Been having a lot of fun and playing with my ferments. Started to broaden out from just krauts, brining more things, making more cultured drinks and being a bit more experimental, just made a small trial batch of coffee kombucha!
My spicy pepper kraut (more like a kimchi, i guess) is always a hit. The continuous kombucha gets amazingly fizzy, love that stuff! I've made pineapple skin vinegar and a melon scraps one, fermenting has become my form of composting!
I've made fermented buckwheat bread, thanks to Amanda Feifer at Phickle (a great resource for us fermenters!) I've pickled water melon rinds (a bit tough) and recently made some garlic-dill sour pickles, they were delicious. I took Sandor Katz advice and added a couple of cherry tree leaves to the brine as the tannins are supposed to help keep the pickles crunchy. They were crunchy, sour and absolutely gorgeous! I left them to ferment for 20 days in a 5.4% brine.
Then i made a ginger bug starter and a batch of ginger beer from it, still have a week to go until that's ready to drink. Yesterday i pickled some carrots and ginger. I'm so glad i started to lacto-ferment... and discovered Sandor Katz. My innards have never felt so good!! ;-)
It's great fun, have a go... it's alchemy!
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| 'Ginger bug' starting to ferment. water, ginger and sugar, which you keep feeding like a sourdough starter |
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| My garlic-dill sour pickles at the start of their journey. |
Your pickles are beautiful! We sell Sandor Katzs book where I work and really cool fermenting kits. You are inspiring me to get back to it, I've had way too much going on, it's time for some fermenting!
ReplyDeleteTracey, i can rely on you for comments! I've had to drift away from blogging, i love doing it, but i gave away way too much time to too few people! Anyway, i look forward to you getting back to fermenting. I love the big bumper Sandor book, but the humble Wild Fermentation is better for me, a doers manual to get the job done. I'm scaling up production now, to give away and hopefully start to sell some of it. God, those kosher dill pickles tasted good! People over here don't really know them properly. It's just gherkins in sweet vinegar. You helped inspire me along this path too. I'm also more and more, thinking about getting some land, growing more, keeping some animals etc etc. I'm not even practical, i'm ill equiped for it!! i guess i'm trying to override who i am, with who i'd really like to be and hoping i can pick up the skills along the way. I can feel my psyche being ripped sometimes by that pull in different directions. Like i'm physically yanking my soul down a different path!! internal schism!
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