Ultimate Guide to Fermented Vegetables

Hey pioneers. Welcome to episode number 320. Today's episode, we're going to be talking all about fermenting vegetables. So just consider this your ultimate guide to doing fermented vegetables. We're going to be talking about the three different kinds of fermentation and which of those kinds is actually used when we are doing fermented vegetables, how to ferment your vegetables, and then the supplies that you actually need. You really don't need nearly the amount of supplies that I often see if you Google, "How to ferment something," or look at recipes out. There's nice to have optional things that do make it nice if you're doing a lot, but if you're just getting started, you really don't need to have hardly any equipment at all, but there are a few things that you must have in order for it to turn out right so we're going to be talking about that in our tips for success. Super excited to dive into this episode with you.

Welcome. My name is Melissa K. Norris. I'm your host and fifth generation homesteader, bestselling author of a few books, The Family Garden Plan, as well as my book Hand Made, which if you have Hand Made, then you already have quite a few of my fermenting recipes in that. I help hundreds of thousands of people, gosh, it sounds weird to even say that, every single month with social media, my books, the website podcast, YouTube, Instagram, all the places, including my courses and the Pioneering Today Academy to live a homegrown in handmade life, using simple modern home steading, and fermenting definitely has a place in there.

Now, I didn't grow up with eating fermented foods. We grew up, my mom canned a lot, she cooked a ton from scratch, we had a big garden, we raised our own beef, but herbal medicine and fermenting were two of the things that we didn't really practice. In fact, other than yogurt, I don't think I even tried fermented vegetables well into my adult years. In fact, I was probably in my thirties before I really ever had a true fermented sauerkraut, definitely in my thirties before I started eating things like kimchi, and now they are one of my favorite forms of food.

However, if you're listening to this and you're like, "I have tried some fermented vegetables in the past and I really didn't like them that much." If you're like, "I don't really care for sauerkraut, it's not my thing, I don't really think it's that good." Stay with me, my friend. We're going to be talking about that the end and I also am going to be doing a free masterclass all about ferments, not just vegetables, we're going to be talking primarily about vegetables today, but how to use fermented food to make a healthy homemade kitchen. There are a lot of different foods that are fermented, that a lot of us don't even realize, unfortunately, because we've been buying them from the store. And a lot of these items when you buy them from the store, they're not really technically a fermented or cultured food because the food industry takes shortcuts and they bypass that a lot. To snag your seat for that, you are going to want to go to melissaknorris.com/fermenting. It's going to be a live class on September 29th, 2021, and I am super excited for this class and I hope that you join me for it.

However, let us get back to the episode at hand. When we are talking about fermented or cultured foods, there's actually three kinds of fermentation, so here's where we're going to get into the science. I'm going to go into the science more heavily in that free class I was talking about, but I want to give you a little bit of a foundation of that and understanding here.

The first type is lactic acid. Lactic acid fermentation happens when naturally occurring yeast and bacteria, they convert the sugars into lactic acid. This is what helps to naturally preserve the food for long term storage, which we'll talk more about that in the class than I'm going to be doing because as you can see, that is going to be a full hour long masterclass. This is also going to be a decently amount of timed podcast, usually about 30 minutes. My goal is to give you everything that you need, but in order to give you all of that information, I have to split it up.

However, as long as proper temperatures are maintained, fermented foods do have a very long term storage life and lactic acid is the typical form that is used for fermented vegetables. This is what you're going to see when we're doing fermented pickles, sauerkraut, tomatoes, et cetera, even miso, and some soy sauces will use the lactic acid form of fermentation. That's number one.

The second type of fermentation we have is ethyl alcohol. Most common forms of ethyl alcohol fermentation are going to be beer, wine, hard cider, alcoholic beverages. These ferments used yeast to break down starches and sugars, and they transfer them into carbon dioxide, which gives a lot of your ferments that really nice bubbly effect that people off really enjoy with their alcohol.

