Real Food Fermentation: Preserving Whole Fresh Food with Live Cultures in Your Home Kitchen Paperback – Illustrated, July 1, 2012

I had not heard of this author before, so I did a bit of background research to find out more about him.Alex Lewin is a software engineer, health coach, and 'real food' advocate who lives in Boston and San Francisco. He has a degree from Harvard in mathematics, has completed the Professional Chef Program at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and has received training as a health coach at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. He's currently working for the crowdsourced video broadcasting startups Justin.tv and Twitch.tv and serving as vice president of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Boston Public Market Association. Since 2009, he has run a 'real food' blog (feedmelikeyoumeanit dot com) and led workshops on food preservation. In addition to his blog, he is active on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook; a Google search turns up advertisements for his workshops, articles highlighting his volunteer activities and food advocacy, and a few mentions of his sustainable technology hedge fund, Atlas Capital Investments, in which he is a partner along with Solar Revolution author Travis Bradford. In his blog bio, he lists Vandana Shiva, Kurt Vonnegut, Anthony Bourdain, Andrew Weil, Barry Sears, Dr. Weston A. Price, Sally Fallon, and Sandor Katz as important influences. He blacked out his blog in protest of SOPA and professes a preference for free and open-source software, so he's obviously got his priorities in order.Granted, you're buying a copy of Lewin's book and not a copy of Lewin himself. Hopefully, though, this information will help you understand this book - Lewin's first - a little better.The Introduction and Chapter 1 cover the basic concepts of food preservation and fermentation, ending with a reasonably detailed overview of the kitchen equipment you will most likely need to create this book's recipes.Lewin cares deeply where the food he's fermenting has come from. Chapter 2 ("Know Your Ingredients," 20 pages) is entirely devoted to the issue of Real Food, covering topics including food freshness and buying local. Instead of making a blanket declaration that organic produce is always superior, Lewin advocates that consumers open a dialog with food producers to really understand where their food comes from. While this might be possible in a farmer's market, he concedes that it is not always practical. I like the vision he has for a better world, but I also appreciate that he is realistic.The recipes themselves fill out the remaining 110 pages. Chapters are devoted to sauerkraut, vegetables, dairy, fruits, beverages, and meat. Unlike Sandor Katz, Lewin makes no attempt to be comprehensive: beer, wine, soy (soy sauce, tempeh, natto, and miso), and even bread receive only a few short words of description and do not include recipes. Strategically, I think this makes sense - Wild Fermentation and The Art of Fermentation already exist, and there is no point in duplicating them. Instead, Lewin has presented a small number of very well tested recipes in such a way that even the most inexperienced and conservative in the kitchen might be enticed to try them out.Covered in detail: sauerkraut; root and other vegetables; Caroline-style slaw; cucumber pickles; kimchi, yogurt; strained yogurt and whey; kefir; creme fraiche; butter and buttermilk; preserved lemons and limes; peach and plum chutney; pico de gallo; hard apple cider; mead; kombucha; vinegar; ginger ale; corned beef.In contrast to the often rather vague 'recipes' in Katz' seminal works, these are laid out much more like they would be in a traditional cookbook: each recipe includes a quantitative ingredient list followed by very explicit instructions and many, many photographs.Ahhh, the photographs! - they are rather gratuitous. In the sauerkraut recipe, for instance, an entire page is devoted to six full-color photographs and 100 words illustrating how to chop a bell pepper. One half of the surface area of pages 70-71 are images of, variously: water being poured into a Mason jar; a root vegetable being coined; salt pouring from a bowl into some water; and a food processor. While some of these images - for instance, an illustration on page 60 entitled 'The Evolution of Sauerkraut' that shows how the colors change as fermentation progresses - are quite helpful, nine out of every ten serve more to titillate than to educate. This is food porn, and in his blog Lewin is unapologetic:"There are other fermentation books out there, including some new ones, but to be honest, mine is the prettiest by far..."While 'The Art of Fermentation' is laid out more like a textbook, 'Real Food Fermentation' has a very modern (love it or hate it) layout. The margins and line spacing are broad, and large full-color photographs fill about one out of every three pages. While it has about the same number of pages as 'Wild Fermentation', the open layout fits significantly less text per page - I received the book this morning and read it straight through in a day. Those experimenting with fermentation for the first time, however, may find the pictures to be worth a thousand words.I will update this review with more information about the recipes once I have had an opportunity to try them. The Carolina slaw, pico de gallo, and plum chutney look especially good, so I'm setting up this weekend to ferment them exactly as written.If you're brand new to fermentation, consider purchasing this book and Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods to complement eachother.If you want an encyclopedic account of food fermentation's history around the world and aren't as interested in recipes, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World is your book.If you dislike Katz' work for its frequent philosphical wanderings and lack of explicit instructions, try this book instead.If you already have, use, and love Wild Fermentation and Art of Fermentation, you will probably not find much new information in this book. It will, however, be a useful coffee table trap for luring sometimes-reticent friends and family into your art.

This is a fabulous book; I'm loving it so far! The author does a great job of taking the "scary" out of fermentation. He also does a great job offering non-mainstream information without being militant about food choices. (Not that anyone reading a book about fermentation is likely to disagree with him, but still...he's tactful, not pushy.)One of my favorite things about this book is the almost step-by-step development of it. Ferments are divided into several larger categories (like fermented vegetables vs. fermented dairy). Beyond that, though, the entire book is set up roughly from easiest or simplest to the most complicated, with chapters building on each other. That makes this a great book to work through in order (more-or-less), ferment by ferment, as a sort of textbook to learn the processes. I haven't gotten very far in terms of actually completing the recipes -- only to sauerkraut, which is first -- but that's the plan and I'm feeling more confident about learning with this book than others I've read.I would have liked to see a "what do I do when...?" section, because I did run into some issues while preparing my kraut. None of them were major, but I was thankful I had some people to ask, because I would otherwise have found myself a little "stuck." Most notably, he doesn't address (unless I missed it) how to get your food to stay under the surface of the liquid. As this is something I have consistently had difficulty with when making any preparations that involve leaving vegetable matter to sit submerged in fluid for a while, I doubt I'm the only beginner likely to run into this, and I wish he had tackled it.Still, I'm pretty excited about this book and it's beautiful step-by-step recipe photos, and would highly recommend it for beginners like me.

I have a few other fermentation books, and have never really gotten all that far into them. I love to read, but for a beginner fermenter they were all a bit much to take in, not as engaging as I needed them to be, and never made it seem absolutely simple. THIS book, however, changed it for me. I found myself reading it from cover to cover, and felt totally empowered to finally give food fermentation another go. I've made kefir and kombucha in the past with success, but it's been several years, and I don't drink much beyond coffee and water and tea. I'd rather eat my calories, for sure. Alex Lewin has made food fermentation super accessible for me and other equally ADD and impatient people.Photos make the recipes even more appealing, and the step by step instructions are super simple and unintimidating. For many of the recipes you simply need the food, salt (with no anti-clumping agents added), and a jar with a tight-fitting lid, as well as a knife and a bowl. My kind of recipe book, and about as off-grid as it gets. Not to mention all of these require about 1/100th of the work of canning and no heat, which damages the nutritional quality of food. This book is perfect for the aspiring permaculturalist.Folks with bad eyesight may have problems, as a couple of other reviewers noted, but I found its readability totally on par with my (hundred) other cookbooks, and would not have thought that myself.Thanks heaps to the author for moving me closer to off-grid independence, as well as re-motivating me to grow more of my own food, now that I know how easy preserving it is.