Self Evaluation
Benjamin Reynolds
Fall quarter,2018 has been my first brush with Evergreen’s Independent Learning Contract through Sarah Williams Student Originated Studies: Food and Agriculture program. It’s been quite the experience drawing up my own study, cutely titled Cultural Preserves: Fermenting Thoughts On Food Preservation. My whole quarter has in one way or the other, been me making some plans and then it being a 50/50 whether reality would permit them.
For the first five weeks, I both wrote and rewrote my ILC several times and got in on two internship opportunities, one at Encore Chocolate and Tea, the other at Cascadia Homebrew that didn’t really get off the ground. Encore was entering its busiest time of year, and the Brewmaster at Cascadia ended up juggling a new schedule with their second job. I believe both of them are open to Winter quarter internships, however.
Meetings made or missed aside, I began with a singular focus on fermentation that broadened to food preservation in a more general way. The Kitchen As Laboratory, The Art Of Fermentation, and The Noma Guide To Fermentation ended up being my guiding texts, along with Mouthfeel which I had from a previous class. My relationship with these texts, this quarter, has largely been that of the reference guide, Mouthfeel and The Kitchen As Laboratory helping with both in-depth recipes and providing the design of the blog posts that are my reportage. The Art Of Fermentation, while a very solid book on its topic, leaves one to one’s own devices as far as recipes are concerned, though all basic ingredients and processes are communicated. The Noma Guide assumes your ownership of metric scales and specialty equipment, but also provides a healthy vault of information. I also ended up using the internet quite a bit and am now quite thankful for the existence of Three Lily Provisions and Mountain Feed, Farm And Supply.
Actually grappling with the hands-on aspect was something that kept me challenged throughout the quarter, and I did manage through several methods of preservation: drying herbs by hanging them out, drying tomatoes and pumpkin seeds in the oven, making both tomato and pumpkin paste/preserves and fermenting cultured butter(and keeping the buttermilk alive through addition), sweet chili salsa, a sourdough starter and making kombucha. Through the buttermilk, sourdough starter, kombucha, and arguably, the butter, I’ve ended up in contact with living sauces, fermentable substances that, if nurtured properly, can keep hundreds of years in the right hands.
As far as discussing and acting food preservation in the context of the events I’ve attended, this quarter… I discussed, tried and purchased, and may have accidently aged some of my own tea based on conversations at Whatcom Teas tea bar, and Miro Teas very good, full range booth at the NW Tea Festival. At the NW Chocolate Festival, Malai Chocolate had a bar with cacao that had been fermented under special conditions (but, because they were busy, I was not able to ask them about what and how) and I heard the head of Grimm Bros farm and hot sauce maker discuss the natural preservative properties and shelf stability of their hot sauce making process. Evergreen’s Harvest Festival featured both a cider pressing workshop and a distillation demonstration in the same workspace. At the Biodynamics Conference, I attended the microbiome discussion, which was largely about diversifying and influencing (in other words, selecting) the microbial life in the speaker’s home garden and the parallel structure of roots and the human gut.
Overall, my study mutated and pivoted pretty much every week, though I feel like I managed to hew towards my stated goals. Not sure I’d do an ILC, again. Though it’s very nice and freeing in regards to having a totally flexible work and study schedule, the grounding of a regular classroom schedule and being able to more regularly see my peers and having the study designed by someone not me are all things I have a new appreciation of from a very different angle than had I not done this.