Workshops & Events

I offer workshops and other events around the world throughout the year. To learn about my current schedule, check out my newsletter or any of my social media accounts {@bookishjulia or @rootkitchens}

I also love to offer workshops and other experiences as part of larger events, for corporate wellness programs, as well as leading workshops with other teachers and thinkers. 

To learn more about my offerings see the PDF linked below, or reach out to me here.


For hands-on cooking classes in Atlanta, any leftover food is donated to Umi Feeds, which redistributes food to Atlanta’s unhoused community. 

Every workshop run through Root includes a scholarship to allow someone from an underserved community to attend free of charge. These scholarships are heavily focused on people who do not have the financial means to attend, prioritizing queer people and people of color, but all eligible folks are welcome to apply.

To apply: please send me an email with a few sentences about yourself and what you hope to get from the workshop. I can’t guarantee I can accommodate everyone, but I do my best to spread scholarships around, so please keep applying if you don’t get one the first time!

Upcoming Events:

Shrubs and bitters! (virtual event) Details TBD:
Are your cocktails feeling flat? Shrubs and bitters are two key ingredients to adding flavor to your beverages, and are both wonderful for making nonalcoholic mocktails. I’ll demonstrate how I make both shrubs and bitters, and you can cook along with me or just watch.
We’ll cover the basics of infusing shrubs and bitters, and you’ll leave with recipes, knowledge of how to layer flavors to make great shrubs and bitters, and answers to all your shrubs and bitters questions!

This event is free for paid newsletter subscribers and Patreon patrons.

If you have an idea for an event, please get in touch at this link. 

Future Events:

Here are a few ideas for events I would like to hold in the future. If any of these resonate with you, or if you’d like to participate in co-hosting one, please reach out!

Fermentation as Craft residencies: Join me and a small handful of fellow creative fermenters for a residency exploring how our fermentation practice connects with our creative practice writ large. Tucked away on a rural nature preserve, you’ll receive in-depth fermentation instruction, daily creative prompts, and lots of unstructured time to draw, dance, write, or just explore the forest as we allow our craft in the kitchen to spill out into the rest of our lives in creativity, connection, and play. I am very open to finding spaces to co-host these residencies as I ready my own space to support them. 

Heritage cultures: Sharing history through fermentation: Sharing food with each other offers us a window to understanding unfamiliar cultures in new ways. Every culture worldwide has at least one traditional ferment as a part of its culinary traditions, and we’ll use this as the basis for an event focused on shared learning and exploration. Each attendee will bring their favorite ferment (or more than one!), plus a recipe if they have or feel comfortable sharing it, and be ready to talk about how it fits into their culinary landscape. We’ll share the ferments together in a casual potluck, talking about the importance of the ferments we brought and learning how they all connect together. What ingredients or techniques are the same? What new-to-us foods have we tried? What do we learn about connecting to living cultures by exploring them through living foods?

Rooted in Place: Using Ferments to Engage with Memories and Grief: Join myself and a local grief counselor to explore how fermentation can help us connect to time and place, and how we can use this to explore grief. We’ll begin with a brief group conversation to help us all settle into a safe, healing space, and then will individually journal with prompts. After we’ve thought about what grief we want to engage with, we’ll sit in small groups and share in the act of making sauerkraut while engaging in healing, nurturing conversation. At the end, the whole group will come together to discuss how we can take what we’ve learned into our lives and our communities, and spread that healing outward. Each attendee will leave with a jar of sauerkraut that captures this healing event. A certified grief counselor will be on site, and quiet spaces available, for those who need them.

Past Events:

Pickles and Prophecy: An Online Tyromancy and Pickling Workshop
Live Zoom Workshop: January 22, 2024 from 2 pm EST to about 3:30 pm EST
This event will be recorded, and a recording sent to all participants after.

Have you ever told your fortune with a block of cheese? Or cast a spell with a jar of pickles?

Join Tyromancy (cheese fortune telling) expert Jen Billock and fermentation historian Dr. Julia Skinner for an afternoon of magical fermentation.

In this online workshop, we’ll go over the basics of how to do tyromancy, and you’ll have a chance to read your fortune with your own block of cheese.

Then, we’ll explore the why and how of mindfulness and spell casting using fermentation, including a fermentation demonstration. 

You’ll leave with some unique new kitchen witch skills, and maybe even a glimpse into your future!

It’s a Pickling Party! (virtual workshop), August 5, 11-1 EST:

It’s summer, which means our gardens and farmer’s markets are bursting with produce, sometimes more than we know what to do with!
Bring your summer produce and your questions, and leave with lots of ideas for how to put them to use in your kitchen!

I’ll go over some vegetable fermentation and quick pickling basics, then I’ll demonstrate the different ways we can preserve different kinds of vegetables, using pourover brine and dry brine, and I’ll also briefly talk about other non-lactofermentation ways of preserving your veggies (like herbal vinegar infusions). We’ll also cover how these methods can give us other products, like hot sauce. 

You can create along with me at home, or just watch and learn.

This event is free for paid newsletter subscribers and Patreon patrons.
If you are a nonmember you can sign up here!

