Some like it sour

BY LINDSEY FRISBIE, RD, LD

What might bread, cheese, pickles, beer and wine have in common?

Well, they all have their beloved flavor thanks to an age-old magical (OK, scientific) process called fermentation. Fermented foods have become increasingly popular in the food and wellness space. In fact, sourdough baking at home was the “breakout star of pandemic-era kitchens,” says the New York Times.

Despite a resurgence in modern kitchens, fermentation isn’t a fad. Fermented foods and beverages have been around for thousands of years, contributing to the social evolution of human history. They continue to be a part of cultures on nearly every continent. There’s sauerkraut from Germany, kimchi from Korea, tempeh from Indonesia, miso from Japan, crème fraîche from France and injera from Ethiopia, just to name a few. Despite fermentation’s longevity, the science behind the process is only more recently understood.

that understands the art of fermentation is Hedge Apple Kombucha. Created by Kyle Sieck, founder of Local Burrito and Heartland Burrito, and his wife Lindsey Morrison, it was a passion project to share their love of kombucha with their local community in Fairfield.

“We’ve both been brewing kombucha for the past 10 years at home, and it was always a way for us to show our gratitude to friends and family by bringing it with us anywhere we went,” Morrison said.

Kombucha is a fermented drink made from black or green tea (or a blend of both), sugar, bacteria and yeast. Herbs and fruit can be added to enhance flavor.

“It plays to both of our strengths,” added Morrison. “I enjoy creating more of the herbal-inspired recipes from my background as an herbalist, and Kyle has been a chef forever, and it brings out the best in both of us. It’s been a culmination of all of our talents and interests.”

Hedge Apple has flagship flavors incorporating everything from reishi mushrooms and rose petals to spirulina and Iowa hops. “It’s like a blank pallet for a painter. You have a slate, you have your options, and you go to town,” Sieck said. “That is the case for our small-batch kombucha. It’s painting a picture of what is unique to us.”

While painting this picture, a number of factors must be considered. First and foremost, you need microbes—without live microbes, you cannot ferment. “Wild ferments” use microbes found naturally on plants and in the air. Fermented vegetables make use of naturally occurring bacteria on the vegetables themselves. The microbes on cabbage, for instance, used to make sauerkraut, feed on the sugars in the cabbage itself and convert them to lactic acid with byproducts like carbon dioxide.

Fun fact: You’ll know your sauerkraut is thriving in fermentation glory when it starts bubbling and burping! The flour and water mixture of a sourdough starter demonstrates wild fermentation as well; microbes on the flour and in the air in your kitchen will feed upon the sugars found in the flour. After one to two weeks, the starter has the ability to cause bread to rise without using store-bought yeast. Pretty cool, huh?

Other fermented goodies, including kombucha and beer, rely on adding a specific group of microbes to assist the beginnings of fermentation. Since starter cultures are already rich with beneficial microbes, when you add them to a food or beverage, they’ll multiply quickly and jump-start the fermentation process.

For Sieck and Morrison, kombucha itself kickstarts the process. “We use a percentage of our kombucha from each batch to act as a starter for the next batch,” explained Sieck.

Logan DePover, brewer at ReUnion Brewery in Coralville and Iowa City, offered Bread & Butter a better understanding of the fermentation process when brewing beer: “We take grain—which may include barley malt, wheat or oats depending on what type of beer it is — and grind it down with a mill that cracks it. It’s then mixed with water and heated to 152 degrees, which activates enzymes that are within the grain that change the starches in the grain into sugar.”

After the liquid is extracted, a sugary water, called wort, is left.

“As brewers, we ultimately make fancy sugar water,” DePover noted. “We’ll take this fancy sugar water, boil it up with hops and let it cool to 68 degrees. We’ll add yeast to it, and the yeast will go to town and change all of the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.”

