Since I started making fermented food regularly, my practice has always been rooted here in the city. I’m lucky because I work with small organic farmers, so there’s a steady and diverse enough supply of what’s in season that keeps me puttering and curious. Will this ferment well? What about that?

Today, as I write this, the weather is cool. We still have several weeks of Amihan ahead of us. The burong mustasa takes an extra day or three to turn bubbly. There’s room to relax in the intervals between starter feedings, rather than extra vigilance. Making rice koji, the room grows fragrant as the hyphae branch out into long networks and coat the rice without overheating. Before the year ended, there were plump, juicy lemons for salt curing. I do not worry about the direct heat from the shaft of early morning sunlight that hits the side of the mason jar, rather I enjoy the cool morning and the soft glow of the preserved lemons as I enjoy my hot cup of tea. 

A rhythm to fermenting

I think of how different it will be as the tropical summer starts to roll in, and it’s as if microbes also wake from slumber and take on main character energy, challenging attempts at regulation. The kitchen’s cooler spots, where empty jars, pots and pans, cookbooks previously took residence are now cleared for the batches of ferments to be made. A day passes and already there’s visible foam in the kimchi or kraut. Opening the jar to release the gas buildup results in kimchi spray on the kitchen splashback. By the third or fourth day, it’s mildly sour. The tepache is bright and boozy in two. The kamias tree becomes heavy with fruit and buro becomes a way to receive the generosity. Imagine all these all at once. I am lucky to be working from home most days.

But there are also ferments that I will stop making when temperatures start to rise, like miso. Steaming the rice and sterilizing the tools turn my tiny kitchen into a hothouse. Inside the incubator the koji requires constant turning so it won’t overheat: a manageable chore in the daytime but a misery at night, waking up every two hours, until I learned my lesson and thought, enough of this madness and just make miso between November and February. Also, just buy sourdough. 

All this to say there’s already a rhythm to fermenting here in Metro Manila that has become second nature to me, giving it the ease of habit that on the flip side makes certain necessities about the practice invisible and therefore taken for granted. A recent trip to Baguio to train a restaurant’s kitchen and commissary staff in fermentation brought this to stark relief. The city was in the middle of its seasonal cold spell, and there had been reports of dips in temperature to single digits in some parts of the Cordillera. At the end of the day, each participant had about seven jars of fermented foods. How long should we ferment this? What about this? They asked me, as I walked around the room in sweaters and thermals. Here was another timescale in another city, where the cool early mornings of Quezon City could not compare. 

Rooted in context

I have always valued the fact that the success of one’s ferment is rooted in context. It is shaped by the environment where it is practiced, and therefore our attentiveness to what is taking place. And so I say what I often say, fermentation is an invitation to use our senses. Listen for the hissing sound, or the pop, when you burp your ferments. Look at the surface–what do you see? are there bubbles? Is that yeast or mold growth? How’s the smell? What’s the texture and mouthfeel? How does it taste–on the third day, on the fifth, or the twelfth?

When we first started talking about this training, we had imagined me returning to their city regularly to offer fermentation workshops to the locals. But I changed my mind. I knew that it was going to be the local kitchen staff that was going to be paying attention to what would be available at the Baguio Public Market, to the changes taking place inside the jars over the many days it would take for the ferment to fizz and pop and get to that flavor they want. They will begin recognizing and building the rhythms most hospitable to their own practice in another part of the country, remote from mine in more ways than one. 

And that is part of what Starter Sisters has always been about. We want to share the practice with more people, and that means not being the expert all the time. Fermentation shows us that it’s the practice on the ground that remains the best teacher.