces is far from the only organism to ever play a role in beer fermenations, especially if we're talking about self-fermentation. Yes, beer can self-ferment, and you've probably already solved my little riddle if you're familiar with the style of Berliner Weisse. (You should be, I just wrote about it again last week.) In fact, many old European styles rely on lactobacillus. Gose, similar to Berliner Weisse but with the addition of sea salt, is even closer to the world of food ferments. Historic farmhouse ales of Belgium and France were likely slightly sour due to the presence of lactobacillus. And that's not even getting into the rich, varied world of lambic and aged-sour beer, which relies on a slightly broader set of a organisms and a technique closer to magic than self-innoculation. (Over time, the microbes terraform the entire brewery, and brewers rely on environmental innoculation. Though one could argue that the wood in which these microbes live is itself the self-perpetuating environment... a topic for another day, perhaps.)

Sure, a lactic beer fermentation fits right in with the acidifying fermentations of vegetables and the clabbering of milk into yogurt, but there's something really awesome about a beer ferment looping back into the Ouroboros, given the added complexity of process. Barley must first be malted and mashed, and only then came fermentation begin. But the lactobacillus will return, even after the grains have been kilned, settling in and ever-ready to make the transition from solid stable food into bubbling liquid. The grains will ferment themselves... sort of. Like I said, beer is complicated. But with any food, it is incredibly interesting to view the fermentation as a magnification, a looping echo of flavors, rather than some outside alchemical magic.

Also, I call dibs on the name Ouroboros for a Berliner Weisse. My lawyers are standing by. Sorry.