Now, the third form we have is a acidic acid fermentation. This occurs when starch from your grains and sugars, usually from fruit, begin to ferment. This is what happens when you have apple cider vinegar, fruit vinegar, kombucha, water kefir or kefir, and milk kefir.

But we're going back to fermenting our vegetables, which is the lactic acid. Honestly, fermenting your vegetables as a form of food preservation is one of the easiest ways and the least amount of hands-on time to preserve your food. What's also fabulous is if you've just got a small amount that's coming on, this is what I usually do with our cucumbers, and we'll do a bunch of fermented cucumbers up instead of canning them, especially in the beginning and the end of the season. In the beginning of the season, when they're growing, I don't really have enough cucumbers to warrant pulling out my canner and doing a whole batch, because I really only usually have enough cucumbers maybe to do one quart sized jar in the very beginning. Then again at the end of the season, kind of the same thing. Stuff is slowing down. They're not coming on as often or in as large of a volume, but I have enough that's coming at that last picking where I don't want them to go to waste or it's too much for us to eat fresh, and so I will ferment them up.

I have to say over the years, we have developed more of a taste, which we'll be talking about a little bit further in this episode, for fermented vegetables. Now the fermented saltwater brine cucumbers that we ferment into pickles are my daughter's favorite and they're my favorite and my husband actually really likes them a lot too. I now do up a lot more of them than I did in the past. The only drawback is we do have to keep them in a cold temperature, for a lot of people, that's going to be a refrigerator depending on what you're or winters are like, how cold your home is, and what type of storage things that you've got, so we'll talk about that a little bit more. I do up now, my goal is to have at least a couple of gallons of the fermented cucumbers to take us through as far as possible and then once we go through all of those, then I do still can some, so that I've got those on the shelf that don't require any type of cold storage. But we are moving, interestingly with the pickles at least, predominantly towards fermented pickles instead of the vinegar canned pickles.

Now, for doing your fermented vegetables though, as I said, it's probably one of the easiest forms of food preservation that you can start with. You are going to make a saltwater brine, so you're going to take salt and water. Now, the salt that you use, very similar to when we are canning, should not have any anti-caking agents in it and you don't want it to have iodine in it. Iodine can mess up and inhibit the natural bacterias and the yeast and stuff from being able to do their job in order to actually ferment it. Ideally, you are using a good high quality sea salt, like a Celtic gray or a Himalayan pink sea salt, or Redmond's real salt. You really want a salt that has minerals in there and nutrients because not only is that better for our bodies, but it also is going to help the good bacteria as it begins to do the fermentation process.

Now, why salt is so important and the type of salt, like I said, no iodine in there, so you don't want to just use like a regular table salt. But the salt is going to help keep the bad bacteria at bay, so it actually is a form of preservation in this. When we're canning, salt is for flavor. When you're fermenting, it is actually part of the safety. The salt is going to keep the bad bacteria at bay while the good bacteria and yeast get established and get the fermentation process going.

Now, once that is established and then it's actually changing as those bacteria and yeast are eating the starches and vegetables in the food, and then it's turning into the acid part, right? Then it's lowering the pH level, which is going to help keep bad bacteria at bay because it doesn't grow well in a lower pH, only the good bacteria that we're after do and yeast. The salt is what helps that as the it's getting established. The salt is actually very important when it comes to your fermentation.

So is your water. Now, if you're on good well water, you probably aren't going to have any issues, but if you are on any type of treated water that has chlorine in it, you're not going to want to use that. You're going to either need to boil it and then let it cool down to room temperature or let it sit out for 24 hours, that helps the chlorine to dissipate, or put it through a really good filter if you have a good filtering system, that's going to remove that. But if you are in a city or treated water thing that uses chlorine, not ideal for doing your ferments. You're going to want to make sure that you're either treating that or getting something else.

