On Fermentation as Philosophy

"Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people in the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you're all to yourself that way, you're really proud of yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock."
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

I've been thinking about this passage this summer. About leaning in - crouching down, bending over. About remembering you have a nose. I try and teach people to rely on their senses in my classes - and wanted so much to speak of Bradbury in my book Wild Drinks, but alas, the quote wasn't allowed :(. There are so many good ones in that book. 

Bradbury wrote so beautifully about gardening, that I've remembered it since I was 14 when we read this as a class text at ISKL (International School of Kuala Lumpur). You can't write like that if you haven't felt it. This could just as easily be about fermentation. Both practices bend you over. Both pull you away from the noise of the world and into something older, quieter, more essential. Both make you sweat a little. Both give you time to think things through, alone.

When I'm leaning over my fermentation crocks - checking the latest brew, or skimming annoying kahm yeast from sauerkraut, folding koji rice, straining milk kefir - I'm not just making food to feed a hunger at a meal.  I'm stepping into a different rhythm. Time moves differently when your hands are in brine, when you're noticing temperatures, when you're waiting for bubbles to tell you the yeasts have woken up.

Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows - but there you are. Philosopher in the pickle crock.

Women's Work, Ancient Work

Stephen Buhner writes about this too, though from a different angle. He traces how fermentation was women's domain throughout history. We were the brewers, the keepers of beer and fermented drinks, the holders of knowledge passed mother to daughter or friend, for thousands of years. Sacred work. Essential work. 

Until it became taxable. Then suddenly it was legislated, controlled, professionalised - and no longer ours.

But here's what moves me most in Buhner's writing: he says that when you touch the ground and pull from it to ferment, you are connecting to your ancestors. You are doing something they did. You are touching the same bacteria - ancient, eternal bacteria that existed long before us and will exist long after.

When I catch wild yeasts from the air for a wild soda or wild yeast beer. When I nuruture my milk kefir.grains. Choose a SCOBY for a customer.  When I pick dandelions from my lawn or paddocks nearby and turn them into wine. I'm reaching back through centuries, hand over hand with every man or woman who ever fermented before me.

The bacteria on my hands, in my kitchen, in the air around me - they're the same ones my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother worked with. They're older than nations. Older than agriculture. Maybe older than language itself.

The Body Remembers

There's something about the physical act of fermentation that matters. The bending over. The repetitive work. The way your back aches a little after an afternoon of... picking dandelions for example.  The way your hands are stained yellow with pollen and sticky with sugar syrup. Or red from kimchi, or purple from beetroots. Or stained brown from green walnuts. The list goes on. 

Bradbury understood this. Those weeds and dandelions bend you over and "get you down where you remember you got a nose again."

Fermentation brings you back into your body too. Back into your senses. You have to smell the ferment to know if it's right. Taste it. Listen for the bubbles. Feel the texture under your fingers. Watch for the colour changes that tell you when to move a jar from counter to fridge.

You can't ferment abstractly. You can't ferment while scrolling your phone or thinking about your to-do list. The work demands a kind of dreamy presence. And in that presence, you get to thinking things through. Alone with your thoughts, your hands, and billions of invisible allies doing their ancient work.

Dandelions Are Better Than Orchids

Right now, as I write this, if you walk outside, you'll see them. Dandelions growing in cracks, thriving in neglected corners, persisting despite our best efforts to eradicate them. We call them weeds. Some spend time or money trying to kill them.

But Bradbury knew; Dandelions are better than orchids precisely because they make you work; bend over. Because they're free. Because they're everywhere. Because working with them turns you away from the world for a little while and gets you sweating and thinking.

And because you can turn them into wine.

"Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered."

Dandelion wine is old magic. Sunshine captured in a bottle. The taste of summer lawn and childhood and time slowing down. It's not complicated - just flowers, sugar, citrus, water, and wild yeasts. But the act of making it can be transformative; not as much as it transforms the flowers though I'd say!

You have to get down on your knees in the grass. You have to pick hundreds of flower heads - just the yellow petals, mind you, not the bitter green bits. You have to take time. But also make use of them before they lose their life and flavour. Yet still - there's no rushing this. Your knees will ache and get patchwork dent marks of grass on them.  Your fingers will be stained. (You'll look slightly ridiculous to the neighbours).

