Ferment : Simple Recipes from My Multicultural Kitchen

A clear, confident, and joyful guide to making―and cooking with―miso, kimchi, quick pickles, kombucha, and more.

“Kenji is a fermenting guru.”―Tim Spector, author of Spoon-Fed and founder of the nutrition app ZOE

Ferment gives you all that’s needed to start your fermented foods adventure―whether you want to make simple pickles, dive into lactofermentation, or discover flavor-packed meals to cook with your homemade (or store-bought!) ferments.

Pickles and ferments bring so much flavor and variety to meals, and they’re much easier to make than they seem. Enter third-culture cook and fermenting expert Kenji Morimoto, who shows just how simple it is to introduce homemade kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, miso, super-quick pickles, and more into your everyday cooking with delicious, gut-healthy results.

Recent research encourages us to eat thirty plants a week to help our microbiome to thrive. Thanks to Kenji’s inventive, globally inspired recipes, eating fermented foods becomes a pleasure as well as the healthiest choice. Whether it's Kimchi Onion Bhajis served with Cilantro and Mint Miso Chutney, Green Bean Miso Soup with Curried Crispy Lima Beans, Kombucha Sorbet, or Preserved Rhubarb and Mixed Berry Pound Cake, this is flavor-forward food like you haven’t seen before.

Part one shows you how to make your own ferments and pickles, giving you all the trouble-shooting advice and step-by-step guidance you need, plus plenty of Kenji’s unique spins: think Watermelon Rind Kimchi, Pumpkin Miso, and Koji Chimichurri. Part two introduces easy and irresistible apps, dinners, desserts, and even cocktails to make with them. (Or, if you prefer, you can prepare them with your favorite store-bought products instead.)

Ferment is a stylish and practical cookbook that will help you bring this ancient technique into your own kitchen.

This edition has been adapted for the US market.

Color photographs throughout

Kenji Morimoto is a fourth-generation Japanese American currently based in London. Food is an essential part of his cultural identity; as a child, he was in charge of making tsukemono (Japanese pickles) for family gatherings, and as an adult his passion for exploring global fermentation traditions has only grown. During the pandemic, he started his Instagram @kenjcooks to document his interest in fermentation and connect the dots between diasporic food traditions and his own. Since then, he’s cooked in fermentation-focused kitchens in Poland, run fermentation-based supper clubs, led workshops on koji and kimchi, partnered with companies such as MOB, Tasty UK, and Sous Chef, and worked with the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen as a guest chef. He was a finalist for the 2023 BBC Food and Farming Digital Creator of the Year Award.