Meet the kosher chef who can heal your gut – with pickles

As any Ashkenazi balaboosta can attest, pickling is nothing new, but the culinary practice goes way back before our Eastern European ancestors were stocking up for harsh shtetl winters.

Archaeologists believe the ancient Mesopotamians pickled food as far back as 2400 BC. By 2030 BC, cucumbers native to India were being pickled in the Tigris Valley, and pickle fans over the centuries have reportedly included Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte.

But the zingy-tasting cucumbers aren’t just a delicious addition to a salt beef sandwich from Reuben’s, they can also be medicinally transformative. Which is why Tomer Ash, a 26-year-old chef based in north London, is passionate about spreading the wondrous joy of fermented foods to the Jewish community.

For Ashkenazi Jews, where Crohn’s disease is thought to be two to four times more prevalent compared to those of non-Jewish European ancestry, eating fermented food might be a game-changer. Some experts think probiotics can help reduce inflammation in the digestive tract and help create a healthier balance of bacteria in the microbiome.

And discovering lacto-fermented pickles changed Ash’s life a few years ago, triggering a dramatic turnaround in his health. Which is why he has created a business — Fermench — selling home-made sauerkraut, pickles, kimchi, hoping to pep up the kosher market while offering a natural, and tasty remedy, to the dreary state of Jewish gut health.

Born in Mill Hill, Ash went to Yeshiva in Jerusalem after finishing university in the UK. “Up until this point, I had struggled with a decade of gastrointestinal discomfort,” he explained when we met in the ground-floor café in the British Library on a busy Friday. He found himself struggling with his energy levels and falling asleep in Yeshiva even after eight hours of sleep and a cup of coffee.

Then, he tuned into a podcast by Dr Rondra Patrick about the healthy benefits of eating two fermented foods every day. “I'd heard about gut health and fermented foods, but I'd never really gone into it. So I thought: ‘Okay, must be easy enough, let me try it.’”

He looked up what the easiest two things to ferment were, the first one was pickles, the second one, sauerkraut. After he started integrating the food into his diet, everything changed. “Literally a decade of digestion problems started to vanish, and I started to feel so much better every day. It just got to a point where I couldn't live without it,” he said.

When you’re lacto-fermenting pickles as opposed to just plunging them in vinegar and sugar, it’s “a much more difficult process to get it right, but it brings out the actual flavour of the vegetable”. Of course, the cucumbers can be fermented with dill, garlic and horseradish if you want them to pack a flavourful punch. A jar of pickles will take Ash up to two weeks to ferment, while a batch of kimchi takes between five to six days.

The young chef, who now heads up the kitchen at Hampstead’s kosher restaurant Delicatessen, says that lacto-fermenting is an ancient method of preservation dating back to Roman times.

“They didn't have sugar and different types of vinegars to be able to ferment with, so they would just use salt water. You would harvest all of your vegetables — your cabbages and your cucumber — and then you would put them in in a brine that infuses them with probiotics, and that's what makes the vegetables really good for gut health.”

When he returned to London from Israel, Ash — much to the discomfort of his parents, began fermenting at home. “My mum and dad weren't too happy about the big bubbling vat in the shed that absolutely stank.” He scoured relevant literature including The Noma Guide to Fermentation written by David Zilber and René Redzepi, head chef of three-Michelin-star restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“They ferment literally everything you can imagine — herbs and leaves and fruits. The most, crazy random stuff. They've got a whole lab where they do all of these experiments and then they create a 14-course dining experience.”

Eventually (and for the benefit of his relationship with his parents) Ash moved the operation to the Delicatessen kitchen.

His pathway to becoming a chef began with a foodie upbringing with his non-religious Israeli parents, who introduced him to the wonders of a diet full of flavourful salads and hummus. While at Yeshiva, Ash decided he would keep kosher but, determined not to miss out, resolved “to be able to make all of the food that I used to eat when I was growing up”. However, when he looked around, he saw the kosher restaurant offering in London was limited and not always healthy.

“People have horrendously bad diets typically in the religious community,” he said, though “the Sephardi community is much better” than the Ashkenazim, who have a problem with consuming in vast quantities “ultra, ultra, ultra processed foods”.

So, when he got the offer to join Delicatessen and be trained up by talented chef Elior Balbul, Ash learnt how to master making food that’s kosher, delicious and healthy all at once.

“He's the one that taught me you can't just deep fry food to make it taste good,” he said. “You need to find a balance between fresh vegetables and cooked vegetables. You need to experiment with flavours. You need to play with the seasons and use different seasonal vegetables that are going to be at their best. Often less is more with a dish.”

Now at the helm of Delicatessen, not only does Ash have a kitchen for his side-hustle Fermench business, he’s also able to introduce the community to dishes like “cauliflower tartare” salad with apricots to tuna carpaccio with melon, green chilli and coriander vinaigrette.

Ash is determined to go beyond kimchi, pickles and sauerkraut, and is developing a lacto-fermented hot sauce, made with jalapeno and lime. Also on his to-do list is to re-make the jars of tomato jam that ladies would sell around harvest time around the kibbutzim in Israel. And he’d like to create a healthy lacto-fermented horseradish and then turning it into a bright purple and punchy chrain with beetroot juice, without any food colouring or added sugar.

So it’s welcome news for Ash that the centuries-old practice of fermentation — which Eastern European Jews relied on to preserve food in the run-up to a barren winter — has returned as a modern-day wellness trend. “All these things are cycles,” he told me. “I'm glad that we're returning back to our roots because you can make yourself feel so good when you eat and live a lifestyle properly.”

Instagram: thefermench