a fermenter's journal

For March 2026

I had to cancel my workshop at the community gardens this month and so I missed the opportunity to make a preserve with one of my favourite foraged ingredients, alexanders. Feral rather than truly wild, alexanders are one of the many plants brought to this country by the Romans for the benefit of their tables; the roots, stalks, leaves, flower-buds and seeds are all edible, with an intense celery flavour which can easily become soapy and overbearing if eaten in quantity but are good for a little spice here or there - little fistful of leaves as one of the herbs in a green sauce, for example, or the stalks immersed in salt and sugar for a few days and then rinsed and packed in vinegar to make the kind of pickle you chop up and put through things rather than eat out of the jar, which is what we would have made at my cancelled workshop. Now the plants around here are a little far on for that and instead I picked a load of leaves and flower-heads and left them fermenting/rotting in water to make a truly foul-smelling infusion as the basis for a film developer.

I am getting more and more interested in non-edible uses of ferments - at home I made another batch of red cabbage sauerkraut (2% salt, some fennel and caraway seed) and put all of the outer leaves and cores and stuff into a crock of water. As their dye seeps out the rapidly souring liquid (uncontrolled by any salt) turns it from purple to a bright pink which does not look natural; reducing the liquid by half fills the flat with the smell of braised cabbage but produces a surprisingly colour-fast ink. The ink also smells of braised cabbage but there’s not much to be done about that. You could get the same effect without fermenting the infusion by adding a bit of vinegar, of course, but I like to see it happen naturally.

I’m still very new to all this - the first I heard anything about fermented vegetable developers was from a filmmaker called Toby Parker Rees who got in touch with me a few years ago to say

“I'd like to make a short portrait film about you and your approach to pickling things. I'd also like to pickle the film.”