Transcript for:
Exploring Fermentation Techniques at Noma

now I'm very happy to to welcome a very silver for that is the head of fermentation lab but Norma and I don't think I need to many presentation I've seen that quite a few of you are with the book the book on fermentation fermentation so you know exactly wheeze and I just want to thank also shall on because he has been the first one whether the idea and the contact also with David and so we are very happy to Adam here and so thank you and I just like before it starts I just want to say thank you to Malini officer company for helping me organize this and happening and for David of course my comic I was lucky enough to take part of him at symposium last summer and not is a branch off of the Noma group they have a symposium for people in the industry or also that are not industry to deal with some of the biggest issues in our in our industry in the food industry last year was mind the gap and there's an after party after the first day and I saw Dave and I kind of just went up to him and approached him I was pretty drunk actually and we started talking and there was a bunch of other people and they all like went away and I just was like you know what you need to calm like I know I study in this university where a lot of people are gonna appreciate what you know and what you do and they're gonna be very thirsty for your knowledge so ask a lot of questions it's not every day that we're lucky enough to have somebody like this so thank you again Dave for coming and accepting this and yeah enjoy [Applause] [Music] so normally went into class like this it's for maybe like 10 or 15 interns in film at a time remember Pepe the chef restaurant know very much believes that only need to be more than just a restaurant young mostly young but also old chefs a year means that you know you can't just come to this restaurant and pick herbs and call it a day and say that you've learned something from so you also need to actually be talked theories and some of the ways we actually approach food and try to understand what it can do for a diner in a seat but also for the world at large so since we've all come to know in 2.0 which is this thing here at the beginning of last year I actually invite all the interns to the time into the lab I spent probably two or three hours ago walking them through the world of fermentation and kind of dispelling any misconceptions that they might have and actually getting them to at least grasp as quickly as you can because this is something that you spent your entire life working on and never truly know every single Democrat but at least to understand the basics and definitely demystify when it comes to fermentation I've never talked about this thing before I've never taught university before it hits universities so this is fun I know Richard Fineman but I'll try and crack jokes and I'm pretty easygoing so if someone has a relevant question I believe there's no such thing as a stupid question if it's genuine also don't ask questions you already know the answers to but we're gonna just kind of flow and if someone has if someone doesn't understand something we have three hours today and that's more than enough time to kind of delve into all the parts of knowledge in here just raise your hand or something but just a diamond what what it what is fermentation transformation part of it is that but this is a fermented product and this is not preserved this was not a soy sauce person somebody to take over this sauce so it's not just about preservation the transformation of a raw ingredient is very correct but what do you transform you can transform a wrong reading by putting an egg into a pad but you're not fermenting so there's more to it yeah but the chicken laying an egg is also a biological process so we can nail it transforming sugars proteins back okay we're close with no cigar to me the the box answer and someone's showing out glucose very much the technical biochemistry answer to fermentation it's a very specific pathway in organisms that is the metabolization of glucose into ethanol that is like the textbook if you got two chemists what is a permutation pathway they're going to talk to you about all the enzymes to East uses to break down sugars and proves that multiply products but that's too narrow too description for us so I'm going to expand the descriptions a fermentation B is the transformation of one ingredient into another by way of a micro organs to so your micro organism easier Fryman your micro organism is the tool you use to take a raw brand your base ingredient and transform it into something else now that's something else for it to actually be fermentation has to be useful to humankind because if you take an apple and just leave it on a counter the Lord knows every molding about two weeks time kind of oozing out the bottom onto your on to your kitchen counter and that is absolutely a transformation at the hands of microorganism to something else or rocket power but that bought an apple is exactly safe for you to eat and it hasn't transformed to anything delicious or useful to people in fact as detrimental so the animal transforming food from a raw green into a useful ingredient by way of microorganism is in fact the act of fermentation and that distinction between a rotten apples and a fermented that's good to eat that'll fill your gut with healthy bacteria fuelie oh good morning that has a bit of lactic acid and zing to it that actually tastes delicious that that whole world of intent that you made something delicious on purpose with the help of microbes and the clues that you as a human being deciding to do eggs don't fry themselves and turn themselves into comments nor does who just ferment itself into something safe for people to eat people have to actively become a part of this process it's not just about the raw ingredients of the microbes there's also human intent and decide what you're going to grow just like a farmer so in his field yes you can going forward to the wild and buy food for you to eat spring back to Casper back to your kitchen you start cooking with but beyond that as a farmer you're deciding what to plant you're deciding what you want to see grow you're deciding what you six or eight months time you actually get to eat fermentation is the exact same thing it is farming at the microbial still very much okay so I'll explain a little bit of the history of fermentation in Nome and now that we understand what it is we're gonna have to talk about accidents an accidents are some of the most interesting and useful tools that you know kind of examining history because they often lead to great discoveries back in 2000 and must have been eight or nine just a few years after Noah opened something called the Nordic food lab was created by once again my chef Rene in cooperation with some both at Copenhagen University now the Nordic food lab was going to be a research facility that served not just Noma but the Nordics at large and an attempt to it started out as an attempt to catalog what was edible or Nordics a very academic level there's this old fable of the cooks at Noma working the dish with wild horseradish that Rene tested the day before the foragers bringing wealth horseradish and he puts it on the dish and he tasted it before service and it's a complete disaster there's no spice and there's no nothing and then he gets on the phone to the forge but what is it what did you bring me he's like it's wild horse to actually however does it taste like it tasted yesterday he's like well that's because there's a hundred and fifty varieties of wild boars flowers to grow in Denmark and it was at that moment that Rene realized that just going out into the wild and picking what you saw and saying that oh this is what I mean wasn't enough we actually had to catalogue understand nature a really fundamental level and thus the Nordic food that was born so accomplished chefs from the restaurant Torsten Bogart and Soren Soren West started in there alongside stone some professors or students rather phone köppen 18 University and began his journey and at that point when they realized you know I'm thinking back to when know my first Okinawa opened in November of 2003 in the dead of winter and this was a restaurant that was supposed to use wild and foraged Goods and you know maybe just due to bad luck of that planning all of a sudden they opened with nothing but onions and beets and potatoes on the menu and a bit of meat and no wild good statue cause it may be because nature wasn't around for that yet so that first winter was actually a huge struggle for time and people forget that as famous as this restaurant is today there was a time long before I started that you know they would struggle to fill you know even a few tables for lunch where they would do you know four desks for dinner on a Wednesday and I was hard to fathom now but that was the reality was a restaurant that was trying to do something different no one had heard of the chef no one went to that part of Copenhagen and it was really a place where you know they were struggling to kind of put their name in their vision out there so that first initial winter as hard as it was to come in make ends meet if you will in that restaurant they've actually taken a profit it did give retain the team time to kind of delve into the books of things and really kind of research what was actually eaten in the Nordics and really kind of do this academic research when they started they were nothing but cooks who just you know worked did can't see restaurants and France and the state's this whole understanding of the natural world was a response that would come out you know over the decades that Norma was open it wasn't there at the start and had to be discovered so by the time the Nordic food lab came around you know Renee thought back to ok well let's try working on salting we're reading a lot about that we're trying to figure out how we could actually preserve these things so we wouldn't have to suffer another winter without ingredients and basically they went down the road of trying to create pickles and preserves they didn't think of it as formatting they thought of it as just you know pouring fresh capers buds from plants like wild garlic or or gooseberries at the height of the season in the hint of vinegar and just making a fruit picker making salted capers if you want and the guys in the Nordic Food Lab started working on that so they had tons of vacuum bags you know Ottomans packed in salt and that went on for a whole summer season maybe five six months later one of the chefs in the Test Kitchen brings out a bag of gooseberries that had kind of like inflated he says her name you gotta try this he's like what is it looks rot like him how long that one thing that doesn't look like it was preserved properly it's like you just have to try it and he gave him a spoon focused murky liquid from the bag and these were salted gooseberries they were trying to make gooseberry capers and it completely blew burnings mind it was salty but also sour still sweet and had this enormous complexity wasn't just our from the sourness of a barrier does it also it had this lactic acid that kind of wrapped around a richer tongue and he realized wow this is going to be the perfect foil for the seafood we have going for them cure oysters or you know high perch to take little slivers of this address it over top was that perfect little bite of acidity that's going to cut through the fish's richness and he realized what what happened here and with a little bit of research they realized that this batch of gooseberries had been under salted instead of using the six or eight percent salt they were used to make capers that you might caper berries in the grocery store it only had a couple percent so and that allowed microorganisms to thrive but on all of them and they realized that at the time they made something called a sauerkraut berries and was at that moment like okay sauerkraut everyone understood as ingredient we didn't made that but you didn't understand that this was like an act that was taken that they had fermented something by accident but then it was actually extremely useful and that opened the floodgates they realized okay well if we're going to you know run into accidents like this fermentation probably has a lot of power across his restaurant and that the the goal the aim in the in the Nordic Food Lab definitely shifted and all of a sudden they were focusing on fermenting and everything they could find all the literature and at that time there wasn't enough shadowcats of written I think maybe one book one or two books by them literature on things like ogee you know buzzwords things you hear today the Carolinas black fruits and vegetables there was nothing of that doctor and the people in the North who have to do all of this groundwork reading scientific papers trying to translate Japanese or Chinese to make sensitive like to you know call up hippies that lives out in the woods in in mainland Denmark to find kombucha mothers and things like that because this stuff wasn't at all mainstream but wasn't at all talked about even less it was nothing that was ever done inside a restaurant maybe there's Japanese chefs and I'm working really high level that might make their white wine vinegar but you didn't see restaurants making soy sauce or reso's or things like that so all this knowledge had to be built and slowly but surely Noma kind of built up its world of fermentation one experiment one success lots of failures at a time so Lars Williams who was with the restaurant neasha for about eight years and an intern at the time named Ariel Johnson who ended up getting hired when OMA who's doing her PhD in flavored chemistry where that tasks in 2013 by retain to take this game to the next level and build no miss fermentation lab and that was originally a set of shipping containers that just sat outside the restaurant in the parking lot and they devised ways to make temperature control rooms for each style of ferment that no heat reduced to use in the kitchen it had one big shipping container upstairs that kind of servers like very makeshift kitchen an office to kind of run the ship and that's where a lot of this research really took off but I'll get into kind of where we are today and we'll take a look at some photos of the current lab and the new facility that's just a little bit of the backstory about how oh my god is the fermentation but now we'll actually kind of delve into what we do at the restaurant so like I said that sauerkraut berries that initial accident that spurred knowing into this whole world is one facet of fermentation called lacto-fermentation is a fermentation pathway that's not like an alcohol fermentation pathway that is tarried out by bacteria that are classified if you will by their ability to produce lactic acid now there are bacteria that only produce lactic acid when they come into contact with you know organic molecules that they can metabolize like sugars and there's lactic acid bacteria that can consume mo whole range of things even some proteins and produce a whole different flight of metabolites as with all the byproducts but the whole the key idea here is to say that lactic acid bacteria is a bacteria that produces lactic acid at some point it's less likely now classifying all these bacteria from all different walks of the great tree of life under this one term is a completely human convenience you have to think that calling all these bacteria that have this one characteristic feature lacto bacteria or lactobacillus if you will is just convenient kind of catch-all that we use as a descriptive label it's also the same as talking about all four-legged animals as being underneath the same umbrella obviously you have alligators and cows and giraffes and they're nothing alike but they do have the one feature of pole having four legs when you get into the world of bacteria which there are far more species than there are species of everything you can see on earth you realize that yes there are you know pathways that come up again and again evolutionarily because they're extremely useful to these bacteria but these can also be from extremely disparately related organisms there are bacteria that produce citric acid there's also a fungi that produce electric acid and the split between those evolutionary histories is hundreds of Suvir so yes you could have microbes that produce the same metabolites the same useful products but are quite distantly related so the entire idea that a bacteria or a microbe is consuming a molecule like glucose is all for the sake of fueling its own life cycle it means energy to reproduce to wiggle around to explore its environment to divide and multiply and it does that by taking England goes running it through a really complex system of enzymatic pathways breaking that glucose down in an attempt to extract chemical energy from that molecule to create ATP for itself ATP is adenosine triphosphate it is the molecular the molecular unit of currency of all life on Earth everything that your body does at the cellular level is ATP you process about a trillion molecules of ATP a day which is crazy because you're like well that's more than I could ever imagine eating or consuming and that's the whole point of this thing is that all these life cycles just recycling imagine that like a rechargeable battery when your cell has to move when your cells have to move a motor protein down your leg to actually carry some important transmitter or a molecule somewhere in your body they're using gtp to do that they're using a little battery pack sticking it where it needs to go letting it pop off and taking that used battery pack breaking down more glucose so they can make more ATP and the cycle continues what happens though when you extract chemical energy from glucose is that you get leftovers and for every molecule of glucose that gets broken down by bacteria Hellena Jim you end up with two molecules no sorry that'll help Ichiro of lactic acid now there's a bunch of different ways that bacteria can go around breaking down glucose to fuel their own metabolisms not all of them not all the enzymes that we use in this process will lead to lactic acid results but the fascinating thing is that the bacteria that figured out this trick that figured out what enzymes it takes to break down glucose fuel their life cycle and leave behind this particular molecule we're developing an evolutionary defense mechanism bacteria that produce acids as a byproduct to their own existence actually in fact acidify their environment they acidify the the aam everyones that they live in in an attempt to eke out any competition obviously if there's glucose there that's fuel not just for that bacteria but any other species of bacteria that might be in the area and if there's one thing that like knows it's that competition is fierce so even for bacteria in a petri dish that are just trying to kind of make the way around and divide and multiply they have to make sure that if they're in that space they can hoard all this useful energy for themselves the evolutionary trick of developing lactic acid is a byproduct actually lowers the pH of the environment so much so that other things can't grow acids completely break down the cell walls of other organisms that the ph gets low enough and meanwhile because this organism has grown up producing this thing it's developed defense