Today's post falls at the intersection of two seemingly unrelated hobbies: pottery and fermentation.
The fermentation started innocently enough in college with just the odd batch of mead. Then, sometime in 2006/7, one of my coworkers heard that I make mead, and mentioned that she'd just made some T'ej (Ethiopian honey wine) from a recipe that called for no yeast (or rather, wild yeast that occurs naturally in the air of your kitchen). Intrigued, I asked to see the recipe, and she loaned me her copy of Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz.
I'd been taught that, to make mead successfully, everything that came in contact with the must (mead before it's fermented) had to be carefully sanitized and controlled or else the mead would be spoiled--or worse, make you violently ill. The T'ej recipe, however, said that it was perfectly possible to get a good fermentation by just leaving your must covered with just a cloth to keep out bugs and dust for a few days before putting an airlock on it. My coworker who'd made the T'ej insisted that it came out great, and that she'd suffered no ill effects from drinking it, apart from a slight hangover.
I flipped through the rest of the book, finding recipes for all sorts of interesting stuff like kombucha, yogurt, and kimchi. I'd tried making pickles before, using a recipe in The Joy of Cooking that involved putting cucumbers in spiced vinegar, but I found the results extremely sour and unappetizing. After the recipe, there was a cryptic warning that while it's possible to make pickles in brine instead of vinegar, but it's far too complex and requires too much specialized equipment to be attempted in a domestic kitchen. Yet here was this book, telling me that brined pickles are easy and don't require anything that isn't already in most kitchens or easily acquired from a thrift shop.
