Fermented Delicacies Across China – Come and Taste This National Day

After all these different attempts, I’ve come to realise that once you acknowledge the presence of microorganisms and understand that different microbial communities take the lead at different stages of different fermented foods, and treat them like pets – providing suitable living conditions: anaerobic? oxygen-free? What temperature and humidity range? – using fresh, organic ingredients and chlorine-free water – and finally stopping the microbial activity at the right time, it’s hard to fail.

In my view, a truly failed fermentation is food contaminated by unwanted bacteria to the point of rotting or moulding – of course, you have to decisively throw it out. But if it’s just that you missed the exact moment to stop the fermentation and the flavour isn’t what you expected, most of the time I decide based on my own taste whether I can work it into something else.

My secret recipe, naturally, is rice bran apples. Here’s an excerpt from notes I wrote elsewhere before:

Two attempts, both failures. I don’t know what the ideal flavour of rice bran in food should be; I have no such taste memory, and my sense for gauging fermentation time is very vague, so that every time I dug food out of the bran bed and popped it in my mouth, my first reaction was to immediately spit it out: a salty, strange taste (the bran flavour) thoroughly soaked into the food – who on earth likes that?

Unpleasant food makes you lose the will to keep it going. The poor rice bran bed naturally headed towards its fate of moulding away in a corner.”

Back in Berlin, I tidied up the leftover rice bran bed starter I’d had from a Japanese supermarket and resolved to give myself one more chance.

I live in Germany long-term; this isn’t a rice-growing region. Supermarkets don’t carry rice bran, but there’s plenty of wheat bran and oat bran. I saw Nordic Food Lab demonstrate on their website how they build a bran bed with oat bran and beer, so I had no more doubts about using wheat bran to maintain one. All the experiences over these years have made me less obsessed with recreating the original flavours of distant regions. Instead, I learn the logic of pairings, source ingredients from what’s around me, and rewrite local flavours with new formulas. So Sichuan peppercorn and pomelo were swapped for more readily available black pepper and lemon.

This time I decided to indulge a bit of laziness and keep the bran bed in the cold store to feed it. At the same time, I also started cultivating sake starter Sakadane. On days I’m not making toast, the discarded starter becomes fodder for the bran bed.

With all these adjustments, turning over the bran bed each day – fragrant with lemon, pepper, and the combined aroma of rice and wheat bran – became the healing moment of my day. It also led me to accidentally discover that the best pairing I’ve tried with bran-pickled food is actually apple!

The malt and rice bran aromas just gently envelope the apple, set off beautifully by the bright, clean scent of the pepper, while the apple’s own flavour is still there. If you let it ferment a little longer (about a day and a half), you can also feel the lactic acid bacteria at work, giving the apple’s texture just a hint of effervescence. And suddenly I understood why people say eat bran-pickled in summer, miso in winter!

This year I visited a friend’s farm in Liangzhu, Hangzhou. The rice bran from rice grown using natural farming – without a drop of pesticide – is naturally the best nourishment for a rice bran bed. We both got into rice bran pickles at the same time, sharing tips and swapping notes every other day. While I’m devoted to this one bran bed and my daily apple ritual, she’s so energetic she’s already expanded her microbial crew to three – each with its own flavour, its own personality.

And I can’t help but imagine our reunion at the end of autumn or start of winter this year – meeting in person to swap and taste the different flavours raised with different brans in different regions!!

Making fermented food has anchored my life’s cycles: tending yeast and nurturing the bran bed by the day, refreshing kombucha by the week, ageing vinegar and miso by the month, even the year… I’ve found my own rhythm within these cyclical patterns, letting the microorganisms and the pace of my life gradually fall into sync.

At the same time, in choosing ingredients and providing living conditions for microorganisms, I’ve become more aware that fermentation should follow the seasons and adapt to local conditions. This fermentation-focused way of looking makes me pay more attention to how seasonal ingredients change, be more sensitive to temperature shifts, and hold more reverence for the land.

And learning how similar fermentation techniques have developed into different paths and aesthetic flavours across regions and cultures – that is a joy unique to cross-cultural fermentation practice.

In my hometown, chopped chillies and pickle jars are the most basic forms of lactic acid fermentation. Only recently did I learn that the scallion oil rice cakes fried on the street often involve yeast, too.

Of course, the most famous of all is chou gan zi (black stinky tofu). Miles from home, there are always moments when I’m ambitiously determined to recreate stinky tofu at home. But that ambition every single time hits a wall the moment I realise just how complicated the fermentation brine is to make… Sometimes you simply have to accept that a place has its own taste, and that home’s flavour can only be found back home. But, regrettably, these days there are fewer and fewer places that properly make the brine and use fermentation to turn the tofu black – which is probably why Changsha chou gan zi is gradually disappearing from the streets.

My ai qie (maternal grandmother) used to make chopped chillies often. Technically, oil-preserved chopped chillies aren’t a fermented food but a pickled one. Still, salt-tolerant lactic acid bacteria can survive and work in the chillies’ own moisture, quietly fermenting in the fridge. Every time you open the jar you can hear a little “pfft” of gas releasing. That’s probably why chopped chillies get better the longer they sit.

