I’ve been fermenting vegetables for some time. Fermenting is putting vegetables in a closable glass jar, adding salt (and sometimes water, depend what you ferment) and letting it ferment (in room temperature), on your countertop for about 7-14 days.
Why ferment? Fermented vegetables are more healthy, fresh, without additives or preservatives. They last much longer in the fridge, and are customizable regarding their taste.
When do we add water to the fermentation process? when we are working with hard vegetables (cucumbers or carrots) that CAN NOT be pressed. If we just put them in a jar and add salt, they will just get dry and turn bad, so we need to arrange them nicely in a jar and fill the jar with water until they are submerged.
When do we NOT add water? When we are fermenting vegetables that CAN be chopped or pressed, for example chopped cabbage (like the one on your hotdog) or with pepper sauce. In the case of the chopped cabbage, when you add 2.75% salt to it and let it seat in a bowl for two hours, occasionally stirring it, you’ll see it release its fluids, enough to cover it whole when its in a jar and pressed. When I’m fermenting cabbage I use glass weights to keep the cabbage tightly submerged under it’s own liquids. Sauces of any kind (lemon, garlic, pepper) will not require weights.
How much salt? It can range between 2% to 3% of the overall weight. I tried 2% but it’s too mild for my liking and the cucumbers aren’t getting crunchy enough. So, after experimenting I think that 2.5-2.75% of salt is best to get good fermentation process, and nice taste and texture.
Calculating the amount of salt to add:
The amount of salt will be 2.5 – 2.75% of the overall weight of what goes IN your jar. That includes your vegetables, optional seasoning and any water you added.
To make things safe, take your empty jar and weigh it, write it down on a paper or with a permanent marker on the jar for the next batch.
Start arranging cucumbers in the jar, if you put garlic/English pepper/chilly/ginger/dill (yes, do it), put them on the bottom cause you don’t want anything to float back up (or just put them in a tea strainer).
Add filtered water (to avoid off taste, chlorine etc.) until all vegetables are submerged (half an inch, 2 cm will do).
Now put the jar on your scale. Subtract the empty jar weight from the overall weight, divide by 100 and multiply by 2.75 , that will give you the weight of salt you need to add in.
You can place a glass weight on the vegetables to keep them submerged. Close the lid but not tightly.
Let ferment on the countertop for 7 days. Cucumbers are ready to eat the moment they start to change color, from bright green to an olive hue.
What I like about fermented sauce is that it’s a live product, unlike posturized sauce you’ll buy on the store, which is a “dead” material, most likely packed with artificial preservatives, the friendly bacteria that developed during the fermentation process, help keep this sauce tasty even after two months in the fridge. While bought pickled cucumbers will change their taste after a few days, fermented cucumbers will taste the same even after a month in the fridge.
Note that in any of the fermentation stages, the scent should be nice. If it has a bad odor (I doubt that will happen) just discard, and start again. The white yeast that appears in fermentation is fine and harmless (See for example the yeast sediment at the bottom of unfiltered beer bottles). This is different than mold which is fuzzy, hairy, colored, or smells bad.
