In an approximate version of QCD, which has vanishing quark masses for N quark flavours, there is an exact chiral SU(N) × SU(N) symmetry of the theory. The QCD vacuum breaks this symmetry to SU(N) by forming a quark condensate. The existence of such a fermion condensate was first shown explicitly in the lattice formulation of QCD. The quark condensate is therefore an order parameter of transitions between several phases of quark matter in this limit.