Fermented Delicacies Across China – Waiting for You to Taste This National Day

Once you have tried your hand at enough different things, you realise something: as soon as you acknowledge the presence of microorganisms, understand which microbial communities take the lead at different stages of different ferments, treat them almost like pets, and give them the right living space – anaerobic? oxygen-free? what temperature and humidity range? – using fresh, organic ingredients and chlorine-free water, and finally halting microbial activity at the right moment, failure becomes very hard.

In my view, a truly failed ferment is one that has been contaminated with unwanted organisms and has rotted or gone mouldy – those get binned without a second thought. But if all that has happened is that the timing was a shade off and the flavour is not quite what you expected, more often than not I decide based on personal taste whether I can work it into something else.

My one secret recipe, naturally, is nukazuke with apple. Here is an excerpt from some notes I wrote elsewhere:

Both attempts ended in failure. I had no idea what the best flavour a rice bran bed was supposed to produce; I had no taste memory to anchor to, and my sense of the right timing for digging things out was hopelessly vague. Every time I pulled a piece of food from the bran bed and popped it in my mouth, my first reaction was to spit it straight out: a salty, strange taste (the bran tang) had soaked into the food utterly. Who on earth enjoys this?

Unpleasant food is not worth the trouble of looking after, and the poor rice bran bed naturally drifted to its fate – moulding in a forgotten corner.”

Back in Berlin, I pulled out the leftover rice bran bed base from the Japanese supermarket and resolved to give myself one more chance.

I live in Germany, which is not a rice-growing region, so there is no rice bran in the supermarket – wheat bran and oat bran, however, are in abundance. When I saw that Nordic Food Lab had demonstrated on their website how to build a rice bran bed from oat bran mixed with beer, any lingering doubt about using wheat bran was gone. Years of wandering the world of fermentation have stopped me chasing a faithful reproduction of flavours from faraway places; instead, I study the logic behind the pairings, source what is close at hand, and rewrite a local flavour with a new formula. So Sichuan peppercorn and pomelo gave way to more readily available pepper and lemon.

This time I let myself be a little lazy and kept the bran bed in the fridge to feed it. At the same time, I began keeping a Sakadane (sake yeast starter); on days when I was not baking loaves, the Sakadane discard became bran-bed feed as well.

After all these adjustments, turning the bran bed over each day – releasing its fragrance of lemon, pepper, and the grainy sweetness of rice and wheat bran – became my daily moment of calm. And I accidentally discovered that the best pairing with a rice bran pickle so far is, of all things, apple!

The malt and rice-bran aroma merely wraps gently around the apple, set off by the fresh sharpness of pepper and lemon until it is wonderfully refreshing, yet the apple’s own flavour still shines through. If it sits a little longer (a day and a half or so), you can feel the lactic acid bacteria doing their work, giving the apple a faint, almost effervescent texture. And suddenly I understood why people say: in summer, eat rice bran pickles; in winter, eat Miso!

This year I visited a friend’s farm in Liangzhu, near Hangzhou, which practises Natural farming – no pesticide sprayed at all. The rice bran milled from that rice is, of course, the finest food for a rice bran bed. We both became obsessed with nukazuke around the same time and shared our bran-tending discoveries every other day. While I devoted myself to the single-branch, one-apple-a-day discipline of one bran bed, she, boundless as ever, had already expanded her microbial crew to three members – each with its own flavour, each with its own personality.

And I can already hardly wait for our late-autumn, early-winter reunion, when we can hand over our jars in person and compare the different flavours grown in different lands with different brans!!

Making fermented foods has planted anchors across the rhythm of my life: tending yeast and feeding the bran bed in units of days, refreshing Kombucha in units of weeks, ageing vinegar and Miso in units of months or even years… Within these cycles I have found a pace that suits me, letting the microbes and the steps of my life fall gradually into the same rhythm.

And in the process of choosing ingredients and building a habitat for microorganisms, I have come to feel ever more strongly that fermentation should follow the season and suit the land. This fermenter’s gaze makes me pay closer attention to the changes in seasonal produce, more sensitive to shifts in temperature, and more reverent towards the soil.

At the same time, discovering how similar fermentation techniques have branched into different paths and different aesthetic flavours across regions and cultures is a joy unique to cross-cultural fermenting.

Back home, chopped chillies and pickle crocks represent the most basic form of lactic acid fermentation. I only recently learned that the fried scallion puffs sold on street corners often have yeast in them too.

But the most celebrated, of course, is the black stinky tofu – chou gan zi. A thousand miles from home, ambition strikes and I vow to recreate it in my own kitchen. Yet that ambition every time collapses the moment I grasp how complex it is to make the fermenting brine… Sometimes you simply have to accept that a flavour belongs to a place, and you can only taste it where it comes from. What is more, sadly, there are fewer and fewer vendors who still take the time to build a proper brine and let fermentation turn the tofu black – which is perhaps why Changsha’s stinky tofu is fading from the streets.

My āi jiě (maternal grandmother) used to make chopped chillies all the time. Strictly speaking, oil-packed chopped chillies are a preserved food rather than a true ferment. But salt-tolerant lactic acid bacteria can still survive in the fresh chillies’ own moisture, quietly fermenting away in the fridge. Every time you crack open a jar, you hear the soft “pop” of gas releasing. That is probably why chopped chillies get better with age.

