How To Make Lacto-Fermented Fruit and Vegetable Pickles

Select Your Ingredients

• When we make these pickles we are essentially harvesting the wild LAB from the skins and leaves and we don’t want to wash all those bacteria away.  You’ll want to choose fruits and vegetables that you can be relatively sure were not recently sprayed with pesticides.  I recommend using home grown fruits and vegetables or ingredients from your local farms.  Foraged berries are a safe bet as well, as long as they are foraged in wild environments, not along urban or suburban trails where dogs pee all over them, and you know what you are doing.
• All fruits and vegetables can be fermented using this process, however, some fruits and vegetables make tastier pickles than others.  Choose ingredients that are good when eaten raw and have some crunch to them.  Cabbage, grapes, carrots, apples, bosc pears, asian pears, beets, celery, tomatoes, brocolli, cauliflower, and asparagus all make great pickles.  Berries, other soft fruits and mushrooms loose a lot texturally when lacto-fermented but make great sauces.

Prep your ingredients

• Lightly rinse your veggies with cool running water if they have visible dirt on them.
• Shred, chop, dice, mince or puree ingredients to your liking.

Prepped vegetables for apple kraut.

Weigh your ingredients.

• Put a mixing bowl on your kitchen scale, set the scale to grams and tare so that the scale reads 0 with the empty bowl on it.  You want to weigh only what is inside the bowl.

Mixing bowl on scale after pressing the “tare” button.

• Add your fruits and/or veggies to pickle along with any herbs and spices you want to use.

Cabbage and apple ready for salting.

• You may want to add a little water to your bowl if the ingredients won’t produce enough liquid to be able to fully submerge themselves during fermentation, or you may want to totally submerge your ingredients in water if you want to pickle in a brine (as you do with cucumber pickles).
• Once everything except the salt is in the mixing bowl, make a note of the total weight of all the ingredients and water (if using).   

Add 2% Salt

• Calculate 2% of the total weight of your ingredients.  W* 0.02= 2% of total weight.  For example if the ingredients weighed 1500 grams, 1500 * 0.02 = 30 grams. 30 grams is 2% of the total weight.
• Add 2 % salt to the mixing bowl.  Use your hands to toss and stir the ingredients with the salt.  Let the mixing bowl sit on your counter for 30 minutes or so while you clean up and prepare your jars.  The salt will start to pull the liquid out of the ingredients and make a brine.
  

  2% of salt to add to mixing bowl with cabbage and apple.

Pack your pickling containers.

You can pickle in any food-grade glass, plastic, porcelain, ceramic, or stainless steel containers, including vacuum seal bags as long as the ingredients are submerged in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment and that there is a way for gasses to escape either through venting or burping.  I use 2-quart mason jars with a weight made from a bag of brine.  These instructions will describe my process.  Feel free to modify as needed to suit your vessel of choice.

• Gather your jars and lids.  Clean and sanitize if needed.  If your jars have been washed in a high temp dishwasher and are dry in your clean cabinet, they are good to go.  If you are handwashing them with a germy kitchen sponge right before pickling, I recommend that you heat sanitize by either cooking in the oven at 300 for about 30 minutes or dip in boil water then let them come back to room temp before loading them up.
• Pack your jars with the mixture from your bowl, including the liquid.  Really pack the ingredients in, you can be a bit rough with them.  You want to be able to pack the ingredients below the brine that they have created.  If there is not enough liquid, you can either wait a bit longer to see if more water will be pulled out from the salt, or put your mixing bowl back on the scale, tare it, add some water, calculate 2% of the water weight, add 2% salt and then add that brine to your jar. 

2% brine to add to pickles as needed and to fill your weight bag.

• If you have cabbage leaves, vegetable peelings, or scraps, you can put them on top (as long as they were calculated in your salt equation) and use them as a cap to help push the ingredients down into the brine.  Get a plastic bag (I like the Gallon size twist tie bags for this, not ziplock), you could also another food-grade weight of some kind.  Put your hand in the bag and push it into the jar.  Fill with as much water as you can fit while leaving a little bit of space to knot off.  You want the weight of the water-filled bag keeping your ingredients submerged, not the pressure of the bag against the lid of the jar.  If the lid is pushing the bag down, eventually, during the fermentation time an odiferous brine will shoot out of the jar all over your kitchen.

Jar of apple kraut weighted down and ready for closing up.

Close your pickling container

• Cover your jar with an airlock, silicone fermentation lid, a clean kitchen towel, or a 2 piece canning lid where the ring is loose enough to allow gasses to escape.  If you are vacuum sealing or using a lid that doesn’t let gasses out you will need to “burp” which means open the container every day or so and then reseal.  

Ferment 

• Leave container at room temperature, tasting every other day or so until the pickles are fermented to your liking.  They will taste less salty and more acidic over time as the LAB convert sugars to lactic acid.  The warmer the ambient air temperature is, the quicker this will happen and the softer your pickles will get.  Cooler temps make slower, crunchier pickles.  As a reference point, my house is currently fluctuating between 62 F – 70 F and I just pickled some stuff that took 4-6 days.  

Store your pickles

• Once your pickles are done to your liking, simply switch out your venting cap for one that stays closed and move them to the refrigerator.