Science - first and foremost chemistry and physics - has always been at the root of cuisine, whether we do not pay any attention to it [hopefully not everyone will be thinking about the Maillard reaction9 cooking the roast] or rather that we deepen it to create new combinations, new forms and flavours, as French chemist Hervé This, father of molecular cuisine, sensed since the early 1990s and whose association with the avant-garde chef Pierre Gagnaire gave way to the gastronomic revolution that, in the following decade, would have conquered the world. Fermentation awaited science groping. Since its casual discovery, this natural process has been applied for hundreds of years to the preservation of food without man knowing what was actually going on during the transformation he was witnessing, therefore considering it magical and mysterious in nature and relegating it to a purely philosophical and alchemical field. 84 in fermento It was only from the end of the eighteenth century that chemists began to analyse fermentation more carefully - particularly for bread, wine and beer wine and beer - and to acknowledge its scientific and biological interest, though not without dark sides and conflicting opinions. Some disputes ended only with the spread of Pasteur’s results, using controlled fermentation to widen its domains over the production and storage of dairy products and meats. It was the outbreak of the first chemical revolution in the food field - which, however, spawned as a side effect the demonization for almost two centuries of unpasteurized fermented foods as unsafe and even injurious to health, confined to exclusively domestic preparations, uses and consumption. We will have to wait until the 2000s so that biologists and microbiologists’ studies, aware of the nutritional importance of probiotics and driven by the desire to be able to include them in food safety guidelines, can finally focus on their analysis in order to develop a formula capable of ensuring its healthiness. Adopting the theory of the obstacles - namely by establishing a calibrated and scrupulous proportion between pH, temperature, salinity and oxygen, so as to create a selective environment suitable only for the salutary microorganisms - today the fermentation techniques no longer see further obstacles on their horizon. Indeed, they went beyond: realities like the one started by Raffaella di Cagno and Marco Gobbetti at the University of Bolzano with the Micro4Food research laboratory10, or like that of the IMP - Italian Microbiome Project 11, demonstrate high correspondences between the intestinal microbiome and the brain, which significantly influence some characteristics such as mood, so they can be used for the study and the treatment of psychological and psychic disorders such as, for example, the depressive states. Finally supported - and indeed, advocated - by these studies, the unpasteurized fruit and vegetables fermentation is spreading like wildfire in restaurants, cocktail bars and organic markets, paving the way for the second chemical-gastronomic-cultural revolution, whose hashtags correspond to #experimentation and #creativity.
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