Now, depending upon what the vegetable is is going to depend up on how much salt to water ratio. I prefer for my fermented cucumbers to do two tablespoons of salt to one quart of water. Or I should say two tablespoons of salt, to four cups of water. One of the reasons that I say doing fermented vegetables, especially something like cucumbers, where you're making pickles is one of the easiest ones to get started, is because you only have to usually let them set at room temperature for about anywhere from three days to two weeks. Now, there's a little bit of a play in there, but when you're doing things like sauerkraut, sometimes those will be fermenting for three to four week so it's going to be longer. But the good news is this is not hands on time. You're just letting them set and you're going to be checking on them every few days.

This is where though I feel like people get a little bit confused or are unsure of when they're beginning to ferment. When you're doing your fermented vegetables, very similar to sourdough, which is also ferment, the temperature of the room where the food is, fermenting is going to greatly affect how fast it ferments. The warmer it is, the faster it's going to ferment. If it's too warm that actually can cause yeast to become more active and overtake it rather than having the good bacteria, so ideally keeping it beneath 85 degree Fahrenheit or lower, you don't really want it to be at 90, 95 degrees or hotter like around 100 degrees. That is not going to be ideal.

But oftentimes people think that their house is just too cold. For your fermented vegetables, you want it to be 60 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer. Now, at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, that's pretty cold, especially if it were to stay at 60 degrees Fahrenheit the entire time. But if you're overnight, it's cooling off, and in the early wee morning hours, you're around 60 degrees Fahrenheit and then during the day, it's warming up into the high 60's, into the low 70's in your house where you're fermenting, that's going to be absolutely fine. It's going to take it a little bit longer to probably reach the desired effect and to be totally fermented than if it was in a warmer room, but it's not too cold. It just takes it a little bit longer. This, I feel like temperature has less of effect, especially on this when we're fermenting our vegetables, than it does when you're doing something like a sourdough starter.

With our fermented vegetables, you are going to pack them into a glass jar. Now, you can use a crock, they have larger crocks if you're doing a large amount, but when you're first getting started, most of the time you're just going to be using something smaller, like a Mason jar. I usually do mine in either a quart size Mason jar or a half gallon Mason jar, depending on how many vegetables I've got coming in at once, or how many cucumbers I have.

Then you are going to obviously put your food in there. You're going to mix up your saltwater brine and stir that until the salt is fully dissolved into the water, and then you're going to pour it over top of the vegetables. I like to have dill, of course, and garlic in with my cucumbers because that's our favorite flavor profile for our pickles.

You want to make sure, this is a biggie. You want to make sure that the brine completely, the liquid level, completely covers the vegetables. Usually you need to use some type of weight. Of course, there are weights that you can purchase, but you can also just do homemade weights as well. I have used a small glass baby food jar from way back in the day because my children are now preteens and teenagers. You can use a Ziploc bag that you fill with water and have it sealed all the way. Some people will use a cabbage leaf or a grape leaf to help tuck and keep the things underneath the water level. If you're using a crock, you can use a plate and then you can have something sitting on top of that. People have even washed really well rocks and used rocks that will fit in there. I really do like the glass fermenting weights. They don't cost that much, they're pretty inexpensive and they fit and work in really great so I use those now for pretty much everything, except when it's my crock. You can actually buy weights for your crock too, but I tend to still just use a dinner plate that fits inside my crock as my weight and I'll just put water in a Mason jar and set that on top of the dinner plate for the crock and that works just great.

Now, for actual links to some of the different fermentation lids I'll be talking about, which are optional and weights and different things like that, you can go to melissaknorris.com/320, because this is episode number 320, and you can see all of that written out in a blog post, including links to go and further go through that.

