While working in a small upscale French restaurant 10-15 years ago, someone accidentally ordered 4 litres of pre-peeled garlic. It promptly started to go off from a lack of use, and stink up the walk-in, and I remember worrying about the smell attacking the rest of our mise en place and fruit, cheese etc. A fellow cook who I worked with had spent a few years working in South Korea, and she was the only one embracing the fermented garlic cooler-stench wafting around our small kitchen. She had eaten her fill of (intentionally) fermented foods while there, and loved it enough for some rotten garlic in our walk-in to be causing her nostalgia. I found this hilarious yet oddly intriguing at the time, and have never forgotten it. Little did I know….
Fermented is now the new green, which is great for people like myself, (enthusiastic, but needs to see it happening to fully understand it, as opposed to reading about it in great black and white detail a trillion times while absorbing nothing) because there are now plenty of colourful pictures and videos out there happily spinning our right-brained minds into action.
