Best cookbook on fermenting

[gfron1]

Mostly vegetables, but not limited to that - what's the best book out there.

[Shelby]

I use the heck out of The Joy Of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich.

[Smithy]

The Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Katz, has been making quite a splash. I'm a pickling newbie and have only purchased his 'baby' book, Wild Fermentation, but the full blown Art is reputed to be encyclopedic.

 

Edited to add Amazon links.

[imafoodie]

Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon

[pbear]

FWIW, the book I found most useful is available online and free: Fermented Fruits & Vegetables by Battcock & Azam-Ali (1998).  No recipes, but a really good explanation of what's going on biologically. 

 

For recipes, I like Ziedrich a lot.  Have looked at Katz at least a dozen times and always put it back, but maybe that's just me.

[Werdna]

Best one is the one that drills home the point- use starter cultures.  Best kimchi is the one made with some of your previous batch.  I'm not sure where along the line I figured that out, but once I did fermenting lost the mystery (and sort of the need for recipes, you want it to be one or more of sour, salty, sweet to various degrees, and control what grows on/in it

 

(I think Nourishing Traditions was the best one for me, I recall it encourages expermentation which shocked me at first, as I had been reading the horror's of living-food in my blue-ball book of preserving)

[helenjp]

Nourishing Traditions came along a bit late for me -I'd already encountered most of the ideas elsewhere - but it's well worth seeking out if you haven't already really dug into this area yet.

Surprisingly a lot of good information on the internet, especially in some of the university extension websites in "fermentation homeland" states.

http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can6a_ferment.html

Some of my favorites are things that are only partially fermented, such as Turkish pickles - not designed to keep for long periods.