But you need to have your Mason jar, some type of weight. In the beginning, this is one thing when you're first learning, doing fermenting where people will think, "Oh, I don't need a weight. It's all the way beneath the liquid level, especially with things like cucumbers. This has even happened to me in the past." I'm like, "Oh, it's totally underneath the liquid level. No problem. It's packed in there nice and tight. I've got it under the shoulder of the jar, I don't need to put a weight in there." Then you'll come back in say two to three days and you'll check on it and low and behold, some of those little darling cucumbers have popped up and are now exposed and beginning to mold. Trust me. You want to use some type of weight, either a purchased weight or some of those homemade options that I just laid out.

Now, do you need to have a fermentation lid? No, you don't have to have a fermentation lid. They make fermentation lids, lots of different kinds. They make airlocks systems, they have silicone Mason tops that kind of look like a little nipple that go on top of the jar and you just use the band to hold it in place and screw it down. They have other ones that have airlock system lids that kind of have a little, it's hard to explain this in audio without a picture or using my hands. But they have a little cup and these little pipes of this plastic that hold the water and will allow them to vent and different things like that. They're all actually pretty inexpensive, and they go on top of your Mason jars. Those can be really great, but you don't have to have them.

I will say that they seem to cut down, especially on things like fermented green beans, at least for me, they do tend to cut down on mold issues, as well as kahm. kahm is, a lot of times in the beginning people will confuse it for mold. It's not actually mold, but it's a little white film that will grow on the top of the ferment. Usually it's on top of the liquid, especially if you've done a good job of keeping all of your solids beneath that liquid level. It'll come on in the beginning and you can skim it off, it's not harmful, but a lot of people feel that it can impact the flavor down the road of the ferment so a lot of times you'll skim that off and then it'll keep fermenting and it won't grow back.

It's in the beginning when you don't have the acid pH isn't there yet because it hasn't went through the full fermentation process yet and the good bacteria hasn't had a chance to get fully established and you have the yeast part, which is overgrown, and then you get the kahm that's in there. A lot of times I have found that if I am using one of the fermentation specific lids, either a silicone one that called Mason types like pickle pipes, there's different companies that have them and those are their different names or one of the other ones where it's more of a airlock type system. I have much, much less issues with any type of Kahm yeast when I'm using those. As I said, they're pretty inexpensive, but you don't have to have them.

You want it to be breathable because as it's fermenting, it will let off bubbles and you can have that build up of gas and you can have jars explode. That's why we want to make sure that it is breathable and that's what those lids will help provide but then they help it to off gas basically, without allowing in all of the other contaminants that could be in the air floating around your home.

But you can use a metal lid and band, just a regular canning lit and band, you have to burp the jar if you do that though. You have to remember every day to unscrew it enough so that if there's any gas, beginning to build up, that it can escape and then you want to screw that band down as fast as you can to not to allow any of bad bacteria that could be getting in, et cetera, before we have got our good established pH levels and the good bacteria in there.

Oftentimes people will tell me, "Well, I would love to eat more ferments because I know that there's health benefits." You guys, there's more health benefits than most of us realize. I'm going to be diving into that in that free masterclass that's coming up, so I hope you grab your seat, it's pretty exciting stuff. But when you are doing it at home, you have the ability to control how strong it gets, and also how to influence the flavors. The longer that you let it ferment and at the warmer temperatures, then the stronger of a ferment flavor it's going to have. You can shorten the fermentation time or lower the temperature, and that's going to control the outcome.

But you also can flavor it. In fact, I don't really care that much for regular sauerkraut, but I love cortido. Cortido is a Spanish version of sauerkraut, it's still cabbage based, but cortido uses carrots, onions, garlic, as well as oregano, and you can put peppers in it. I don't like things spicy, so I leave those out. I don't put jalapeno in mine. But it is so good that we never ever go without it. I don't make regular sauerkraut, honestly, I only make cortido and we love it. But even with fermented pickles, like Bubbie's, I believe, is a fermented brand of pickles that you can buy at the store, doing them at home, you can use whatever spice blends that you like. As I said, that flavor difference, it's controlled by you.

