Want To Make Fermented Food At Home? This Expert Recommends Starting With Bread

When we think of fermented foods and all their benefits, it's usually kimchi and kombucha that come to mind—but the truth is many other enduring foods have their roots in fermentation. Chief among those? Wine, cheese, and bread—which is, incidentally, also the title of fermentation wiz Katie Quinn's new book.

Within a few moments of (virtually) meeting her, I knew it was going to be a great conversation—and I wasn't let down. A veritable encyclopedia of the way fermentation, and these foods, are a part of global cuisine, we were off to the races with topics before I even got to the questions I had planned. And she has thoughts about the way one traditionally fermented food has been changed over the years:

"Gluten has gotten such a bad rap, but often it's all of the different things that are put in bread," she told me, "the added yeast, the things that make it rise faster—so that bread is reacting to the industry of pumping out bread quickly." But the traditional practices of bread making (like sourdough) are actually practices in a slow fermentation. "When we try to speed up fermentation, it reacts badly to our bodies," she told me. "[Fermentation] predigests those elements of food that make it harder for us to digest."

If you didn't join the sourdough movement at the start of lockdown, consider this your sign to jump on it now. (In fact, after my chat with Quinn, I was so excited, I started prepping a new sourdough starter to replace the failed one from a year ago.)

These days, Quinn says that her sourdough is part of her routine—and she honestly feels it "goes on to improve the quality of your life in some ways," even aside from the obvious benefit of having fresh, homemade bread.

"I felt, almost on a cellular level, drawn to these items," she told me, "and I felt grounded in them. These are some of humanity's oldest and most essential things. Encyclopedias have been written on this stuff, and even dedicating an entire book, I still feel like there weren’t enough pages. To just briefly touch on it, when you consider that the ancient Romans carried wine—to think that we're still drinking what they drank, and what was a major part of their dinner tables—it's kind of transformative and connecting."