In Germany, because of the higher latitude, it’s hard to buy fresh chillies in large quantities all at once. If I only made a small jar each time I chopped chillies, I’d really be hampered. Besides, different varieties taste different, and it never quite feels the same, so I use every trip back to China to haul big jars of chopped chillies home to Germany.

But this year, when I went back, I received a bottle of fermentation jar water from my ai qie’s friend – she’d been tending that jar for over twenty years. As soon as I got back to Germany, I poured it into my pickle jar, and it felt like overnight my jar had grown from a baby into an adult. And that ladle of jar water has become the thread tying my conversations with ai qie together – in our daily check-ins about how things are, I always end up reporting on the jar’s status. I feel like I’ve been entrusted with an important life, a bond, and a flavour.

The following content is from Fermenting China: Yunnan and Guizhou. The authors, Ma Junli and Liu Xinzhen, start from the origins of ingredients and take readers into Yunnan and Guizhou, exploring the rich fermentation cultures and traditional fermented foods of both regions, and showcasing the diversity and regional character behind the food. For more on fermentation in the Yunnan-Guizhou region, click the image to purchase the book.

Wei Li (hometown: Guizhou, fermentation craftsman)

We Sui people always serve wine to our guests – at festivals and family gatherings, wine is never absent. When making starter cakes for brewing, we choose an auspicious day according to the Sui water calendar. We’ll first shape a pair of starter cakes, one male and one female, and the balance of yin and yang will naturally bless the brew and help the wine turn out well. This is a tradition passed down by the elders.

Every herb used in the starter cakes is gathered by me from the mountains. It starts every year on the sixth day of the sixth lunar month. The deep forests are beautiful, and each herb grows in a different place and in a different season. Gathering all the more than 120 kinds of herbs needed takes over a month. For example, there’s a blood vine – it’s a vine hundreds of years old, and they come in pairs, male and female. Our tradition is to revere nature; we only take a small amount of bark and never damage its healthy growth.

Also, after going up the mountain to gather herbs, I like to have a little wine afterwards – it lifts my spirits the next day. Even during my postpartum confinement period I could still have some. You heat it up and boil an egg in it – delicious and nourishing.

Ergan (hometown: Guizhou, founder of Xingjiang Craft Brewery)

Fermentation in Guizhou actually needs to be understood by region. In the three southern prefectures, the sourness comes from fermenting the starch in rice with natural fruit (wild mao la guo) and chillies. This is the kind of sour most people are familiar with – sour soup fish, sour soup beef, and so on. In northern Guizhou, like Bijie and Zunyi, fermentation uses soy products instead. In Weining, closer to Yunnan, the climate is drier, so there’s ham fermentation.

I’m from Anshun. Anshun’s sourness shows up in its pickled vegetables. When I was little, every household made pickles, and different seasons called for different types. In winter, for example, you’d ferment rapeseed greens, cut them up, and stir-fry them with cured pork and sausage. I think the Guizhou fermentation closest to beer brewing is Kaili white sour soup – it uses the starch in rice for natural inoculation and fermentation. Among the ethnic minorities in the southeastern part of the province, especially the Miao people, every household has a jar where they keep their white sour soup starter. They tend it for decades or even over a century, adding starch and sugar every month to keep the yeast active. When it’s time to eat, they expand the yeast culture, mix it with fresh rice water, and make a hot pot.

Yang Zhirui (hometown: Guizhou, Deputy Head of the Food Science and Engineering Teaching and Research Section, Kaili University)

My hometown is in Tongren, Guizhou. My family has always made pickles since I was little. After coming to Kaili, sour soup appeared so often in everyday dining that it gradually became a habit. Actually, in the southeastern part of the province, besides red sour soup (Guizhou) and white sour soup (Guizhou), there’s another fermented food called an tang (dark soup). The biggest difference from the other two is the ingredients – several types of vegetables are soaked and fermented. It smells extremely foul, but to the Miao people in places like Huangping and Leishan, it’s a dish that whets the appetite.

Zhang Yunjia (hometown: Yunnan, chef)

The taste of fermentation always leaves an imprint on memory. Kunmingers always have a second stomach for rice noodles, and suan jiang thick rice noodles are a fermented food: they carry their own distinctive sourness, and for long-time Kunmingers, their absence is a gap in taste memory. From childhood to now, my favourite breakfast has been mi jiang ba ba (rice batter cakes). The traditional way to make them is with fermented rice batter, plus an egg and a big spoonful of white sugar, cooked in an aluminium flat pan. The moment you open the lid, the cake has puffed up to twice its size – one bite and you’re satisfied. And then there’s Yunnan’s zhā flavour – an absolute rice companion. I’d also like to try fermenting mushrooms that are hard to season and rich in gel, like golden ear fungus and walnut fungus, using rice flour as a binder in the zhā method.

Edited by: Yuyang, Kai Rui