Visitor Questions

In culinary practices throughout the world, beans are often fermented prior to consumption, and research studies show fermentation to be a safe and desirable step that can add to the nourishment provided by the beans. However, most individuals in the U.S. are not familiar with the practice of fermentation in home cooking, and they are equally unaccustomed to the tastes and textures of fermented foods, including fermented beans. Since factors like pH (degree of acidity) can greatly influence the success of fermentation, and because unwanted microorganisms can sometimes be present at the time of fermentation, we do not recommend fermenting your beans without some prior training and experience in this area of cooking. If you are interested in this area, you may want to visit the following website:

http://www.eden-foundation.org/project/ferment.html

On this site, you will also find a link to the graduate thesis on food fermentation written by Peter Sahlin at the Division of Applied Nutrition and Food Chemistry, Center for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the Lund Institute of Technology at Lund University in Lund, Sweden.