Yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle had an article on fermented foods in the Bay Area: the fermentation festival, sauerkraut, kimchi, and so on. (No discussion of yogurt.) I especially liked this:
Leaving foods unrefrigerated for two weeks or more can be disturbing to those who weren’t raised with a crock of pickles in the hallway. But U.S. Department of Agriculture research service microbiologist Fred Breidt says properly fermented vegetables are actually safer than raw vegetables, which might have been exposed to pathogens like E. coli on the farm.
“With fermented products there is no safety concern. I can flat-out say that. The reason is the lactic acid bacteria that carry out the fermentation are the world’s best killers of other bacteria,” says Breidt, who works at a lab at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, where scientists have been studying fermented and other pickled foods since the 1930s.
Breidt adds that fermented vegetables, for which there are no documented cases of food-borne illness, are safer for novices to make than canned vegetables. Pressurized canning creates an anaerobic environment that increases the risk of deadly botulism, particularly with low-acid foods.
Nothing about fermented — also called aged – meat. The last taboo. I believe we like umami flavor so that we will eat more bacteria-laden protein. (Glutamate, which produces the umami flavor, is a protein breakdown product.) All meat producers, as far as I know, age their product 2-3 weeks to improve the flavor. Understandably, they don’t like to talk about it.
Thanks to Ashish Mukharji.
I think in certain contexts people talk about aged meat. I worked at a steakhouse once and the managers would tell the customers the meat is aged. Before you started blogging about this though I’d never heard (or paused to reflect on the fact) that the purpose of aging meat is to cultivate beneficial bacteria. But there are lots of things regarding meat that people willfully forget…like the fact that it’s full of dead parasites. I also worked at a Long John Silver’s as a teen and learned to cut the fish. We were taught to remove the small pink parasites when we found them. They weren’t a health issue, just aesthetic (they plump when you cook em, so people would notice them in the white fish meat). I was told other meats have parasites too but you can’t see them because they’re the same color as the meat.
This is known in hanging meat. Hanging meat is a big issue amongst foodies in the UK. When my family has game or turkey at Christmas it’s typically hung outside in a shed for a few days prior to cooking. Perhaps it most vocal proponent of hanging meat in the UK is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, there’s a review of his “Meat” book, in which he discusses hanging at length, here: https://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/19/highereducation.houseandgarden
We even have a company called the Well Hung Meat Co.: https://www.wellhungmeat.com/
Seth,
Perhaps you should heed your own advice. I’m referring to the title of your subsequent post – “A Little Knowledge…”.
Aging meat is controlled breakdown of the proteins by lactic acid which tenderizes it. It’s usually carried out at a few degrees above freezing and has very little to do with fermentation.
Umami has something to do with access by the taste buds to glutamine in food (an amino acid and a neuro transmitter).