I will go in test my whatever ferment I'm doing. After about three to four days once I begin to see signs of fermentation that are happening, I'll go in and I'll start taste testing it. As soon as it's reached the level of flavor that we like, my family prefers, then I immediately put it into cold storage, which for me is a refrigerator. If you live in an area where you have got a place that's 50 degrees Fahrenheit or cooler. Most of our fridges are, you can obviously set your fridges, but most of us keep our fridges in the high 30s, maybe at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. But if you have a cold room or maybe it's a basement or a garage, you don't want your ferments to freeze, however, so you, we need to make sure that if you're not using a refrigerator, that they're in an environment that is not going to freeze, but is staying beneath 50 degrees Fahrenheit, if at all possible, then those ferments will last for weeks and months. The closer that they are to that of a refrigerator temperature, those colder temps, then it to last even longer. I've had ferments that have lasted at least nine months. Usually we go through them faster than that, but they'll be good for at least up to nine months.

What happens is once you put them in a cold storage, and this is true of any ferment not just vegetable ferments, is it just puts everything into hibernation mode. It doesn't actually stop it all together. It will slowly still ferment. You still will get more flavor pronunciation that stronger tang, it's not like vinegar. A fermented vegetable does not have a vinegar flavor, but it does have that tangy sour, and the longer you let it ferment, the more pronounced that be comes, especially the longer that you let it, what we call the first ferment, which is when it's at room temperature, the longer you let it sit at room temperature and ferment, the stronger it's going to become. Then once you put it into the fridge, it will hold whatever that flavor profile is where you pulled it from room temp, but it will become a little bit more pronounced, especially if you let it go for months.

If I pull my cucumber pickles and put them in the fridge, three months down the road, six months down the road, they are going to taste stronger than the day that I put them in the fridge. But it's very slow. It's very minimal, I would say. It's not like this huge pronounced flavor difference.

Some of the best vegetables to ferment are going to be cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, garlic, jalapenos, other peppers, kohlrabi, radishes are phenomenal, snap beans. You can do tomatoes. You can do turnips, kale, actually. There's a kraut kale recipe that's really great. You could also do beets, but here's my caveat for lack of a better term. When it comes to doing beets. I love beats, roasted beats, pickled beats. Give me all the beets. I will use cooked pureed beets up in cake, and nobody can tell the difference except they think it's an amazing cake. However, fermenting beets all by themselves, I have to tell you tasted like straight dirt. I wanted to love them so much because I love ferments and I love beats. No joke. I love beets. I absolutely hated the fermented beats. They were so bad that my chickens didn't even want to eat them, they were that bad.

However, I am going to try fermented beets with carrots, because this is where I said you can play with the flavors. Carrots are naturally sweeter so I'm going to try doing a mix of fermented beets with carrots to see if that will get them to a point where I like them. I was so disappointed, but I have to say, I do not like just plain fermented beets, but they are a wonderful vegetable to ferment so definitely give them a try. However, adding things like some ginger and carrots, that is going to be what I try with the beats and doing mix, this next go round as I'm starting to pull things from the garden and finish getting all of our fermenting done and into the fridge jars and then into the fridge of course, for long term. I will let you know how those turn out and if I find them to be more palatable and can get through them because I was so disappointed, but I have to be honest with you. I did not care for the fermented beats, but everything else has been a definite, definite go.

To find out more about the health benefits and more on the science, including all of the other types of foods that you can ferment because there is a lot more than just vegetables, my friend, I hope that you will join me in that free masterclass that I am doing. You can get your free seat at that at melissaknorris.com/fermenting.

Onto our verse of the week. We are in Matthew chapter 7, verse 24. "Everyone who hears these words of mind and acts upon them, obeying them, will be like a sensible, prudent, practical, wise man who built his house upon the rock and the rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall because it had been founded on the rock." That was actually Matthew 7 verse 24 and 25 and that was the Amplified translation of the Bible.

