InvestigationImmerse carrots and cabbage in brine, make your own miso… Boosted by confinement and the concern for waste, the lacto-fermentation technique seduces a community of amateurs and starred chefs, who share their taste discoveries
On the work surface, knives, cutting boards, jars, jars and more jars. Big ones, slender ones, small ones, empty ones and filled ones. The “discovery of lacto-fermentation” workshop is complete, and the participants are neck and neck in the tiled kitchen of the house in the Parc du Champ des Bruyères, very close to Rouen. Before going into practice, Malika Nguon, chef of the specialized Parisian restaurant Ferment and author of Cooking and fermentation (Ulmer, 2021), offers some of its preparations for tasting, well sheltered in their Le Parfait glass prisons.
Its carrots immersed in brine (a solution of water and salt) with cumin seeds come to shake the palate. But the chef also shows how they bring a vibrant touch of acidity to homemade hummus. “Fermentation is not just pickles to be eaten raw, you can also dip into the jars to improve everyday cooking”she explains.
To provide this training, the cook came with friends: the microbiologist Laura Bouley (host of the Myfermentpassion.fr site) and the passionate chef Jemel Ghroum. “Above all, they are curious people who tinker, like me, notes Malika Nguon. We are constantly groping, we give each other tips, and many of us do workshops, books, tutorials on the Internet to help each other… Even the people I train send me their recipes. Fermentation is the opposite of a closed club, it’s a community that does everything to expand. »
The fermenters move forward in bands, united by a philosophy based on the taste for sharing, new flavors, and an aversion to waste.
Malika recounts an exchange with chef Marine Gora (Gramme) and Sébastien Bureau, co-author of Fermentation Revolution (Les éditions de l’homme, 2017), sharing his wild picking spots in the Ile-de-France region with the culinary consultant Olivier Le Corre, and having visited Florent Ladeyn, the locavore boss of the Auberge du Vert Mont, in a village in Flanders, to give him his work.
Pickles, kimchi and kefir
“Containment was a trigger for many, whether chefs or amateurs, they had time to design jars, remarks Julie Maenhout, who created Les Jarres Crues in 2018, a company based at the gates of Bordeaux, specializing in fermented organic vegetables. And fermentation is part of heavy trends: home-made, healthy food. For the past two years, I have had more and more competitors, both self-taught people who sell on the markets and large companies attracted by the niche. »
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