Join us for Rough Rice's Perennial Pickles fermentation workshop for the ‘Seaweed Salon Knowledge Symposium’.

ROUGH RICE (Adam James) is a Lutruwita based food innovator whose obsession is the alchemy of fermentation, preservation and flavour making. His work in fermentation takes traditional techniques from around the world and adapts them to local, seasonal + organic produce.

A Churchill Fellow, he has studied preservation techniques across Japan, China, Korea, Italy, France, Georgia, and Denmark. He has collaborated with chefs and fermenters worldwide and has hosted fermentation masterclasses for nearly a decade.

In this salon, guests will create their own pao cai master brine using a 10-year-old starter culture, alongside crafting a turmeric and ginger perennial pickle bed with an 8-year-old culture, providing a unique and flavourful foundation for continued experimentation at home.

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PARTICIPANTS TO BRING:
— Please bring a sharp knife and chopping board.

Guests will take home two jars of pickles that they have created.

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Pao cai, a traditional style of pickled vegetables from China’s Sichuan Province, are typically made using what is known as a pao cai master brine, a living, perpetual fermentation medium rich in lactobacillus and aromatic spices. This brine is celebrated for producing deeply complex and nuanced flavours that evolve over time. In some households, pao cai brines are treasured heirlooms, passed down through generations. Adam had the rare opportunity to sample one such brine that was over a century old—its flavour a testament to decades of cumulative fermentation, shaped by the countless vegetables it had preserved.

In this session, guests will create their own pao cai master brine using Adam's 10-year-old starter culture, to take home and begin their own fermentation journey.

Over the past decade, Adam has also been developing what he call's Perennial Pickle Beds, inspired both by the pao cai tradition and the Japanese nukadoko rice bran fermentation method. These beds use thick, fermented pastes made from vegetables and rhizomes as the fermenting medium. Vegetables placed into these beds ferment over one week to 3 months developing vibrant, crisp, and complex flavours. Adam currently maintains three mature pickle beds:

A 10-year-old chili and mixed vegetable base I refer to as the "Mothership"

An 8-year-old beet-based "Borscht" perennial

An 8-year-old turmeric and ginger base

These perennial fermentations were recently featured in Fermentation Journeys by renowned fermentation revivalist Sandor Katz.

As part of the workshop, guests will craft their own turmeric and ginger perennial pickle bed using my 8-year-old starter—a unique and flavourful foundation for continued experimentation at home.

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SEAWEED SALON is a skill and knowledge-sharing symposium connecting our community with local artists and thinkers in a generative space for cultural learning and creation. It is an ode to the intelligent ecological networks that profoundly shape and sustain our world. We look forward to welcoming the community back for our second series of the SEAWEED SALON.