83 in ferment #in ferment curated by Laura Colleo in the name of pasteur. new dialogues between science and fermentation There’s a good chance that several alembics must have blown up in Pasteur’s laboratory when, through the pipettes which later will be named after him, he inoculated microorganisms in wine in order to study its reactions. Thanks to his observations we have the first scientific truths in relation to the mechanics of fermentation, laws that put an end to the discussion between those who believed that it would have generate due to the presence of probiotics and who claimed it was just a chemical reaction, nothing to do with yeasts and bacteria. In 1857 Pasteur cut the proverbial head off the snake, coming to the indisputable conclusion that «fermentation, far from being an inanimate phenomenon, is a vital process, possible only thanks to the presence of live microorganisms7», thus laying the foundations for the controlled application of fermentative development in foods. After the purely technical study of Pasteur, chemists and microbiologists investigated and defined the rules for maintaining fermentation quality and nutritional stability, and came to fix the importance, nowadays established, of their role on the intestinal microbiome with its consequent impact on emotional and cerebral activity. However, to get today's results several attempts, failures, acknowledgments and achievements necessarily had to happen. After all there could be no discovery without experimentation, innovation without failure: the strong point is to keep on trying, even passing by inevitable explosions, as happened to Pasteur and as also Ferran Adrià knows well, he who repeatedly smeared the walls of El Bulli with slimy and gelatinous substances, definitely uninviting looking, before rising to the peak of worldwide gastronomy8.
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