Q&A Interview: Kirsten Shockey of Fermenting Change
On the 10th anniversary of her classic guide to fermentation, with a new edition.
Today I’m thrilled to bring you fellow Substack author and longtime fermentation fan
of . Together with her husband, Christopher Shockey, Kirsten is the bestselling author of Fermented Vegetables, re-releasing this month with a new update for its tenth anniversary. In addition, the two wrote the award-winning books The Big Book of Cidermaking; Miso, Tempeh, Natto & Other Tasty Ferments; and Fiery Ferments. Kirsten also wrote Homebrewed Vinegar1.As someone who’s personally benefited from Fermented Vegetables, I’m also happy to announce we’ll be giving away a copy of the new edition to one lucky paid subscriber. Upgrade by 9 am CDT on April 12 to be eligible.
Kirsten graciously agreed to answer my questions over a couple weeks of written back-and-forth covering her fascinating fermentation journey, which has led her back home again. Here’s our conversation.
Lisa: I understand you and your husband, Christopher Shockey, wrote Fermented Vegetables together, and it’s now being re-released as a tenth-anniversary edition with 65 new recipes. It’s a gorgeous book from which I’ve adopted many recipes for my own kitchen and city homestead. Why should folks get excited about the new edition?
Kirsten: It’s true—one would ask why change something that has worked so well. The first edition has been translated into six languages, a copy is on display in the Kimchi Museum in Seoul, Korea, and it has sold over 250K copies. The truth is that our understanding—our being both Christopher and mine, but also the science—of fermentation and its importance to our own health has changed exponentially in the last ten years. We wanted to include more about gut health in a gentle way, without being nerdy.
Fermented Vegetables also changed my trajectory. There is so much more I had to say. My story is a journey from home fermenter to small-business owner to author and fermentation educator. I still marvel at how this thing that I enjoyed became a full-time job—by accident, by luck, by being at the right place at the right time. I will never know. In the last ten years, I have learned so much more about how the microbes that we collaborate with can be coaxed to work for us and the flavor we seek in so many beautiful ways.
I was delighted when my publisher offered to let me have a stab at revising the book and including many more techniques and highlighting makers from all over. When we wrote the first edition, we were hard-pressed to find makers—professional, culinary, or home. We scoured the internet, and it was hard to find much about fermentation or its makers. Now there is an international community of people sharing their knowledge, their successes and failures. This new edition also gives a nod to how the human culture around fermented foods has changed.
Lisa: That’s fascinating… I’ve been thinking of asking you this question but didn’t want to do it in a gushy way, so you’ve given me a great opening: What’s it like to be part of this gut-health revolution? To have played a key role in returning culinary culture to these rediscovered roots?
Kirsten: I imagine like anyone who is doing a thing when you’re in that space and with people who are interested it feels no different than any type of work. I feel like it is something that happens one beautiful human at a time. I love when people share their own journey to discovery or healing with me. Sometimes the stories are around flavors. Often people will tell me, I thought the flavor of Grandpa’s pickles died with him, but when I tried the pickles in your book, I discovered the secret ingredient: fermentation. Or, people will have made major shifts in their diet by learning fermentation. This makes me feel like what I am doing makes small differences, but I don’t lay claim to anything other than being a teacher by sharing what I have learned.
Lisa: You and Christopher have both written on Substack in the past, but now it’s solely your baby. What’s your vision for
?Kirsten: Christopher started our Substack in 2020 when the world was trying to figure out how to best keep our immune systems strong. It was natural to lean into the science of gut health at the time, and as many of us did, we had a lot of time each day. When things started to open up again, Christopher began working full time for a local music festival, and his Substack went dark. I spent the next year or so thinking about how I wanted to engage with our community in my own voice. I see Fermenting Change as more about fermentation as metaphor in life. I want to help people feel comfortable with fermentation and share things I am thinking about. The full title is Fermenting Change at Home with Kirsten K. Shockey. I see the “at Home” as the center of this. Readers hear from me at my home, and I hope to inspire them in their homes.
Lisa: I love the idea of home in this context. As you might know from reading Brunette Gardens, home is a central concern of mine, the idea of returning home, to finding home in the garden. I love the double entendre in “Fermenting Change,” and the idea that change begins in the gut is powerful. Do you want to say more about that?
