Cooked - First Season

All cooking is transformation,

and in that sense, it's miraculous, it's alchemy.

But of all the different transformations we call cooking,

I think fermentation is the most miraculous

and the most mysterious.

And that's because it doesn't involve any applied heat at all.

This is food and drink

made strictly through the action of bacteria and fungi.

Microbes, most of which come from the earth,

they perform all the transformations

that normally we need heat to make happen.

You know, I don't think people realize as they walk through the supermarket,

or, indeed, into the far reaches of their own refrigerator,

how many fermented foods are there.

It's the ketchup and the hot sauce,

it's the, uh, the sake, it's the kombucha,

it's the beer, it's the salami, it's the prosciutto.

You know, all the way to chocolate.

A third of the food in our diet are fermented.

In most cases, we have no idea.

The yuca is a root that develops underground,

and, well...

One of its derivatives is masato,

which is a regional beverage.

Our ancestors used to harvest and drink it,

and that is why we are cultivating the yuca in the same way.

You know, we've been fermenting for a long time,

but one of the most desirable and probably earliest ferments

is the fermentation of, uh... of alcoholic beverages.

I mean, people have been questing for alcohol

as long as they first stumbled on it,

probably in a piece of rotted fruit, uh, or a split coconut.

And you need sugar water, essentially.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae,

the yeast that's responsible for making any alcoholic ferment, needs sugar.

So, we plundered nature for sources of sugar

that we could turn into alcohol.

And there are ways of doing it, still common in the Amazon,

that are ingenious.

One of the most,

probably one of the earliest, crudest alcoholic beverages is made by,

uh, taking a starchy root called yuca or cassava,

and chewing it.

And this is done collectively,

a bunch of people will chew and spit into a vat.

And lo and behold, something very interesting happens.

In our saliva are enzymes, amylase enzymes,

that break starches down into sugars.

And if you try to prepare masato by just crushing the yuca,

and not chewing it,

it will not mature well.

It smells so bad you cannot drink it.

On the other hand, when it is chewed, you get a tasty masato.

Chewing will ferment it.

I wonder how our grandmothers figured out how to do this.

But this is what they taught our mothers,

and our mothers taught us.

But the secret ingredient is saliva.

And saliva is doing the job of, uh, of the enzymes.

One of the things that's incredible about fermentation

is that people mastered this

long before they understood how it worked.

I mean, that they were learning how to corral and direct

and channel the energies of microbes without knowing what a microbe was.

To them, it must have seemed like magic.

And indeed it is.

It's this cold fire that can transform things,

from one state into a very different other.

You know, it's generally assumed that the creation or discovery of agriculture

was about feeding us, it was about food.

Um, but it may well be that it was about alcohol,

uh, and there is a "beer before bread" hypothesis held by some anthropologists

that suggests that the real motivation for settling down and growing grain

may have been motivated by the desire to have fermentable crops,

plenty of them.

'Cause if you think about collecting grain in the wild,

it's a really painstaking process.

Whereas fields of barley or fields of other grain

that you could make alcohol from would be very appealing.

And there is some circumstantial evidence

to suggest that it may have been alcohol that came first.

Isaac and I, my son, started brewing beer several years ago,

when I was starting to learn about fermentation,

and we did it from kits that we bought at the brew store

and that was great and we made beer and it was drinkable.

But we discovered that there was a person of our acquaintance,

the father of a friend of Isaac's, who had gotten very serious about brewing.

This is crystal 16, crystal 120.

And when we mash it, it's getting the sugar out of this.

- Mmm-hmm. - That's what we're gonna be doing.

This is a barley mill, known as the barley crusher...

Shane McKay happens to be one of these kind of obsessive hobbyists.

And he's made himself into a very good, uh...

amateur brewer.

So, when he offered to let us brew with him,

we thought it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

There you go.

So, basically we're trying to boil all the sugars

and flavor out of this, right?

Yeah.

So, you want the right amount of water in there.

Too little and it's too thick,

but if you have too much water, it's too thin

and the enzymes get diluted and they don't do their work.

And if you taste this now... it's sweet.

- Yep. - But in an hour, it'll be really sweet.

This is so much more intricate than how Isaac and I started out.

Remember when we started? We did it in the kitchen.

It was like the Duncan Hines of beer-making.

Well, it was funny, because when we were doing it...

we'd never, you know, we'd never done it before

and we didn't know what to expect. And we were just, like...

banging pipes together...

...and funneling liquids through other liquids,

and cooling things down

and heating them up and cooling them down again.

But then, the moment when we were like,

"Oh, we actually..."

Like, "This might work a little bit..."

Was the next morning when we go down and look at the carboy

and there's just this city of activity.

The word "ferment," which means to boil,

is really kind of appropriate.

Because this liquid that was just kind of inert is suddenly bubbling.

So, if you look closely, you can actually see the bubbles forming,

you can see them coming up to the surface.

It really is a lot of very tiny little bubbles.

You know, this will continue until the sugar is used up.

The yeast's taking that sugar and turning it into alcohol,

which we want...

And that coming to life of something that had appeared dead,

how else would you explain that as a gift from the gods?

And which, indeed, we thought it was.

Dionysus is the god of fermentation,

not just alcohol, but of this whole process of transformation.

And this completely crosses cultural lines,

the notion that fermented foods are sacred.

In fact, ancient peoples across South America,

Mayans, Aztecs, Olmecs,

all had rituals dedicated to one of our most treasured ferments...

chocolate.

When you think about chocolate and how it exists in our culture,

we have these bars of chocolate

and we have chocolate drinks and we have candies.

We give each other chocolate on Valentine's Day, Easter, Christmas, even.

So, we've adopted chocolate into our modern rituals as well.

Chocolate's a big part of our culture.

And we think of it as this Western candy that, you know, is ours.

But in fact, it's the product of this rotten bean from the Amazon.

This fruit is about two months old.

It will be ripe in the fifth month.

This is a cacao tree that's just been harvested.

And we're selecting the ripe ones.

This is how you open a cacao.

If you get a cacao pod and slice it open,

uh, you will find inside some big seeds,

but they're surrounded with this kind of mucilaginous,

disgusting white, uh, gel,

um, that tastes nothing like chocolate.

And the beans themselves are just bitter beyond belief.

But if you take those beans covered with their slime

and let them ferment,

uh, an amazing transformation will take place.

The process of fermenting cacao must take place in boxes

to allow the temperature to increase.

It is also essential to cover the cacao,

to ensure the temperature rises.

As the cacao is saturated with the pulp,

the anaerobic fermentation takes place because there's no oxygen.

First, when the temperature rises,

the grains don't germinate.

Then on day two,

we can see that the mass...

the mass is no longer cold.

We're talking four degrees more than the first day.

On the fourth day,

the mass has to reach 50 degrees.

And the fermentation continues.

More bacteria is formed,

and acetic acid is formed.

Well, on the seventh day,

now, it has a chocolate color.

This means it has reached the optimal fermentation

to start the drying process.

If you put the cacao on a thin layer,

the humidity comes out, but the acidity remains.

This is the importance of the drying stage.

Here the fermentation process ends.

We think of fermented foods as kind of exotic now,

but of course they were very important before we had refrigeration.

The way you kept food was...

You had a few techniques, but the main one was you fermented it.

That's how you got through the winter. You fermented food in the fall.

Um, and so the taste of this food was secondary at the beginning.

Kimchi's a great example of a fermentation

that is used to preserve food for a very long time.

And in Korea, people in the fall will take their harvest of cabbages

and add spices to flavor it,

and add salt and then they bury it in crocks in the earth

to keep it at a certain temperature.