mechanisms to its own by pockets if you will so it makes the environment safe predict and it alone leaves behind lactic acid and completely transforms that environment so that is why we're talking about this abstractly as if this was growing petri dish but what happens if this environment is ahead of touch or an apple a Brian of all disparities then all of a sudden this lactic acid isn't just making that environment safe for that bacteria is doing that but it's also transforming this thing that we considered food and it's making it so nothing else can grow in that place this is where preservation comes into play this is how bacteria preserve our food for us now there's plenty of bacteria that go through this same cycle they break down glucose they feel their own life cycle and they produce something else as a by-product botulism does this but one of the byproducts it produces is a neurotoxin that's how it keeps an environment safe for itself a neurotoxin technically to the botulism bacteria is a way of preserving that food for in it alone but it is a way of preserving food that is not in any way helpful to human beings this happens to kind of sit in the Venn diagram of organisms that have interests mutually aligned without we can actually enjoy intolerant lactic acid we can put it into our food have it not be so acidic that we feel sick or ill afterwards you not be eat enough that you will and it keeps it safe from other bacteria or harmful microbes that might seek to they presume that food for themselves and this is the whole act and this whole kind of you know hand-shaped that we have with bacteria in the world of food preservation and fermentation so how do you get this bacteria to work for you well to do that you have to control the environment and set set up some initial conditions this is something we're going to come back to again and again in the stock but when you're fermenting you have to find a way to ensure that the bacteria that you actually want to grow in your product in your asparagus your app can do that while keeping out other microbes initially at the start once this thing gets going once there's enough that lactic acid bacteria it's writing in your product thriving in that environment it'll take care of business it'll produce so much lactic acid that nothing else is going to get in there spoil about but initially it's a free-for-all now I talked about this in the book and I was kind of the way I just thought about it the entire time I was fermenting and it seems to be like one of the favorite analogies but as a fermenter you're acting as a bouncer to a club everybody wants to get into if there was no bouncer out that door drunks crackheads party kids everyone would want to get in and it would be a raucous massive fight would break out me no fun for anyone inside as a fermenter you're acting as the bouncer you're the guy at the door with the velvet rope towering big muscle man saying no not you tonight you too drunk go home meanwhile all good-looking guys and gals can come on in drink expensive champagne and make the party somewhere fun to be and that's the basic idea you need to understand what tools are at your disposal to work that velvet rope to say not you but you those are in the business we call them maybe control points or control parameters and for lactic acid bacteria that happens to be salt good old na C of the most important minerals on earth salt has the amazing ability to desiccate an environment by way of osmosis you had a little bit of salt to something it changes electrochemical balance of solutions much that if there are pockets of lower concentration it will draw salt into those corners to make sure that everything sits in equilibrium now we get into physics of this and talk about you know how cow manure was dissolved and ionic compounds and all that but we can kind of basically skip over that all you need to know is that for a cell like Jim over here who can tell Excel will build an amoeba that doesn't like to you have a salt cook or a salt will draw the ions sodium and chlorine ion and they're sitting up here and this is an area of lower concentration they're gonna want to get in there or make this amoeba shrivel up to get the water out and that's the process of osmosis they just want the entire system to sit in equilibrium and if your membrane as an organism isn't built just right you won't be able to tolerate salt in your environment you will shrivel up and die so this is why this works lactic acid bacteria can actually tolerate a fair bit of salt their membranes are built as such that they can actually you know either take salt in and have their normal life processes to a function or they're strong enough to actually keep the salt okay and not have all of their insides kind of pour out losing water shriveling up and dying every party does not Earth has what's called a water activity level that it can tolerate human beings can't drink salt water in the ocean for this reason because once the salts is inside you you'll just start basically becoming extremely dehydrated piss out everything that you need to keep inside you you're not actually taking in water you're losing it for this reason same thing for microbes there are microbes that are extremely well-suited to and adapted to living in high salt environments those are called halophiles and to a small extent lactic acid bacteria are bilbao's there are a lot of bacteria that are also harmful to humans that lucky for us can't tolerate salt and so just by having a little bit of salt normally in the range of two percent by weight of your product you can make an environment safe for beneficial microbes like lactic acid bacteria but completely intolerable for comfort comfort of microbes like watch lism or moles or things like that so that's one of your biggest control points another is oxygen now oxygen for lactic acid bacteria a bit tricker it's not as a black and white assault it's not like saying okay I've dusted this with salt nothing's gonna grow here except for what I want oxygen it's not like black to gets bacteria completely shrivel up and die in the presence questions are just very well suited to working in its absence but by removing oxygen you're also removing something essential to a lot of life-forms that would again seek to grow in that environment lots of molds in fact almost all molds are anaerobic creatures like yourself any oxygen to allow cellular respiration to take place and so when you remove oxygen from an environment by either submerging your product in water underneath of brine let's say or packing it as such that water is kind of oozing out of it and then making an airtight seal you're making it so that nothing from from that whole branch of life can thrive now there are a lot of bacteria that can thrive in oxygen-free environments but you're kind of using as many control points at your disposal as possible to make sure that that environment is safe for at least the guys who monitor so I've got an environment an oxygen-free environment we have salt and those are our two control points that help this microbe to thrive once it does so you just kind of let it do its thing you said it you've set the parameters and he let the party kind of run its course so let's get bacteria as they work on fruits and vegetables in fact really do transform them now this is a very simplified kind of chalkboard run this whole process but it's rare to find life forms or lactic acid bacteria that are actually this simple and just do that one thing that just consume glucose and just produce lactic acid life forms are a lot more complex than that and a lot of times they'll need other molecules from their environment and have enzymes and pathways that are dedicated to breaking those down that well either modify the environment and produce interesting flavors or completely different molecules that you wouldn't think of I guess there's a lot of Italians in the room of Parmesan cheese the yamani that you taste when you bite into an age of two years from a John Ruggiano that actually comes from certain species of lactic acid bacteria that also have the ability to break down proteins the souring of milk at the hands of lactic acid bacteria is one of you know humanity's great evil traditions of preserving food cheese making and some of those lactic acid bacteria like I said also mean other molecule environment amino acids to build their own bodies and wending work are not just sugars like the sugars you find the milk but the proteins you got whole other types over and those are a lot of kids we associate with Romani rich Jesus so traditionally classically historically people never really understood what was happening when they would make kimchi or make sauerkraut or make the hut sauerkraut of berries if you will historically humans must have stumbled into this somehow now it's great that humans have always lived on the coastlines you could you could you could posit that just having access to salt water and maybe storing food in salt water was enough given the salt content of the ocean in some parts of the world sitting around 3.5% halls in the sweet spot was enough to actually kind of keep these food safe make that little makeshift Brian and allowing rocks to ferment but these recipes were born of tradition and handed down for thousands of years before anyone ever had any sort of understanding about what kamae croak was or why he went back but they knew through history through tradition through teachings of life grandmother's to mothers to daughters that you can transform food and keep it safe just by adding a little bit of salt they didn't have to know how it worked but it was absolutely essential to their survival to our survival of the species that it did work so these microbes have been growing alongside us working in these very traditional recipes sometimes being transferred from batch to batch to batch and I got into you there's probably ferments out there that use a little bit of a premium much back slopping to introduce these microbes into a fresh batch of a new friend whether it's whether it's our cup what happy that have been going on for thousands and thousands of generations so we keep that lineage alive in this way and fermentation goes really really deep in history it's something we've been doing since before recorded history some of the earliest recorded artifacts of fermented foods come from the darkest mountains where people were very where there's artifacts of people who were very clearly making wine in that region purposefully was intent so you have to think that just because you find that first artifact in the historical record dated you know eight and a half thousand years ago you can't assume that it started at that moment obviously this is a very advanced technology that people have probably been doing for much longer since even then but we carry it with us today we're talking about it the world's best restaurants do it and serve these fermented products because they are recipes that are so ingrained in humanity's way of cooking and staying alive that they really have become in 70 you know people talk about dogs being man's best friend but you never think about the microorganisms that we've been carrying with us traveling around the world with and using the recipes that have been transferred between generations for thousands of years as being just as friendly and useful to humankind so that's lactic acid fermentation and like I said there are these very traditional recipes that work because tradition is meant to keep ideas pure the better your transmission culturally from one generation to the next the better to ensure the survival of whoever comes out to you it kept you alive if having Tabata style for the winter was a way of making sure that you didn't starve in kind of the darkest months of the year then tradition ensured that your children's generation everyone who came after you we do the same tradition is about cultural mimetic fidelity what Noma does is learns from that and then throws all that by the wayside you pick a part of process and you say okay well if this works for capuchin if this has worked for humans and cabbage for thousands of years what about it works why is this so useful and then you ask yourselves those questions you can kind of extrapolate those answers and then apply them to completely different things and say well what if we fermented fruit instead of cucumbers or cabbage what would that take that would there be some sort of added benefits that and turns out there is and so lactic acid fermentation at restaurant Noma isn't so much about fermenting cabbages over traditional recipes in fact we've never served sauerkraut no it's often about the fermentation of fruit in an effort to kind of can the summer months when they're at their best because they might does suffer through some very dark and dreary winters so we can have really delicious fruit for the winter menus and things like that just a speed to this back but this is what our lactic are lacto-fermentation room which has a set temperature that humidity looks like kind of peak season and this is about 500 kilos of Mirabelle plants undergoing this fermentation process in vacuum bags to Kiki era and salted 2% to make sure that noble of bacteria yes so one interesting thing that you're gonna realize about work in this talk is like okay well you guys do these rear techniques that have kind of been not wishy-washy but imperfect that I've served people for a really long time at the same time you're a restaurant that strives for three Michelin stars or tries to be the best in the world it works makes you me high level so how do you take something that is imperfect and often chaotic up to organisms that you don't have direct control over and keep it exactly where it needs to be and then there's a whole bunch of really kind of over-the-top things that we do at Noma to make sure that our fermented products are as perfect as they can be little bit of a contradiction so that the restaurant is consistent and good and things are and recipes work now if you prevent a plum let's say and it's in a good amount of brine and it has enough salt you can technically leave it at room temperature it definitely and like reach into that and it's gonna be extremely sour it's gonna change it's gonna start to it'll get musty other things will start to break down in there to give it enough time but it is in fact safe to consume and we're done it you can leave fruit at room temperature for like a month and it's still oh wow this is really sour it's over fermented but at the same time it doesn't make you sick to you the short answer though is that use a seller and this actually works quite well in terms of the seasons and people doing this stuff traditionally about it in South and North Korea when grandmothers would make kimchi in the mountains the harvest for that is in the fall it wipes out the last lip goes warm months you know in October and November and he's earned that get buried in the ground and the ground keeps these things cold until the spring when they could start harvesting a new fresh vegetables and things like that so by lowering the temperature you kind of put a damper on all microbial activity we'll talk about temperature in a bit as well but that's the world of doesn't from the ditch you can you can but that requires a bit of microbiology and that's not a bad thing but when you take let's say cherries that are grown in the garden out back and then you add your salt to it toss them around and say okay hello I'm gonna start to ferment them into the jar they go [Music] and you have a bit of a pun song to help to make that airtight environment and use fermentation to what you're doing here you're just taking whatever's in the environment these microbes are everywhere there is not a corner of the earth that does not have microorganisms in it or on it and lock to gossip bacteria are some of the most power they're already on the skids of the fruit waiting for the right opportunity to take hold yes that would turn this into cherry wine are doing this they're already there and they're opportunists organisms that are just waiting for the like the gunshot to go out to be like Oh someone give me the perfect environment now you get to work that's wild fermentation there's no such thing as spontaneous but he's made that work does it harks back to Aristotle and his idea of spontaneous generation interests completely like ass backwards but there's no such thing as spontaneous fermentation so microbes were already there you just set up conditions to let them flourish you made a gateway you made a gateway your control points took all of microbes on that through anyway block most of them but then allowed certain ones to thrive so if you want a specific taste or a specific kind of world of flavors in your in in your ferment you actually have to go and figure out which one's of these myself are the ones responsible for those flavors and then add them in a very sterile environment to make sure that only they they won't grow and that's kind of the world that industrial fermentation works when you are you know a big corporation when you're dole or whatever you have to make two hundred thousand kilos of giggles four for this month's quarter or whatever you actually go to great lengths to ensure that your product is consistent and there's no other players in that board so you'll almost sterilize the base products wash them extremely very thoroughly sometimes we radiate than whatever and then add one specific microbes so that it has exactly that flavor you have to inoculate and it's nothing you exactly you have to sterilize so if so long as you add enough inoculum that one species will out-compete the rest you'll get enough of a football that'll just kind of quash the choir and then take over so that's how that's how big companies tailor very specific flavors of lactic acid fermentation even things like yogurt or secure or or loud or what happened we actually have the great fortune of being in combination with Noma alongside another very famous food company called Christian Hansen which you might not have heard of but this is a food company that is responsible for an enormous amount of the fermented foods you eat in the world they are microbiology lab that started with the fermentation of sausages in South America over a hundred years ago and then branched into every corner microbiology and food and they supply you buy yogurt in a grocery store odds are there are the ones that gave that company the bacteria that they needed to make their yogurt Christian handsome and they were kind enough to actually show us some of their processes and so sometimes they'll find an interesting fermented product bring it back to the laboratories take samples grow it on a petri dish and they have the most insane machines that are like computer control 300 you know dropping these individual swabs if you will onto a giant plate they watch these things grow and then select and select and select and pare down those generations until they find the microbe that produces exactly the set of molecules that they want in the data back as they're kind of gold standard groaning quantity and then that's their you know CH r122 3la see they give it some name and then it's for sale for people to use and has a very specific profile sometimes we'll make cocktails and they'll take different bacteria that thrive at different times or produce different