Why I ferment
I came to Gozo in 2019, a year before the world shut down. I've been growing things in small rooms ever since.
It started with mushrooms. Years ago I watched Paul Stamets' talk 6 ways mushrooms can save the world, and I never saw fungi the same way again. They're not a side dish but some of the most capable organisms on the planet, with research reaching far beyond the kitchen. What hooked me was the science underneath: a living thing doing work no machine can.
Fermentation came the same way. I went looking for a healthier way to eat and found a field where every jar is a small experiment. Microbes, temperature and time go in, and what comes out is something you can measure and taste. Water kefir is a staple on my bench: sugar water, fruit and a colony of grains that keeps growing as long as you feed it. I'm testing scaling efficacy as we move to larger batch sizes
Koji is where the two meet. It's a mould that Japanese cooks have relied on for centuries to make miso, soy sauce and sake. In my lab right now, that means amazake: a sweet rice drink where the koji turns the rice's starch into sugar all on its own. It's also one of the most exciting tools in food science, with chefs and researchers using it to build new flavours and even new foods. It's an old tradition, new science, and flavour you can't get any other way.
Island Alchemists is my lab on Gozo. This site is the notebook: what's growing, what worked, what didn't, and what you'd like me to try next.