The Science (and Art) of Fermented Foods
David Zilber isn’t like most chefs. More precisely, he isn’t much like a chef at all. After getting his start in Vancouver, Canada, Zilber wrote a letter to René Redzepi, co-owner and head chef of NOMA, asking for a job. Zilber then proceeded to work in NOMA’s kitchen for around 18 months before Redzepi moved him to a different department. “During the staff meal, I would always bring a book with me. It was scientific, non-fiction,” remembers Zilber. “I was the one guy in a room of 50 chefs who had a book open. All the other guys were either on Instagram or smoking outside.” This earned Zilber a reputation among the chefs as a knowledgeable resource, and Redzepi eventually asked him if he’d like to join the restaurant’s research lab, which is responsible for developing new flavors and culinary processes at NOMA.
Zilber’s time in the lab—which he now heads as director of fermentation—has coincided with a general rise in interest in fermented foodstuffs, as seen in the number of devotees of kombucha, miso, even the pungent Japanese natto bean. Home pickling and preserving have steadily become more popular—partly due to restaurants like NOMA—while the nutritional benefits of centuries-old, even millennia-old, traditional dishes such as kimchi and sauerkraut are gaining recognition outside their countries of origin.
“I don’t think fermentation is undergoing a trend; I think it’s undergoing an understanding,” says Zilber over the phone from Copenhagen. “You realize there’s an industry built around harvesting good microbes and preserving food and it has this deep history. All the people who’ve typically been handed these products by big corporations are like, ‘Oh, this is really easy to do; everyone used to do it at home and I should too.’ They unearth this whole other side of cuisine that’s infinitely variable. You won’t see it slow down. It’ll become a new facet of life. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. It never has.” Only now are we gathering empirical evidence that gut bacteria affects major health issues such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, auto-immune diseases and even mental health. Many studies claim eating probiotics such as Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli, whether sourced from dietary supplements or from fermented foods, is a proven method to improve gut health. Our ancient food cultures already knew this: fermentation has long been an non-negotiable part of traditional cuisines around the world.
In the midst of the renewed interest in fermentation, Zilber and Redzepi worked together on the NOMA Guide to Fermentation. The book itself mixes tips—many of which apply to other recipes—with a string of creations that come in the lineage of NOMA’s boundary-pushing cuisine. While many of the ingredients are easily accessible, the book also features less familiar foods, such as bee pollen for garum (traditionally a type of fermented fish sauce used in ancient Roman, Greek and Byzantine cooking) and grasshoppers, which are then combined with moth larvae to create a grasshopper garum.
The recipes contained in the NOMA Guide to Fermentation reflect Zilber’s unconventional approach to food. This approach—which in many ways led him to NOMA—was exemplified by a recipe and essay submitted as a Saturday Night Project at the restaurant. Every Saturday, before chefs finished for the weekend, a chef from each section would prepare a dish they had been working on for the week. The creation would then be judged by Redzepi and the other members of the team. After talking about one of his entries on the phone—which he described as “a long article about philosophy and the subjectivity of food”—Zilber showed us the accompanying essay.
Titled “Ruminations on Solipsism Along a Mediterranean Coastline,” the 1400-word essay goes on to define solipsism, a philosophical idea dating back to ancient Greece: “the only thing you can ever be a hundred percent sure of in the world is your own existence, your own mind. That things outside of one’s own mind can never be truly verified, and thus are always unsure.” Zilber’s essay goes on to explain how this theory relates to a dish: “By serving the exact same ingredients in four different preparations to a table of four, and explaining tableside only what the dish is comprised of so as to start everybody off on an even footing, you hint at the nature of subjectivity and individual experience.” It isn’t usual to use food to investigate philosophical concepts. Through his work first as a chef and now heading up the fermentation lab, Zilber has been pushing the boundaries of what food can be and how it relates to the world around us. As we said, David Zilber isn’t like most chefs.
“I don’t think fermentation is undergoing a trend; I think it’s undergoing an understanding.”
I got really terrible grades in school, and I didn’t think I was going to succeed at doing anything else. A counselor at school suggested an apprentice program instead of university and it worked out really well. I just stuck with it. I had a really good placement at a super fancy restaurant in Toronto, and then I just kept trying to find better restaurants until I found NOMA. I was working at a really great restaurant in Vancouver, Canada, called Hawksworth. Then I wrote NOMA a really long letter and they were like, ‘Who is this guy?’ I went for a trial and they hired me.
You expect NOMA to be this wonderous voyage of mystery and discovery and tasting things you’ve never tasted before. And it is a hundred percent that. It really is. It’s up there with El Bulli for what it's contributed to the industry. It's rare to say that you get to work for a visionary, but I don’t think many people would disagree.
