The Space Between Fresh and Rotten – A Fermentation Festival
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| Reedsburg Fermentation Fest Photo |
According to Katz, fermentation is the flavorful “space between fresh and rotten, where the world’s most prized delicacies exist.” – Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, September 9, 2012.
Sandor Katz is a man of sublime truth. He’ll be a participant at the Live Culture Convergence, this year’s edition Fermentation Fest – that will run from October 12th through the 21st in the general vicinity of Reedsburg Wisconsin [Link]. He wrote the bestselling book Wild Fermentation. Riveting.
Many might dismiss a fermentation festival as odd, but then sometimes the most beautiful lunch can simply consist of a little bread, some wine and a few slices of cheese. Top it off with a few pieces of chocolate for desert. That beautiful lunch was all a product of fermentation. In that light a fermentation festival isn’t odd. It makes perfectly good sense.
And almost larger than life, compost falls into the category of things fermented. We don’t think of it that way, but it is. More importantly, it is the mother that nurtures fertility.
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| Growing Power Photo -- An Urban Farm |
Milwaukee’s Will Allen is all over that story. It seems, he’s writing an interactive textbook, scattered among small postage stamp sized plots of land, here there and elsewhere. The book’s title is Growing Power [link], but it isn’t a book. It’s a model.
The Fallacy of “Organic”
“Organic” has been has been the high profit, boutique side of agriculture for a long time. It’s been thought by many to be the salvation of the diversified family farm. For some it has been. The Organic Valley Co-Op in southwestern Wisconsin [Link], for example, has been hugely successful. But it isn’t necessarily a panacea.
Compost is part of the organic farming method but it doesn’t favor small farmers alone. Corporate/industrial farms can spread manure to grow organic produce and animal feed. And they do. A confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) can produce “organic, cage free” chickens, reap all of the benefits from that label and do so with little additional costs. “Organic” doesn’t necessarily imply all that we might think it does. It doesn’t necessarily imply wholesome foods produced through agricultural and environmental best management practices.
The trouble is the economics of food production is always weighed in terms of the cost of production versus the market value of crop. So land spread raw manure is an organic alternative to commercially produced nitrogen fertilizers. Well manure isn’t soil. Nutrient overloaded waterways don’t distinguish between organic and commercial fertilizers. What’s lost in the equation is the value and beauty of fermentation.
Will Allen's Composting Urban Farm
That’s where Allen’s model is a game changer. The finished crop isn’t the only product brought to market. It’s one of many byproducts of fermentation.
On Allen’s farm soil is the first product. Everything else is a byproduct from producing soil. On Allen’s urban farm, organic feedstock for composting is the first stream of revenue. He is first dollar comes from picking up and disposing of vegetable wastes from restaurants, grocers, and produce wholesalers. On that he competes with the land fill garbage haulers.
That garbage is his raw material. From it comes a second stream of income in the form of the organic potting soils and slow release organic fertilizers he sells.
Earthworms and worm castings are a cash byproduct from the compost heap. Finally year round fresh salad greens, herbs, mushrooms and tomatoes are a final compost byproduct.
Years ago when I first visited his Milwaukee three acre farm, he estimated that as a family business it could produce nearly $500,000 net revenue a year. Allen stumbled into a new way of viewing agriculture. Rather than looking at economic model based on cost inputs and harvest yields. Allen instead saw the entire process from compost to table ready produce as productive. The result is an economically viable, environmentally sound, highly intense agricultural method suitable for small acre farms. It makes small footprint urban agriculture commercially possible.
The cost input isn’t fertilizer, herbicides, insecticides and hybrid seeds. It’s garbage, which he get paid to haul away. His farm-to-market logistics do not require a legion of food processors, transporters and wholesalers to resolve.
Allen is the son of a sharecropper whose career as a professional basketball player in Europe led him to rediscover his love for the garden and growing things. One thing leads to another. Allen’s basketball career led to a corporate career. His marriage and love of growing things lead to taking over his wife’s parent’s vegetable farm. The farm led to his purchase of the site of few vacant greenhouses on Milwaukee’s urban north side. He thought of it as a produce market for the farm. One thing leads to another. His willingness to help out a local boys and girls club establish a garden on his property, as a club activity, led to putting the three acres back into agricultural production.