metabolites that work in concert to boots very specific flavor profiles and it does get that fine-tuned in terms of tailoring and you can do that you can do that it's like breeding thoroughbred horses or dogs you can make that perfect and but at the end of the day that mutts gonna love you bleep your face when you come home as much as like $10,000 great so there's nothing wrong with wild fermentation just understand that you have far less control that someone like Christian has to invest tens of millions of dollars to perfect genealogical lines to make sure that food tastes exactly how they want it to taste it is a whole the other side of fermentation that is like science of its most extreme yeah next are we good with lack of fermentation we get it we understand we're like okay now yeah so that's risky for the stated reason that if you do not have this control point this this lines in here and just everything is grow you could technically try and have enough inoculum so I get it's totally black that's bacteria later they can tolerate salt they don't need it to live lactic acid bacteria will grow even in the absence of salt you can grow them on a petri dish does in a neutral medium but if you do if you don't have salt other stuff will grow too so if you're trying to prevent just beginners leave fruits in jar and you could have an encounter and say oh this is gonna like it that's what stood at the door with the top rope you just let everybody in so you do need some salt there are probably ways to do it if you had a knock-back slaw you put it into an already fermented medium it'll kind of just carried along with it hopefully safely but that's no guarantee you could maybe lower the pH enough but then you're doesn't pickling it at the outset you're not actually for maintenance so it's a bit rusty and another thing to think about is that this is without the addition of salt this is how you make wine you just make an interim plan and the yeast will help the yeast is fast and if there's enough sugar the yeast will take off you're just gonna make wine the only reason you're locked up fermenting and not making booze when you do something is if you've added salt and the salt inhibits the ease and that's lactic acid bacteria thrive because the overlapping between what yeast needs to survive to produce alcohol and what lactic acid means or lack against major unions to survive to produce pickles so I don't know it's a possibility but you also maybe there's something about potassium ions that like mess up so that's logic acid fermentation [Music] moving away from that we're going to talk about yes if it's I mean this is just kind of a demo but the thing about salt is that it's gonna start pulling liquid out of those areas so you can take a party like there's probably dry packing carrots big chunks of carrots probably wouldn't work because they're so they're so sturdy and Hardy not a lot of juice is going to come out of there things like ripe fruits the salt just by pressing them against the skin being underweight is enough that it'll start taking liquid out of those out of the pleasures of cherries and that's gonna form the Brian what's in a couple days which is a short amount enough a short enough amount of time that the fermentation process no it's usually enough time that it works out you just want to make sure that there is enough weight that's gonna happen if you don't pack it tightly vanish as the saltiness of the box would be a bit of juice there that's gonna live it's like one of the most common photo they attack a lot this year and I hope it was doing more than that's like that you know like there's no weight on top you actually have to force the osmosis to take place okay so kombucha getting into a different world of salafi many products kombucha is traditionally a product of sour sweetened tea it hails from eastern Asia where exactly is kind of tough to say some folklore has a writing on the back of a Korean physician that would travel through eastern China with this remedy being doled out to people who need it a little fixing but at the same time the bacteria and the microbes responsible for producing this do exist in the wild there are little puddles that you see in the whole of Denmark that have something that looks like a scovia looks like a cockroach another growing in and if you kind of stick your foot in or statistic you're thinking it's actually a little bit acidic these are colonies of organisms that do live in the wild somewhere someone must have had the good fortune to a found one purchase you could use and I kind of honed in or domesticated the things that it could do in order to make this a drink that everyone else today can anyone tell me what kombucha what it is how it works Scooby's what a Scobie stand for yes so I call the colony potato potato symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast escape Scoobies in the world of fermentation they're kind of interesting because you can actually see them when you lacto fermented fruit you never get to actually meet the people responsible let's go meet your actually you can actually say oh wow this is this is what I'm working with it looks how like an ugly jellyfish so I don't have a photo but one let's just finish Congress busy ice cream and it is this the symbiotic organism if you will somewhere yeast is operating on one level and then it's looking alongside bacteria that they make with these or use what the East is producing and then take it through to another process so when we're talking about East working on fruit trying to sugars into alcohol let's draw a little East molecule here it's making a little baby butter it takes glucose two molecules and then from there acetic acid bacteria a relative of lactic acid bacteria but this time they have the ability to take ethanol and it transformed into acetic acid take those and produce let's see the gases as well so when people talk about like fermentations pathways this is why because it actually looks like a whole set of steps like an algorithm if you will that you're plotting on on a white board molecules being transformed at the hands of microbes into different products so each step in this process the yeast is making ethanol that garnered useful chemical energy so it can thrive in Dubai this leftover thing gets consumed by this microbe over here useful chemical energy is extracted you can burn in ethanol right that's chemical energy it's basically doing the same thing inside its cells and reduces this acetic acid as a result and it could survive the acetic acid bacteria gets more out of this relationship than the yeast does but at the same time these isn't much bothered by the fact that there's a seed acid living alongside it these that live in stogies can actually tolerate you barely high PHS they've been trained to just by the nature of their environments being so acidic all the time but at the same time you have to think that these are organisms that have made themselves useful to humans and the same way dogs think about wolves in the wilderness a handful left tens of thousands mate dogs millions on earth what's the only difference between wolves and dogs what subset of this animal has made itself useful to humans and being useful to humans is one of the most powerful evolutionary tricks animals organisms on Earth have discovered to this date if you're useful to humans I can guarantee you we will breed you in great quantity and that's exactly what takes place in a scope the yeast that gets to live alongside the acetic acid bacteria that produces the sour drink get to be very numerous and multiply their fitness is extremely high if you want to talk about evolutionarily all because humans like to drink it the domestication of any plant of any animal works for the organism that's being slaughtered or consumed because we grow it in the mean time before it dies in huge quantities Michael Pollan talks about this a lot but it is a fascinating kind of idea to wrap your head around and this isn't the only place in nature where this happens where humans you know directly affect their environment to grow a specific organism for their own benefit ants do it to answer fermenters and leafcutter pans company to take them back to the lair not to actually eat the leaves but because it's certainly fungus grows on those leaves and the right conditions and then the ants eat the fungus so we're not the only animals in the world to form and we're not the only animals to take micro organisms domesticate them and make them useful for our own purposes in kombucha the whole reason you can actually see these are right these are microbes look at them floating around and I've got a water under a microscope you'll see little flowers but the whole reason we can see kombucha as like a thing and grants for a mother into a fresh batch of sweetened tea to make it is because acetic acid also in the process of you know consuming ethanol produces cellulose that then forms what's called azulejo MACT cellulose is buoyant the cellulose deficit gas bacteria excretes so it floats to the top of this liquid and then allows this kind of McElrath to form which guarantees that all these bacteria teas that are actually kind of in this web of I've got an organic matter get to be carried through to future generations so it's made a very physical form to ensure that they'll always have a place to live humans can take them with them you can ferment kombucha with bacteria it used to make this kind of symbiotic colony without ever producing the raft if you're clever but you also have to consider that there is to these microorganisms an evolutionary advantage to actually producing a physical form that humans come at me like Oh putting you here now it'll always ensure that a lineage survives that raft is also important and the fact that the point is also important because for acetic acid to actually run through this fermentation pathway it needs oxygen when you leave wine out what happens it turns into vinegar right oxidized flying widens been open for a couple of days that the restaurant no one wants to sell you it's oxidized because oxygen is the molecule responsible for creating houses that's literally what it means from the Greek oxygen acid form and this was discovered by laguage a and others you know over 100 or 200 years ago when you oxidize ethanol you end up with acetic acid and while Lac des bacteria are fine to work in the absence of oxygen acetic acid bacteria needed to do what they do if you put a cap on it on bucho it'll just stop itself I hope you die you might get a little bit of alcohol fermentation but there might be reasons whether it doesn't happen kombucha needs access to oxygen in order to work the oxygen is another vital component in this and even in thinking about that we also realize that added ingredient like oxygen is also a control for your back allergic isn't going to work unless it has access to air so that's why you keep complicated with a cloth how you're fermenting it in a jar or a jet or something like that that blue that blue blue madness buoyancy ensures that those acetic acid bacteria are always in contact with the air which is kind of neat so they make themselves a raft so they can always have access to oxygen and a fermented liquid well look with just what Brownian motion it's always moving around any jug and eventually they'll come into contact with all the ethanol that's produced and you'll get collagen so kombucha isn't completely alcohol free even though this is kind of a lockstep process yeast is consuming the glucose that you used to sweeten your tea is producing ethanol think it's converting to suggested but there is a little bit of black time that's why you traditionally find that comes we just have an alcohol content of 0.5 to 1 percent so it's not technically alcohol free for serving into life children live a lot and this is important because in conscious we're going to talk about that your next button contest with vinegar but here attends to Peter up for a couple reasons yeast while they do produce ethanol and can tolerate it how winemakers and deer Mainers control the alcohol content of their finished alcoholic beverages by selecting these with certain tolerances to the amount of alcohol they produce and this is a very seriously taken trick that these Brewers I guess that's what they're called yeast makers used to control very specific strains so Chardonnay needs to be 12% local and all the sugar of the grapes will leave some behind because the East in that particular batch of wine will die off when the alcohol content that about grapes reaches 12% alcohol is a poison and it will affect even the things that produce it if it's a high enough wants when you make vinegar this process is to bite and this is my tongue which it does taste a little bit different familiar these comes first then the aesthetic aspect area come later in kombucha this cycle is constantly working so the yeast never reach a high enough alcohol concentration because it's always be consumed by sea of gas bacteria being turned to acetic acid so they never reach the threshold so that means said you'll notice something music accomplished that you can run accomplish and completely dry and it will be extremely acidic because the yeast have never hit a threshold where they're gonna die up in their own health all consumption you can have kombucha they're like so far gone so acidic that you would spit them out if you tasted a drop and that's an important thing to understand is that fermentation of something like company where you have a set limited supply of some resource being transformed into to others means that timing is an extremely important part of fermentation fermentation is cooking it just happens more slowly you have a question absolutely yeah and some people use it was that you can make a super sour accomplished it's not technically a vinegar it's just very sour kombucha because you're gonna you're gonna lose your sweetness it'll just completely evaporate all that sugar will be used up and like cooking good seasoning is all about balance you can't add you know a salad dressing is fat and acid and salt and other spices and it has to sit in balance otherwise it's not a good salad recipe that's not going to be good sell the culture is the same thing so while you're trying to achieve balance when you're putting together your salad dressing and it might take you two minutes to do that when you're brewing accomplish uh you have sugar diminishing while acid Rises and it's not exactly a one-to-one scale like this but you have to understand that at some point in this chart maybe around here you're sitting in perfect balance maybe it's your maybe in Syria maybe it's exactly here but you have these windows where you come which is actually going to taste right then you also have to think about other brands like how much sugar did you start with to begin with if you start here compared to here you'll have both more sugar and more acetic acid at the very so figuring out the right starting point either right you know jumping-off point for the amount of sugar in your tea before this whole process gets started is also extremely important to producing accomplished uh that's well balanced if you make a sugar serum that sits acts 25 bricks that's one quarter circle it's extremely sweet the yeast can tolerate will start to ferment but you also have to think that it'll produce a lot of acetic acid while there's still a lot of sugar left over so you'll have something visit once too sweet and too acidic and it's not palpable you have to find that sweet spot where there's an amount of sugar kind of counteracts these a density reduced but there isn't so much so that's you know too sweet or you give the bacteria too much fuel to produce too much acid so it really is about kind of moving these triangles around finding that perfect balance perfect set so while this isn't a perfect example of a plot of this Sun on accelerating thing you can imagine that you get out very extreme charts where you have a lot of sugar and then a lot of ass being produced and that kind of shape of that X being more extremely to more unbalanced confiture so you want this kind of gentle curve and you want to be able to get that sweet spot just because you can provide something in a pan in ten minutes time and say that you've cooked something shouldn't put out into your head the fact that timing is also extremely important thing in processes they take days or weeks or months and that's what a good diligent for general fermenter does understand the processes that are underway they say okay well I have X amount of time I have X amount of days to make sure that I can see the rate of decline in the Brix you test it every day and then ultimately you like taste be your guide for the moment where okay this isn't balances and harmony you keep it there now to keep it there you can either put something in the fridge which again will slow down all microbial activity it won't stop it stuff goes wrong in your fridge to give it enough time but it'll really slow it down you could pasteurize your culture but some people don't like doing that because I actually want to be taking in these living organisms and kind of bolstering their own gut the population that does their buddy good or you can freeze it and so to get back to I forget which young man asked the conversation or harassing question or like I will have you from getting too sour you know over fermenting this is having with kombu chili fries because it's effervescent the bacteria also produced co2 co2 gas that's a bit busy and actually has to the ball you can freeze co2 you can freeze Carboni everybody was take it out of the freezer it's still coming up yeah so by freezing our concrete should we make sure that it's exactly at that point it's not moving around and when we thought we can use it no detriment to the flavor still effervescent still great not everyone has unlimited displacement everyone want to do that for someone who does brewing knowledge at home if you want to make sure you're drinking delicious combo chip doesn't prove every week it almost makes the process easier yes no absolutely not it is not that there are certain instances there are certain braising techniques that will kill some bacteria but a normal freezer in your home does not kill bacteria just renders long inert so they stopped working or locked in place they're not moving around and then everything stays there there are ways to freeze things that will kill bacteria but a -15 freezer they resort is just keeping things still that's it you can pull it out and get the permit going again if you really want it to kombucha is traditionally made tea of black tea a lot of questions okay before I get to that yeah you in the back that's exactly what's gonna start talking you can try it might work the bacteria might be in stasis I would say that it's pretty risky to me that's like bad news bears like it's gonna just not work or something else will be in there but it's possible that they're still alive and still okay bacteria can survive in stasis for a very very long time you'd be surprised with you know you find spores of Kochi which we'll talk about in a second that can just live on a shelf for years there's all the most indestructible mushroom spores and fungal spore the most indestructible cellular generationally functioning fine they can like survive the vacuum of space come back down to earth to survive being irradiated