Fermented foods, traditional techniques, and fermentation culture.
Every Tuesday evening, Foodthink hosts open-air film screenings by Tuanjie Lake in Beijing, where audiences can browse the farmers’ market and watch stories of food-delivery riders, rice farmers, herders and fermentation artisans, followed by a post-screening talk.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, microbiology made home fermentation seem dangerous, and large corporations advertised cleanliness, convenience and safety, pushing factory-produced food onto the table and replacing homemade foods such as pickles, bread and cheese.
Young people from different cities share their eating experiences and reflections on takeaway, dianzi zhacai, plastic packaging, wet market, and fermentation and fermented foods.
Zheng Yuyang’s mother returned to a village with only seven or eight households and, in the old house, saw the crockery cupboard and pickled-cabbage jar, weeping. In Beijing, he made his first bucket of pickled cabbage, trying to reconnect Northeast’s daily life with city life.
Changsha-born designer Xu Xijing tends pickles, makes bread and cultivates kombucha in a Berlin kitchen; she also borrows a ladle of jar water from Hunan and the yeast shared by friends, and feels seasons and regions again in the cycles of microbial communities.
From kombucha and Sichuan pickles to Guizhou’s jiuqu starter and sour soup, successes, failures and local flavours from many places form a map of household fermentation, and comments can supplement hometown methods.
From rice-water fermentation to tomatoes and chillies in the jar, Guizhou sour soup carries the Miao people’s migration memory amid salt scarcity and a humid climate. It becomes the everyday flavour on festival tables and for people away from home.
Brewer Zhang Kai of Fenyu Brewing and Mars Elephant Lab co-founder Xu Xin bridge brewing and baking through fermentation experiments using the same grain, from inoculating corn with sake koji to brewing beer from leftover bread, and address practical challenges in China’s grain supply chain.
Starting an organic sourdough bakery was not a whim. In order to provide my family with quality carbs, I spent several years learning how to make sourdough using a natural wild yeast starter. Over those years, I often gave loaves to friends or brought them along to potluck dinners, where…
Gerile and other dairy producers in Sanggen Dalai Town, Zhenglan Banner, Inner Mongolia, describe how hand-fermentation, local fresh milk and wooden tools shape flavour, and explain why standardised upgrading makes it hard for many small workshops to expand production.
