As mentioned in my previous post on The Flemish Primitives 2010 (TFP2010) two chefs had taken their inspiration from Asia. Peter Goossens had come across high pressure processing during a study trip to Japan, and had developed this further in cooperation with Stefan Töpfl. Korean born Sang Hoon Degeimbre (of L’Air du Temps) on the other hand had returned to his roots to study kimchi, the ubiquitious Korean staple food. It is a pickled dish made of vegetables with various seasonings, and it is a very common side dish in Korea. In fact, it’s so common that Koreans say “kimchi” when being photographed, just like we say “cheese” in English.

Sang Hoon’s idea was to take the basic concepts and modernize them. Central to the preparation of kimchi is the lactic acid fermentation, using lactic acid bacteria. And in this sense kimchi is closely related to miso, kvass, kapusta, kefir, yoghurt, sauerkraut and sour dough bread – all of which involve fermentation of sugars to lactic acid. And as a commenter mentioned, I should not forget sour beers such as Flanders red ale.

The science was very much integrated into this years event, and to help him with the science of lactic fermentations Sang Hoon had teamed up with Xavier Nicolay from the Meurice institute. Xavier briefly mentioned several scientific papers on Kimchi, most of which you can find by doing a quick google scholar search on kimchi). However, from what I manged to pick up during the presentation nothing from these publications was actually applied in the cooking being done.

Traditional home made kimchi. Photo by J.W. Hamner (CC by-nc-sa).

A lactic fermentation induces several changes in foods. Firstly the acidification aids the preservation as food spoilage microbes generally can’t grow at low pH. Important flavour changes include the lactic acid with a hint of carbonation and other fermentation products such as diacetyl and ethanol. The texture of lactic fermented products is also quite unique as the vegetable or fruit becomes tender without beeing oversoftened. In fact they retain a remarkable crispiness. Interestingly the colors turn brighter, and in some special cases even change (green garlic was the topic of Harold McGee’s first column for the New York Times)

Sang Hoon used the following procedure when preparing his modernized kimchi:

• blanch vegetables (this releases sugars for the fermentation)
• add 1-8% salt
• add a lactic starter (no specific info was given on type and source – hints form readers are welcome!)
• vacuum pack – this is definitely a novel use for your sous vide plastic bags (compare with traditional German way of anaerobic fermentation in “ceramic pot” with water lock rim)
• the vacuum pouches were then left to ferment for 1 week @ room temperature
• to aid creation of flavors starch was added
• yeast autolysate was also added for flavor
• final preparation was clarified in a centrifuge

As a result, Sang Hoon had arrived at a “more sturctured” kimchi (sorry – no picture as of now, but the blog Cuisiner en Ligne does have a nice picture of the finished kimchi inspired dish).

For comparison you may check out these kimchi recipes. Note that none of these uses specific starters (i.e. starting culture of lactic acid bacteria). They all rely on the bacteria naturally present on the cabbage leaves.

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I also visited The Flemish Primitives in 2009. You can read more about that in my four posts from last year: The Flemish Primitives: A travel report (part 1), Chocolate surprise (part 2), Heston Blumenthal (part 3) and Glowing lollipops (part 4). Final note to readers: This year my travel expenses were covered by TFP and the tourism bureau of Brugge.

Inspired by the Swedish bread blog Pain de Martin which I recently discovered I decided it was time to have a go at sourdough breads! Although one of my favorite types of bread it’s a long time since I gave it a try and even longer since I actually succeeded. Leaving apple peel covered with water for two weeks in a cool place (15 °C) I got a light apple cider which I used to make a starter some years ago. I followed a recipe from the Norwegian artisan bakery Åpent bakeri and it gave a marvelous bread. But since then I’ve tried to repeat this twice without success. No wonder that even Rose Levy Beranbaum in her book “The Bread Bible” writes that she didn’t intend to include a chapter on sourdough at all. There’s no doubt that sourdoughs are tricky, but I was a litte surprised and disappointed that someone who sets of to write a 600+ page book on bread even considered to skip sourdough… Luckily she changed her mind and the introduction has a fascinating nice-to-know fact: 1 g flour contains about 320 lactic acid bacteria and 13000 yeast cells!

I believe one the reasons why sourdoughs seem to live their own lifes sometimes is that they need to be kept in a warm place. My kitchen isn’t that warm so I figured it was time to use my immersion circulator and give sourdough another chance (who says you can only use immersion circulators for sous vide anyway? – I think my next project will be to make yoghurt!). With a thermostated water bath keeping a sourdough starter at constant temperature is as easy as 1-2-3. But surprisingly I haven’t seen any blogposts yet from people using their sous vide water baths for sourdough starters (although some have built their own water baths for this purpose using aquarium equipment).