and still grow so there's some instances where yeah you can take something truly old at something you've forgotten about get it going again but I'm not saying it's guaranteed it might just not work or offer maybe the East have died but the acetic acid bacteria are still alive and then it's just all wanted so to answer that question when I said the easiest thing to do for you is to just make accomplish your pressure every week that is the answer if you always have a batch accomplish it going your Scooby will always be healthy you have to feed your dog to keep it alive yet to feed your gum with your mother to keep it going keep it healthy keep it strong now as it grows it makes more of itself bacteria are always constantly dividing by two by the process of so you've got to think that yeah if you have a little bit actually give it to your friends and then spread the joy but that is really be Jesus waited you're pulling off come Lucia just brew up another batch back slaw add a little bit of that previous batch in to just lower the pH to make it a little bit safer for that for that batch of kombu to get going and then from there just let it go for another week and you have your come with you for the week in the fridge so yeah so yes to answer your question the back you can't accomplish it out of different things and that's exactly what no one does again we looked a tradition and say well why does it have to be this way so traditionally it's made of sweetened tea like sugar cane sugar into black tea I can camuto and let it ferment but it no we found that you can ferment a whole lot of other things and so yes there are some pathways there are some sugars the East's can't ferment if sugar chains are too long yeast enzymes work on it it won't be able to break it down but there are a lot of sugars that work completely fine a lot of fruit sugars fructose disaccharide things like that maltose are completely fermentable by these that live in common each other and that's something we discovered quite clearly one of the first time which is that no ever made was a caricature carrot juice is extremely sweet normally sitting in a brick stuff like twelve or fourteen and that's kind of in that perfect range that permits sweet spot to make it really delicious a great combo chip that was one of the first launchers accomplishes no I made and it works great I see a lot of people like commenting on the book complain like oh no but you need to you needs like certain antioxidants it needs this molecule use that molecule that's all well in theory but if you do it and it works then so much for the conjecture and so we do that a lot we brew accomplish from fruit juices apple juice berry juice blackcurrant juice pear juice made from asparagus juice sometimes you have to add sugar to actually sweetness to the right level sometimes you can just use the natural fruit sugars that are in there and allow it to go you can make it from honey which is one a lot of people think you can because honey sugar levels are actually larger than just a plain table sugar so yeah it is kind of this world of exploration you'll find that not everything works but a lot of stuff does so that's kind of the joy why was your must wait so like yeah no yeah you could absolutely do that but the must after it's been fermented in wine if it's a if it's like alcoholic it's not gonna okay before it's fermented yeah you could you can absolutely do that again you have to make sure that what you water it down make sure the sugar content is to the right point let me do that by just getting a refractometer and kind of looking to the stars and making sure the sugar levels exactly agree but would absolutely work we don't have grapes in Denmark it's too cold so we don't make great kombucha but I imagine it's delicious that's the other thing about that never got the fermentation there was like ten Yama's all over the world in every corner and climate this would be a much larger bucket of try everything but we're also restricted by our mandate to kind of cook within our region this book is things that grow at northern latitudes which again there's a lot of overlap with other places on earth but grapes of course me yeah we made coffee kombucha and it's absolutely delicious we actually make it from like our leftover coffee grounds that we use any guest we just do a second cold steeping we add sugar to it and then ferment it and it's absolutely fantastic it's so delicious people though it's like though oh you must be so full from it it's not like I'm working at gnomic like snacking on the Copacabana but the one thing if we're making you for the menu that I do enjoy is the comic-con future and we've done so many trials we've done so many tests so many different varieties concentrations levels and that's the other side of it is that fermentation is this kind of it is as large as the world of cooking is so in in every way you could imagine making a soup and every okay how many carrots what's the ratio of carrots to onions celery how many different varieties of soup can we make and what will they all taste like you can have a sensory analysis outdoors and say this is the best thing that's what Campbell's should do you can do the same thing in the world of fermentation you can make you know a hundred different flights different increments using different bacteria using different sugar contents and then find that perfect sweet spot electorate temperature then you can then serve to all appear welcome to guests yes yes they do like like I said like the drawings on this board are fairly simplistic but if you find a research paper and I've read through if they're a bit of them to other reasons you'll find it like people who do analysis who Brun I was like okay what's actually going on in this movie there are a whole other bunch of volatile aromas like no life is not simple even simple like I love it when Mike biologist is like Oh for two and a half billion years simple left up very simple organisms are not simple it is incredibly complex the way they treat molecules the enzymes that they use to thrive on earth and they will produce whole different flights of molecules as a result of their living is not just black it's all like yeah so if you come to no market both if you come to Noma and there were no one has no hard or fast or set rules about how to cope with you know if we want to triple something will pickle it if we want to make it we want to serve someone a drink will do that so convolution is used a lot as an alternative to the alcoholic menu even though yes it has 25cm we're not only mixing it but maybe a little bit of like fresh tea or another food juice and st. enough basically a very low alcohol cocktail and if you come to know when you're pregnant or you don't you can order the juice menu and have comp witches that are very densely made of very expensive ingredients this is saffron kombucha which is our inventory chef really does not like it because it kills the food cost because I throw in like a hundred grams of saffron into a twenty five liter bucket like there's a hundred euro so yeah it's just great a drink that people consume we can you can reduce conclusion to a syrup so it's sweet and sour almost like a gastrique but of course with all the added benefit of you know not just being wine and sugar dressed strawberries with it or strawberry sorbet anything's like because you have all of this little way these layers of complexity of the same flavors kind of talk to each other so there's really no limits [Music] you would think so but then in this book while we're in Mexico that was something I was kind of Mexico hot place people really like to cool down so this is mingle calm each other and I was like what could Network like the Pipers not revealing where the Pipers is going to stay there it's not like it's gonna inhibit the bacteria from getting the glucose so yeah this is like a thick puree was like Mexican mangos blended it up Thermomix and then fermented the problem is that first of all you'll get like a little bit of a phase separation you'll have a bit of a pulp on top or the scoby sitting more liquid underneath but the disgust he was not inhibitor at all so yeah of course you can't just swirl it on to chop fruit and you ferment to the kombucha it's not gonna work you need it needs to be a liquid but that was a very thick puree and work fantastic on the finished block was amazing you have this basically comp which is smooth so if you do with other other foods as well you just have to be sure to stir it every day to make sure that all those molecules are moving around and then take a little bit more work but it was still say that again yeah yes you can I've seen one of my interns would actually kind of took on a project I was like oh I'm gonna make this taste and I'm like you can't I try but he actually just boiled a dick Scobee down in the sugar syrup like basically Canada and it was okay it kind of tasted like a wind up but what this year but its wax in this moist what it's actually like palatable that's good like Mugaritz is famous do they serve people I have scovia them like it's not good like I mean it's and they're it means they're like like to me it's like no one who restaurants all right but sometimes they do stuff that's not delicious for the sake of doing okay certain people's gobies and the cellulose itself has no flavor and it has the texture of like placenta so it's not you know at some point you're just doing it to do it I've seen people make like leather out of kombucha scoby is and stuff and that's fine if you're like I don't wear it if you make art from it to do all sorts of things but I am NOT a kind of eating it there's nothing there's absolutely nothing wrong with you eating it is nothing but pure fiber but the texture is terrible it doesn't you yeah you sir light so let light in ferments general rule of thumb don't leave your comments like in direct sunlight ultraviolet radiation is antimicrobial because as you taking what light waves super energetic photons particles use busting up DNA that's what skin cancer is it's sunlight busting up your DNA goes haywire your cells die or they reproduce without act so yeah UV radiation bad for life all life so much intolerant but generally leave it out of the Sun the light from an LED isn't gonna do anything I don't notice a difference when our wishes are fermented in the dark or the light I haven't done my super controlled tests but some days the light in the room is off come which it works as far as Sunday if it's on just fine temperature is also a super important feature in all forms of sermon kitchen like I said if you want to slow a fermentation duck why microbial processes you've lower the temperature what's temperature basic grade nine physics kanopolis temperature its energy its energy so yeah it's the kinetic energy is the average kinetic energy of molecules and if microbes need to actually bump into all these molecules to be able to grab onto them to ferment them the faster those molecules are moving around in the liquid the more those interactions are going to take place so when you cool something down you are literally slowing down the kinetic energy of all the contents of whatever it your of whatever's in your vessel so that includes the microbes it includes all the molecules of glucose and includes all the molecules of ethanol that are produced the warm or something is the path now there are limits just like you would no doubt die you know the Gobi Desert going on a hot summer day if you stayed there for too long and 45 degree heat so too low microbes they all have their threshold where things no longer work most life on Earth can't survive above 60 62 degrees Celsius that's like really the kind of line there are thermo files or extrema by bacteria that do survive extreme environments as far as I know none of them are used for fermentation or produce useful fermented metabolites so but generally room temperature or slightly above up to 28 degrees is a fantastic range in which to ferment products with bacteria and those are called the middle which means most basically they like the ambient temperature other times it bacteria get a little bit overheated other fermentation pathways will come into effect that normally wouldn't be in place at a lower temperature and stuff managing dick off flavors so sometimes will be speeding up all the reactions that wouldn't normally take place at lower temperatures and you'll have you'll notice which is fermented in like 30 or 35 degree heat it'll taste a bit weird other things are gonna start happening no I can't get into the specifics of which reactions but you just know from experience the like okay you get a flavor through format too high too cold that's less of a problem but it just does take time you can throw a Scobie into your sweetened tea and put it in the fridge and wait a month you get kombu Chuck but while you want to wait a month or something to do in six days okay yes so this acetic acid bacteria this is the guy income which is that's responsible for producing that do Aglio math and like to see EtOH acetic acid oxygen you get your mat in a comp which I'm at the east of looking here as well but everything goes along to the right even you know the flavor of the base of your buttocks is it's basically a giant sponge layers of cellulose to the kind of stacked on top of each other everything goes with it and that's how like I'm which are propagates effectively in a vinegar mother the East isn't president like I talked about been here two-stage process first you make why bees die off then you introduce the team Casa bacteria they do their thing you can find acetic acid bacteria that still produce a suitably little map in absence of yeast and that's what the vendor color is so a video your mother is basically you know this map just without these and so when you see vinegar floaties just understand it's the same bacteria the same family bacteria that are responsible producing the same thing both scobie's come to just go bees so if you take a better line and put it into the micrometer base like sweet tea or that's already it's it's you put maybe it's possible that you could start making this hybrid organism and the yeast would end up living it's plausible it's possible the East would then start occupation alongside what you took out of your vinegar but there are good if your mother is where you can just took that been your mother I'm three meter sweet D not without because those acetic aspect you have no way of breaking up glucose there are certain life is very diverse and like there's no one catch-all for how all this works but there are you see the COS of bacteria that can catalyze glucose and then just straight make acetic acid and so sometimes you'll find emitting your mother is just like just throw it in and then you get there but it is a little bit different but this is just this is the broad and kind of most correct and easily definable way of spending about both college and bigger yeah it should yeah it would ferment because the acetic acid bacteria will still be able to thrive um yeah it's again it's possible it's if the yeast that come with your mother can tolerate whatever the Aqua if it's beer you trying to go malt vinegar so shoot into bender so just think about that and again you never know until you try like no man has done a lot of work in the world of fermentation but the other thing we don't have a microbiology lab I can't send its I don't have a budget to be like oh I just really want to know what's in this about to come we'll just skip it even though I have ten others although I don't get to send that away to a lab to say what exactly is growing do a DNA analysis something exactly what metabolites right now it's extremely expensive to be able to understand like bottom line was actually going on in that fact you need to look at it with very expensive machinery a very highly trained person's time so at the end of it we're still cooks you know yeah we turn to science to be able to do this but to really know we just taste so a lot of it is you know understanding the science but at the end of the day we try it up and if we run into an experiment like that we literally say okay do two and then if one dies let me know what was great so yeah yes yeah just move it slowly oh you think you can move it but it's up to what you want out of it from the microbes point either happy to live in whatever environment goes wrong into but if you just take ice coming out of black garlic accomplish it and then throw it into your banana complet yeah I'm not gonna say that's gonna taste good it's like watch the cutting board between working from chicken and lettuce so when I do the same for your stove so the easiest thing to do is just to just do buy and they just teach those lanes as going strong and whatever mediums are working in and sometimes it works to your benefit too because sometimes as in the case with that Walker image there might be certain organic molecules that are actually antimicrobial that then you've created an evolutionary pressure for all of these microbes to work around there's a little anecdote in the book about me doing black I'll come into the first time all the leftover skin deep knowledge to get all the sugars out of them he's not caramelized and broken-down pyrolized sugars taste great the base here become bleach of the first one when she took three weeks to get going and I thought it was dead it was all because the ulema seen black garlic was actually hampering the east until enough of it divided where one that was a bit taller too when I said get five and then from there you now have a block all of it it's evolution in real time it's breathing it's like selecting the smallest dog to make a chihuahua you make something very civic given parameters cool next which is fairly simple so it doesn't explain vinegar is a two-step process you take your grapes dried yeast those grapes get turned into wine shouldn't become injured after these produces let's say whatever that you can tolerate let's say 12 Oh Daesan CLA never to come back it's tribbles up alcohol poisons it it's there's an interesting allegory here for humans on earth and like global warming and like what you studs to kill itself off when conditions get too good but we're not gonna get it so the yeast dies off and they introduce acetic acid bacteria now acetic acid bacteria is everywhere travels on dust molecules it is an extremely prevalent type of life on Earth again they often live on the skins of fruits waiting for that opportunistic moment where they can describe but if you introduce them on purpose by either backs talking with a little bit of old vinegar you will then let those who see the common bacteria and you have to take the cork out of the wine and you let those acetic acid bacteria turn that wine into so that's the that's the important distinction here so we have two steps first yeast then NASA factory so there clearly delineated and the important thing about this to know is that in the same way that vinegar work or winemakers beer makers whatever control the dryness of their wine by testing the bricks of the juice of the start selecting a strain of yeast that will leave a specific amount of sugar left afterwards after the fermentation is complete and they can control the actual flavor of the wine that way so - are you effectively controlling the flavor of whatever vineyard comes in its place the acetic acid bacteria will only work