“Trust Your Gut!”

Shiva’s cosmic dance of destruction-creation is active in our kitchen this week.  With the holidays here, we chose not to bake but to bio-lactate and the results have been well received.  More importantly, our efforts provide healthy probiotics as compared to sugar-laden baked goods.  

My daughter and I recently took a Kimchi making class at Frinklepod Farm in Arundel.  It was a delightful Father-Daughter outing, and the mysteries of fermentation became clear; the fascinating chemistry whereby glucose, or six-carbon sugars, are converted into cellular energy and lactic acid.  The anaerobic process results in an abundance of live microorganisms, probiotics that are highly beneficial for our digestive and immune systems.  Trust your gut, indeed!

Fermentation is as old as the hills, has been practiced by everyone, everywhere, longer than memory serves.  Good bread ferments; good cheese ferments; yogurt, pickles, sauerkraut…endless is the list. Milk fermentation predates the historical period, which puts the beginning somewhere in the Neolithic Revolution.  Recipes for cheese production have been found in Babylonian and Egyptian texts, while Genghis Khan celebrated the Mongolian lunar new year with “white food” – fermented milk – as part of a shamanistic cleansing ritual.   Louis Pasteur, active 1850s France, was late to the game.

Our “Christmas Kimchi” is named “le Roi Borgne” which hails from the French proverb “Au pays des aveugles, le borgne est roi,” which was popularized by the Dutch humanist Erasmus, who quoted the Latin “in regione caecorum rex est luscus,” to wit: “In the blind world, the one-eyed man is king.”  Such truth has informed much of my life’s experience. 

We use Napa Cabbage salted 2.5% by weight, then brined for an hour or two. A rice flour slurry is made with gochugaru (chili pepper flakes), sugar and fish sauce (our “le Roi Borgne” is not vegan), into which “matchstick” carrots, daikon, onion and scallion are tossed. The brine is rinsed from the cabbage and then all is mixed together and sits on the counter – but out of direct sunlight – for about three days. 

The result is a delightfully tangy slightly sour kimchi, known as “Tongbaechu,” a Korean traditional style. Here is the recipe we used, viewed 29 Million times. 

Serendipity has graced us. The ceramic pot in which we ferment came to us from Corea, Maine.  By convention, it is an official Boston Baked Bean pot, which belonged to my wife’s maternal grandfather, but at our art farm it is now a cherished “onggi.”

“Know your food, know your farmer”…well, at Frinklepod Farm, Flora Brown and Noah Wentworth do amazing work, and their class was a godsend.  http://frinklepodfarm.com/

Ger, who taught us, is a maker from the mid-coast. Her teaching was clear and cogent, fact-filled while fun. Robust is the wisdom of the locavore culture on this rocky coast.  We are the better for it.  https://redkettlekimchi.com/