An acidic gift

What do these things have in common? A clue: the urn to the right is used to make surkål, which is called by it’s German name sauerkraut in English. The herrings to the left may look harmless enough, but if you could smell them there would be little doubt in that they are fermented, or sour as we say in Swedish.

What these two things have in common, in my opinion, is not only a tiny bacteria but also that they both prove how incredibly clever our ancestors have been, and how important is is for you and me to try to preserve (pardon the pun) an important craft.

It’s harvest time at the farm. The first vegetables are ripe and I sense a couple of great months ahead. So far we’ve harvested salad, tomatoes, courgettes, kohl rabi, cucumber, chard, spinach, dill and a few strawberries. Eating freshly picked stuff like this is new to me, even if organic vegetables have been a major part of my diet for a few years now. I feel like a queen!

The spaceships have landed

Name the good things that last. These few weeks are the result of a full years’ labour, and soon it will be winter again. Nothing is possible to harvest under a thick layer of snow, so the need to preserve all this goodness is and has always been essential. We all know a few ways of doing this. Freezing parboiled vegetables is one method. Drying them another. Pickling in various ways a third. Then you can ferment them.

Many of the foods that we eat contain within them an outstanding way of preserving them: the lactic acid, also known as milk acid (mjölksyra in Swedish). This bacteria is present in obvious foodstuffs such as yoghurt and kefir; curdled milk is just another word for fermented milk. Kvass was once upon a time preferred by hard working laborers; it didn’t cause nausea such as a sip of cold water when you’re too hot can do. Another common food using this process is actually salami.

A bit of a forgotten art in food preservation is the use of lactic acid in vegetables. Borsjtj, the famous Russian beetroot soup, is made on acidified beetroot. One reason this method of preservation is less used today could be the relationship between healthy soil and a slowly grown vegetable; an impossibility in an industrialized agricultural landscape. The process of fermentation requires a certain level of minerals (salt which the plant extracts from the ground), a certain temperature and an oxygen free environment (hence the urn above).

If you get this process right there are two stages the food passes through. First the food, let’s say we’re  acidifying cabbage in order to make sauerkraut, starts degrading. If the requirements mentioned above are not met there would most probably be a development of for example acetic acid or butyric acid (which smells pretty bad). The cabbage rots. However if the circumstances are the right ones the cabbage will degrade until a certain point, until it turns and starts building up again. Just like their fresh parents the lactic acidified veggies are bursting with nutrients and are easy for the body to digest. Because you and I carry lactic acid in our intestines, on our skin and in our mouths.

The presence of lactic acid is indeed a gift which, as Annelies Schöneck writes in her book on the subject, is bestowed on all higher beings on this planet of ours. Big words for a tiny bacteria perhaps, but if you remain unconvinced, have some lovely warm sauerkraut with your next frankfurter…

Advertisement