on the alcohol and again cooking is balanced so if you have a very dry wine you will get a very dry vinegar and it's gonna be a vinegar the best doesn't actually taste all that vinegar should also be balanced in terms of sweetness and residual fruit sugars mingling with the acetic acid so that's the basic process we kind of touched there's a lot of analogies with the commutator but important to note is that yes oxygen is a very important thing to consider you need access to oxygen to be able to transform a molecule of ethanol into a molecule of acetic acid oxygen the acid former the entire active of oxygen extremely reactive molecule o2 is is a reactant so one two and I just love stripping electrons into its spirit so it's really greedy and that's the whole point and that's why it's an acid form the oxidation the oxidation of iron into rust oxygen being greedy the oxidation of ethanol Haseena captain oxygen being created once again so it's a greeting moment and this is something to keep in mind because you can use that to your advantage if you want to speed up the process of making vinegar which is technically quite passive if you just let wild acetic acid turn your wine until you'll wait a couple months but it will happen those bacteria will just slow down in the Y will eventually sour but you're not doing much to facilitate that speeding up you can you can make vinegar that way but you can also speed up that process by actively aerating your mind the more oxygen the bacteria of access to instead of just being in contact with a narrow surface area at the top of the jar the faster they will metabolize so at Noma what we do if you want to make a bit of your very quickly we're trying to preserve the fresh flavor of a fruit or vegetable juice we will aerate our backs of base with a fish pump like literally a fish Butler you know and that's a really clever technique because the the air stones is the bottom of your container you have a very tall vessel it's bubbling oxygen from the bottom to the top it's actually making a circulation flow inside that back so all of it bacteria that are then living inside your your your alcoholic beverage the turn into vinegar are always in contact with oxygen and they're always producing acetic acid so across this stuff would sometimes take one or two or three months can then be sure down it's a 10 or 14 days now another really fun kind of just clever thing that we do at Noma is to turn juices that would normally not ferment into wine into a product that can be fermented by acetic acid bacteria and we do this by cheating would just add pure neutral grain spirit or pure distilled alcohol if you think that these guys need that alcohol to be there to do what they need to do that doesn't preclude the fact that that alcohol can come from a bunch of different sources it doesn't just have to produce be produced by the yeast that was living on those grapes it can come from other places as well you actually need a fair bit of sugar grapes are very sweet I have a lot of sugar in them and they'll produce something with alcohol content 12 bricks you need sugar contents of like up 18 20 bricks to be able to produce that much alcohol in your finished product if you want to make vinegar of celery juice celery not so sweet you can try adding sugar to it but then you're gonna get into a whole mess of other problems so what we do is we'll take fresh celery juice the juices of a lot of different plants and vegetables Lubar squash pumpkin things that aren't normally fermentable you can you can ferment water into vinegar if you wanted to by making this by using this stuff so you take your pure 96% ethanol not denatured because that has other harmful things that'll make you go blind in it you pour it into your back around 8% concentration and then you end up with then you just pick up this stage over here you can add your bubbler you add your Z just bacteria but back slopping and then this will transform it'll completely be used up your juice will no longer be alcoholic you will have a vinegar juice that's sitting at around 5% 6% acetic wait yes sir yeah that's a little process of Beck's love it so oh it does because whatever you're adding is gonna flavor apart from that you just need the vector you can get freeze-dried cultures of acetic acid bacteria ingesting static you want they're very hard to find it's not as easy to explain it like a spectator for making yogurt but they exist but for the most part vinegar making is made by back slaughter so if you haven't unpasteurized what's well in the States the apple cider vinegar all the if he's drunk you have that you throw it in whatever 10 percent 15 percent and it's gonna be not of that bacterial culture to get that next batch going it's gonna flavor your vinegar but then that just gives you a reason to do it again so let's say you're taking celery veneer in the first stage it's like celery slight apple Whitaker because he backs lopped you do it again use that celery ring and then you're diminishing the quantity of that original flavor each time until you have a very pure celery vinegar they can use this box off for so we vinegar as a healthy population the bacteria and you have a very pure celery in there so that's the idea with that I have to move through a lot of material now so are we good on vinegar we don't have to talk about balsamic wine or balsamic that you guys live in it okay cool so yeah you can make vinegar from a whole lot of other things other than necessarily grapes and that's really where you do run into a lot of delicious click between you turn things that would normally not be commendable line into vinegar you can then use them to dress salads and mix like that you're like oh wow like a lettuce vicar or a lovage vinegar and you get all these amazing floral notes and herbaceous notes and you're a product that you wouldn't be able to do just by steaming and do any better be this way doesn't make it taste differently just like taking I finished quite mine vinegar and blending in here it does not taste the same it actually goes through a process like I said none of these processes are black and white none of these processes are eight it goes to B goes to C there's a lot of other things that get carried along in the flight and you get complexity of flavor when that happens cool see you later Ben here so now we're going to get into a very important ferment at restaurant ha ha cookie this is Yu ting who was my intern last year she was making cookie in the lab anybody telling about koteas before we get into it shout it out who knows no one else it's a fungus yes you're absolutely right anything else there's lots of fungus is lessons outside it's more than that not uh nothing no okay Cody before we talk about Cody we're gonna get sidetracked to talk about fear there's no recipe for beer in this book is known as it freezes on alcohol we don't have a license for that so we don't do we have done the permit just not what we don't do it so I didn't put it but it is very important to talk about beer because I'm talking about beer we talk about grains and the substrate the thing you're looking to ferment is sometimes as important to the ferment as the microbe we used to ferment it what are grains what other sees their seeds seeds are what are seized yeah there's starch and seeds that's a component I wouldn't say that's what they are so we've got one component start that's this what else doesn't see there's fiber where's the flag legacy yeah so we got that so we have fiber what else do the carbohydrates that's the starch the germ very important those are for all intents and purposes the three most important parts of a seat what's the germ can we like give that it's a small plan a seed is a baby plant packed with its lust to take to school by its mom wrapped up in a lunchbox that's what it is that's a seat that's all scenes when a grass produces a seed it's putting forth its next generation it is investing a lot of energy to produce the next generation all that DNA that package that first embryo and giving it again a very costly form of food a food source so that when it starts it's like it'll have something to work with you can't just throw genetic information into the wild expect to make a new ordinance you can't just throw a human embryo fertilized with sperm into a field to be like make a baby you need to actually nerd to it and plants nurture their offspring by making this very ingenious setup seeds are some of the most fascinating biological objects in the natural world they are the genetic information for a baby plant packed up of the food it needs to start its life wrapped up in a heart to get at husk baby plant lunch in a lunchbox out into the world be fruitful and multiply when conditions are just right genetic material inside that germ starts releasing enzymes that break down the starch what starch kind of complex sugars so now I've no professor marina I can't draw the small to us exactly we'll simplify it just David it's a chain link in starch of sugar molecules let's say each one of these is glucose and they're linked together and you form glucose it's a saccharide sugar you form a polysaccharide this is hard to digest and it's built that way on purpose starch is made to be hard to get out so it's not just freely consumable by whatever organism might happen to come upon it energy can neither be created nor destroyed law of conservation of yet runs the universe that law and for a plant to make an energy-rich molecule it takes a lot of work it takes a lot of sunlight it takes a lot of water for a plant to make glucose it is a precious molecule and that's why so many things already did as their fuel source when a plant invests all that time and energy making search it wants to make sure that it's not just freely accessible to anyone has to keep it safe so putting glucose molecules together in a long link makes it hard to digest big things are kind of hard to fit your mouth if you will and they're not just freely available for anything that might float on down to start consuming to make sure that this baby plant can actually get at its lunch and enjoy it take that lunch out of its wrapper that plant has enzymes that can break apart these long chains of molecules and get of these individual molecules of glucose that it can then break down and use personal website just like the bacteria just let the yeast what are enzymes they are proteins this is very true no matter they are made use of catalysts or maybe I deserve it but that's what they are yes they are proteins that serve as catalysts for chemical reactions in layman's terms they are both cheese and scissors the way that proteins can fold form extremely complex three-dimensional shapes and then by the grace of the laws of chemistry you can do really cool things with electric potentials active sites that make enzymes extremely well tailored and doing one thing and wonderfully sometimes I'm taking more than one thing that you have enzymes that do one thing one thing really really well they are this complex three-dimensional team that only works in some instances and breaking apart a molecule a polysaccharide of starch into a disaccharide of let's say maltose which is easily digestible by a lot of animals of plants by cutting it at every two molecules of glucose so in some ways they're cheese and this only works because beta-amylase the enzyme responsible for doing this in a plant has a very specific shape just like a key but then this is an icky that just opens a door it's a key that breaks apart material so it's an city's specialized tailored chain breaks apart molecules keys and scissors that's what enzymes are in the world of fermentation so this germ this baby plant has been equipped by its mom with the keys and needs to unlock its lunch and it prevents outside organisms whether that's bacteria or Birds or whatever from getting in by creating this hard shell of fiber a very hard to break apart organic molecules that make this hard shell and when conditions are just right this germ can consume all the starch sprout its Cobi how do you say that word again could you deal on whatever the baby please and then the plaintiff started swipe put up its first sprout start photosynthesizing and on it goes the circle of life continues everyone saw the logic so this is cool it's like life is fascinating when actually get into like how about ology works and like how things on the earth live and do their thing and thrive and multiply this is cool now in fermentation like I said it's not just about microbes and your based product it's also about human intent and thousands and thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia the ancient Egyptians and Iranians and everyone lived in the Fertile Crescent discovered that sprouted grains can make a really really delicious alcoholic beverage called beer how do they do that if the yeast can't break down starch went in this polysaccharide state well they do that by tricking the plant into starting its lifecycle and breaking down those starches into sugars for them but before all the sugars are used up and it's routed its first leaf you kill you kill it by roasting it does anyone know what process I'm describing what is the molten exactly so by bolting the grain you're getting the plant to produce enzymes that can break down the starch to produce sugars that you can then roast to kill the plant to stop the process halt in this place and all those roasted sugars are now extractable when you boil in water weird which if you're to just boil on multigrain water what do you get yeah porch that's not exactly something you can turn into beer if you boil multi grains and water you get a warped which is for mental values which if you've met you know a friend I go to town well we understand beer not necessarily important to Noma but the idea behind this process very important to all of fermentation in East Asia so in the West thousands of years ago our ancient ancestors might have discovered the process of molting all well again that leads to beer that leads to vinegar that leads to whiskey and scotch and that whole world of fermentation in East Asia that never occurred to anyone or it came too late because they found something else they found a fungus that can do this for them and it was a wild cropping is it was actually a parasitic fungus that would parasitize rice fields rice paddies and take this valuable starch for itself you know just like a fox gets into a chicken coop and takes those chickens for itself so too does Aspergillus horizon you take the starch that someone worked very hard to produce whether it was Bob Peck or a farmer in this field or itself crop funguses are one of the most you know kind of biggest pestilences to farmers and growers of food in the world funguses are some of the plants biggest predators they might not look like it but they are so once upon a time some very adventurous culinary or someone just plain out of their mind decided that they would take some of this moldy rice in a field and try and do something with it and lo and behold they found that the same process of multi was effectively taking place in the rice that was infected you can then steep that rice that moldy rice into a liquid and finally the rice got a lot sweeter you can add unmolding rice into that and all those enzymes that are produced by this parasitic fungus that hacked those grains own life cycles and produced the same enzyme so this it could fuel with its life cycle those who go to work on other unfermented grains as well and thus the prices of rice claim or sucked a making was born and this is where it comes there was a wild crop fungus that was then investigated people found this to be useful and then they started doing it on purpose it first started in ancient China the first records of it go back to you know the time of Jesus 50 100 BC and then from there got carried into Japan and the Japan being so Taku were like although we're gonna get really nerdy with this and then war the whole world of stockade and all the tens of thousands of domesticated and different species of Aspergillus arises we have today so koji was a once wild crop fungus that often produced like we talked about with lactic acid bacteria metabolites that were harmful to people but we slowly bread it right I can read it and devise ways to kind of narrow in we kept up the harmful batches just like if you're trying to domesticate a dog from well wolf if you have an aggressive pup in the letter it keeps biting that feeds it you don't take it through to the next generation who let it go and you keep the com-pubs that are actually in a surgery well the same thing happened with Asperger's arising harmful bacteria that contained mycotoxins toxins produced by fungi that would make people sick or left out of the equation and they found interesting ways by using by adjusting pH even though no one understood what the power of hydrogen was or what these muscles were or what this fuzzy thing was the name for Kochi comes from the Chinese characters 4% lot of people thought it was just a small totter it was like what is this thing you use analogies to kind of make sense of it but if they understood what it was doing and they understood that it was useful to go they kept it around and then slowly read those lineages into the codis that we have today so Kochi when it comes down to it a form of Kochi and that's how fungi propagate so a Spore of Kochi floats along lands on the grain start spreading web start spreading its web and starts growing cells that are called piping and hyphy are the wispy white roots that you see in like cross sections of the earth in the forest that form of mycelium network that passage used to get me the way around fungi mushrooms they produce the same thing just not very smaller scale those high peas spread into the grain starch then we'll release the same enzymes the same beta-amylase that that plant produces but then a harvest all the sugars core itself and by osmosis it takes up all these newly formed in nutrients to fuel its own so on the reflection so that multiply and thrive and if you have a lot of grains inoculated with Cody spores eventually that could you will grow over all those grains and those roots will form an interlocking network of web if you will that basically keeps a lot of like single grains whole and intact and then you make it a cake a cookie cake this also happens in tempeh very similar process the Cody then what's called sacrifice all that starch and it makes all these grains extremely sweet but again cooking his timing and just like moulting you have to stop the process before all of those that you've used up so after about 36 or 48 hours of growing Cody spores on cooked grains you end up with this very sweet grain that's in the form of the cake that you can then use for other things you can put it in the fridge you can roast it that'll kill the fungus you can freeze it'll stop the fungus in its tracks but if you let this go too long the fungus will enter its reproductive stage and its life cycle start producing its spores actually use up don't forget like it's going through all this work its producing all these enzymes to break down starts with the sugar do something and it'll start to produce spores and all that you're doing get used up and the cookie will no longer be sweet so you have to stop it before it has the chance to use up all that sugar and you do that at the 36 to the 48 car if you leave coaching