Make Garum

After my legendary attempt¹ to lacto-ferment fish in 2018, I didn’t touch meat-fermentation any more. Somewhat later, I got gifted The Noma guide to fermentation. It’s an OK book. It’s nice to look at. It’s not very efficient for homesteading. And, it’s nothing that the internet could not also provide in terms of information or knowledge, or pretty pictures.

But, it was very inspirational in terms of trying out things. I got my hands on koji to make my Make Miso, instead of relying on store-bought material, and it was really worth it. I always had to figure out the infrastructural stuff out myself because, the fuck with having a fermentation chamber that can hold steady 60° Celsius for several months…

One thing stuck with me in particular was the ✨ Rose Petal Shrimp Garum ✨ I’m a sucker for fish sauce. The Noma book suggests some energy and time-consuming process, and I wasn’t down for it. I mean, they didn’t have those kinds of tools to work with in the old days, did they? So I searched my way around and found some fantastic information about how to make garum with at home, and that’s definitely my kind of thing: letting oversalted fish devour itself and rot in a yoghurt-maker!

Recipe

• Get small fish, best fresh, whole, not cleaned, not disembowelled
• Cut it up and mix it with 15-20% salt
• Stuff the mix into glassware and let rest in the yoghurt-maker for a few days, stirring or shaking occasionally
• Store the container somewhere for a few weeks
• At one point you can sift the mess, retain the liquid, get rid of the rest

Experiences

• The yoghurt containers were filled with liquid pretty quickly. Between the chunky and the fluid state are just two days. After that, not much happened, just slow cooking and the meat coming apart.
• I refilled the single container into one larger one because they weren’t evenly filled, and I wasn’t confident if they were equal in terms of salt and enzymes from the digestive system of the fish.
• It started quickly to deliciously smell like salted anchovies, but just when opening the container. I also tasted the
• Wunderlich, in the sources down below, has some interesting recipes what to do with this base-Garum.

Process documentation

See also

• Flavour of fermented fish, insect, game, and pea sauces: Garum revisited - ScienceDirect
• Recipe for Garum or liquamen, the Roman fish sauce
• The Garum Page