S2:E10 The Art of Fermentation with Sandor Katz

In this episode, we take a walk with the world-renowned fermentation revivalist Sandor Katz to explore the world of fermented foods. From Miso Soup, to Blackberry wine, asparagus and beyond, Sandor shares the stories, traditions and microbial magic behind fermentation practices that have nourished communities for thousands of years. 

Whether you're an experienced fermenter or simply curious about the foods that shape our lives, this episode offers an inspiring and thought-provoking journey into one of humanity's oldest culinary arts.

The Newt Podcast is created by the team at The Newt in Somerset and produced by Harry Coade at Sound Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, follow The Newt Podcast to enjoy more walks and talks across the estate, or better still become a Newt Member to visit our estate yourself, stay the night, or shop The Newt online. 

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Transcript

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Welcome back to the Newt Podcast with me, Arthur Cole. Join us for a walk through the estate with our invited guests to the backdrop of the Somerset landscape and its wildlife residence. This week we welcome the Prince of Pickles, the King of kombucha, the Frank Sapper of ferments, Sandor Cats. Probiotics is really a strategy for trying to enhance biodiversity in the gut. And that's one of the things that's making so many people interested in fermented foods and beverages at the present moment. Spoke at our great garden show this year. And I had the pleasure and privilege of catching up with him after his talk. So let's jump straight into it. So Sandal, you are originally from New York. Correct. And then still as a child moved to Tennessee? No, no, no. I moved to Tennessee as a 30-year-old. Okay. So I was I was definitely an adult. Okay, so in New York, I know enough about New York to know that if you're in upstate New York, they do have dry stone walls. Yeah, yeah, sure. But I I was in New York City. But I mean, you know, there are old buildings in New York City that are that have dry stone walls. Yeah. The largest uh cathedral in North America is in New York City, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which is unfinished. I mean, it was started in the 19th century and it is as yet unfinished. But they've been um bringing stonemasons from Italy to train young New York City people to continue the construction. Right. I mean, New York City is one of those amazing melting pots. I I visited New York, lived there for three months, and the people often talk about food as a reflection of culture. New York has the most amazing food culture for what you would call a modern city. I mean, from all of the iconic delis to the restaurants, amazing variety and array. And your life is about food, about this fermentation journey, right? Well, and I and I do try every time I go to New York to um try the cuisine of some different ethnicity that I know nothing about, or you know, uh I'm actually I I first tried um Taiwanese cho do fu, which gets called in English stinky tofu. It's one of the sort of notorious ferments. Um but I first found that in New York City in uh in a neighborhood called Flushing. Um so yeah, no, there's a lot of food culture. But I mean, it's funny because I I would just, you know, before I was in Cornwall, I was in London for a few days, not even for a few days, for two days. But like whenever I'm in London, it it feels a lot like New York, just in you know, how international it is, how many languages you hear spoken when you're writing on the tube, how many, you know, restaurants and little hole-in-the-wall places of you know where immigrants are selling the foods of their homelands. So I I mean I do love that aspect of being in a in a big, vibrant international city. Is that where you I guess, is that where you got the bug for experimenting with fermentation? Because you say in your book that you're the fermentation revive revivalist, but you are also perpetually experimenting. Yeah, no, that's that's that's true. Um, you know, I call myself a fermentation revivalist because fermentation is such an integral sandal, we've got a there's a fan running after Sandal. Oh, nice. Okay, beautiful, beautiful. Okay, Kyle. Yeah, nice for me, mommy's a present for my mom. So oh, okay, what's her name? Uh Tanya Petersweek. Okay, T-A-N-I-A or Y-A? Y-A. Okay, T-A-N-Y-A. Okay. There you go, caught just as uh we were about to set out over the Viper. So Sandor Cats's fermentation journeys. When was this one published, Sandor? Uh 2021. I mean, I wrote this was my COVID project. I remember I wrote this uh I love that I love the front cover of it as well. I mean, it's sort of there's a picture of Sandor with rather shorter hair than you've got at the moment, Sandor. You know, hair hair hair grows and gets cut, you know. Um, and with this love of like bright yellow uh cover and a whole world behind of Niger, Croatia, China, India, Japan, Indonesia. Cool. Well, well, enjoy. I hope your mother enjoys it. Thanks so much. Thank you. Nice to meet you. Okay, we get to walk on this. So I was saying that the you know, the re where how I came up with this this phrase of describing myself as a fermentation revivalist is fermentation is such an integral part of how people everywhere make effective use of whatever