Outside Berkeley Whole Foods I encountered this cooking camp in session — they teach kids 8-12 years old to cook in two-week sessions, 4 hours/day. I love the idea. I think childhood obesity is due to eating ditto foods (foods, usually factory-made, that taste exactly the same each time) — teaching someone how to cook is a good way to reduce that.
I asked if they included any fermented foods in the curriculum. “Tomorrow we’re making tofu,” said one of the counselors — a Nutrition major at UC Berkeley. Tofu is not a fermented food, I said. She wasn’t sure what a fermented food was.
Did you at least give her a recipe for making yogurt?
Some 30-ish years ago, I used to make my own tofu, and one of the steps is soaking the soybeans overnight. In warm weather, they frequently ‘fermented’ to the point of being quite bubbly before the steps of grinding, milking and boiling. I’m sure anything alive was killed in the process of boiling, of course. No tofu I have had since tastes as nice as fresh tofu still slightly warm from the coagulation and straining stages. Once it’s refrigerated, it becomes something entirely different.