Editor's note: Longoven has temporarily closed amid safety concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic.
Longoven's scallop dish with fermented turnip beurre blanc (Photo by Fred Turko courtesy Longoven)
The Longoven kitchen is a treasure map of ongoing fermentation experiments. A dry-goods shelf is crowded with gallon jars brewing misos and garums — umami-loaded sauces, such as Worcestershire and fish sauce, made from animal protein. There’s a two-phase chanterelle vinegar made with wild yeast from The Veil Brewing Co. and a chocolate-lentil miso that exudes an intoxicating perfume of cocoa and earth. One jar of seedy green sludge — a vegetable-based riff on a garum — burps with a zesty aroma of green tomatoes, ginger and basil. These are off-hours experiments with no definite purpose but to explore the limits of food science. This is what a no-waste kitchen looks and smells like, where kitchen scraps are exalted and saved for a long game whose prize is flavor.
Chef and co-owner Andrew Manning flicks the side of a gallon jar, and bubbles shimmy to the surface. “This one’s jamming,” he says, admiring his work. It’s a shio koji, a fermented seasoning made from rice, salt, water and koji, a fungus used in fermented Japanese foods such as soy sauce. Manning might use it to ferment vegetables or to pickle fish. With the pureed solids, he could marinate duck or dry-age a rib-eye. “You’ll get a 60-day aged beef in like two weeks,” he notes with the reverence of a surfer describing a gnarly wave.
Fermentation makes good sense to Manning, who first witnessed the art on a large scale in the bathtub-sized vinegar vats of Italian winemakers while cooking in Italy’s Piedmont region for over a decade: “You get crazy flavors you’ll never get any other way, and you don’t waste food,” he says. “The more people that know about [fermentation] the better.”
Illustrations by Lauren Baldwin
Fermentation on the Menu
House-made kombucha steeped with roses and wildflowers serves as a glaze for roast pigeon.
A funky beurre blanc on the tasting menu’s “scallop, shiitake, turnip” dish starts with fermented turnip scraps.
The craveworthy “seeds risotto” folds in a miso derived from sunflower seeds, which are right at home alongside chia, pepitas, millet and quinoa.