food resources are available to them. You know, and yet because so few people remain engaged in the direct production of food, and you know, we've just all become more accustomed to foods that have already been prepared in different ways for us. Very few people have any connection to this important process, and then in the same period of time, people have become afraid of bacteria. Like you know, people didn't know about bacteria before, but now people are are most frequently afraid of bacteria. So, you know, when I when I say I'm a fermentation revivalist, it's just trying to sort of demystify fermentation to make people who might be interested comfortable to try it in their own kitchens. Yeah, but then you know, you're right. I mean, I'm I'm I I'm interested in traditions, but I'm also interested in um experimentation and innovation, and I think that you know fermentation really illustrates um, you know, how like culture is never static. We might have traditions, but every generation maybe puts their own little spin on things, and so things do change over time, the tools that people have change over time. People have access to a lot more ingredients that come from more different kinds of places. So yeah, you know, it's just it's easy to experiment and and uh try different kinds of seasonings, use different kinds of ingredients. So um, you know, I think that innovation and experimentation is really part of it. So we're standing here, Sandor, on what's called the quite an amazing view here. It's quite cool, it's nice being up here in the canopy. So we're about 40 feet up, and immediately blurse we have there's some field maple, there's actually um a that's one there is actually an elm which has sadly succumbed to touch on disease, but we've also got some ash in here, some young oaks and some hazel. Sandral's just spoken at the Great Garden Show and spoke about one of he was asked the question, what's your favourite ferment at the moment? And you spoke about the chestnuts. You've got a couple of chestnut trees at home, and you've made a fur you've fermented, I guess, the nuts from that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, fermented nuts, it it doesn't sound nuts. No, no, no, it's not there's a people are doing a lot of it. Actually, in Portugal last week, I had um some um uh acorn miso. Right. And acorn bread. Um how curious, because I was always taught that the tannins and acorns made them uh mildly toxic. Well, there's techniques for for removing the the tannins. I mean, you know, I mean a lot of the um a lot of the indigenous groups of North America, you know, were were very heavily dependent on chestnuts as a as a uh a source of nutrition, and and so what they would do is like you know, break up the chestnuts and um you know put them in some sort of vessel in running water, or they would just like repeatedly put them in water, dump that water after they sat for a while, put fresh water, but you know, that's it's it's not it's not that difficult to um leach the tannins out, right? And of course, different varieties of oak have different levels of chest of tannins in their chestnuts, so some of them require more uh processing than others. Okay. So with your chestnut, I'm assuming these are sweet chestnuts. Yeah. Um could you quickly tell our listeners how, like what you get up to with those? Sure. So I have been making miso with them, and miso, of course, is the sort of you know Japanese um paste that's typically made from uh soybeans or or other beans, and um you know the production of of miso requires this um uh prior ferment. It's in Japanese it's called koji. So koji is a Japanese word for um typically rice, barley, soybeans, or sometimes other substrates grown with a particular fungus, aspergillus orise. And koji, although it is delicious, it's typically not eaten as a food. Koji is an ingredient for subsequent fermentation processes ranging from sake, all sake involves koji, soy sauce, all soy sauce involves koji, uh miso, amazake, really a wide range of Japanese foods, and it's not even just in Japan, all across Asia. People are, well, people have their own forms of these fungal starters and a wide range of different kinds of foods that are prepared with them. So the first step is growing this particular fungus on some of the chestnuts, and then meanwhile, I steam some more chestnuts, and then I grind up the steamed chestnuts with the chestnuts with the fungus, the koji chestnuts, and salt, and I turn it all into a kind of a thick paste, and then I ferment it for um, you know, generally a year or longer. Really okay. And it just develops a a really like you know, rich, complex, delicious uh flavor. And I and I guess it's sort of for the listeners, I I know miso soup when I go to say uh a sushi restaurant. In fact, the some of the best sushi restaurants are in New York, right? I mean, I certainly for an uninitiated westerner, I certainly learnt about sushi in New York. Well, sushi's everywhere now. I mean I don't think that there's I don't think that there's like a city of you know more than 50,000 people in the world that doesn't have to be. And when I was there, my uncle taught me that, and this this might be nonsense, but that the miso soup that's served before has an anti-parasitic quality because often dealing with raw fish, there's certain especially fish that quite fast swimming fish from