Jennifer De Marco & Jordan Aversman

340

Illustration by Michael White

Fab Ferments started over a simple pot of sauerkraut, circa 2008. The business bloomed, and now the owners share a sustainable farm, making their production model full-on farm to fork.

Why ferment vegetables? Jennifer: It was historically done to preserve the food and to make it more digestible. For example, when you bury yucca, the fermentation process pulls out the natural cyanide.

What’s your favorite fermented snack style? Jordan: We call them pro-biotic condiments. I love the Holy Jalapeños on a pizza or burrito.

Where do you get your ingredients? Jennifer: We strive to use ingredients that are certified organic or grown by local farmers. While Fab Ferments is not technically certified organic, we say we’re self-certified because we’re harder on ourselves than any certification program out there. We also run a farm, where we grow as much as we can.

How is your kraut different from the grocery store’s? Jordan: The sauerkraut you see on the shelves has been pasteurized and uses vinegar. They can make it in a day’s production—whereas we take our all-organic ingredients, age them in a handmade German stoneware crock in a temperature-controlled room for three to five weeks.

That sounds hard to mass-produce. Jennifer: We’re concerned about quality, not quantity. We pack and label every jar by hand, we grow our vegetables, we pound our kraut—there’s no machines. It’s just us.

Originally published in the April 2014 issue.

Facebook Comments