Beatrice Dalle, a chubby pigeon, invisible microbes and a Rich Tea biscuit

Abundance 7 February 2025

I have been sat too long these past weeks. The unavoidables conspired into a month-long festival of calls, zooms and typing taking all but the last hours of each day.

This morning, as I write, a band of sky the colour of a Rich Tea biscuit picks out the scattering of trees on the horizon above my screen, above it the silhouette of a chubby pigeon is backdropped by school swimming pool blue: imagine someone added too much water to a watercolour of Betty Blue.

It’s about time I moved these bones, and it’s about time I said goodbye to the festive cheese baby I’m in danger of carrying into a second trimester.

This weekend I shall walk; today, I shall make tepache.

Tepache, tepache, tepache: I can’t not say it to the empty house when I make it. The word ricochets around the kitchen like the Lone Ranger’s bullet when I make it for the first time in a while. I’m making tepache because it’s delicious, but more because I need everything it gives me.

Traditionally made with pineapple, today I’m using rhubarb because forced rhubarb is what makes sluggish February days bearable.

Unlike kombucha and many other ferments that require a bacterial ‘mother’ to be added, tepache relies on naturally occurring bacteria for its transformation: what’s on the fruit and in the air is all it takes to work.

Invisible microbes on us, in my kitchen, on this rhubarb, reveal themselves not by inflating to a size at which I might see them, but in their action - a trail of fizzy, sour breadcrumbs letting me know that very specific, beneficial, lacto-bacteria have been munching through the fruit’s carbohydrates, digesting the sugar, and creating lactic acid (hence the sourness in ferments¹) and carbon dioxide (hence the fizz) while they go about it.

I make tepache because it works physical and mental magic on me: I feel better when I drink fermented drinks and I feel better when I eat fermented food. Equally, I feel better when I ferment - just the doing of it. I require the magic of fermentation as much as the fizz.

Fermenting very often results in the ingredients aligning more completely with how our body can assimilate them, and in doing so we introduce our gut to representatives from the bacterial community that promote healthy digestion and are crucial to physical and mental wellbeing. The combination ensures we assimilate more of the nutrients in what we eat. In effect, fermented foods feed us twice. We are, simply, made to thrive on these foods.

Which is why today must be a tepache day, despite it not being a certain success. Fermenting in February is a fool’s game: natural ferments like tepache work best in warm weather, the activity of the microbes hurried along considerably, but as much as anything a return to fermenting feels like a marker laid down for spring to come, from hibernation released.

I remember the instant fermentation gripped my mind: coming in from yet another run that I hoped would see me enthusiastic for the blessings apparent in others, collapsing on the sofa and into the arms of a Radio 4 interview about fermenting. The conversation I heard was quite the revelation, a door through which years of pleasure and exploration were to follow.

I wrote this at the time; it found its way into my book SOUR:

I unthinkingly pictured the internals of digestion as a slightly refined tangle of bicycle inner tube leading to a hot water bottle of a stomach, in which all the sorting of Useful from Useless took place, before another slightly more direct inner tube took the Useless to be reunited with the outside world. In my post-run melting, my awareness that the gut must be something more complex than inner tubes and hot water bottles was transformed into a sense of wonder. Not only are we apparently forested with living organisms working to our benefit, research increasingly indicates that our physical and mental wellbeing owe much to the vitality and diversity of this remarkable ecology. The guest assured us that in the same way that mental health was little spoken of three decades ago yet its importance is now appreciated as it should be, so too our internal microbiome would come to be recognised as a world as fascinating and undiscovered as outer space.

The years that followed have made me only more certain of those words; more certain that while we always think of ourselves at the technological and evolutionary limit, ascended all we have to, that we are really simple clapping seals, still too dim to act even in our own medium-term interests, too certain of our own wisdom that our complicated mix of thought, feelings, desires and more reside behind our noses, to realise that our other brain lies within this microbiome.

So I spent a day with Sandor Katz, the brilliant Gaby and Hans Wieland from the Neantog in Ireland were hugely influential in drawing me into this enriching world, and the creative Naomi Devlin inspired every time I ran into her. I was hooked and remain so.

And so after a few months without, I shall slip back into the microbial sea via tepache with St Dominic’s Preview² filling the air, and I know this will just be the start of this year’s ferments. My relationship with fermenting is very similar to my relationship with Van Morrison: I’m either full in or I’m full out. It’s rare I have one ferment on the go; it’s rare I listen to one Van album at a time. I know that in a few days it’s likely I’ll be making kimchi with Veedon Fleece in the background, perhaps then the hot and spicy kraut that reveals every micromillimetre³ of my sinuses.

I am micro-farming, harnessing the power of invisible livestock in my kitchen, and in so doing enriching my insides, livening my brain, sharpening my mental capacity and feeling intentional, and that’s exactly what I need in early February.

Rhubarb and ginger tepache

This is a foolproof recipe⁴, that is almost impossible to predict. Depending on the time of year, the temperature, the nature of your house and what feels like a gazillion seemingly random variables, this can be a ready in a couple of days or reluctantly reach its peak a week or two later. Embrace the uncertainty, for there is nothing you can do to change it: taste regularly, and bottle it when it has some zing.

Try this with pineapple so ripe you need to release its grip on the kitchen surface with the help of a plastic ruler when the weather suits it, and play with the spices and add herbs as you see fit: cinnamon, lemon verbena, lemongrass, Ethiopian passion berries, and bay are very good here.

Makes around 1 litre

Rhubarb tepache from the last batch as the light is shocking today - the little bits are crushed Ethiopian passion berries, every bit as good as they sound

500g rhubarb
180g (6oz) raw cane sugar
a fat cigar of fresh ginger
1 sheriff’s badge of star anise
1 medium hot chilli, optional

Unenthusiastically wash the rhubarb stalks to remove any dust etc, but not too thoroughly, as you’ll risk ridding the fruit of its natural microbes. Top and tail the fruit.

Slice the rhubarb into 1cm pieces.

Add the sugar and 5cm (2in) or so of water to a sterilized 1.5 litre Kilner jar and shake to encourage the sugar to start dissolving. Add the rhubarb pieces to the jar, then the remaining ingredients, and fill with water leaving an inch or so of headspace at the top of the jar. Fix a piece of muslin in place over the top using an elastic band.

Allow this to ferment at room temperature for 4 days, checking a few times in the last day and a half to skim off any white fug that may have formed on the surface. It will gradually develop a light fizz as fermentation develops. These 4 days may become 2 weeks at this time of year: be patient.

When ready, strain and bottle the juice in bottles with a flip-top lid, chilling it before serving. I often leave a few bottles out of the fridge to ferment a little longer, developing more of a sparkle and becoming less sweet as the sugars are devoured by the fermentation process.

1. Other bacteria and acids are involved in some ferments - such as acetic acid in vinegar

2. There aren’t many better opening lines than ‘Shammy cleaning all the windows, singing songs about Edith Piaf’s soul’

3. This may not be an actual unit of measurement

4. Last week, one of the things that has kept me sedentary these last weeks involved chatting to Brad Leone on zoom. He is one of those people who really opened the door on interesting ferments and more via his work on Bon Appetite and since. If you find watching rather than reading a recipe more easily places it in your mind, check this out