For amateur picklers and kimchi-makers, there is a new edition of “Wild Fermentation,” the 2003 manual
that helped its author, Sandor Katz, become a heroic figure among cooks who ferment their own foods.
“You’re constantly in this thing that’s not reality, and eating food can be the most real act you can partake in.”
At Lalito, his restaurant in Manhattan, Mr. Gonzalez serves food he describes as “hippie Chicano,” like vegan chicharrones
and the brown goddess cucumber salad, with brown mole vinaigrette, mint and candied pepitas, as well as dishes like eggplant topped with tahini, lemon juice and Japanese gomasio seasoning.
Like the back-to-the landers and Whole Earth Catalog readers before them, a new generation is once again becoming interested in fermentation, especially do-it-yourself projects, a shift
that Mr. Katz attributes to people becoming more critical of the industrial food system and seeking alternatives.
We can appreciate their flavors, textures and general possibilities because we —
that is, the big collective we — know so much more about cooking foods of all kinds.”
The current food mood may also be a reaction to the more exhausting aspects of life in the digital era.
The last several months have seen the release of many vegetable-rich
and raw-food cookbooks, including ones from Lucky Peach; Martha Stewart; Wolfgang Puck; the vegan website Thug Kitchen; Sarah Britton, of the website My New Roots, whose Instagram feed of bowls and sprouts has over 330,000 followers; and Amanda Chantal Bacon of Moon Juice, a small chain of juice shops that started in Venice, in Los Angeles.
“It’s as true in any creative field as it is in food.”
Deborah Madison, the author and chef who made vegetarian cooking sophisticated with her 1987 cookbook, “Greens,” has seen this food before: She cooked it in the 1960s
and ’70s, as one of “a growing number of people who were trying to cook differently from our parents,” she said.