Fermentation and Daily Life (2018)

Using your hands doesn’t matter. For the same reason that fermented stuff should be washed or sterilised before being canned (well, rinse the soil and dirt but that’s it). Once you’ve started eating them though (so after they’re done fermenting), you should use clean utensils, no double dipping, etc because it has a higher risk to spoil as you’ve introduced air in the vessel.

The organisms that ferment come from the air and the surface of the food you’re fermenting. If you use sealed jars that can outgas (so they don’t explode), the fermentation generates CO2 while eradicating all other bacteria. Mold cannot take hold because there is no air.

It’s a self caring process where you virtually can’t intoxicate yourself. Just use your eyes and your nose: if you somehow didn’t seal them properly they’ll go bad. And if they’re bad you can very easily tell: they smell and look wrong.

I’ve been lactofermenting all sorts of food and it’s a great source of vitamins, probiotics. It’s very very easy to do and it’s been done for millennia in societies where refrigeration didn’t exist and where we didn’t have access to sterile kitchen and utensils. It can also be done anywhere as you don’t need heat or energy. Only water, salt, and food. You can even use water jars instead of sealed jars (not sure how they’re actually called, they have a water layer to keep air from touching the fermenting food so it doesn’t mold)

Nope, you can eat it like fresh Amanita, but you should not. Mold shows on the outside when the mycelium "saturated" the host. Cutting of mold is only fine on hard cheese.

Well that’s ironic given how fecal transplants are rapidly seen as a possible cure/medicine for many ailments. What we probably don’t want to encourage imo is an ultra-clean sterilized environment everywhere we go. Both are equally bad.

That tells me the microbial colonies are resilient to any harmful pathogens introduced by getting your dirty hands involved. Isn’t that precisely the point?

One: yogurt. Yogurt is boiled milk fermented with mainly two lactic acid bacteria, Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacilus bulgaricus. During fermentation the milk is held at ~45°C (the optimal temperature for thermophilic bacteria).

Two: kefir. Kefir is fermented milk with a consistency that ranges from a loose drink to a thick yogurt, depending on how it's made. It is fermented with a rich culture of bacteria and yeasts found in "kefir grains" (in truth, an exopolysaccharide that houses the community). Kefir is fermented at room tempeatures (around 25°C).

Three: cheese. Cheesemaking begins with a fermentation step where lactobacili and lactococci are used to increase the acidity of milk to speed up its coagulation by rennet enzymes in a subsequent step. Some cheese recipes include an additional fermentation step where milk is "cooked" to a temperature favoring thermophilic bacteria. In all cases, the bacteria of the fermentation culture remain alive in the body of the cheese and impart flavors to it as it ages.

In none of those cases does fermentation without salt result in "rotting gunk". Cheese in particular can be made without any salt at all and such cheese can be preserved for at least a year in a temperature of 16-18°C, well within the range of tempetarues one can find in natural caves, cellars or mountain creameries. My reference for this is my experience with making saltless hard and soft cheeses for the last trhee years.

Obviously, if you leave yogurt, or even cheese at room temperature for a prolongued period of time, they will go off, but that's not what you're saying, correct?

Kefir, btw, can "hold" at room temperatures perhaps indefinitely. Although it does tend to go a bit stinky, probably because yeasts begin to dominate.

Not that easy. The problem is the crop growing and processing you must do beforehand, to get your feedstock for fermentation. I'm from Brazil. Here we have a large industry built around ethanol production from sugarcane. To this day problems like boiler explosions and people falling in sugarcane crushers are not entirely unheard off, and also poor working conditions in sugarcane fields. Not that easy.