In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms by Doug Bierend

Author:Doug Bierend [Bierend, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781603589802
Google: qs4hEAAAQBAJ
Published: 2021-03-09T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ferment Yourself

The landscape around Short Mountain, curiously the tallest point in middle Tennessee, is a tangle of creek-cut ravines crowded by tulip poplars and thick oak-hickory forest. The local dogs have a funny habit of pacing alongside the passing cars on the serpentine dirt roads and napping in the shaded embankments. My cell phone reception vanished along with the pavement, well before I crossed the leaf-littered gulley and ascended a steep, rutted road that led to the home of Sandor Katz. Near the top of the hill, a hand-painted sign strung to a tree welcomed me to Walnut Ridge.

I had come to the deep reaches of Cannon County to attend a semiannual five-day workshop held at the off-grid homestead of the celebrated fermentation revivalist. Parking next to a half court–sized solar panel, I approached the two-hundred-year-old, handsomely refurbished cabin. It was still morning, and quiet save for the murmur of Katz’s distinctive voice drifting from behind a side door, and the complaint of a small cat that stalked out from the trees in hopes of getting inside. Creaking open the door, I stepped into the midst of a crowd clustered around a large countertop at the center of a green-walled wizard’s lair of a kitchen. “You must be Doug. Welcome, welcome,” Katz said, easing my slight embarrassment over the interruption. I tucked up against the stone backside of a huge fireplace as he resumed his demonstration.

Katz stood at the head of the gaggle of more than a dozen aspirant microbe-charmers, eager to plumb the seemingly infinite culinary possibilities of fermentation. Sagacious and scruffy, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a perforated old T-shirt that read PLEASE PASS THE BACTERIA, he massaged a heaping teaspoon of koji starter into barley, gingerly dumping the mix into a cedar tray box and furrowing the pile with his fingers, explaining that he was increasing the surface area to radiate heat and avoid killing the fungus while it incubated.

Fermentation might be most easily associated with bacteria, but fungi are no less fundamental to fermentative practices. Koji is a prime example. The Aspergillus oryzae mold is fundamental to miso, soy sauce, amazake, sake, and other traditional ferments; in Japan it is the “national mold,” and its use in China extends back some nine thousand years.¹ But koji has undergone a renaissance in recent years, as chefs and gastronomists and home fermenters alike discover its many applications for bringing umami out of all manner of ingredients. The malleability, reliability, and relatively easy application of koji have made it an intense subject of interest for those looking to unlock new flavors through fermentation, such as for meat and vegetable charcuterie.

“Koji’s all about the enzymes,” said Katz, “because koji’s not really a food, people don’t really eat koji, although it’s delicious, and there’s nothing wrong with eating it, but generally, it’s a vehicle.”

Setting the barley into his incubator—an old refrigerator with a tricky door, stripped of its wiring and retrofitted with an incandescent light bulb—Katz retrieved a small crock of another koji product, called doubanjiang.

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