In this episode, you're invited to the fermentation party! Join us as we learn about the funk-filled process behind making sauerkraut, sourdough and sour beer. Plus, no fermentation episode is complete without a lil history of our boy, yeast.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, it's Regina Barber. And we're starting today's episode with breakfast. Because regardless of what you had for breakfast today, chances are at least part of it was made by fermentation. Yogurt and granola, fermentation. Eggs with cheese, fermentation. Bread, fermentation. It's even key in coffee.
When a coffee bean is harvested, you know, in the jungles of Costa Rica or Colombia or wherever it might be, those berries, which look like little tiny cherries or almost like crab apples, they get hauled into baskets or trucks and then like thrown onto the ground. And there's either like dry or wet fermentations.
But in both cases, just whatever endemic microbes are in the jungle, on the fruit, start to acidify and metabolize all of the fruit flesh. And all those metabolites, all the acids that are produced, all the organic molecules seep into the actual coffee bean itself and change its flavor.
This is David Zilber, chef, reality TV show host, and former director of the Fermentation Lab at the world-famous Danish restaurant Noma. And he told me, if fermentation wasn't part of my coffee, it wouldn't even be good.
If you took a fresh coffee bean and completely stripped it of the fruit and dried it immediately and went through the same roasting process, you would end up with the most like... flat, cardboardy, acrid coffee compared to what happens post-fermentation. So fermentation is an incredibly important step in coffee production.
To make it taste delicious.
Yeah. Complex.
Okay, I'm convinced. Fermentation is important. But what exactly is it?
Fermentation is the transformation of one food into another with the help of microbes.
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