[bane]

Some anecdotes:

- My wife is Korean, and a lot of Korean food is fermented, preserved, or otherwise kept using a traditional pre-refrigeration method. There are a number of really beautiful traditions that come from the logistics of keeping stuff around for months, or even years. The idea of things being diverted off at various stages of fermentation for different uses was a massive revelation to my American mind.

- That being said, my Korean relatives are completely blown away by some old Western methods of fermentation especially around land mammal meats -- various sausages, smoked meats, salted meats -- and fermented milk products like cheeses.

- The best restaurant in the world, I think in Norway, featured a dedicated fermentation R&D lab as part of their core restaurant menu development process.

- The global trade in alcoholic drinks in based on truly beautiful and sophisticated battles between various micro-organisms.

- My friends in the bio-world recently (in the last few years) have taken an interest in fermentation as part of the thinking on long-term food sources for space habitability. Nothing produces the incredible complexity in microbiology, specifically ones good for food sources for humans, creates anything close to the complexity of fermentation. The thought it using stages of fermentation to produce all of the feed material needed for complete human nutrition. But it's perpetual.

Bonus - you might also divert some parts of the process into fuel, air, and other required processes. It's incredibly compelling, highly technical (informed by modern AI models) research.

[MengerSponge]

The Noma Guide to Fermentation: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/rene-redzepi/the-no...

It's beautiful and useful too!

[awesome_dude]

The fermented food that has always blown my mind has been

<drum roll>

Chocolate

I have no idea WHY that should come as a shock to me, but it does

Honorable mentions also go to Tea and Coffee

[nyc_data_geek1]

Want to have your mind blown again?

Vanilla beans are also fermented before use. They start green, before they are processed and ultimately fermented, giving rise to the delicious aroma and flavor we're all familiar with.

[bane]

Oh whew, when I finally learned how Chocolate is made....mind blown.

The Western 19th and 20th centuries's approach to foods have been an incredible disservice to culinary and health history and modernist trends.

[fuzztester]

>a lot of Korean food is fermented

Examples, other than kimchi and probably some fish sauces? Don't know much about Korean food, but I liked what I tried, the few times I ate at a Korean restaurant.

[bane]

The fermentation traditions around soybeans are particularly interesting. The starting point is called meju [1] which are blocks of open air fermented soybeans in blocks.

From there you can continue to process and ferment them to produce a variety of sauces, pastes, soup bases, and so on - soy sauce is the most famous in the west, but the rest of the products have honestly mind-blowing, highly complex, tastes.

There's also a broad tradition of preserving and fermenting various seafoods, from the corvina to fermented skate (hongeo) [2].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meju

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongeo-hoe

[jurip]

Gochujang and doenjang are two fermented pastes that are used a lot.

[Melatonic]

Check Natto and the equivalent Korean bean ferments !