Writing Playground: A Playful, Improvisational Workshop for Food Writers and Other Creatives
Saturdays in October, 11-1 PM EST on Zoom

Forage and Feast talk and dinner, McCarthy, Alaska
Culinary Wild | an evening of environmental issues expressed as edible art
Dinner + Fermented Beverage Pairings | Glacier Desserts to follow
Saturday, August 19th, 6 PM
Salmon and Bear Restaurant
Tickets $85

Pickling Cook Along on Instagram Live with Burlap + Barrel and Root Kitchens!
July 15th, 1 pm EST
Join @burlapandbarrel and @rootkitchens on Saturday, July 15th at 1 pm EST to learn how to make delicious quick pickles using our new Pickling Starter spice blend, inspired by Dr. Julia Skinner’s new book Our Fermented Lives.

Demystifying Fermentation Workshop with Sandor Katz & Julia Skinner
Society for Economic Botany & Society of Ethnobiology
June 4th, 2023
Emory University, Atlanta GA
#SEBSOE2023

Between Past and Future: Fermentation as a Living Tradition
In celebration of Skinner’s new book Our Fermented Lives, MOFAD is thrilled to welcome Dr. Julia Skinner and world-renowned fermentation revitalist Sandor Katz for a virtual conversation about fermentations influence on our past, present, and future.
Wednesday, April 5, 2023 @ 7-8 PM
Virtual Event: Zoom link will be sent with ticket confirmation email

Reducing Food Waste with Fermentation
Join us for a zero-waste fermentation course! We aim to explain the theory, but most of the learning will be by hands-on making.
February 18th, 2023 @ N1 9AB York Way London N1 9AB United Kingdom

Fermentation Workshop with Dr. Julia Skinner & The Koji Kitchen – Edinburgh
Join me and Robin Sherriff for talks, demonstrations, eats and hands on fun
February 15th, 2023 @ The Koji Kitchen Room
135 Midlothian Innovation Centre Roslin, EH25 9RE United Kingdom

Beyond the Book: Our Fermented Lives
Join me for a book talk as part of the Bookmarks lecture series
January 21 @ 4pm | Winston Salem, NC

Join me for a talk at The Chicago Brewseum Beer Culture Summit 2022, being held November 9-12, 2022.

Join me for a talk at the Atlanta Fermentation Festival, presented by Cultured South. Sunday, November 26 @ 12-7pm, Atlanta Utility Works, East Point, GA.

Our Fermented Lives Book Party, October 22nd, 2022. Cultured South (in White + Lee), Atlanta GA. Come celebrate the launch of my new book, Our Fermented Lives! This event is a love letter to Atlanta, to thank you all for your support of my work over the years. My book wouldn’t exist without you!

Make Your Own Vinegars, October 5th, 2022 at Bold Fork Books, Washington, DC: a talk about all things fermentation, followed by a vinegar making class! Ingredients provided by Each Peach Market including fresh herbs, edible flowers, and hot peppers. Each attendee will go home with two different vinegars that they made themselves to enjoy.

Decatur Book Festival, October 1st 2022. A Book Buffet: A Culinary Arts Panel. What do kimchi, sourdough bread and beer have in common? The answer is fermentation. Julia Skinner explores how the process has shaped our lives and culture in her new book “Our Fermented Live.” She joins “Where’s the Beef?” author Jessica Formicola and “A Return to Ireland” author Judith McLoughlin in this session moderated by Belinda Smith-Sullivan, author of “Southern Sugar.”

Fermenting food scraps, Whitehall Terrace community garden, July 9: A class run through the community garden and Umi Feeds to educate the community on using our food scraps to make new dishes and stretch food stores.

McCarthy Lodge and the Anchorage Museum, Alaska, July-August: Join me for classes on Storytelling through Food, using wild foods and fermentation to tell the story of place and people.

Midwest Women’s Herbal Conference, May 27-29. I’ll be teaching a hands-on Ferments for Mindfulness workshop as well as giving a talk on Historic Food for the Future. 

Greensboro Bound book festival, May 22: Join me for a panel on Eating and Drinking Together: How Food Shapes Culture with Marcie Cohen Ferris and Tal Bevins. The event is free, but registration is required.

Forage and Ferment: An online workshop and conversation with Mallory O’Donnell of How to Cook a Weed.

Preserving Abundance Virtual Festival: Fermentation and food waste festival, held in May 2020 to help people stretch their food stores during lockdown. With guests including Sandor Katz, Rich Shih, Cheryl Paswater, Kirsten Shockey, Raquel Guajardo, Anna Brones, Mara King, Elliot McNally, Jenny Dorsey, and more.

Preserving Abundance: A Food Waste and Fermentation Weekend: with guests Sandor Katz, Kirsten Shockey, Cheryl Paswater, and Jillian Ross, plus a wrap up panel on food equity and fermentation with Atlanta food guests including Umi from Umi Feeds, Chef Zu from King’s Apron, Ash from Global Growers, and Stephen Satterfield from Miller Union.

Ferments for Justice: A virtual lacto-fermentation workshop with Julia Skinner and Alex Lewin to benefit the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and Black Visions Collective. 

The (Virtual) Florida Fermentation Fest: A day of international speakers demonstrating a range of fermentation techniques on Instagram Live, including my demo on making kraut-chi with food scraps.

Afternoon Tea: A History book talk and signing at Omnivore Books in San Francisco and Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, NC. 

Mead Making 101: Learn the basics of making your own mead! We will be making wild fermented meads, with a focus on both the mead making process and on  building flavor profiles with a range of ingredients. Each attendee will watch demonstrations, have lots of space for questions and answers,  and will get to create their own jar of mead to take home, filled with  custom flavorings they choose!

Queer Soup Night: During the pre-COVID times, I hosted several Queer Soup Night events to raise money for queer-focused nonprofits, and to fund a scholarship to a fermentation residency with Sandor Katz.