Fermenting Vegetables A to Z
You can probably bring up a memory of something you put in your mouth that surprised and delighted you. Your eyes closed in a slow-chew moment.
That’s what this section is about: enjoying new flavors that also happen to be good for you. For some, that new flavor is tasting fresh lacto-fermented cabbage sauerkraut for the first time. For others, the addiction to lacto-fermented vegetables is already in place and they’re ready to go beyond — way beyond — green-cabbage sauerkraut, kimchi, and brined pickles. This section provides recipes and complete instructions for both — from archetypal ferments to unusual single-vegetable recipes to creative combinations and spins on the classics.
We invite you daring fermentistas to come up with your own combinations, using this section to help guide you. Technically, you can ferment any vegetable, but through trial and error and countless hours in the kitchen and our fermentation cave, we’ve saved you the agony of attempting the few that just aren’t worth it.
This part of the book is designed for exploring — a source for culinary discovery. We hope it inspires you to take our ideas and, well, ferment them. Let the journey begin.
We designed part 3 to be useful in several ways. For example, if you’re a gardener and find yourself with an abundance of, say, spinach, flip straight to the spinach pages, where you’ll discover ways to work with that veggie. Or if you’re at the farmers’ market and see a vegetable you’d like to prepare in not-the-usual way, buy it and then turn to the pages here that give you fermenting recipes for that vegetable. Each garden vegetable and herb, presented alphabetically, has its own section, followed by two smaller sections on foraged wild veggies and a few fruits that lacto-ferment well.
Within each vegetable section you’ll see Your Raw Material, which provides information specific to the fresh vegetable, perhaps about nutrients, or maybe tips for selecting. In the Crock tells you how to use the vegetable shredded, sliced, or diced and fermented without the addition of a brine solution. In the Pickle Jar is for pickling or brining whole vegetables, which of course you can do in a jar or a crock, and Create Your Own Recipes presents ideas for inventing your own ferments.
Our passion for simple good food and delicious flavors and aromas has driven this book. When you ferment garden-fresh veggies, you’re part of the renaissance in using an ancient culinary technique that is now coming into its own as micro-krauteries throughout the country are creating this artisanal food.
Vegetable fermentation is like putting on a play.
In both there’s a cast of characters. Some, such as the vegetables, the salt, and the spices, are onstage, in the spotlight: they’re the leads. The majority, though, do their work behind the scenes. Lactobacilli ride into a crock on the coattails of the stars, but like set designers, costumers, and the director, they’re just as important. Regardless of the role, each performer has her own personality. It’s the same with ingredients: they each have a special aroma, texture, taste, which may change according to the season, the soil, your climate, and the ambient temperature of your home. Thus, as in a play, no two performances are identical.
Fermentation times as shown in the recipes can be only approximate. Use them as a guide or suggestion, but rely on your own senses to tell you when a ferment is ready: watch for changes in the vegetable’s appearance; taste and smell for that telltale pickle-y sourness.
In each recipe you’ll see a range of time. Many factors can affect the time it takes your produce to ferment, but as a rule, the first number in the range is your minimum warm-temperature fermentation time and the second number will be your minimum cool-temperature time. So when the recipe suggests fermenting for 5 to 10 days, consider the temperature of your room and know that your veggies will take longer to get “sauer” in a cool room than in a warm one.
Unlike the chemistry in baking, which requires exact measurements — get the baking soda wrong, and there are repercussions — vegetable pickling leaves room for divergence, variation, and adaption. In most of the ingredient lists we refer to the whole vegetable. Although this may seem unconventional, we found a few problems when we tried using precise measurements.
The first is the springy nature of sliced cabbage: consistent measurement in a cup is difficult (and savoy cabbage has even more bounce). We tried measuring by weight, but then what to do with the bit of cabbage left over? Worse is if there’s more waste in the outer leaves than anticipated and you don’t have enough to meet the weight requirement. Recipes based on quantities of whole vegetables minimizes waste of both vegetables and energy. You’ll know how much to pick or buy, and you’ll use it all.
Note: If you’re using a grater or a food processor, use the medium grater blade when a recipe calls for grating or shredding, unless specified otherwise.
Recipe yields are all approximate because you’re working with different-sized vegetables and varying water contents, often determined by season and freshness.