for 72 hours all this you've already gone on actually tastes a little bit bitter tastes like it kind of tastes like like I like a musky break so you never want that to happen if you're actually cooking some Koji to use it you want to stop in his tracks from there you can cook it's amazing to use on its own Renee does be getting more and more into it the long I work in a lab to the point where we make you know like ice cream sandwiches with cookies a wrapper we barbecue it on the barbecue and make really dense cakes that you can then use like almost like an in here II that's on the menu right now start with sea urchin so is something that you can eat as a base product but I talked about it in the book in such a way because there are classes of ingredients that are just ingredients lettuce is just an ingredient you grow it you can cook with it you can eat it but lettuce is not good at doing anything other than being ingredient eggs or good at doing things other than being ingredient you can use them as ingredie you can fry an omelet and have your breakfast you can also use it as a tool you can whip egg whites pour it into a consummate tools howdy stuck and clarify your consummate you don't need to use the eggs afterwards it might impart some of your flavor into your stock but you've used an ingredient as a tool Cote is the exact site you can use it for what it is you can also use it for what it does so those enzymes the Koji produces don't just get to sit there and do nothing after this third third in there their big producer sitting in this sweet grain and now take that coaching add it to other products and have those enzymes run through that's the distinction that we made called primary and secondary fermentation processes a lot of times you'll think about fermentation has like a living organism actively doing a thing and the act of that organism living its life dividing and multiplying is the act of fermentation in a lot of cases it is everything we've seen up until now is a primary fermentation process you're going to live bacteria in that process that producing the lactic acid and that is the process of fermentation this is a primary fermentation process you're growing McCoach is transforming again but the grain is now a fermented product that you can then use to do completely other things in which no active living cycles are going on if you take soybeans and mix it with Koji and put it in a container and leave it alone you will get miso and that's because the Koji all those enzymes that first worked on breaking down the starch can then be reused and in a crock starches in other products so if you have starches in beans or in legumes split peas followed beans soybeans those impacts will get a second leg to start breaking down all the all starches in those second products and producing what again more sugar but like I said no more even ISM works in this kind of black and white landscape and Cody is buried introducing a whole bunch of other enzymes that can also be used for other processes so in this germ what else is there there's a lot of protein as well grains are extremely high in protein so the ones the humans have domesticated over the years co-chief also has a chemical toolkit an enzymatic toolkit for breaking apart chains of amino acids or proteins so just like we do that chain link of polysaccharide you can also draw a chain link of amino acids the basic building blocks look like the stuff the DNA codes to put together in the ribosome and but that's kind of what they look like these complex molded molecules of these linked amino acids again lots of living organisms can produce enzymes that can then snip these proteins and allow them to float free no longer linked together they can kind of wander up into the distance and these are free-floating amino acids Cody does this extremely well it produces whole flights of proteolytic enzymes as they're called proteases that can snip apart proteins into their constituent amino acids now white is a work why is turning proteins into amino acids an interesting thing exactly all life is made from other forms of life life both living earth is just as constant recycling organism that takes life breaks it down built it back up and a lot of these molecules get recycled hundreds of thousands of times the amino acids they can be produced from base chemical molecules but a lot of times they're just broken down into living organism and then built back up in some other way in another one that's what metabolisms and feeding grow in your body actually is and if you think about it that way amino acids are extremely valuable to living organisms and if something is valuable to you you want to have a way of detecting it just because you say there's gold in them thar hills you actually have to find a way to actually look for it you can't just take land ten dollars worth let's say I'm rich you actually have to find a way of getting it out and you've got a very good way of finding gold let's say a metal detector then all of a sudden you're actually quite the same way it works in gold hills it works in animal bodies especially with a million bucks and the million bodies are extremely fine-tuned for being able to detect free-floating amino acids and one in particular the kind of stances of markers for all West but odds are from eating something with this one particular free-floating amino acid and it sets off a chemical sensor in your tongue that sends your a message to your brain saying eat more of this there's the good stuff that I like that I need to build my body with you'll find that big delicious and this is where taste becomes a really philosophical thing but it's best exemplified Koji and the process of umami but taste is Darwinian tasties an evolved trait that is your body's way of sensing the world around it the better you are tasting the things that your body needs to grow the more fit you and your offspring will be if you have a gene that's really good at detecting glutamate glutamic acid and you then have a preference for tasting things with high amounts of these amino acids you're eating a more nutritious diet so all of a sudden a chemical pathway that happens on your tongue from an organism that's able to break apart proteins outsource the work digestion for you then becomes a very sought-after thing people develop a taste that's reinforced for all their kids that's also like the taste of this flavor through the generations and human beings develop umam as a sense and something you enjoy so that's kind of a cool thing but you can ask that real Marini about bitterness and how that the opposite end of the spectrum but that's the idea there so when you taste free-floating glutamate it's normally a fantastic sodium chloride I am different monster excuse me you're realizing that the thing that you're eating isn't just delicious because it contains protein but because a lot of the hard labor that your body you have to spend to break these proteins down to amino acids has been already done for you if you can save your body the energy of doing something you're saving calories and a calorie save his calorie burn a very harsh environment we had two courts with who to stay alive if your body didn't have to go through some chemical process to break down food and digest food it was then more nutritious for it and this is why we have these compounded incentives for tasting enjoying money when Cooney's enzymes come to contact with protein rich legumes like soy beans like fava beans like peas it makes a lot of money and that's why these fermented products are so delicious to us because we can clearly tell that this work has been outsourced things are broken down ready to be built into the things that we need to survive and we love them for this reason and that's why we kept koji around for thousands of years because it's very good at doing this koji creates month there are a lot of other processes in nature they also create mommy by breaking apart proteins and use the constituent amino acids but this is one that's really cool and interesting because it's not just relegated to the ingredient itself you can make money by making fish sauce but you're writing that fish here we have something like I said I came to egg white something that is its own thing but you can add to other things too coasted money out of all those other things and so half of this book is kind of uses Cote in this way to make other things have different or interesting or mommy rich flavors just by using cookie as a tool it's amazing greedy its own right you can cook with it and fry it you can find all sorts of clever ways to turn into flour student into stocks barbecue or grill it you know roll it into Japan's whatever you want put it into sausages but at the same time you can also make a whole flight of other secondary fermented products like miso like Jeremiah's like soy sauces that utilize Kochi ports and thematic powers cool we're good there questions yes from someone who has so this is a super important thing that you really have to get home to maybe an amateur preventers but that's the question I was like oh but I'm gonna come we just go be how did I mean come to sure if you want the Golden Retriever from your mom for Christmas you want a puppy you have to go to a breeder and find a pregnant Golden Retriever all life comes from left all cells come from selves this wasn't always known and this is why I hate Aristotle for its theory of spontaneous generation but all life is an unbroken chain of organisms greeting offspring that were genetically quite similar to the parents going back 3.5 billion years to the light or to the dawn of our last Universal common ancestor somewhere in a hydrothermal vent in the Pacific Ocean all life it's that and you cannot get any life to do anything for you unless you have yes there is there are organisms floating freely but those organisms came from other words just because they're all around you doesn't mean that they just come for free there are places on that where you won't find them and you have to get them to make them do what you want Kouji is one of those things especially because Kochi is a domesticated organism who has relatives that are quite harmful for you when you have black mold growing in your apartment maybe some of the student dorms and Broadview that is actually a relative of Aspergillus oryzae named hospitals Niger and it will produce toxins that you will breathe that will get you sick because it is an organism that's trying to fend off its territory and say no this is for me and me alone I want to live here if nothing else that's Olivia I'm gonna produce toxins and make a harmful environment for everybody else by breeding out those kind of by defang hospitals horizon we've made it safe for us to consume and that's an especially important reason why when you are making Koji you watch to actually get species that have been verified that's tested on the lab that does not produce toxins because there is a chance to be mistaken there so that's that I'm not a fan of that there are all a lot of people to do it and see all over Instagram because I think it's kind of dumb so Kochi while it does produce proteases will not just grow on meat if I get Koji on my arm and go home the next morning I'm not being fermented there is no I'm not being covered bold and being digested from the outside in that's because kody cannot grow on flesh it has been specialized there are mold to do I used to be a butcher yeah you'd have a very multi fridge but the point is that Cody's specialized to work on the environment that is great all organisms are kind of this mirror image of the or of the environment that they live in just like a puddle of water the water forms the exact opposite shape of the cavity it sits in organisms are the same thing for the environments that they live in thriving they actually have information about the world that they live in and make specialized chemicals and molecules to be able to interact that world in very specific ways and if you take a puddle freeze it and then try and put it inside a square container you'll find it won't fit that's the same thing for living living organisms if you take Koji and try and dust it on meat it won't grow it'll just get wet it'll drown nothing you can keep your meat an incubator for three days little rocks your coach is not going to grow so when you see that on Instagram here's what's happening people are rolling meat in rice flour and then I'm not getting the rice flour with Koji so if you think about that what's the coachee actually working on it's on the rice top so it's like yes in the wet clay yes there are enzymes and then seep into the meat just by being in contact with it but you're also keeping me at 30 degrees for two days and like right like I wouldn't do that in any circumstance unless I'm making salad sausages and there's safety controls to make sure sour sauce was go right but in this instance there are no stages so it freaks me out for a bunch of reasons but then like I talked about Koji being a tool if you just take finished co-team blend it with water you make a paste that you can then rub on your meat put in a vacuum bag leave it in the fridge where it's safe and the enzymatic breakdown of the meat from all the protease works better than if you grew the Koji on rice flour pontes immunity highway so when I see this technique I'm like people in sunglass people get carried away that really enthusiastic and I'm not saying that exploration isn't good but that is something that we've tried more like this is categorically worse than doing this other thing that's more direct but sometimes people like to hold up and moldy piece of meat and say anyway speaking cooking meat we're gonna talk about Garren's I briefly touched on me so okay we're gonna talk about me a little bit [Music] so miso is far and away this is my quick take of coaching me so is your cookie cake your soybeans comics of course and salt these three ingredients make magic that's what this is this is pizza from restaurant know what's growing dark because soybeans don't barley Kochi proudly gross of Denmark rice doesn't so we've taken these processes from somewhere else put them through the lens of where we think we were going to work find ingredients that kind of hit the same notes that act is very similar environments to where this organism originally came from and that creates on the cold evening and that's one of the coolest things about fermentation is once you understand it these aren't just recipes you can treat them as recipes and you can say how to a to B to C and I'm going to get a souffle because I had a to be to see how I'm gonna get swingy so you can also say sub a for X B for Y C present and you end up with something completely new you take the process analyze it for what it is then put in different inputs and you get a completely different output and no matter where you are on earth I guarantee there is something that has not been fermented in whatever style the world of fermentation is not a subset of the world of cuisine it is equally large if not infinitely larger than but you have to understand the processes then treat them like algorithms or tools to be able to access this whole other world of undiscovered flavor without kind of the beauty of this book once you understand the processes you're free to do whatever you want it's not going to be traditional but it is explorative which is kind of the best part you're gonna have some failures some things won't work as well as others maybe cookie doesn't like to me for whatever reason but it can grow on right no one in East Asia that ever tried coaching because rise is endemic to East Asia but it grows here in Europe so you can do that and now you see all the possibilities of taking differently it's just in the way that we're talking about kombucha same thing applies for Koji ' those different inputs will need two completely different outputs you can find whole worlds of interesting new combinations because of it when I was talking about me so being a secondary fermentation process where even though the Koji might be dead or it might be dormant or whatever being combined with a new fresh ingredient you're getting those enzymes to get to work like I said keep this in mind sometimes I can't do it myself it was fine no process in fermentation or the look at the world is completely black and white and when you have it miso and you have these three ingredients going into a bucket eventually undoubtedly you will also have yeast you will also have acetic acid bacteria you'll also have lactic acid bacteria in there as well eventually propagating the less salt you add to your batch of miso the more of these other fellows you see in there salt again a super critical control point for controlling how a miso ages and ferments you try to keep things out make it a safe environment for everything that needs to grow so does have an effect on enzymes but not so much so that it's gonna like stop the process inertia and resource in Japan can be extremely salty sometimes as much as 20% salt now nobody is very salty restaurant renamed pellet and Weiss to keep things clean and fresh so a big challenge for us in the laboratory is finding a way to make miso zazz low salt as possible as possible while still getting the ferment to work successfully in safety so at 4% salt we're keeping out malevolent bacteria but also opening the floodgates to all of these other critters that we've seen before and the previous kind of lessons or bodies of fermentation we allow its depth pretty easy for them to thrive in there that's not necessarily a bad thing because if all of these if eastern acetic acid bacteria and lactic acid bacteria all produce interesting and flavorful ferments on their own when you add them to a feud and let the propagate in Nevada me so you're going to make for a very interesting and complex me so that's something to keep in mind the more salt you add to a firm Abbott the more straight narrow it is you're getting enzymes to do their thing you're gonna produce embalming but it's gonna be blinders on a very OneNote format that's not necessarily a bad thing it'll last for a long time you can age it for a long time and you'll get other flavors because of that but the lower the salt content the more other microbial activity will start to take place all these guys will have something to say the lactic acid will make it taste style in one way you see the gosset in another will hit the different parts of your tongue the yeast will start reducing esters that make it fruity or floral and you'll get notes that are approximating apricots or nuts or things like that in the same way that wine to taste of a million different things because of the yeast because of the grapes because of the combination of all these aromatic compounds the same thing happens in a miso the more activity you have so the less salt content of all complex your me so the higher the salt content the more straight and narrow now you can make up for that you can make up for a straight in Maryland miso being interesting by letting it age for a very long time the longer piece of Ages the more Meyer reactions get to take place and the more caramelized notes are interesting notes will have because that set of chemical reactions not necessarily I'm gonna keep it okay speeding through if we move on from you so and go into the world of Gera we're looking at kind of a system so instead of soybeans we're