“I find that most of the time if something is missing, it’s just that brightness,” says Daniel Gleason, chef-owner of Sumac in Sperryville, Virginia. “And honestly, the definitive quality to good restaurant food is that elevated seasoning, and I think a lot of it comes from acid.”
Gleason decided to forgo citrus altogether when he began cooking artisanal, local dishes over fire. Even the name of his restaurant is a nod to his policy of sourcing everything except spices and cooking fats from within 150 miles. “We do a lot of foraging, too, and it was the first thing that I foraged as a young kid,” Gleason says of sumac berries. “So, it’s kind of a name that means a bunch of things for us. It’s a nod to our wild sourcing and local policy as well as using the sumac as a citric acid.”
Gleason has learned much about fermentation from Sumac’s neighbor, Pen Druid Fermentation, a spontaneous brewery that barrel ferments its beverages “They are fermentation nerds that we’ve been able to call upon a good amount and sort of use their knowledge to our advantage,” says Gleason, who makes all his own vinegars for Sumac. “Our fermentation program is basically what we lean on in lieu of lemons.”
This winter, those ferments showed up in a beet carpaccio brightened with a house-made Pen Druid pear cider vinegar, wild umeboshi paste, and ginger vinaigrette; as well as a rabbit with a lacto-fermented black walnut sauce; and pork with wild blackberries and the same pear vinegar used in the carpaccio.