Microbes prefer different environments. When fermenting vegetables, for example, a salty, oxygen-free environment is needed to support growth of lactic acid bacteria, creating an acidic environment which prevents mold from growing and kills any harmful bacteria. As the acid levels increase, it lowers the pH of these foods, giving them their sour pucker. The lower pH also prevents growth of harmful microbes and improves shelf life. For kombucha, sugar is first fermented into alcohol and carbon dioxide, and then oxygen is needed to convert the alcohol into organic acids to give it its tart, vinegary flavor.

Temperature and timing control is not to be overlooked. Microbes are less active in colder temperatures, taking more time to ferment, and more active in warmer climates, taking less time to ferment. For kombucha, Sieck has found that fermenting between 75 and 80 degrees is a good range.

“It’s a two-week process to make kombucha. You make the hot tea and let it cool. You add a percentage of kombucha back into the tea. You monitor it over a 10- to 14-day time period. Over that time period, it changes from a sweet tea to a slightly sour, pungent, acidic, healthy beverage.”

For beer, DePover said it depends on whether you’re making an ale or lager beer. “Each yeast strain has a sweet spot for temperature. Most ales are around 68 to 70 degrees, while most lagers are around 50 degrees.” This cooler temperature for lagers means fermentation takes longer, sometimes several weeks, whereas for ales, it’s a shorter time frame, anywhere from two to three weeks. This impacts the flavor for both styles immensely.

“Generally speaking, lagers will create a more neutral, smoother flavor because they ferment cooler and slower. The yeast doesn’t produce as many flavor compounds that a warmer ale yeast would. For instance, for our hazy IPAs, we ferment them at warmer temperatures and use an ale yeast that kicks out a lot of really fruity notes, and that’s where you get some of that juicy quality from. Plus, we don’t filter a whole lot of our beer at ReUnion, so these hazy IPAs especially have a lot of live yeast floating around in them.”

Not only can fermentation transform food to taste amazing, but it’s one of the few processes that may actually make your food healthier. Perhaps the most widely known benefit of many fermented foods—including yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut and kombucha— are the probiotics they contain. Probiotics are live microbes which are good bacteria that help strengthen gut health and restore balance in the digestive tract. A community of trillions of microbes known as the “gut microbiota”

Microbes on the flour and in the air feed upon the sugars found in flour. Sourdough from Local Crumb. Sid Peterson / Little Village live and thrive in the intestines, which can influence almost everything going on in the body, including boosting brain and heart health and supporting a strong immune system.

Unfortunately, probiotics aren’t in all fermented foods. The probiotics may die off or be removed during processes involving heat or filtration. Even so, don’t write off potential benefits. As bacteria and yeast feed on sugar during fermentation, they release enzymes, which helps break down large food particles, making food easier to digest. That might explain why some people find fermented dairy products easier to digest than unfermented dairy products, and why individuals with irritable bowel syndrome may tolerate sourdough bread better than other breads.

Many fermented foods contain B vitamins and antioxidants called polyphenols. B vitamins help the digestive system break down and convert nutrients from food into energy, while polyphenols may help reduce inflammation and may also serve as prebiotics, which feed probiotics, stimulating growth of beneficial gut bacteria.

Nutrients in the food itself or anything you add to it may also become more bioavailable through fermentation; Morrison and Sieck love adding herbs to their kombucha for this reason. Case in point is their reishi rose-flavored kombucha.

“You can make reishi into a powder, and your body isn’t going to assimilate much of it. But if you drink it in kombucha, your body will be able to assimilate almost all of it because the fermentation process makes it bioavailable,” Morrison explained. “All of our kombucha has medicinal benefits. We wanted our kombucha to have meaning behind what we were choosing to put in it.”

Trends in the culinary world come and go, but rest assured, fermented foods and beverages aren’t going anywhere. Science has proven that food can be transformed with a little help from living bacteria. If you are curious and want to broaden your taste buds, head to your local co-op to try a variety of Iowa-produced fermented foods and beverages. Currently, you can find Hedge Apple Kombucha at Breadtopia, Cafe Paradiso and Bountiful Bakery in Fairfield, with an expansion to the Iowa City area planned for the future. They also ship nationwide.