tropical waters, um, there is an uh there is a risk of certain picking up certain parasites. And apparently one of the reasons for drinking miso ahead of the raw fish was to layer this, to to get this layer in as an antiparasitic measure. Is that complete bunkum or is there something in that? Well, I mean, I'll tell you this is the first I've ever heard that story. I mean, it's it it does not seem implausible. Um, but I but I but I but I couldn't specifically say. But what I can say is that um miso has many, many applications beyond miso soup. And miso soup is wonderful. Um, it goes with many things beyond sushi. Um, but also I mean, miso is just this like rich flavoring that you can use as a marinade, you can use it as an ingredient in um uh dressings and sauces, in like you know, dips that you would serve at a party. I mean, it has like you know infinite applications. We're now moving out of the, we're moving away from the story gardening from the deer park, and we've just entered into a much more densely wooded area, and actually some of the bluebells are just hanging on in here. And these look like berries, these are maybe wine berries or um, so brambles, so they'll turn into um there'll be an abundance of blackberries in here. Okay now, during the talk you spoke about nearly anything vegetative can be fermented, but you wouldn't necessarily ferment everything vegetative at all, and if you did just pick yourself. Well, I I also would say anything edible. I mean, there's I would I wouldn't, I mean I mean you could ferment non-edible vegetative matter into say compost for to feed the soil, but you know, I mean, we don't want to be feeding people inedible, uh inedible things. But you know, when I see berries, the first thing I think of is um is wine. And so, you know, of course, the UK has given the world this concept of country wines that you can make, you can make a wine out of almost anything. Right. So, you know, you can make parsnip wine, you can make blackberry wine, you can make blueberry wine, you can make raspberry wine. Blackberry wine was the first wine I ever made. Elderflower wine, yeah. We're we're looking at some elderflowers. Yeah, I mean, that's got a good heady center. We've just walked past the first blossom of the elderflower in in Ash Cops in this little woodland, and there's soon this will have a multitude of flower heads on it. Where there's only a couple showing now, and that first scent coming off them there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, elder flower wine is uh just very, very beautiful, delicate uh flavour. It's very playful, sort of. It's probably got that sense of um the lusty month of May, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's captured in that bottle with it. It certainly does have a sort of almost dreamlike quality to it, Oberon and Titania. Um so I was also taught by my mother who very kindly bought me the Art of Fermentation, your book, Sandor, to really get me to understand and appreciate what's going on in these ferments. And she used to, when we were children and we had upset stomachs, she used to pull out something that there was no English writing on it, it was a packet, and within this packet there were a dozen of these plums. She used to call them umiboshi plums. Yeah, umiboshi plums. That's a that's a Japanese style of a pickled plum. The the plums they're made from are typically unripe plums. And they're um, you know, they're they're they're heavily salted, they're dried, they're put in a brine, it's a kind of elaborate process. They're they're very salty, um, they're very delicious, and I know that there's there's a lot of applications of them for therapeutic reasons like helping people uh uh get well. I mean, I mentioned in my talk that you know I spent some time uh following a macrobiotic diet, but I'll bet your mother was influenced by macrobiotics because you know umiboshi is one of the things that um you know macrobiotics really emphasizes for helping people feel better. So, Sandal, could you tell us a little bit about that macrobiotic diet? Well, first of all, I I I should say that like this is a diet I have not followed for many years, and there are many sort of concepts in the diet that I really do not um that I do not specifically endorse at this point. It it's a diet that um you know is inspired by Japanese Zen Buddhism. It's very simple. You eat a lot of whole grains, you eat a lot of steamed vegetables. Generally, you would eat very little animal flesh or other animal products, very little oil or fat. They're not so into stimulants, you know, very little spicing. Um, and I, you know, I I love all of that stuff. But I will say that like the the aspect of macrobiotics that has really, really stayed with me is they emphasize chewing your food for a long time. And you know, I have really always been a slow eater ever since that period of my life, and I do think that that is uh a very, very beneficial uh practice, no matter what you decide you like to eat. Yes, we do seem to have within the Western world this um dietary problems, right? Let's lump them under one umbrella. This could either be irritable bowel syndrome, it could be bloating of some sort, or it could be um very uh acute food intolerances. And in your talk you nodded to perhaps there is a correlation between the increase in chemical imbibing through either water which has been chlorinated, um medicines, pharmaceuticals, and perhaps now this irritability in our guts. Can you tell us a little bit about your theory on this? Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, I I would say it's sorry, that is the ramp that's the that's the last of the wild garlic. That's the Ram. Okay, beautiful, beautiful. So um for our listeners, okay. So yeah, yeah, I mean, that's something that I mean it's delicious to eat anyway, but if you happen to have a great abundance of them, they ferment beautifully, beautifully. So that's wild garlic. So a lot of people probably make wild garlic pesto, I know I do, but how many of the listeners actually make from a fermented something fermented out of wild garlic? So if you had a lot, you could make uh you could just salt that and and and make like a sauerkraut type ferment out of just that, or if you had just a little bit, you could sort of add that to cabbage or other vegetables and use it as a as a seasoning. Right, okay. So sorry, back to this um gut uh microbiome and where we currently sit as as a let's say let's call it a western hemisphere, sort of the blight on our stomachs. Has this something to do with fermented foods or or the lack of fermented foods, do you think? I mean it could. I I mean, you know, usually usually the diminishment of gut biodiversity to which many chronic diseases have been attributed, but certainly not all, is due to you know increased chemical exposure. And it's not just a singular thing. You can't just say, oh, it's antibiotic drugs or it's chlorinated water or it's glycosphite, uh, gly glycosphate uh uh residues uh on food. You know, it's just from the accumulation of chemical exposures that we have, and then compounding that, you know, our modern diets have so much less fiber than the diets of our ancestors because we have milled flour, we have um juices where we can sort of get all the sugar from a fruit without eating the fiber of the fruit. But our diets are so much lower in fiber than people in the past, and um, you know, all of the microbiome researchers that I talked to really emphasize that you know fiber is the primary food for the bacteria in our intestines, and you know, you could eat all of the probiotic foods you you like, and if you're not also trying to increase your your your fiber intake, you're you're really not doing everything you can to you know enable those bacteria to thrive. Yeah, so there's a number of plausible explanations. You know, let me also emphasize that I am not a clinician, you know, I know a lot about how to ferment different kinds of foods and beverages, and you know, I I hear a lot of anecdotal stories, but you know, I you know I do not know a lot about space a lot of specific diseases. I couldn't tell you much about irritable bowel syndrome or or other things. So I really, you know, I'd just like to emphasize that like I I am not in a position to be giving anyone medical advice. Yeah, but you can certainly advise us on how to foment all manner of things. Have you come across this? Is we this is winter saying. I didn't know what you called it in the States. It has a beautiful aroma. Yeah. But I haven't specifically had that. So, you know, a lot of these, like, you know, lightly fermented beverages, like let's say kombucha or water kefir, which I know are pretty popular over here. But you know, you can season them with all kinds of delicious culinary herbs. Um, so uh, you know, they don't have to have uh, you know, fruit flavors. You could make a, you know, a winter savory uh uh flavored kombucha. Um, and that's you know, that's the kind of innovative experimental thinking we're seeing is people just trying different flavor profiles. The other day I had an amazing kombucha in London that was a cucumber mint lime kombucha. Right. So, you know, most of the kombuchas are like you know fruit flavors. Yeah, and quite sweet actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this one was, you know, had much more, it was much less sweet and it had, you know, a little bit of sweetness, but but but but this you know very pleasant, mild, savory flavor profile. Okay, I mean it's certainly something you talk about the evolution of of us, our diets and the food culture, and actually we can't put a hard, we can't put a line in the sand and say this is when fermentation was started and by whom, right? It's all we know this this has been going on before anyone's able to communicate it. Yeah, yeah, sure. And I mean, you you know, I mean, certainly fermentation, I mean, humans are not the only creatures that that ferment. Um, you know, um leaf cutter ants in tropical areas, you know, they can't eat the leaves they spend their days collecting. They cultivate a fungus that grows on the leaves and then they eat the fungus. And the you know, the queens of the ant uh colonies actually have a special sac to hold spores of the fungus. So if they go and start a new group of leafcutter ants, they can grow the fungus that's essential for their survival. And there was a mutation in primates about 10 million years ago of an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase, which enabled primates to begin to digest alcohol at the same time as some lineages of primates basically descended from the canopy to live on the ground. And so, you know, this mutation enabled them to eat fruit that had begun to ferment and