Book Review: Michael Pollan's "Cooked"

Wait! This is a BEER BLOG, why the hell is there a food book review here??

Good question!  Turns out that fermentation is one aspect of the book. And how is beer made?? FERMENTATION!  OK, the other obvious answer might also be that beer IS food.

Along with loving beer, I am also a bit of a foodie and love to cook. After reading Michael Pollan's "Food Rules", I had to read this one.

I won't even attempt to layout the book for you.  Either you are intrigued enough and want to read it yourself ... or not.  Either way, I wanted to share a few things that I really liked.

"To learn how to make beer is to marvel at the ingenuity of the people who first figured it out.  The process is much more complicated, and involves many more steps, than making mead, or for that matter wine.  Charlie Bamforth, the Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Brewing Scientist at the University of California, Davis, likes to begin his lectures with a little joke. 'Do you know why Jesus performed the miracle of turning water into wine? Because it's so much easier than making beer!'"

"As I learned from Sandor Katz and Sister Noella and Chad Robertson and all the other fermentos I met, mastery is never more than partial or temporary. 'Dude, I don't make this beer,' a brewer in Oakland once told me after I had complimented him on his black lager. 'The yeasts make the beer. My job is just to feed them really well. If I do that, they'll do all the rest.'"

The next book on my stack? "The Drunken Botanist" by Amy Stewart.