About

What Freshie Ferment is

Freshie Ferment is a structured reference encyclopedia for the world's living fermentation traditions. Not a blog, not a recipe collection, not a personal newsletter — a reference work organized into six cross-linked dimensions: Ferments, Categories, Cultures, Origins, Pairings, and Guides.

The encyclopedia documents 59 ferments (sauerkraut to natto, balsamic to gravlax), 8 categories that organize them, 15 microbial cultures that produce them, 29 geographic and cultural origins that anchor traditions, 22 canonical pairings that complete dishes, and 7 foundational guides that underwrite all of it. Every entry cross-links to every other dimension where relevant — origin profiles link to their member ferments; ferment profiles link to their cultures and origins; pairings link to all five other dimensions.

What it isn't

It isn't medical advice. It isn't a substitute for hands-on apprenticeship with traditional practitioners (Korean grandmothers making winter kimchi, Italian acetai tending balsamic batteries, Indonesian tempeh-makers selecting Rhizopus, San Francisco bakers feeding sourdough mothers). It isn't comprehensive — there are documented fermentation traditions the encyclopedia doesn't yet cover, and gaps that future versions will address.

It also isn't a commercial product. Reading the encyclopedia is free and will remain so. There are no ads, no premium tiers, no email-newsletter capture, no monetization theater. The site exists because building it satisfies an editorial interest, not because it's a revenue vehicle.

The Veryation portfolio

Freshie Ferment is one project in the Veryation portfolio — a sole-proprietorship DBA operated by Matt Crittenden in the San Francisco Bay Area. Veryation is the parent identity for a portfolio of structured reference and tool projects across various domains: live events aggregation (ture.live), free utilities (67fresh.com), quantum computing reference (hadamard.app), and several other in-development properties.

The portfolio's working principle is that small, well-designed reference and utility sites — built without venture capital, ad networks, or growth-hacking — can persist as genuine public goods. Freshie Ferment is the largest single property in the portfolio at over a thousand pages across eight languages.

Editorial perspective

The encyclopedia operates with several editorial commitments:

Living traditions, not museum pieces. Every documented tradition has practitioners alive today carrying it forward. The encyclopedia documents how things are practiced now, not just how they appeared in 19th-century ethnographic texts.

Native scripts preserved. Where a tradition uses non-Latin script (Korean Hangul, Japanese kanji, Chinese hanzi, Tamil, Amharic Ge'ez, Georgian, Arabic, etc.), we render the native script alongside Latin transliteration. The encyclopedia covers 14+ writing systems across its entries.

Multi-language at v1. UI chrome, navigation, section headings, and per-entry taglines are translated into 8 languages (English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German, French, Italian) for v1. Long-form editorial bodies remain English at v1, to be translated by qualified editors in v2.

Sandor Katz acknowledgment. The contemporary home-fermentation revival traces in significant part to Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation (2003) and The Art of Fermentation (2012). The encyclopedia includes an explicit acknowledgment of this debt in its first guide. We document traditions that long predate Katz, but the accessibility of those traditions to a contemporary Anglophone audience owes much to his work.

Foundational over comprehensive. Where choices had to be made, we documented foundational and well-anchored traditions before niche specialties. The 22 canonical pairings reflect this — kimchi-and-rice and miso-soup are foundational; we cover them. Niche variants are noted within profiles rather than getting their own entries.

Acknowledgments

The encyclopedia draws on many sources: academic papers, published cookbooks, ethnographic literature, traditional practitioners' interviews, and the substantial body of public food-science writing. Sources are listed in entry-level reference notes where appropriate. The synthesis and editorial framing are original; the underlying cultural and scientific knowledge belongs to the traditions and researchers that produced it.

Particular thanks to: Sandor Katz (whose books reshaped contemporary fermentation literacy), Harold McGee (whose On Food and Cooking anchors the science), Nancy Singleton Hachisu (Japanese pickling reference), the Korean kimjang practitioners whose 2013 UNESCO designation contextualizes Korean fermentation depth, the Italian acetaie maintaining Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale DOP standards, and the many others whose work makes this reference possible.

Future direction

The encyclopedia is built to grow. Anticipated v2 expansions include: editor-translated long-form content in the 7 non-English languages, additional ferments (the current 59 covers the foundational territory but is not exhaustive), additional origins (West Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia are underrepresented relative to East Asia and Europe), additional pairings, and deeper guide content.

Suggestions, corrections, and proposed additions: [email protected]. We read everything and incorporate where editorially appropriate.

Contact

General inquiries: [email protected] Editorial corrections: [email protected] Technical issues: [email protected]

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