had some alcohol content. Sure. We're now in the kitchen garden and we're at the cold phase. Look at these. Here, pick a little pick a leaf off and or try this. Pick a leaf out. Yeah, the team will be quite happy. We've got this lovely red color to it, getting deeper green towards the spine. It's just so different. Oh, fava beans. There's a very there's a classic Chinese fermentation that I've been making since I went to China 10 years ago. Um, it's called dobanjang. But it's basically like um fava beans with a fungus like koji grown on it, and then fermented in a salt water brine solution, and then mixed after after a few months of fermentation like that. Then in a separate vat, you would ferment some chilies with salt, like ground-up chilies with salt. Then you mix them together and ferment them together. And so, you know, this seasoning made from fermented uh fava beans is really one of the foundations of the flavors of Sichuan cuisine. Really? Um, doubanjong. Because one of my favorite tastes actually is just the top sheets of of uh those the fava beans or uh broad beans as we call them. And actually, um the other day in London, I did see, you know, there are people in the UK who are making uh like a miso-like fermented paste of the broad beans. Okay. Well you said it's the artichoke, okay. Yeah. So you said also that fermentafile bean based is sort of very important in was it Shechuan? Yep. Well, look, sitting in front of us, it's I think it's bean and flour. Are these Sichuan peppercorns? Yeah, okay. These are the these are Sichuan peppercorns. And I think Okay, another foundation of Sichuan cuisines. Okay, that's amazing. Okay, I have not uh I have not actually seen this uh this plant growing. That's amazing. Okay, so you you come to you you come to Somerset and you you know you get to see these amazing Chinese plants. Oh I love so this time of the year as well. These fairy, these very little rabbits' feet of the fennel. Um I love I mean I just these tops, really like little brushes. Ah so sweet. Why, as we've evolved, we can kind of sort of understand why we've sought out sweet things as a as a species, right? There's probably very high calorific value, there's something slightly intoxicating about it. So when we found honey or when we found these sort of natural sugars, it was you know it's party time, but this remains with us. And now the sugar is so so prevalent. High fructose corn syrups and all that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and we're seeing this coming sort of almost being sold as you know, a healthy kombucha drink, but you look at the amount of sugar in it, my gosh, there's a lot. So it's interesting to hear you talking about you're a fermentation revivalist. Do you think that we're gonna find within the sort of food community perhaps a move away from this easy hit sugar and finding some other sort of satisfaction to replace that? Do you think that's possible? I mean, for sure. For sure it's possible. I mean, you know, we we didn't always have sugar the way we have sugar. I mean, you know, it was 500 years ago sugar was a very, very limited and precious resource in this part of the world. And when you eat much less sugar than the things that are naturally sweet, you experience them as much sweeter. So, you know, like an apple becomes a much sweeter thing. A pear becomes a much sweeter thing. Sure, okay. See, where we're we're where I live, our asparagus finished like a month ago. Oh, really? This is uh this is a uh like a treat to um get you get to have some fresh asparagus. You ferment these guys, you make something like that. I mean, I don't have enough of them, so I just I just I just eat them fresh, but um, but yeah, yeah, sure, you can ferment asparagus. Fermented asparagus has a very particular strong flavor, um right. Some I mean asparagus has a very particular uh flavor. Um, but you know, some people like just go crazy and love the flavor of asparagus fermented na brine, and some people are very put off by it. And fermenting flowers. So these are all edible flowers, and I don't know if you've eaten pansies before, these little guys actually are pretty good. So if you try one of those little ones, the the taste, the only thing I can equate it to actually, and I is I tried it some many times many years ago, but it's root beer. So you can't taste anything to begin with, and it's only once you've swallowed the petal. It's a it's a tiny little little pansy like flower, uh, a little violet, multicoloured, and once you've chewed it, and once you've swallowed it, then you get this sort of this taste that then comes in. It was tasteless and tiny. Do you see that? It's almost like a little, and is it root beer? Am I right in saying it's sort of like root beer? I can see that. I wouldn't have I wouldn't have thought of that, but you you know, you you're that you know, I'm open to I'm very like suggestible. Um this is sea kill. They grew this at Hadspon around the Victorian period in huge abundance. If you go down to the south coast, about an hour's drive from here, straight south, you'll see on the shingle beds lots of this growing. Again, this looks the fleshiness of these quite thick. This seems to me like it would really lend itself to being turned into a kraut or something along those lines. Well, I mean, I I'm not familiar with it, but you could certainly try, you could experiment. I