I love tomatoes. I love to cook with them, slice them in the height of their ripeness, salt and eat, but I especially love them fermented. 

In 2015, in a Dripping Springs commercial kitchen, I realized if you could add sugar and salt to whole tomatoes and cover them, in a few days they would start to fizz and create their own carbonated liquid. And so we started making tomato + buttermilk sodas for the farmers market, making Rasam Podi salt and mixing the tomato liquid with a liquor for carbonated cocktails. It was my first foray with fermenting tomatoes. 

I started to research more about preserved tomatoes; on how you can make fermented pastes, tomato water, and read a lot of Sandor Katz, (something anybody interested in learning about fermentation should do). 

Later I learned about wine yeasts, using yeasts leftover from wine or yeasts used for wines, meant for grapes can have a brilliant effect on tomatoes and their levels of sugars. If left on whole fruit, and covered, you can then have a carbonic maceration technique to create tomatoes bursting like Pop Rocks. 

Fermentation is the chemical change in an ingredient/ingredients caused by yeasts or bacteria or something microbial. By changing that chemical structure you can get champagne, sauerkraut, yogurt, the list is very long with a lot of familiarity. Fermentation is also our first foray into preservation. But here is a fact that seems to escape a lot of fermentation discussions. It is always naturally occurring. We add controls to the process in the name of taste and food safety, but fermentation happens naturally to ingredients. 

I asked a winemaker what he thinks of the natural wine movement, and he replied that there really isn’t much to think about. He’s for it, but everything can be natural, like bread, whether or not you add yeast, the dough will naturally ferment, to what success is up to you, but essentially, wine is happening with or without help. In my opinion, this was a really amazing answer to essentially say that the branding is great, but it also really solidifies the nature of fermentation. Ingredients if they are not consumed, and exposed to oxygen will go through a certain amount of fermentation before going bad. 

Now does that mean you don’t need to follow rules? No. That is not what it means at all.