Ultimately, the greenhouses led to Growing Power [Link], an internationally renowned non-profit educational organization demonstrating the viability of small site urban agriculture and the distribution of locally produced foods. It’s hands on. A conference it hosted a few weekends ago drew more than 2000 attendees from around the world.
The Mystery of Bread -- Fermentation Forgotten and Remembered
It seems the mysteries of fermentation are seeing renewed attention in our increasingly manufactured and digitized environment. With that, we would do well to pay attention to bread. It is our culinary corner stone. And before we turned the baking of it over to the large commercial bakers, a fine loaf was presented as part of almost every meal. It offered a beautifully chewy explosion of yeasty flavor that filled both body and soul. It’s something not to be wasted.
What had once been the crown jewel of our diets has become an uninspired and insipid ingredient for sandwiches and toast. The large scale commercial bakers, like the large brewers, are interested primarily in an acceptable, uniform product with a long shelf life. With that, the individual and often unpredictable glory of fermentation is carefully removed from the recipe, and so are its delights.
The home brewer or baker has no fear of fermentation’s unpredictable charms. Things sometime go badly, but more often wonderfully well.
Turning back to the simple supper of a good soup, good bread, a few slices of cheese and a decent glass of wine or beer, in it are all the elements of a charming and delicious meal. Replicate that with a condensed soup, a soggy, enriched, machine sliced commercial white bread, processed cheese and a “light” low calorie beer, and the result might be as nutritious but it will be miserable.
Adding Fermented Goodness to a Pork Roast
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| Unrolling the Roast |
Our bread has been so degraded that we settle for grossly inferior bread crumbs, and rarely think of bread dressing. If we do think of the bread dressing, it comes in a boxed kit with almost flavorless croutons.
So good stuffing begins with the bread. It should be bakery bread or rolls. If you’re frugal, it will come from left over bread and rolls that have become somewhat stale. These are cut into croutons and thoroughly dried in a 200o oven for about an hour. Stored in an air-tight container these keep almost forever and are ready to use for bread stuffing or ground into bread crumbs.
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| The Roast Secured for the Oven |
Stuffed Pork Roast for Six
1 ¼-1 ½ pound pork sirloin roast flattened
6 cups of sage dressing
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| Out of the Oven |
Sage Dressing (about six cups)
¾ Cups diced celery
¾ Cups diced onion
3 Tablespoons butter
1 Heaping Tablespoon sage
2 Cups chicken broth (must be low sodium)*
2 Cups beef broth (must be low sodium)*
4 -6 Cups bread croutons
*Bacon figures into the final roast. There is plenty of salt in that.
Saute the onions and celery in butter. When the onions are translucent add the broth and sage. Bring to a boil then simmer for ½ hour. Gradually add croutons to make a stiff dressing. If necessary ripped up fresh bread can be added to stiffen.
1 ¼ -1 ½ Pound Pork Sirloin Roast, Flattened
To flatten the roast, think of it not as a round log but a spiral. To unroll the spiral begin cutting horizontally along the bottom of the roast at a depth of about ½ inch. Unroll the roast as you cut. This will yield a large pork cutlet. Place this between two sheets of wax paper and additionally flatten it with a mallet to somewhat uniform 3/8 inch thickness.
Stuffing the Roast
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| Sliced and Ready for Gravey |
Layer 3 or four slices of bacon on the flattened roast then mound tightly packed bread dressing in the middle along the full length. Roll the sides of the roast over the dressing so they slightly overlap and secure with bamboo skewers.
Bake the stuffed roast in a 350o uncovered for an hour with ¾ cups of chicken broth and ¾ cup of beef broth and 1 rounded tablespoon of sage. After an hour, repack any dressing that might have spilled from the roast, add liquid if necessary, cover and continue to bake at 300o for another hour or until the roast reaches and internal temperature of 160o. Prior to serving, again repack any stuffing into the ends of the roast and allow it to rest for about 10 minutes before slicing. While the roast is resting make a pan gravy with the pan drippings, adjust liquid and flavor and thicken with a flour and water whitewash.
Slice the roast into 12 portions, two per serving and top with the rich gravy. This can be served magnificently with mixed oven roasted root vegetables, think carrots, parsnips, rutabagas and onions.
Delicious. This works well with turkey thighs too.
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