It’s such a special, rare place. If you take what you do for granted, it’s so unfair. We work in an open-source manner; the stuff we test out and produce, whether it’s a success or a failure, we try to share on as many channels as possible. That’s really the anchor to the public side of the lab. We try to legitimately do different things, whether that’s borrowing equipment from the pharmaceutical industry to try to work with flavor in a different way, or visiting a laboratory that’s doing real microbiology to actually deal with that side of the industry and see what insights we can garner together.
No two days are the same. You sometimes find that huge jobs come across your desk in an afternoon and you have to focus on them and deal with them—for instance, we found this patch of silvertip pine cones, we have to deal with them today—so your day can swerve in that direction. Other days, I have a lot of time to just flick through scientific journals and read about real progresses and if they can apply in a meaningful way to the restaurant. It’s pretty wide swings in the day-to-day life at NOMA.
There’s a lot of trial and error and synthesis through reduction. You take a process or an ingredient that’s foreign to you, you look at it and you break it down. What’s the process? What are the microbes? What’s the substrate? Why does it turn out the way it does, and why is it such a culturally significant item that I now know about? Then you try and build it back up; you try to create something new. We could do that with everything in the fermentable world, but we have to spend our time producing stuff that is actually useful to the restaurant, so there is a kind of directionality to it that can change with style, who’s working in the test kitchen, what season we’re on. It can be adaptable as well.
Both, it’s an organic process. The motives can change all the time, they can need something or we can have something special and both can turn into dishes. It’s like jazz, very organized, structured, departmental jazz.
“It really should just be a thing that everyone does, but doing what makes me happy has been an absolute highlight.“
Sometimes it's just seeing if things work; other times we will do 80 to 100 iterations of a test to see where we hit that perfect texture or that perfect flavor. Sometimes it can be very rigorous, and other times it can be completely accidental. There are no hard-and-fast rules.
You try again. Sometimes things take years to make their way onto a menu. Let’s say you make a black quince [an attempt to extend the process behind black garlic, in which it is slowly caramelized and blackened over months, to other fruit and vegetables] for the first time. You go in and smell it, and then when it’s finished, you’ll be like “oh, this actually is interesting.” No one was demanding it, so there was no reason to put it up right away. You hold on to it and one day there might be a tasting and you’re like, “I have something that might work with that,” and it’s amazing, so you want to do it again. Quince season has already passed because it’s three months later, so next year you put it on but it didn’t fit for this menu and it may make its way onto the menu after that. So you have this two-year timeframe for completely legitimate reasons. It’s just the way that they operate, from where you have the initial idea to actually being on the menu. That doesn’t mean it’s a failure; it means it’s a success. It’s just a long wait.
NOMA’s David Zilber speaks to HYPEBEAST Magazine on the tradition and science of fermentation.
THIS STORY WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HYPEBEAST MAGAZINE ISSUE 26: THE RHYTHMS ISSUE AS “SLOW-GROWING”. FIND OUT MORE HERE.
THIS STORY WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HYPEBEAST MAGAZINE ISSUE 26: THE RHYTHMS ISSUE AS “SLOW-GROWING”. FIND OUT MORE HERE.
NOMA’s David Zilber speaks to HYPEBEAST Magazine on the tradition and science of fermentation.
The Science (and Art) of Fermented Foods
“We work in an open-source manner; the stuff we test out and produce, whether it’s a success or a failure, we try to share on as many channels as possible.”
“We work in an open-source manner; the stuff we test out and produce, whether it’s a success or a failure, we try to share on as many channels as possible.”
“Sometimes it's just seeing if things work; other times we will do 80 to 100 iterations of a test to see where we hit that perfect texture or that perfect flavor.”
How did you get into being a chef, and how did you go on to work at NOMA?
What’s it like working in the fermentation lab?
What’s the setup like in the lab? What is a normal day at work?
Is there a process that you have with each ferment? Or is it just trial and error?
What is your relationship with the kitchen team? Do they come to you saying “we need this, we need that,” or do you go to them with what you have?
How does the experimentation work? Are you just seeing if things work?
With fermentation there’s such a long wait. Things can take months and years. What do you do when it doesn’t work out?
“I don’t think fermentation is undergoing a trend; I think it’s undergoing an understanding.”
How did you get into being a chef, and how did you go on to work at NOMA?
What’s it like working in the fermentation lab?
What’s the setup like in the lab? What is a normal day at work?
Is there a process that you have with each ferment? Or is it just trial and error?
What is your relationship with the kitchen team? Do they come to you saying “we need this, we need that,” or do you go to them with what you have?
How does the experimentation work? Are you just seeing if things work?
What's gone well for the brand this year?
“Around 12 years old, I picked up my first spray can, went to town and started painting.”