17-07-2025
Adventures in Fermentation by Dr Johnny Drain: Go with your gut – choose pickle power!
Adventures in Fermentation by Dr Johnny Drain (Penguin Life £20, 320pp)
Dr Johnny Drain is a man who has eaten some unusual foods in his time.
In the opening pages of his book, he confesses to tasting 'extracts from the anal gland of a beaver'. It was 'good but weird', apparently.
More than 200 pages later he sounds like an even more daring version of Heston Blumenthal, as he tells his readers about drinking vodka distilled from rabbit ears and sampling pig's blood ice cream.
As a scientist and a chef, Dr Drain is at the cutting edge of food technology, committed to exploring ways in which the food of the future can be healthier and more eco-friendly.
He has worked with restaurants including Noma, which was named the world's best four times.
However, as the title of his book reveals, his greatest enthusiasm is for fermentation. 'At the core of my work,' he writes, 'is the use of science and fermentation to unlock deliciousness and amplify health and sustainability.'
He invites us to imagine a world without fermentation. No more butter or cheese. No wine or beer or spirits. It's a depressing prospect. Our ancestors used fermentation as a means of food preservation.
Before fridges and freezers existed, it was essential to long-term storage of resources.
Today we can use fermentation, 'cooking with microbes' as Dr Drain defines it, simply to bring 'deliciousness into being'.
Not only that, scientists are beginning to understand the ways in which fermented foods can contribute to good health. They can ward off illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease and bowel problems. Even mental health can be improved.
However, the 'great culinary flattening' of recent decades, in which fast and ultra-processed food have come to dominate our diets, has had some bad effects.
Our gut bugs are not 'fans of this fast and processed food takeover'. The consequence can be 'dysbiosis' which Dr Drain describes as 'a fancy term for an imbalance in the microbial community in our guts'.
In China in the fourth century, a doctor named Ge Hong treated digestive problems with his own remedy which he called yellow soup. Its secret ingredient was fermented human faeces.
Yellow soup seems unlikely to appear on any restaurant menu or doctor's prescription today but fermented foods can work wonders in treating dysbiosis and rebalancing the microbial systems we all have inside us.
In his ardent advocacy of fermentation and fermented foods, Dr Drain embarks on a worldwide tour. He tracks down a particularly prized type of fermented butter in Marrakesh. He samples wild fruit ferments in the Cerrado, a tropical savanna land in Brazil.
He even sprinkles his text with a range of easily understood recipes for a variety of fermented delights, from sourdough pancakes and whisky vinegar to kraut stew and a special kind of French onion soup.
His aim in this unusual and original book is to convince us not only that we should all be eating more fermented foods but that fermentation can change our lives. To a large extent, he succeeds.