We offer a recommended fermenting vessel size for each recipe because while we assume you’ll use your crock if you have one, we want to give you an idea of the size vessel you’ll need if you don’t, and make sure that whatever vessel you use will accommodate the ferment with enough room for the brine to bubble and grow.
We use fine Redmond Real Salt, which is a sea salt with a bit lower sodium chloride content and a subtle sweetness due to its higher natural mineral content. While most salt choices will work, we recommend that you use a salt with a similar grain size (not coarse) that is unrefined and without additives (see Salt: Shaking Out the Differences).
How much salt is right? Something as seemingly simple as salt has variation in weight, sodium chloride content, and flavor. This is in addition to the varying moisture contents in the vegetables and differing climates. So here’s what to consider when you salt your ferments:
The amount of salt needed in the recipes is not always precise because there’s a range in which the magic in the crock takes place. For krauts, that range is a salt content equal to 1.5 to 3 percent of the weight of the vegetable (brine pickles and brined kimchis require a higher salt content, at about 3 percent).
Our kraut and condiment recipes use salt amounts on the low end of the range, generally around 1.5 percent, which is where we think the texture and flavor are best (thanks to refrigeration we can use lower, healthier levels of salt and still be successful); commercial krauts generally use a 2.2 to 2.5 percent ratio of salt; and each of the recipes from our guest fermentistas uses salt differently — illustrating that this is more than just science in the kitchen, it’s culinary art. But there’s no need to do any math here; just follow the recipes, letting your taste buds guide you.
If you remember this phrase, you won’t go wrong:
Submerge in brine and all will be fine.
“I hate my sauerkraut!” someone behind me blurts out. It’s a cry that would make any sauerkraut maker cringe.
I’m solo this Saturday. I’d told Kirsten I could handle everything today, but I’m regretting that decision.
My mind is racing as I fasten a cooler lid. Flight seems like a good idea, as does hiding under the table, but neither would be easy to explain to Kirsten later, so I try to compose myself before standing up to face my accuser.
Peering up at me is a sweet-looking woman with her hands placed firmly on the sides of our tasting tray. She’s waiting for a reply.
“What don’t you like about it?” I ask.
“It’s wrong. It’s just not, you know, good. I’ve followed the instructions in my cookbook and am just so damn frustrated that I thought I’d ask you what to do before I throw out this batch,” she said. Then she noticed our tasting jars: six different krauts and kimchis. “Are all of these sauerkrauts?”
I stare at her while it slowly dawns on me that it’s not one of our ferments she hates; it’s hers. I start asking questions and learn that she’s been using a simple recipe in a popular book on traditionally prepared foods. It’s a recipe that forgets to mention that ferments must remain below the brine line, which calls for a weight of some type. Without it, the vegetables eventually rise above the brine, and with exposure to the little bit of air in the closed jar, even in a refrigerator, undesirable microbes get in, causing the whole thing to go bad.
I explain this omission to her and encourage her to buy a couple of organic cabbages from one of the stands and give it another try.
“Would you like to try some samples to get an idea of what you want to create?”
Looking over our jars of Curtido, Lemon-Dill Kraut, Golden Beet Kraut, and Spicy Kimchi, she turns back to me: “Don’t you make plain old sauerkraut?” We do, but it’s sold out.
Other people push past her to taste, and I watch as she wanders over to our neighbor’s produce stand.
The next week she returns and reports that her latest batch looks great. It’s bubbling away, she tells me, and smells wonderful, but she’s not convinced it’ll be tasty. I hand her a bamboo skewer and point to a sample jar of our Naked Kraut, which is just cabbage and salt, glorious in their simplicity. She stabs at it, puts it in her mouth, then closes her eyes and slowly chews.
“That,” she proclaims, “is what I want mine to taste like. I want to make that,” she says, pumping the skewer at the sample jar for emphasis.
I forget about the interaction until late October, at the end of the market season, when she returns. She tells me she has her recipe down pat and produces so much fermented goodness that she shares it with her coworkers.
“I’m ready to try something new now,” she says. Beginning with the closest jar, she tastes what we have out, eyes closed, chewing slowly, sighing with every bite, smiling.
Not every aspiring fermentista has this woman’s drive to push through a summer-long learning curve. We like to think she persevered because of flavor.