going to add meat and it could be fish so Kochi fish printing and salt can produce Agera garam so traditionally in ancient Africa which is where they come from we're normally produced just with fish and salt but an important part of this process is that fish and salt can also have the capacity to take those long proteins and chocolate mint into amino acids if you use a certain part of the fish then what part is up the guts what do fish do when they eat another smaller fish they digest it and how did they do that with enzymes so a fish in and of itself any large animal actually contains the enzymes needed to break down that animal itself now you guys aren't all that jesting yourselves here turning in the bathroom from intoduce on the floor right now because all of your digestive enzymes are closely moderated kept in homeostasis by a living organism that closely monitors where these enzymes are going and what they're being used for there captain Sachs they're kept in your intestine they don't leak out but if you just throw a fish in a blender all of a sudden they do and if digestive enzymes come to contact with parts of the fish that we've normally kept separate ie the muscle tissue it'll start to digest itself anyone else this process is called so what yeah ketosis yes and the verb is to Otto lies so yes autologous is effectively from Latin self digestion that's what that means so to authorize fish into garum all you need to do is add salt and salt is only there to keep out bad microbes now protein is one of the most sought-after digestible things free-for-alls in the natural world a rotting carcass on the side of the road is fair game for anything to come into contact with it everything likes to grow in rotting meat so you need to add a lot of salt if you're making garam that's just fish its guts and salt normally into the neighborhood of like maximum saturation of salt and a liquid which is sitting around 23 to 24 percent before it can no longer dissolve via the suspension it just sits as crystals in the bottom of the liquid but garin's are normally made with salt concentrations that high if you're to make a caramel just by leaving fish and salt rotting at room temperature for a year you would need the salt to be that high but I've gone down as low as around 18% I would never go lower than that because there's one thing in this book that is gonna go off if you had too little salt and actually make you very very very sick it's going to be a Garrett because meat will allow all sorts of harmful things to grow in it if it gets the chance enough salt though and you're safe now people often think the fish sauce is eating and it is because it produces a lot of different volatile aromas that you're associated with being quite smelly but at the same time it's not smelly in the way that rotten fish is smelly get sponging it's strong these are strong aromas but it's not stinky stinky and if you get the garam well made with extremely fresh fish it will be punting at the end but it will also still taste like extremely fresh fish this is a very important thing to remember when you're fermenting your fermented products even though they take months to produce is sitting in the corner or rotting away somewhere are only as good as the ingredients that go into them the pressure your products are when you ferment them or when you start from anyone the better your ferment will be at the end you can't just let something rot for two weeks then say oh I'm gonna turn this into something and save it and expected that ferment at the end no you've started with bag first finally ingredients you can get a bad finish product that's always something to keep in mind even though Leggero might be made of rotten fish if that fish is fresh the girl actually tastes good even though it's still strong is the strong tasting is the pungency of that gara doesn't come from like I said it's rotting fish slush or the smell of bacteria eating ordinance of a breakdown fish fat it comes from those digestive juices just like eating awful that any animal is actually like quite an experienced search of his seasons an awful fish even in the form of a stewed fish Karen so at Noma if we want fish to be caught fish garam or any air for that matter to be extremely clean and flavor relieved all the heavy notes of fermented guts out of the equation and southern Koji which is good to eat on its own as a delicious flavor it's sweet its floral touch everything muffled that's a flavor in and of itself the absolute fungus has a taste and it's really fruity that's really mean and that's a really cool feature of that say you add a bonus of all this delicious flavor all the enzymes that you would normally have us from the fridge you leave out the guts say Justin's the flesh add your salt again high salt concentration that's 18 percent later but some microbes can survive it salt compounds that high and in 6 8 12 months time you get an amazing concentrated liquid you can strain off the solids some of you might know this is go to the deed of Ichi some of you might know it is squid gram fish sauce some of you might know it as ancient Roman garam but it makes cooking that much better and easier just a splash of it fills whatever you're cooking your stir-fry your stew your pasta bolognese with all this umami that makes you want to eat more it triggers this underlying fluttering sensation of what you are eating is inherently delicious for all the evolutionary reasons we talked about 10 nights ago super cool process in this book we also sometimes ferment out jams in the heat and this is an instance where you see me checking up on something in the lab but some of these carobs are fermented 60 degrees Celsius to accelerate mired reactions on purpose and that actually doubles up on a safety ground which is heat like I said if you have microbes at 60 degrees you're gonna die they're not going to produce any harmful toxins that will kill you so to use heat as an additional safety parameter compounding it with the salt and then you can actually lower the salt content so you can make a less salty gara by adding heat you get a different flavor they need to just left a degree temperature to to kind of pass to a new thing but at the same time you just end up with a different product so that's always something to think about is that heat can be used as much of the safety parameter as an anaerobic environment and a lot of oxygen or salt work pH so if there's a lot of tools your disposal and once the more you ferment the more you understand fermentation the more you can understand you can mix and match things and get different results because of all these parameters that it really is like playing in a giant control bin where food goes in one side microbes come in another and you get a pinch mark switching those knobs will yield different results yes you're just looking for a different result I think the thing with growing cacao me is like oh I have the super tender umami rich state and then you cook it as mistaken EDA's is a state and you can do that in a much more safe and controlled way by just blending Koji and marinating your stake in Koji and blend it coach because all these enzymes in there and grow right that makes that to me is a smarter way of going about getting one result in business since you're making completely different product and again they're not growing the cookie on the fish or on the meat you're looking to commit you're combining them and let me cookies enzymes work on those proteins to make a liquid that you can then use in this season so what you're looking to do the intent the thinking of looking to greet is very important to how you consider going about a process if you want a finished cake that has some aspect of fermentation in it and you're trying to make it more delicious or hatin it in some way and you're not just fermenting for the sake of fermenting but you're trying to call for something then you have to think about what steps it takes to get to that point and how that point is gonna be at its best and for me when it comes to the conversation about growing cooking odd meat marinade cooking meat that's a better process when it comes to making Dara if you don't want to be pungent use coaching blend it together you'll get a finished liquid that is delicious and roasted tasty but you haven't used it in a way that doesn't make sense if you try to grow Kochi arm meats and then blend it into water and salt and then be like oh I'm making it that way that's it dumb way to make it go with meeting coach you see what I mean because you just opening yourself up so put some more happiness or danger or or things going wrong a lot of control basically and control his very important permutation okay that's Guerra next up soy sauce or show you show you is a fun one because I guess technically you can make it by taking finished Koji and taking soybeans and then combining those two things in a salty brine basically it's almost exactly like making a Gera kind of halfway did you make a miso but you had soybeans and then this salt is in the form of a bra so it's a liquid it's basically like wick liquid me so that's actually how it ended up me so's came before they proceeded soy sauces and if a miso is wet enough eventually and you should keep a miso underlay flawless everything you people a chrome on underway eventually a bit applicable form of the popular form of the top and create was kind of like Arabic or steel anyone know what that liquids called tomorrow exactly so the tamari that would form on top of me so they fermented in a bats was such a tasty kind of by-product people were completely enamored with it in Japan in China and it became an industry unto itself and tamari the characters were translated from ancient Chinese characters literally means or it means like paste liquid or paste boil oil is what they were used a viscous liquid so it means like paste liquidity event but you have to make a lot of miso to get a little bit of smart so it wasn't this completely sensible process just to make one thing to get a byproduct of another so they adapted the recipe to make soy sauce its own thing that hit all the same notes as to Mario's and to do that they grow cookie cakes of your soybeans with wheat to kind of soak up you have to cook the soybean because the mold can have no chance of growing on it if it's just a hard one well your soybeans you mediate the moisture content because you don't want to drown your scores i adding cracked wheat and then you let the cookie grow on the beans and the wheat all of that goes together in a brine and then your soy sauce ferments or the secondary process of all these enzymes stirring around the salty liquid takes place over the course of months or years and my reactions come into play as well it ages gets more complex very salt tolerant yeasts get to propagate from there and they're play volatile aromas into the mix as well and you get a really complex and delicious thing there's ways the chemists have devised to cheat this whole process using hydrochloric acid to make what's called chemical soy sauce the stuff that you get from like you come on tin can that tastes really flat it's like no this is not a new thing that's often made and very strict kind of factory conditions using hydrochloric acid to break down protein chains into glutamate the natural process is far superior and again it's superior because you get all of these other microbes coming into play adding their voices to the few making your finished product artisinal interesting layered and complex and that's a really important distinction to make to fermentation in that regard again you can ferment a whole other world of legumes and grains into soy sauce we've made soy sauce from from from split peas we've make soy sauce from lentils with made soy sauce with black beans and cranberry beans and they all do taste fairly different the longer you let them go the more they converge not just a dark my reaction flavor but when they're young you'll notice that they are quite nuanced and different from whatever your commercial products were so again soy sauce Eastasia is made from soy and that's how it's done but once you understand that process and open it up to whatever you have in your region you can create whole in flecks of flavor that income existed nowhere else on earth just because of where you are in your own terroir taking ideas from somewhere else and applying it to your region super cool it's not soy sauce everybody knows how to cook with it and use it delicious a little splash goes a long way for the same reasons that a Gera well this is a beef garam up here Karim assets around and not spill it you can smell it it smells like roasting me okay we'll do that and these are very salty but you can smell this like the beef Aaron really does smell like roast meat it has the strong but her madness adaptable and like really beef flavor and then this seaweed show you where we had seaweed to the final steeping was actually Pimentel taste like it smells almost like a fruit juice but it also have that we use we use gel all right so that's the world of Kochi my March the only thing left to talk about is something that isn't actually technically fermentation but Blackman semesters [Music] and to do that yes sir just so so you have your so let's say that this is peas and wheat and I made a cookie cake from it they're going to goo all over the peas and wheat and then I put that into a jar with salt water so there's my Bryant that goes in and it just sits there and like it's saved it's salty enough the enzymes are doing their thing on all the residual and touch starches in there and it gets to age and yet otherwise throw you can throw in other products at that stage and have those products aged and add their flavor to what you're doing so for this we have Celia at that stage and it get to carry through and you get this kind of oceanic flavor it releases all of its umami you can see we super high glutamate itself and you get a really complex again it's cooking there's no hard and fast rules you can do things that aren't normal and get results you can make a salary vinegar and then steeping with fresh parsley at the end for like a day and have this like teacher you can do anything you want it's cooking you can make it recipes as complex or as simple as you choose to if you understand the points where flavor extraction is cool yes [Music] needs to be covered with salt water so that that's the environment it's just like making blind pickles you need your cucumbers to sit under the same thing steward breakdown yeah okay black we're just gonna talk about black our mother anyone know this is me yes yes so she is a fascinating thing and when we're talking about storing the Jerome's and they eat lemon Cara life slowly we're talking about very slow of my own reactions can anyone here explain the my reaction I know you guys know this one come on you said all the lies you know that exactly so reducing sugars not to get the chemistry in it of what the electrons are doing reducing sugars come into contact with proteins you can get a whole flight of aromatic compounds browning compounds as they're called that add color and flavor and that characteristic Morrison is that like steered stig flavor all those flavors come from a breakdown of proteins and sugars normally being smack together at high heat normally heats in excess of 100 and I think 17 anyway that's normally the required temperature to force my reactions to have reactions either take energy to undergo transformations or release energy in there go translates when you break apart glucose you get energy a little spark goes off that's something that you can use if you're trying to break apart molecules that normally are very stable don't want to be broken apart you need a lot of energy to force me to react to do things together and then get different parts of it and that movie doesn't happen in baking bread or serum using the pad until you had 170 degrees Celsius now is that it is fully seven degrees above the boiling point of water so normally if you have water in whatever it is you're trying to caramelize or let undergo a wired reaction nothing's going to take place why because the water is acting as a thermal sync that is not allowing any of those reactions to get energetic enough to undergo my reaction to take a reducing sugar intake approaching smacking another away you go that's why you get my reactions we're in a steak in the pan where it's being seared into that hot metal surface the water is being flashback rated and you get that crust we're in an oven on the crust of bread where the hot air is in contact with the flour with the proteins and the crust that's where you get a maggot on the center of the dough my reactions don't take place all through a product at the same time it takes place at the contact will water evaporate and then allow the temperature to rise and not to force an energetic reaction that breaks apart of protein with a reducing shirt tada that's that so if black garlic is transformed and not miss a fermented cassava at 60 degrees how are we getting my reactions garlic sweat it contains a lot of water everyone knows that so how are we getting my reactions [Music] yeah you're right and we touched on this when we're talking about temperature before but temperature is the kinetic energy of molecules in motion the greater the kinetic energy becomes the higher the temperature the important thing to note is that in even this paper cup there are trillions and trillions of atoms not all those atoms are moving at the same speed but I can look at this cup and say that it has a temperature of 22 degrees Celsius because I am taking average that average looks like this that is the thermal curve of any black body emitting thermal radiation let's say that I'm holding a clove of garlic at 60 degrees Celsius this is what 60 degree Celsius looks like so that's what we can you know okay yeah most of the molecules in here are moving at a kinetic energy at a level that approximates 60 degrees on the whole some of them have just bounced around a couple molecules in a back-and-forth motion and are out now actually moving much slower and maybe they're moving at the equivalent immediate energy level of let's say 33 sauces but by that same token sometimes molecules will ricochet at such a speed that they end up getting knocked around quickly and any individual molecule might actually be moving at the equivalent energy level of 170 degrees Celsius now the thing about this bell curve is that the higher you move it along a range of temperature the more likely you are to actually have a molecule initiate from my reaction to something a product of 30 degrees actually has a much lower probability of eliciting a molecule moving fast enough to elicit or to start a my reaction but something held at sixty degrees if left for long enough will produce enough of those energetic molecules to break apart or smack together reducing sugar and a protein to start my Russian even in the presence of water and eventually if you leave something for long enough it will black and that's how black and includes and vegetables work you're waiting for those rare instances over a long enough time in a region of temperature of average temperature that you're going to push something if given enough time into being a fully black and state and that's why black garlic black beans from the inside out in a way that bread or a steak does not that's