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Sandor Katz is neither a chef nor a scientist. He grew up in New York, learnt that he was HIV-positive in 1991 and shortly afterwards moved to a rural commune in Tennessee, where he still lives. It was there that he began fermenting, partly out of an interest in what living cultures do to the body and partly because the commune grew considerably more cabbage than they could eat. His neighbours nicknamed him Sandorkraut.
In 2003 he published Wild Fermentation, a small and fairly scruffy book that set the entire modern home-fermentation movement in motion. This is the follow-up, nine years later and five times as thick.
It is the scope that has made it the reference work. Vegetables, milk, grains, pulses, meat, fish, alcohol, vinegar and koji, with techniques drawn from traditions around the world. Michael Pollan wrote the foreword and the book won a James Beard Award in 2013.
Katz also appears in the literature behind Noma's fermentation work. There are better-looking books on the subject, but there is no book that replaces this one.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 528
Language: English
First published: 2012
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Katz explains why while others show how. The theory behind the practice is the part that ages most slowly. This is a book you return to again and again. It can admittedly be a little slow going, but the point is to analyse and understand the recipes and techniques, not to read it in one sitting for inspiration. The day your sourdough starts behaving strangely or your miso smells wrong, this is the book that can tell you why. That answer will be just as valid twenty years from now.