Here in Germany, at our northern latitude, it is hard to lay your hands on a big batch of fresh chillies all at once. Making just a small jar of chopped chillies each time feels cramped and unsatisfying. And since different chilli varieties taste subtly different, I always haul big jars of the home-made stuff back from China in my suitcase.

But this year, when I went home, a friend of my āi jiě gifted me a bottle of her old crock brine – mother liquor she had been feeding for over twenty years. The moment I was back in Germany I poured it into my own pickle crock, and it felt as though overnight my crock grew from infant to grown-up. That one ladle of brine has become the ribbon tying me to my āi jiě’s daily check-ins: amid the usual small talk about the weather and our health, we always end up reporting on the state of the crock. I feel entrusted with a living thing, a bond, and a flavour.

*The following content is from Fermenting China: Yunnan and Guizhou. The authors, Ma Junli and Liu Xinzhen, start from the provenance of ingredients and lead readers into Yunnan and Guizhou to explore the rich fermenting cultures and traditional fermented foods of both provinces, revealing the diversity and regional character behind every plate. For more on fermentation in the Yunnan–Guizhou region, click the image to buy the book.

Wei Li (from Guizhou, fermentation artisan)

We Shui people always greet guests with wine. Whenever the family gathers for a festival or a New Year celebration, wine is indispensable. When making the liquor starter, we consult the Shui calendar to choose an auspicious day. We always mould a pair of starters – one male, one female – and if the yin and yang are in balance, the brew will naturally turn out well. That is a tradition handed down from the elders.

Every herb that goes into the starter I gather myself from the mountains. Starting on the sixth day of the sixth month in the lunar calendar, the deep forests are in full, beautiful bloom. Each herb grows in a different spot and at a different time of year; collecting the full set of over 120 species takes about a month or more. Take blood vine, for instance – it is a vine that has grown for centuries. They come in pairs, one male and one female. Our tradition is to revere nature: we only take a small amount of bark and never damage the vine’s healthy growth.

After a day’s foraging in the hills, I like to have a little wine as well, and the next morning I feel brighter about things. Even during my postnatal confinement I could drink it – you bring it to the boil, poach an egg in it, and it is both delicious and good for the body.

Er Gan (from Guizhou, founder of Xingjiang Craft Brewing)

Fermentation in Guizhou really has to be understood region by region. In the three southern prefectures, the starch in rice is fermented with wild fruits – wild cherry tomatoes and chillies – to create the kind of sourness most people are familiar with: sour soup fish, sour soup beef, and the like. In northern Guizhou – Bijie, Zunyi – the focus is on fermented bean products. And in Weining, close to the Yunnan border, where the climate is dry, you get dry-cured ham.

I am from Anshun, and here the sourness lives in the pickle crock. As a child every household made pickles, switching varieties with the seasons. In winter, for example, you would ferment rapeseed greens, chop them up, and stir-fry them with preserved pork or sausage. I think what comes closest to beer fermentation in Guizhou is the making of Kaili white sour soup. It relies on natural inoculation of the starch in rice to get the ferment going. In Qiandongnan Prefecture, the ethnic-minority communities – the Miao in particular – every family keeps a crock of white sour soup starter, nurturing it for decades, even a century. Every month you add fresh starch and a little sugar to keep the yeast lively. When it is time to eat, you propagate the culture further, mix it with fresh rice-water broth, and turn it into a hotpot.

Yang Zhirui (from Guizhou; Deputy Director of the Food Science and Engineering Teaching and Research Office, Kaili University)

My hometown is Tongren, in Guizhou. As a child, making pickles was a household staple. After I came to Kaili, sour soup turned up in everyday meals so often that it slowly became a habit. In fact, beyond Red sour soup and White sour soup, there is a third fermented food in the Qiandongnan region called “dark soup.” Its greatest difference from the other two lies in the ingredients: several vegetables are steeped and fermented, and the smell is intensely pungent. Yet for the Miao people of Huangping, Leishan, and surrounding areas, it is a dish that whets the appetite and brings the mouth watering.

Zhang Yunjia (from Yunnan; chef)

Fermented flavours always lodge themselves in your memory. A Kunming person always has a second stomach reserved for rice noodles, and suanjiang cu mixian – sour-slurry thick rice noodles – is itself a fermented food, carrying its own distinctive tang. For old-time Kunming people, missing that taste is a genuine gap in the palate. The breakfast I loved most, growing up, was mijiang baba – rice-slurry pancake. The traditional way is to use fermented rice slurry, crack in an egg, add a big spoonful of white sugar, and griddle it in an aluminium pan. Lift the lid and the pancake has puffed to twice its size; one bite and you feel utterly content. And then there is the flavour of Yunnan’s za – the rice-powder ferment, an unbeatable companion to rice. I would love to try fermenting hard-to-season, gelatinous mushrooms such as golden ear fungus and Walnut mushroom using the za method, with rice flour as the binding agent.

Editor: Yuyang, Kairui