basically what it is and so to correct myself here a little bit yes there is also oxidation yes there are also browning enzymes that also take place and add to the complexity of black garlic but for the most part that slow of I agree action is just a probability curve in temperature leave something for long enough black garlic will eventually taste burnt as if you burnt garlic in a pan and high heat so think about blackening that's the area under a curve if you leave something at a low temperature we're walking up the area under this curve let's say temperature the area under this curve at a very low temperature 25 degrees will eventually lead to something blackening because of this reason if you put something in the pan the high temperature for short amount of time again you've now inverted the curve but you still have enough area under that curve to force enough these my directions that you're going to taste carbonization or burnt flavors so you're just shifting the scales of time and temperature you can burn something in a pan you can burn something by leaving at 60 degrees for three months but like I said fermentation all these slow cooking techniques are still cooking in timing matters as much as you don't want to overcook your medium-rare a stick for your guests you don't want to overcook your black garlic so at that time period stuff in between let's say six to eight weeks your god will reach that sweet spot where enough those minor actions have happened that it has it's amazing flavors amazing aroma where it's blackened when you taste caramelize it taste deep and rich and other things have been broken down to improves all sorts of volatile aromas and you catch it at that moment even though it's a day if not an instant and you say it's ready today and then you pull it off you keep it in the fridge and you use a cord everyone use moisture content is also super important so these molecules actually have to like move around move around and actually swim through water to to hit each other if your garlic dries out that'll stop happen those have dry hot garlic it actually needs my aggressions won't take place okay to mark the molecules actually tickling each other so a little bit of moisture retention is also super important the easiest way to make black mark just put it into a tough work honestly something like this just put into a container like this you can wrap them in tin foil EXCI not we'll just put it into a rice cooker then saran wrap the rice cookers and once you can escape but it isn't work to keep some moisture in there and then let that not form a queue just age so that's fine it doesn't just take garlic but garlic works really well why because it's pungent it's not going to lose its initial taste and also has a lot of sugar in it a lot of sugars that are available for these my reactions so if you're ever thinking of exploring the world of blackening just keep those two things in mind it needs to be able to retain moisture it needs to be able to hold its shape so it just doesn't turn into a puddle on the floor and it needs enough sugar to be able to undergo up my reaction and also enough flavor to be able to be recognizable at the end and that's how you do that that is the entire contents of the book are we for time can I like just ran to it can we take questions so this is a slideshow that I kind of showed us some people sometimes and we'll just kind of run you through what the lab looks like now as I promised but this is no more this is the lounge over here in this building extends off for a hundred meters going down the road and in there is where the lab that's where the absolutely production kitchen is where we have 25 interns prepping the cob platter or picking herbs or making leaves perfect shapes and also the lab is situated in there as well now when we started working on it this is what it looked like it was just an empty room I have the fortune of having a skylight Ramon at the back Cubano to natural light in there and it really was just a blank box for me to start filling up that's kind of my dream kitchen so we have workspace we have a bench on this side that's very much a functional kitchen that's where our oven sits actually is research contract with rationale they don't name the one under like top self cooking centers for us to actually work with fermentation programs and maybe one day the matching program into a rationale oven so imagine that we like cooking a fancy restaurant ten years from now and then you're like cookie seven then you have an instant incubator and then along the back you brought about and some other tools over here that's what it looks like today so as you can see everything I described we wrote about distillation we also use ultrasonic modernization which is a really cool tool yes we're a fermentation lab but also just like the lab at Norma so if something needs to be done if something needs to be figured out we have a lot of tools that just deal with the states of matter a deal is food processing that can allow some really cool stuff well not great interviews for spinning blood it's kind of like the biggest thing you get and we can do like three liters of liquid at a time in there so again somehow if you want to clarify up ferment and we don't want to spend a lot of time letting something great ability to mention some pretty dry ice will spin in the centrifuge and you get all your faces back solid portion and then you're super clear liquid when you spend four thousand G's we have a mixture that we use actually you mix two batches of miso with brine no proteins or whatever for geralyn's and then this over here is a fun thing but this is what's called a supercritical fluid extracted and just a little aside but again the lab just deals with science at the restaurant and I have a pleasure of going down to the South of France a while back actually starving at perfumer means to understand how the flavor and SFP as it's called is a really amazing that's basically the most powerful on flavor attraction on demand where you take carbon dioxide pressurize it to a point where it becomes what's called a supercritical fluid anyone know what that is no it's a fluid say what it is a phase in and of itself that combines properties of both being a liquid and a gas so liquids are cool as a state of matter because they're very hard to compress you can't compress one a little bit but at some point the molecules are just butt up against each other and they're not gonna go anywhere and that's why pneumatics work but a gas is amazing because it's also diffused if you open a balloon in a vacuum room all those molecules will spread out to pull on you a supercritical fluid is as dense as a liquid while also being is diffuses the gas we just kind of come to different but that's why it's useful so if you want a supercritical fluid through a charity we will enter the chariot every poor possible without ever being able to expand and so in doing so it becomes an amazing solvent so carbon dioxide above 35 degrees Celsius and above 74 bar pressure becomes a supercritical fluid that can then strip organic molecules into a stream just like ethanol can take paint off of a or Sharpie off of a whiteboard and then at some point you release the pressure and all of the dissolved solutes in that street precipitate out and it literally rains the one thing you want now that's cool and of itself but the cool thing about sfe is that by controlling temperature and pressure you can categorize what size molecule you want where the polarity of the molecule so you didn't really specific things and this is super cool because this was actually developed by the coffee industry as a way to make decaffeinated coffee beans so they calibrated a recipe or a set of parameters in an SMB unit that would take just caffeine out of coffee beans and leave all the flavor molecules behind so it's as good as extracting one specific thing as it is taking health one specific value now I don't think there's any other restaurant on earth one of these machines inside their walls but the possibilities for this technology and food are like crazy beyond you can add solvents to the stream of co2 have it passed through your main ingredient and then leave it there your main ingredient can be a piece of fish you can add let's say but of them an ethanol mixture to your co2 stream inject a solid piece of fish with the flavor of butter and then have sashimi that tastes like crab pot if you wanted to on the inside so there's all you think you're like oh no this is Spacey but like this is like a whole realm of molecular gastronomy look like for right hatred and every right touch mainly because like this machine is $100,000 but it's also soup like the probability space the potential of this technology to become like a restaurant changing cuisine changing thing if the machines got simplified or cheapen is quite young so that's something I work on in my spare time sometimes we need to extract and although you put into the stream out afterwards we get a very concentrated and pure extract and that's what we're doing here with rotovap that's our Crowther and Yusef no other moles that we use in the lab this isn't ask us purpose that we've never been able to smite unicorn I've never been able to catch it tradition I can't grow it on grains it sucks this is how Chinese used to make char c5 many years ago I don't know how they did it because I can do it you try this is squirrel garam that's what squirrels look like squirrel guarantee delicious you know what it tastes like it tastes like the juice that you get in like a vacuum bag of like empirical have like you just like like the best it's really good this is an extract of forest for that we're using on the game enforce Pena asphalt and that's something that we made with in the sfe machine who basically took like a square meter of the forest we got a report just to bring it back desiccated it ran through the machine and it was like being like lying down in a bed of moss and like a rainy day sent the first course with that that's like this is a medicine extract seaweed extract president liquid nitrogen this is a cloud very extract a super grab berry in the Nordics yeah so fun stuff that doesn't deal with fermentation it worked with like emulsions and extraction with the the ultrasonic modernizer as well going back the centrifuge is really useful for things that you would never even think possible like licen let's say parsley juice and taking all the facts and florals yeah plants that back if you have a powerful enough centrifuge you can make case that are completely baggy and waxy that are hyper concentrated versions the flavor you basically end up with like brown liquid at the end and everything good about a plant gets compacted into like a 10 gram portion that will like knock your socks and we use that on the mini sometimes yeah that's a fun place to work [Music] [Music] [Applause] you can yeah Oh our publisher no it's made of a very special paper so classic if you're if you're a stationery nerd but it's 80 gram paper so for every every square meter of this paper weighs 80 grams normal paper you in the textbook normally weighs 120 grams salt that's why it's a very delightful it's really nice Japanese do everything better Oh like pyrolysis yes yes so pyrolysis yeah but then you're you're taking it even further so if you tie well assistance like the thermal breakdown of molecules where you're just like and it's not it doesn't necessarily have to be a Meyer reaction with shirt isn't protein if you just smack molecules you're basically burning and it's a controlled slow burn so you take this process a little bit further down like you're not just dealing with my rent anymore but you didn't look like a thermal carbonization and you can get interesting flavors out of that too and again so normally you can paralyze something by like putting it into a furnace at 400 degrees toast or you can stretch that out and kind of again catch it at a very particular point but blackened blackened and pyrolysis are closely related pyrolysis does actually take place in a blackened in a piece of black garlic in small climbs along with those other processes that much yes sir the structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas come it's a very important it talks about how science works if you understand how science works you understand a lot and it's not just like oh it's like a history of science it's like how fundamental it is it's the best shirt and it was written like 70 years ago it talks about what science is like at philosophical level and how you come to know anything call how what paradigms are and if you understand that you can understand how knowledge is created and can be broken down you can be Rico and it is a very widely applicable set up tools to understand the world it doesn't matter what field you're in the structure of scientific revolutions that's up there and another book from epistemology by the astrophysicist David Deutsch from I think Oxford called gateways to infinity too highly recommended books also Richard Dawkins self-esteem also great even though it's like wrong it's still carried in cycle is wrong today science involves this fine doesn't mean it wasn't it works yeah see through education through someone giving grenade soapbox and letting him wants the world mad is effectively that I think Renee understood that you know what you know professor Marini yesterday it's like yeah chefs have an enormous amount of power and it's way an influence in the world today given more attention today than they ever have been and like spider-man says with great power comes great responsibility so mad the creation of that NGO and you see mass of all the two are doing it with repertory oh and the clicker is like yes someone gives you a mic I think you owe it to your peers and your fellow human beings to use it to say useful and helpful and beneficial things so and yes at the end of the day Noma is by no means obliged to help the rest of the world it's just a business it's a restaurant that's just trying to feed people and make money so everyone can go on with the paycheck but it's I think it's to Rene's credit that he's always thought there's like a moral servitude that needs to go a step further so more of that yes speak up how I got to know I got to know him like writing them a really long letter and everyone was like David coming on strong I can show up my cover letter was like 10 pages long and in it I was like this is why you should hire me like and I landed on the chef's desk and I heard the story after like I've got a Europe he be like yeah I remember the day that a man we thought you're crazy so we just have to get you in to see what you can do and then if someone gives you shot don't blow it so I gave my best on my trial and try to impress them and I started it known as a line cook I was I was you know chompy's and dropping the pumpkins and things like that sinking everyday I didn't scream that by everyone and then about six or eight months then I got the offer to move it to the lab as just a sous chef to Mars if you will I never saw it coming I did I had no work tin there but I think people understood that I could understand scientific concepts pretty well and I was around with it you know I've run it got to design a new lab have a whole team I've just always loved science I like grew up reading Carl Sagan and stuff yeah no I don't have a checklist I didn't this wasn't on my checklist and then I checked it off anyway what's next food wise I think restaurants in the next there's been a lot of exploring like we've gone from restaurants existing in the high courts of Kings to feeding the wealthy and France and England to be democratized the government international and mixing cuisines to the point we're at today where people are getting back to nature and foraging we're like completing cycles leaving the circle where the end of a restaurant have always been expensive especially for food down at this level and I don't think Magnus also talks about this as well as like the concept of a destination list when is inherently unsustainable we're talking about reusing that hardening you know tending for the earth you can feed someone a bowl of grains and give them a meal and this takes very little energy or you can have the staff of a hundred people like work to form a symphony that is the pinnacle of hyper one of those things sustainable buildings not so I think restaurants and the next 25 to 50 years are really not to come to terms with what it means to exist what it means to feed people where our moral lines should be drawn and how much energy you should invest like there's a lot of talented and genius people helping the best restaurants in the world if you take those people and say okay now eat as many people as humanly possible and make it as good for those people as possible while minimizing environmental impact I guarantee you all their smarts and holder a knowledge of food could do that so how do you bridge that gap how do you get how do you change people's perceptions of value yes if they do great well it's really fun to work once you understand it you know but and Dave Teng has talked about the supports like just because there's some restaurants somewhere in like Nashville Tennessee that has its own chickens and inspector it doesn't mean every restaurant on earth needs to make its own backs like no others farmers for that there are also artisans where you can buy from into products from but if you have the resources or if you want to your restaurant to focus on that and you see the benefits of doing it you can ferment yourself and save money and you do interesting and creative things it is a creative Avenue like anything else not every not every singer needs to have a studio in there if you're ambitious enough I want to get into that side pool otherwise you know like I'm sure this book will spur companies if it already hasn't of people who are making these name formats we're then selling at restaurants so if even that happens in small businesses yeah so that's difficult to explain I mean you have a hunch you can imagine that something might work or might not and you take an educated guess of any kind of jump off the deep end but it takes a long we don't have at the end of the day we're still a team of four or five people you don't have an unlimited amount of resources we have to do a lot of stuff that's not produce for the restaurant as well so you have to kind of hedge your bets a little bit and say what's what's a what's a experiment worthy of doing and then once you commit to it then you take a very fearful like documented and regimented and rich approaching say okay we're gonna try this one test in 35 different variants with 5% increase in this component or that component and then you plot the best one we're talking about but it takes a certain amount of intuition just like being shot any creative process easy to imagine a successful outcome before you ever stepped foot onto the balcony so you need to to just and that's worth being a chef comes in handy you actually need the experience to understand what's going to be a worthwhile endeavor to pursue then you then you go to Professor yesterday but you know one of the best little quips in for certain research is ready finally ping so you have your idea in mind you take a shot and then you sort out the strap and make sense of it afterwards but you still have to know what you're shooting [Applause]