where it all began
I've had a passion for making food for as long as I can remember. Back from when my grandmother taught me how to make pancakes as a kid, through training as a fine dining chef & then working in restaurants throughout my career.
As a chef I achieved the level of Saucier - the one responsible for making all the stocks & sauces - & I loved this role. Pairing dishes with sauces, combining & extracting flavours, developing specific textures & achieving vibrant colours, always from scratch & always using only natural ingredients & processes.
I was introduced to chillies when I was quite young & they too have been a constant in my life. I love the extra level of feeling they bring to food. There are the five tastes of salty, sweet, sour, bitter & umami, then there is the physical tingle that chillies bring. Really no other ingredient posesses this quality & I think they're magical for it.
Whilst working full time in 2018 I began a side hustle making & selling hot sauce to friends & family & through this process I started learning about fermentation.
Apart from the benefits fermentation brought to my hot sauce production, I learned about the benefits of eating raw fermented foods & started introducing them to my family's diet.
Soon my friends & sauce customers were asking for the live ferments & I brought them into the fold.
When covid struck there was rapid growth in demand for fermented food, known to strengthen our immune system, &, out of work due to restaurant closures, I set about turning my side hustle into a business.
I went through many incantations of the products, bouncing from one brand name & design to another until I finally settled on Muti. I had long decide Troublemaker would be the original sauce, named after my daughter & when you look at one of the earliest versions of the Troublemaker branding to the left, you can see why. Absolute mischief & attitude.
The name Muti has two parts. Firstly, it was my stage name back in the day when I used to be a rapper & DJ, so Muti is me & I am Muti. Secondly it is the word used for medicine in Southern Africa where I was born & raised. That is why the bottles today take their design ethos from medicine bottles & it fits in nicely with the benefits of eating fermented foods.
As the business has expanded so too has the product range & so will it continue to do so, delivering fermented versions of sauces & condiments we all know, but free from vinegar & all the other nasties normally associated with such products.
So too will the live products continue to expand as the business takes up & marches forward with its slogan: Microbes for the Masses!
This is a protest against the declining health of our planet & the people, plants & animals that live on it. It is a slogan that promises fermented foods that are designed to have mass appeal, nothing too obscure, nothing your average human would be too scared to try, just real food, made delicious & versatile for everyone to enjoy.
It is a slogan for minimising the cost of fermented & real food too, as I am well aware that there are many people out there who would love to eat fermented foods, but they either don't have access to them or couldn't afford them if they did & the same goes for easier, more affordable access to real food.
Right now, UPFs account for 60% of the diet of the average person in the UK, this goes up to 80% when talking about teenagers. The most accessible, affordable & convenient foods are UPFs & our ability to prepare food from scratch is declining. Nutritious, real food should not be a luxury, it should be a human right.
We want to change this &, in the blog section of the website, you can read about some of the initiatives we've started in order to make this a reality.
It is time to end the madness of the purely-for-profit food system & Muti is my small contribution to making that happen. I hope I can encourage some of you to join us on a march forward to better health for the planet, its people, animals & plants.
Muti
