Vegetable Fermentation as Preservation
Fermenting vegetables is a simple, inexpensive process that was used reliably for a few thousand years. Then, in the early 1900s, technical innovations promised things the crock just couldn’t deliver. Canned jars of food remain stable on a shelf for years. Blanch your veggies, toss into a bag, and store in the freezer — what could be easier? No heavy crocks to clean, no time spent monitoring and skimming off any impurities; it was all very modern and clean and safe.
Only in more recent years have nutritionists begun to understand what all that sterilizing and freezing did to the vitamins and minerals that make vegetables good for us — not to mention the flavor. Enter fermentation, or, to be accurate, reenter fermentation.
Now fermented foods are considered artisanal, a combination of traditional methods and scientific knowledge used to preserve food for flavor, color, and nutritive value.
When we bring vegetables into the kitchen, we hope to preserve them long enough to enjoy them, so we wash them and keep them at the proper temperature. Despite that, a 2004 study by the University of Arizona found that 40 percent of the food grown in the United States goes to waste, and a large portion of that is what consumers let spoil in their fridge. Every year the average household sends $600 in food to the landfill (for some of us that is actually the compost pile or out to the chickens). So if you couldn’t resist that beautiful bunch of turnips at the farm stand but have no idea how to prepare them, think fermentation. Lactic-acid fermentation is an ideal way to preserve the bounty while retaining nutrients and deepening the flavor profile.
Sauerkraut belongs in a barrel, not a can. Our American mania for sterile packaging has removed the flavor from most of our foods. Butter is no longer sold out of a wooden tub, and a whole generation thinks butter tastes like paper. There was never a perfume like an old-time grocery store. Now they smell like drugstores, which don’t even smell like drugstores anymore.
—Cary Grant as Dr. Noah Praetorius, in People Will Talk (1951)
Many batches of fermented vegetables that you make will be consumed within a few days or weeks — you won’t be able to help yourself — but fermentation is also a live, nutrition-enhancing, long-term preservation method for the bounty that comes from your vegetable patch, local farmers, and the farmers’ market. If you’re serious about pickling everything in your garden, consider a ferment refrigerator, which is simply an old refrigerator you set in an out-of-the-way corner and fill with your finished ferments. It will allow you to catch your ferments’ flavors just where you like them and effectively keep them there.
Two refrigerators might seem lavish, but it’s cheaper than digging a root cellar. And it’s all relative: modern Koreans, who traditionally buried their onggi pots in soil or under straw for preservation, consider their kimchi refrigerator a basic household appliance.
At our stand at the farmers’ market, customers told us many a story about barrels of kraut in their grandparents’ basement. One woman said that when she was a child in Wisconsin, her grandmother would give her a bowl and send her down the stairs, through a dark cellar, to get a portion of sauerkraut. She remembered removing the lid of the sauerkraut barrel and then carefully folding back a thick mat of mold. She’d fill the bowl, pat down the remaining kraut, carefully replace the mold mat, and cover with the lid. This mold mat sounds awful, right?, but it kept the kraut anaerobic — that is, alive without oxygen — and therefore safe to eat (see Going Off the Grid: Non-Refrigerated Storage).
It was at our first farmers’ market that the questions started coming. “So are you guys sauerkraut makers?” people asked. The question stumped us. Technically yes, but we also made kimchi. Later in the summer we added a line of crackers made from brine. More questions arose when we began serving assorted brines in shot glasses; at that point we were makers of sauerkraut, kimchi, and crackers and bartenders of the brine.
“Traditional food preservationist” seemed like someone who would work in a museum. I’ve seen “fermentationist,” but that’s quite a mouthful. A “zymurgologist”? Zymurgy is the branch of chemistry relating to fermentation, and although the word is super cool, it’s appropriate for the brewing arts. “Pickler” is the traditional word for the occupation, but that only confused folks. People assumed this meant we made cucumber pickles. Which would mean that for most of the year we were picklers sans pickles.
One frosty day, after we’d set up for the day’s market, I headed to Noble Coffee for our morning brew. As Daniel prepared the drinks, he asked what I did. I told him we followed the season, combining the best of the vegetables as they came in from the fields. I rhapsodized about the difference between an early crisp beet and one overwintered and oozing sugars.
“Sounds like a barista to me,” he said, as he handed me two steaming cups.
“You know what we are?” I asked Kirsten, as I handed her a cup of coffee.
“Hungry?” she guessed, passing me a breakfast burrito.
“Fermentistas,” I said proudly.
Science is in the nascent stages of understanding how our physical and mental health is interlocked with the vitality of the population of bacteria that live with us. We know fermented vegetables are a piece of the puzzle not only in keeping probiotics in our diet, and therefore in our gut, but also in the changes that overcome the vegetables that make their nutrients more available for our bodies to absorb.
Many discussions of vegetable fermentation mention that Captain Cook kept scurvy at bay on his ships with mandatory servings of sauerkraut; it worked, as we know now, because fermentation increases the cabbage’s vitamin C. Now we also know that fermentation increases other vitamins and minerals as well. For example, in 2005, a study published in Food Microbiology found that when homemade vegetable juices are fermented, their iron is 16 percent more soluble than in the raw juice.
Among many other nutrients critical for the body’s well-being are B12 and folate. Vitamin B12 is difficult to come by for people on a strict vegetarian or vegan diet, as it’s present only in animal-based foods. Fermented vegetables, however, contain B12; the bacterium Lactobacillus reuteri produces it during the process. This friendly microorganism also munches away on the vegetable sugars, converting the carbohydrates into acid, which is important for people watching their blood sugar.
There are social benefits attached to this culinary art as well. When you cook with family or friends you create a bond — from the food preparation (which can start as early as choosing seeds to grow) to gathering daily at the table. Food keeps us connected both tangibly and immeasurably.
Consider fermenting vegetables as a group activity. Enlist the kids, your significant other, friends, and guests to chop, slice, or grate; salt; and massage, pound, or press vegetables into a crock. No experience is necessary, so even the youngest member can participate. And for the I-don’t-like-kraut set, they’re sure to at least taste the ferment they helped make.
Fermentation preserves vegetables raw and without heat, so it retains their vitamins, minerals, and enzymes. But did you know it often enhances them? And the organisms that enable fermentation are themselves beneficial. Here’s how fermentation helps: