Genius in a bottle

When Adam James was busted at boarding school for fermenting aniseed essence to make Sambuca under his bed, his teachers should have known they had happened upon a home grown Heston Blumenthal. Inspired by his discovery of the Japanese cooking paste kanzu

Adam James eats garlic like peanuts. The selftaught cook and alchemist lets the sugars and starches in whole heads of garlic ferment in big glass bottles with black pepper and lovely slithers of beetroot. After several months of what’s called wild fermenting, what he ends up with are beautiful, fluorescent, pink and crunchy cloves loaded with an earthy taste and a good hit of probiotics.

“It’s a punch of flavour,” says the Hobart fermenter who ran the Tricycle Cafe in Hobart for 11 years. “The process means the garlic flavour isn’t as harsh. I’ll probably chop them up and roll them through a salad.”

A lovely waft of garlic is one of the first things I notice as James opens the front door to let me into his Melville Street man cave. The cosy cottage is the home he shares with his 10-yearold son, Leo, but it’s is also his fermentation station.

It’s a place where he creates and makes his sauces, condiments, salsas and other ferments like his super-hot sauce that many foodies pick up from his Rough Rice stall at Farm Gate Market on Sundays. Many of his creations end up in high-end restaurants like the Agrarian Kitchen and Dier Makr.

We walk over timber floors strewn with animal pelts and down a step into an inviting sunken lounge and past a fire with a sake cup laden mantle and straight into his office — a well organised and spotless kitchen.

There are 22 very sharp-looking knives hanging from the wall. Through the glass doors I can see glistening piles of bull kelp sun-drying on his weathered table. It will be used for a kind of rice porridge called congee.

What I can smell is black garlic. There’s a stack of locally sourced organic bunches of it in his dehydrator sitting in a toasty 60C destined for dressings.

“They’ll end up quite pasty,” James explains. “I’ll also dab things with it like roast potatoes.”

There’s a leg of ham curing and hanging from a hook near the main bench. Underneath that is a mix of different sized and