Fresh apple peel in water. This particular experiment failed – the cider smelled OK, but there was quite a lot of mould on the surface after two weeks so I didn’t dare to proceed …

It was Martin’s post on an apricot starter that triggered my desire for sourdough (but careful – never close your jar with a rubber as shown in his picture!). I got a bag of dried apricots and gave it a try. There was some bubbling and it smelled quite nice, but the bread dough never rose properly. I later found out that in a comment to the first post and a later post on the same topic it was pointed out that the apricots should not be treated with sulfur dioxide or a sulfite (used to conserve the fruit, appears on labels as E220-228 in Europe). That’s very obvious once you think about it, because the sulfur dioxide/sulfite is there to kill microogranisms and increase shelf life. For a sourdough however you want living microorganisms! The solution to this is to use untreated dried apricots. I haven’t been able to find any yet, but I’ll definitely give it a new try once I find some! Other options of course are to use dried or fresh apples, pears, grapes – preferably not treated with pesticides or sulfur dioxide – as the surface of these fruits are host to many yeasts.

A relatively firm rye starter with 150 g water and 200 g whole grain rye flour (left) shows signs of yeast activity after 24h at 28 °C (right).

Having failed with the apricot starter I decided to give a traditional rye sourdough a try, using a recipe from the book “Brød” (=bread) by “Åpent bakeri”. I got a nice bubbling after 1 day, but the starter was pretty dry. As I discarded a portion and fed more flour and water to the starter it seemd as if it died… I (believe) I followed the recipe very accurately (except for the very first day where I opted for a hydration of 75% instead of 60%), but the final dough never rose, so I had to cheat and add bakers yeast in order to actually get the breads baked. Acid production was fine however and the resulting flavor was very delicious and I got the crumb that I desired! However, with all these problems I figured it was time to turn to the scientific litterature and read more on sourdouhs … More on what I found out in a follow up post.

One last thing: Despite my limited experience with sourdoughs I’ve already been a little annoyed by recipes for starters that require one to discard a significant portion of the sourdough every day before feeding the start with more water and flour. One obvious way around would be to start at a much smaller scale so that every feeding can be done without having to waste any sourdough. In fact Kurt Janz already has a post with detailed instructions on a less wasteful sourdough (and he BTW has one of the most comprehensive sites on sourdough I’m aware of including a sourdough calculator). The only reason I could think of why one perhaps would want to use more than a couple grams of flour to start with would be to outnumber any unwanted yeasts or bacteria from the air or the equipment. Is this the case? Are there any other reasons? To circumvent this one would simple have to work very clean and wash all equipment properly.

I did get the recipe and it turned out that it was from a cookbook called “Food that really schmecks” by Edna Staebler. The book is a collection of recipes from the Mennonite community in Ontario. Many Mennonites came from Germany, hence the word “schmecks” in the title which is German (zu schmecken = to taste). According to the cookbook, leftover sauerkraut makes the cake moist and delicious – which I can certainly confirm! And the strange things is you can’t really taste the sauerkraut. Here is the recipe (the way I made it):

Sauerkraut chocolate cake
170 g butter (ca. 3/4 cup)
300 g white sugar – less than the 1 1/2 cups in the original recipe
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla (either essence or vanilla flavored sugar)
2.5 dL water (= 1 cup)
6 dL flour (= 2 1/2 cup)
1.3 dL unsweetened cocoa (= 1/2 cup)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon soda (sauerkraut is sour, therefore the recipe calls for soda!)
1/2 teaspoon salt
330 g drained  sauerkraut (1 1/2 cup) – more than in the original recipe

Mix butter and sugar. Add eggs, water and dry ingredients. Stir in the sauerkraut and pour batter into greased pan. Bake at 350 F/180 C for 30-50 minutes.

The cake was a little too moist in the center when I made it and could have needed a couple more minutes in the oven. Make sure you check if it’s all set by inserting a wooden match or a knitting pin in the center of the cake!

Interestingly, the cookbook “Food that really schmecks” was recently presented in the blog Cream Puffs in Venice, with the following statement attached: “There is no haute cuisine or molecular gastronomy to be found here”. But chocolate and sauerkraut might turn out to be another flavor pairing based on sound chemical reasoning.

Update: Read the followup on this post with more about chocolate and caraway (the main spice in sauerkraut)