After a busy summer touring my new book, Adventures in Fermentation, hosting workshops at the world’s best restaurants, and doing my usual fermentation-fuelled fieldwork in the wild world of microbes, I can feel worn down by the new places, new spaces, new beds, and the inevitable slew of airport and train station meals. After years of maintaining a busy travel schedule, I’ve learned that it doesn’t take much to feel more human again. Here are some of the small rituals I return to that gently pull me back into myself, my home, and the rhythms of my body.
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Morning coffee: made slow, or smart
There’s coffee, and then there’s coffee. At home, just before I go to sleep, on a sideboard one short step away from the bed, I prep my Moccamaster: measure the water, slot in a new paper filter, portion in the grounds, and set the timer. The ritual isn’t in the drinking — it’s in this setup. I love being woken not by the sound of an alarm, but by the gurgle of the machine and the smell of fresh brew curling across the bedroom. I take my first bleary-eyed sip back in bed or down in the study, and the freshly brewed cup eases me into the waking world.
When I’m on the move — book tours, flights, strange hotel rooms — I carry an AeroPress and a small tub of pre-ground beans. It’s quick, tidy, and makes reliably excellent coffee. There’s a small pleasure in the method that soothes me: scoop, pour, plunge. I brew coffee in airports, even on planes. All I need is hot water. Knowing I can have a very good cup of coffee anywhere — anywhere — brings me a deep sense of calm and security. A reclaiming of ritual and comfort, no matter how chaotic my surroundings.
- Stirring a ferment
There’s something anchoring about tending to something alive. Periodically — perhaps not as often as I should — I check in on the ferments in my workshop: stirring a batch of miso, giving things a sniff, or just pressing an errant cabbage leaf back into its brine. At one point, I had some 150 kilos of ferments going, which made checking everything a full-day affair. These days, my selection is far more modest. But the act of checking in — seeing how they are, how they’ve changed, how I might use them — connects me to microbial time. When we ferment, we must set our watches by their clocks. Not vice versa. Along with the promise of delicious bounty, slowing down to the more-than-human rhythms of our microbial collaborators is one of the great rewards of fermenting at home.
- A mug of miso
On gray afternoons when I’ve already had my fill of caffeine for the day, I’ll whisk a forkful of miso into a mug of hot water, and maybe add a few dashes of a hot sauce I have in the fridge or ferment cupboard. An unorthodox serving of miso, I know, but one of pure comfort — salty, savory, with a subtle backbone of spice — and a pick-me-up. Mug in hand, breathing in those warm, malty vapors and watching the miso sediment swirl and settle, I can feel my nervous system downshift.
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Five minutes of quiet
No phone. No music. No talking. Just five minutes of breathing in (relative!) silence. Or as close to that as possible: Interruptions are common. I make a point of doing this on work trips or days when I’m giving lots of talks or stuck in back-to-back meetings; times when I’m always “on” — and often overstimulated, even if I don’t realize it. It works wonders for me.
These are small rituals, easy to overlook. But they act as a kind of scaffolding, providing ballast and resilience against the noise and friction of life. Like fermentation itself, they can appear to be simple but are deeply transformative.