But there you are. Close to the ground. Thinking things through. Connected to something older than you can name.

"Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back. So much for sounds. What about light then? All things, once seen, they didn't just die, that couldn't be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly's hemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe.
And yet... looking here at this bottle which by its number signalized the day when Colonel Freeleigh had stumbled and fallen six feet into the earth, Douglas could not find so much as a gram of dark sediment, not a speck of the great flouring buffalo dust, not a flake of sulphur from the guns at Shiloh...”

OK you should probably just buy the book. 

Dandelion Wine Recipe Summary - full recipe link below. 

Makes about 4 litres

This is wild fermentation in its truest form - you're relying entirely on the natural yeasts present on the flowers and in the air. No commercial wine yeast needed. Just patience and faith in the invisible world.

The work:

Day 1 - The Picking

Go out in the morning after the dew has dried but before the heat of the day. You want flowers that are fully open, bright yellow, vital. Pick only from areas you know haven't been sprayed with chemicals. You'll need about 4 litres of loosely packed flower heads.

Sit somewhere comfortable. Put on music or a podcast or just listen to the birds. Now comes the meditative part: pull the yellow petals from each flower head, discarding all the green bits. The green is bitter and will make your wine harsh. Just the sunshine-yellow petals.

This takes time. An hour, maybe more. Your fingers will turn yellow. Your back will tell you about it tomorrow. This is the bending-over part. The remembering-you-have-a-nose part. And a body. Don't rush it.

Day 1 - The Brewing

Day 3 or 4 - The Feeding

Days 4-14 - The Waiting

Yep. Wait. Watch. Listen. Peek inside to smell it...

Week 2 - The Bottling

Months 1-6 - The Maturing

This is where patience becomes your teacher. Young dandelion wine tastes... well, young. A bit rough. A bit sharp. Give it time. 

"Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in."

Store your bottles in a cool, dark place. Check on them occasionally. After a month, taste it. After three months, taste it again. After six months, it will have transformed into something golden and smooth and surprisingly complex - honey notes, citrus, a whisper of flowers, a hint of funk from the wild yeasts.

This is wine made from what most people call weeds. Wine made by bending over and getting your hands dirty. Wine made with time and trust in invisible forces.

A note on wild fermentation:

Sometimes the wild yeasts don't wake up. Sometimes the fermentation stalls. Sometimes you get flavours you didn't expect. This is the nature of working wild - you're in conversation with forces you can't fully control.

If your fermentation seems stuck, you can add a pinch of commercial wine yeast to help it along. No shame in that. Even wild fermentationists need backup plans sometimes.

If it tastes a bit funky or vinegary, that's likely acetobacter (vinegar bacteria) getting involved. It won't hurt you, but it might not be delicious. Trust your nose and your taste buds.

Peering Through at Winter

Bradbury writes about what happens when you open a bottle of dandelion wine in the depths of winter:

"And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine. Peer through it at the wintry day - the snow melted to grass, the trees were reinhabitated with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind. And peering through, colour sky from iron to blue."

This is what fermentation gives us. Not just probiotics. Not just flavour. But the ability to hold time. To capture a moment - a summer afternoon, a lawn full of dandelions, your hands stained yellow with pollen - and preserve it. Transform it. Turn it into something that will sustain you when winter comes.

Every time we lose a fermentation tradition, every time someone's grandparent dies without passing on their recipe or methods, all the times we have anihilated a people or race, or shamed traditional foods, banned a food or drink for too long, the world is bankrupted of that specific knowledge. That specific touch.

I guess this is why I am drawn to teach. Tell stories, write books or here on this site... not knowing if anyone will read it.(?) And more romantically, why I have been known to bend over dandelion patches and remember I have a nose.

Not because fermentation is trendy or because probiotics are having a moment. But because these are practices that connect us - to our ancestors, to each other, to the invisible world of bacteria and yeasts that makes life possible, to the simple act of touching something and changing it into something like us.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher, Bradbury said.

But so is fermentation.

Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows - but there you are, thinking things through, alone with your dandelions and your buckets and your ancient, invisible allies.

There you are, doing work that women have done for thousands of years.

There you are, bending over, remembering you have a nose.

There you are, making wine from weeds.

There you are, holding summer in your hand.

For the full Dandelion Wine recipe click here.