mean, you don't have to make things out of just a singular ingredient, so like the flowers, like you would need an awful lot of flowers to like you know make a pansy uh a kraut, uh um, you know, or or even really like a pansy flavored country wine. Yeah, but you can use things in combinations, so you can just have like that color can sort of like and and that and that distinctive flavor can really just sort of like pepper uh like a more a more mundane, plainer uh uh uh kind of vegetable. Yeah. And that's where I guess the chefing comes in, right? Yeah. So there's one aspect to to the know-how, the process of the fermentation process, but there's another then to then play around with it and get and and to I guess experiment with flavors. Yeah, yeah, totally. Um, you know, I have a friend in the US who makes these outrageous rose-flavored kombuchas. So, you know, she makes the kombucha the typical way, using sugar-sweetened tea as her primary substrate. Right. But then after the primary fermentation, then she puts it in a bottle with rose petals. And so she carbonates it with rose petals, and then it just like takes on the incredible like aroma and flavor of rose. What it's it so it does taste like rose, it doesn't get sort of broken down. That would that that that flair that essence remains. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, you would have thought such a transformative process would take out those gentle aromatic. People also do like floral country wines sometimes. So, like I've had a lot of like marigold wines, um, dandelion wines. Oh, yeah, yeah. And using the flowers of the dandelions. Yeah, I mean, dandelion does seem like a really useful plant, right? I mean, the we've got a little tortoise at home and it loves the leaves and the flowers, but the root is a good coffee substitution. Yeah, yeah, sure. Um, burdock, another common uh um um uh root. You know, I mean Japanese cuisine makes makes great use of burdock, but um fermented burdock root is really delicious. Last week in Portugal I had this these uh fermented horseradish roots that were made by a Ukrainian chef with a restaurant in uh in Lisbon, and he just um coarsely chopped the horseradish roots, fermented them in a brine, and then after they were fermented and they had softened a little bit, he just teased apart strips of the fiber of the root, and they were very tender to eat, they had very full-bodied, sharp flavor like horseradish, yeah, and he was just using them as a like an accent um um on on the plate, like they weren't like the the main course, they were you know they were a condiment. So tell us about your trip because we're honored and lucky to have you, but we are only one of the visits you've been making, and part of this, I guess the Sandal Cats tour that's going on. Yeah, well, you know, I mean this since wild fermentation first came out in 2003, and I self-organized across the US book tour. Um, you know, my book tour really has never stopped. And um, and I do I do a lot of teaching, you know, I mean, some of it close to where I live in the US, um, and some of it in in faraway places. But this tour was actually organized by a woman who was a student of mine some years ago who lives right here in Somerset. Um uh uh, but she's originally from Brazil, and she organized a five-day workshop in uh Alantejo in the south of Portugal with me and some other fermentation teachers. So we were kind of tag teaming, and we had a really diverse group of international students. I know she's planning to do another workshop next year, it's called uh Fermen Academia. You know, and then I did a an event that was primarily um like a local crowd in a town in Portugal called Parede for two days. I did uh an event at a at a restaurant in um in Lisbon, so I had a really nice experience in Portugal, and then and then I came to the UK and did an event in London, uh, a couple of events in Cornwall. I'm here now in Somerset, and then tomorrow uh evening I'll be heading to Cambridge and Saturday I'm doing a like a day of workshops in uh in Cambridge, and then Sunday I'm heading home. Oh I mean it's pretty uh it's pretty far out torn. And as you say, Paula, who's got them she's uh she's somerset-based, she is she is Brazilian, but she's Somerset-based, um, and has got a wonderful pickling business called Get Pickled, which really suits some settings because they tend to get pickled across the board. But what I just want to say for anyone who's interested in fermentation workshops, I mean, first of all, there's a lot of people doing fermentation education. Like, I'm I'm definitely not the only one. I know Paula does some uh some events locally. Lots of people, I'm meeting lots of people around the UK who are engaged in fermentation education, but um for anyone who'd be interested in seeing where where I'm doing workshops, I have a website which is wildfermentation.com, and um you know generally I list them on there andor on my social media on Instagram. I am at Sandor Kraut and Sandor Kraut is my um is my handle and my nickname. So Sandor like my name, but instead of my last name cats, it's Sandor Kraut. Fantastic. Sandor Cats, fermentation revivalist. Thank you for being on the new podcast. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Sandor. Thank you for listening. Subscribe and tune in for more episodes from the estate every month. See you next time.