Description
This is a step-by-step guide on how to pickle any fruit or vegetable with lacto-fermentation. As with any recipe, read through the entire process first, before beginning to make your pickles. The images used to illustrate this process are from our AppleKraut Recipe.
Ingredients
Fruits and/ or Veggies that you want to pickle
Herbs and Spices (optional)
Water (optional)
Salt (with no iodine or anti-caking agents)
Instructions
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.
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.
- Add your fruits and/or veggies to pickle along with any herbs and spices you want to use.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Notes
Can you Water-Bath-Can these pickles?
Generally, yes, but why would you want to? Heating these pickles kills their beneficial probiotic bacteria, destroys their effervescent qualities and makes them softer. By killing all their beneficial bacteria it opens the doors to other harmful bacteria to take over if your pH isn’t quite right. If you are planning to water-bath can these I recommend following a recipe designed for canning (by a legit source for canning like Ball Blue Book or a Cooperative Extension website), or using pH strips or a pH meter to verify your brine is less than 4.6.
How long do these last?
In theory, indefinitely. In practice I would keep them refrigerated and eat them within a month or 2. Across the world, you will find food cultures that leave lacto-fermented pickles at room temperature to eat throughout the year. But pickles get more sour and softer the longer they ferment. You will also need to skim off the scum regularly.
Botulism and how is this safe?
I had been processing meat for a long time when I started learning about Lacto-Fermented Pickles and my first thought was “Low acid foods, room temperature, no oxygen = botulism” followed by “How is this safe?”
Clostridium Botulinum is a frightening bacteria that lives in soil and is present all over our natural environment. It forms spores that cannot be killed with regular heating and these spores create the deadly toxin botulism when they germinate. The spores of Clostiridium Botulinum germinate when exposed to a climate that they like. That climate is low in acid (above 4.6 PH), a sustained amount of time 60-130F degrees, 96% and above water activity.
Our good Lactobacilli bacteria strains (LAB) are salt-tolerant which is great because a lot of the dangerous bacteria are not. 2% salt is enough to make your fermented pickles safe during the time that the LAB are working to convert sugar to lactic acid. As the acidity of your pickle increases, that acidity becomes sufficient to protect your food from C. Botulinum. It is incredibly important that you properly weigh your ingredients and salt and do your math correctly. Fortunately, the most common math mistakes in this recipe (not taring your bowl and multiplying by 0.2 instead of 0.02) will either be immediately obvious or result in more salt not less, making your final product safe but possibly unpalatable.
Scum, Pink Stuff and Molds
Sounds delicious, huh? Higher salt concentrations and cooler temperatures cause fermentation to take longer. If you are fermenting over a longer period of a couple weeks, many recipes will call for skimming the scum off the top daily. The scum is typically white or pink, or little dots forming on the surface of the brine. This scum is yeasts and molds. If removed regularly they are harmless. However, left to colonize your ferments, these yeasts and molds will feed off the lactic acid created by your LAB and increase your pH to potentially dangerous levels above 4.6. I don’t really like daily chores with my slow-food projects (which is why I’m not a fan of fermenting in containers that need to be manually burped) and am happy to report that when using the bag method to submerge the fermenting ingredients and this salt ratio, I have not had any issues with scum.