Meet Holly Davis
World Ferment Day Ambassador for Australia
Hi, I'm Holly Davis. I'm in Sydney, Australia, and I am the Australian ambassador for World Ferment day. Delighted to be so.
What led you to fermentation and when did your journey begin?
What led me to fermentation in the first place was having a cold and having someone make me a drink that included fermented food and telling me about macrobiotics and the idea of balancing, maintaining and restoring balance using food, if you like, as medicine. And I got hooked with the idea. And in a macrobiotic diet, there's a little ferment with every meal, a little drink or a little condiment with every meal. And they were very expensive back in the 70s. And so I got interested in making my own. I was 14 at the time and my first ferment that I made, was kefir. I had an aunt who kept what she called a ‘yogurt plant’ and it was in fact I now know kefir. I didn't really know what I was doing. And I made a kind of horrible mess of my mother's kitchen. And I made a product that got more and more sour and cheesy and kind of revolting. But I was determined and I kept all sorts of smelly ferments in my mother's fridge until she begged me to throw them away. And over time I got more understanding and I started to make things that were actually rather good.
What is an easy way to introduce ferments to someone who has never tried them?
There are a few things that I would start with. Something pretty simple, like a salad dressing,
where people expect sour. So most ferments have a sour flavour, more or less. put a little juice from a ferment, like a sauerkraut. Just use the juice where all the benefit is still in that. Add that to a dressing and then put that on a salad. No one will even know that it's there. And then over time, you could introduce a little bit of something fermented into that salad. It's good, I think, to put ferments where people are expecting a sour flavour. and I find that very effective, especially with kids and really, you don't need a lot of anything fermented to get the benefit, so even if it's a tiny amount go with that.
How does fermentation fit into your life?
How ferments fit in my life it's more a case of how I fit in my home with all the ferments that I have going at once! I teach online I am in the middle of teaching ‘the art and alchemy of Japanese whole foods, which is very much about Japanese styles of ferments. I have miso brewing at the moment over here in this crock and I have got some not terribly Japanese b It is spring and so asparagus going at the moment. This is a sanshozuke (3 sho pickle,(sho is a measurement), which is a pickle with koji, green chillies and shoyu, (naturally fermented soy sauce). I have Jerusalem artichokes with seaweed and soy at the moment. And this big orange jar is making persimmon vinegar. So I first made persimmon alcohol using the whole bodies of persimmons. It's the easiest thing in the world to do you shove them in a jar and wait they'll break down, they'll turn into alcohol and then a mother will form which is happening here at the surface, acetobacter in the environment will land and they will convert the alcohol that was created when it first started to ferment into vinegar and you'll have a really beautiful vinegar and what I love about Japanese ferments is you end up with a ferment but you also then when this is done, I will take off the vinegar and then I will have the the bed of, uh of the persimmon sludge if you like and that is brilliant for fermenting vegetables in quick pickles really nutritious delicious pickles made with something that was left over don't you love that no wastage. Absolute deliciousness. I love it.
Which ferment or ferments did you eat/drink most recently?
So It is always a hard question, which ferment did I last eat? It's sort of whatever I was standing nearest to. I had some pickles, pickled vegetables that I pickled in a... right a fermented rice bran bed called nukazuke which are also a Japanese pickle with my breakfast this morning and some quick pickled radishes were also part of breakfast. I had a miso soup so fermentation at work, not too much of it but a little bit of miso in my soup and were those the last things I ate? I just had some cheese for lunch that's a ferment and it was a very good quality cheese, so I think that counts and at the moment I have got a drink, that I made in May; I used the bodies of citrus to make a sort of spritz so it's an effervescent fermented drink and it tastes like bitter lemon I made it with yuzu which is a Japanese citrus fruit. And these ghosts hanging behind me are that Japanese citrus fruit that have miso and walnuts in them. They're called yubeshi. And now they're busy fermenting. They've been there for about, I think, since the end of May. So where are we now? We're in September. So they've been there a while. And I've started to eat them. And they are apparently something that samurai took with them to war to eat, as a snack I suppose I'm not really sure how but they have become a little kind of, not very sweet a sort of savoury slight edge of sweetness and citrus really delicious that's what samurai were eating but I have been eating them too now.