Kirsten: Home is interesting, isn’t it? It shapes us, and we shape it. At some point it feels hard to untangle what came first. I spent the first 15 years at my current home mostly at home. Raising kids and food was all centered around the home. (Nothing like dairy animals to keep you there! Oh, but I miss the milk, cream, butter, and cheeses.) Then Fermented Vegetables came out, and I found myself talking about all the things I learned at home away from home. Sometimes it felt so disconnected to be sharing a life that I barely had time to live. Now I am bringing myself back to my home. With Substack, I can share more than just fermentation but write a more rounded story of my interactions with this place (and microbes.) I feel like I have a lot to share about collaborating with life that is not human (microbes, plants, animals). The stories, the observations, the recipes, I hope, will all knit together to inspire my readers to see the magic and find tiny positive changes in their lives.
Lisa: That’s inspiring! I can’t wait to read more on Fermenting Change. Tell us about The Fermentation School.
Kirsten: The Fermentation School was our other Covid pivot. We had been traveling educators—Christopher moved his education to Substack, and we together began creating videos. He was behind the camera and the editor. Since there is no way I would have the patience to edit our videos, this worked out perfectly. At the same time, my friend Meredith, also a food educator, found herself in the same situation. She and I realized that it made so much more sense, in this noisy world, to combine our efforts in order to get found. We soon became excited about inviting other creators to join us. We wanted to flip the publishing model on its head.
We amplify the voices of independent educators, promote collectively, and provide community support, and each instructor maintains creative control of her product. Additionally, our profit-sharing model favors the creator, not the platform, to ensure that knowledge sharers can continue to thrive.
Now The Fermentation School is a women-owned and women-led virtual education company that amplifies the voices of independent creators to empower learning and build culture. We believe that knowledge of and respect for the fermentation found in every level of the food system is key to people’s stewardship of earth, self, and community. In celebration of that belief, we bring together wisdom, perspective, skill, and inspiration into one unique, virtual community.
Lisa: Thank you for that. Sounds like a fantastic endeavor. I just joined your mailing list.
As you know, I lived in the Pacific Northwest for 15 years, and I’ll tell you now my husband also grew up there. It’s definitely still part of us, that hauntingly beautiful place. You live on an Oregon homestead, and that’s been the backdrop for your small business as well as your education and publishing work. How does that place inform what you do? I’m thinking of the vibrant food scene out there and other fermenters like OlyKraut, for example, but please don’t limit yourself to that, if the landscape also somehow informs your ferments?
Kirsten: I have to agree it is a magical part of the world.
This whole journey has been very organic. Fermenting started with huge, century-old apple trees and a cider press. Followed by milk coming into the home twice a day—one must learn to make cheese. Then there was a crock of kraut that came to us as a Christmas present. Abundance of food requires preservation, and fermentation is the best way to achieve that. It was all just part of feeding my children the best that I could. At some point, I realized I did this preservation thing well. And so it was, I thought, that it might also be a way to bring in some income.
Our little corner of the Pacific Northwest has had a vibrant organic farmer community since we’ve lived here. These were the friends we made. When we decided to have a small-food business, it was natural to work with our friends to make use of their seconds and overages… because I was helping keep, say, 200 pounds of Walla Walla onions that wouldn’t last the week from becoming waste. I was informing what I fermented by what was available and often needed to be used. This pushed my creativity and a wild, innovative, inventory of flavors. People loved it. Well, the ones that were ready to eat soured vegetables.
I loved this. We were helping the farmers, reducing food waste, and being forced to think about how to ferment vegetables that were not commonly fermented at the time. This eventually led to teaching and the book.
Lisa: That’s a great origin story, and a marker for our time, I believe, as we rethink food waste and reclaim our ancient fermentation heritage. Thanks so much for your time and attention, Kirsten, especially since I know this is a particularly busy spring for you, with travel and this book relaunch in the mix. I wish you a fizzy, ferment-y spring and beyond!
Next week, I’ll share one of my favorite recipes from Fermented Vegetables here on Brunette Gardens, pickled onions (cebollas encurtidas).
Do you ferment your own foods? Which is your favorite vegetable to ferment?
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What's your favorite vegetable to ferment? Ours is definitely cabbage, with green tomatoes running second.
Lisa, thank you first and foremost for bringing this wonderful information and these wonderful people to my attention. I totally believe in the need for fermented foods and how it is not only the way our foods were supposed to enable health and to support us in so many ways, but the way our food was supposed to naturally extend its worth to our health, from garden, to fresh and raw or cooked, and then fermented. It is the way I feel right now at 70, as if my life mirrors this experience and I am in the stage of "fermentation" myself. Sounds weird I know, but I have a whole lot of wisdom, experience, knowledge, and so on, from birth to now, and it I can enrich others in their lives as fermented food does if they are willing to be open to it!