Hello! I'm James Read. I ferment stuff for a living, and wrote Of Cabbages & Kimchi. AMA about making fermented food & drinks, the 1894 Burlesque Opera of Tabasco and why we should have more germs in our kitchens.

Hiya lovely redditors. My name's James and I think we should all be inviting more stuff to live in our food. My first book, Of Cabbages & Kimchi: A Practical Guide to the World of Fermented Food came out yesterday. I'm excited but kind of terrified. Let's talk about it.

About 7 years ago, I was running a pop-up restaurant with my wife to supplement my meagre income as a writer. We were planning our Halloween event (always our favourite of the year), and decided it needed 'vegan zombie brains'. I tried out making cauliflower kimchi, and got completely hooked on using microbes to bring food to life. I started making a lot more kimchi. Possibly too much. I moved from jars to a barrel, then another barrel, then I started naming the barrels. I got it into some local shops, then less local shops, then started exporting it (and then stopped again - I'm in the UK and, well, Brexit...).

I've now written a book all about fermented foods, covering sauerkraut, hot sauce, kimchi, soy sauce, vinegar, kvass, kefir, kombucha, tepache and yogurt. It's full of stories about the surprising history and microbial wonder of fermentation, alongside over sixty recipes ranging from from sauerkraut pierogi to soy sauce caramel dark milk chocolate tart and fig & fennel seed kombucha to kefir panna cotta with orange blossom and thyme, and is packed with some truly beautiful gastro-surrealist illustrations from Marija Tiurina.

I wrote the book partially through lockdown, which made visiting the library for research a little trickier. A lot of the best sources I found weren't in English (and occasionally weren't even in modern languages - shout out to Walther Ryff for the first reference to sauerkraut in Middle High German). I found fermentation absolutely everywhere once I started looking, from 8,000 year-old burial sites to the HMS Endeavour and International Space Station. I stumbled across Russian kvass adverts on Youtube featuring Gene Simmons and Michael Jackson impersonators, and discovered that those miniature Tabasco sauce bottles were originally created as an interval giveaway for an opera.

David Zilber, co-author of The Noma Guide to Fermentation, called it "A fantastically thorough introductory guide to the wild wonderland of fermentation, with imagery that would make Lewis Carroll proud", and Fuchsia Dunlop, author of The Food of Sichuan said "James Read's debut book is both a fascinating read and a practical kitchen guide. I am clearly going to have to start making my own soy sauce!". Very kind of them.

If you're interested, do please buy the book (Waterstones, Amazon UK or Book Depository (free int'l shipping)) - whether you want to read about the folklore, history and science of fermentation, or to learn how to make everything from beetroot kvass borscht to kefir-fried chicken. The pictures are really nice too.

My instagram is @jamesreadwrites

I've goofed off enough on here over the last 14 years, so it's time to give back. AMA.

OK we are broadcasting live. Let's talk about Rampart

EDIT: OK, I've had an amazing 3 hours - I think I've nearly answered everything, and I just need to go and put my daughter to bed, but I'll try and stop back before dinner to catch any more.

EDIT 2, electric boogaloo: Alright, dinner is calling! This has been such fun. I know there's still a couple of questions I haven't gotten to, but I'm pretty active on here so I'll try and come back to them. Thanks everyone - what a great community.