But I've been going back through this. I think this is a parable, and if you went to Sunday school or vacation Bible school, you probably heard the story about the foolish house man who built his house up on the sand and when the waves and the rain came, it went tumbling down and the wise man who built his house on the rock, which is the portion that I just read you, and how we want to obviously be like the wise man and we want our house to still be standing. But oftentimes we could hear these stories and you can hear those parables and we know them, but then you'll come back to them, especially if you're going through something in your life, and they will take on a different meaning or a different lesson. That is why the Bible truly is living word, because you can read something that you have read and heard for a lifetime. I'm 40 years old and was raised, yeah, going to church and going to Sunday school, and I've read the Bible through myself multiple times and I still read the Bible, and I will read a verse that I know I have read multiple times and it will take on a new meaning or give me new insight, which is pretty amazing if you actually sit and ponder that.

But this in particular, I'm not really sure how much to share of this to be honest, because I am still wrestling with it, and I think that there's sometimes that there's lessons in life that we don't share until we've come out the other side and there's some that you don't ever share publicly. Sometimes you do because it will be edifying for those who are listening or it will be a help to people, but when you're walking through it, it's not necessarily always the time to share it, at least in a public format like this.

But I am going through some things personally where we live and some things that we have always been able to do in the past, we are no longer able to do because of health choices. I'm trying to be careful, if you can't tell, I've really tried to be careful here because I don't want this to become about that. I don't want to take away from this lesson here.

Anyways, I am dealing with a situation and it's with someone that I know personally and consider to be a very good friend actually, which makes it a lot harder. I've been struggling with that because I don't know how to respond ... Right now I want to respond out of hurt, like grief. I've actually cried about it. However, that's still responding out of a place where I have a lot of emotion, and when we have emotion tied up into things, we don't always make the wisest choice in our response because our emotions take over. I'm trying really hard to pray through it and to not respond until I can do so from a place without a lot of emotion and emotion that still feels raw.

I was reading this in my early morning devotions and I don't have the answer for myself yet for this specific situation. I don't actually know how I'm going to respond, or if I'm going to, which is very cryptic, but as I was reading this, and which is why I wanted to share this portion with you, is we have to be on a foundation of rock. I mean that with our faith and the things that we stand for, because we are going to experience storms and waves. I think that many of us are going through a time right now with our faith that we have probably never felt this much public storm because of those choices. We've never had this type of waves hit us before, and our foundation has never been tested in this way before now.

For some of you, you might be like, "No, no no. Sis, I have been tested way beyond this." But I have to say for me personally, I don't know that I've ever felt this level before from media, but actual people that I know personally and that's where it's hard. Media is one thing, what we see on social media, from people that we don't know or we see on the news, et cetera. But when it's people that you know and you respect and you're close to, that's where it gets hard, gets really hard. Our faith has to be built on a foundation of rock. Our faith has to rock solid.

For me, that is just diving back into the Word and consuming the less of the media, which we know is always, always, probably a good thing, honestly, but really diving into Scripture and diving into the beliefs that I hold dear and placing them against scripture, even my own beliefs. Is this truly biblical? Is this what the word of God says, not what has been made popular or is theology that I have heard secondhand? Is it actually scripturally sound beliefs that I'm holding onto? Because only things that are scripturally sound are going to withstand and the only way that I'm going to be able to stand with my faith and on the rock is going to be, if it is scripturally sound and diving deeper and deeper into that.

This portion of the podcast got a little bit longer and honestly, a little bit more personal than I intended when I first began, but it's what's on my heart. So, I just wanted to share that with you and I want to thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Next week, we are going to have an amazing episode where we are talking about raising fiber animals, natural dyed yarn, and full lot care, a lot of really cool things. I'm very excited for that episode. I want to thank you for joining me today and I hope that I get to see you in the live fermentation masterclass on September 29th. But no matter where I get to meet up with you again, blessings and Mason jars for now.