Ooh, experiments in fermentation are high on my list but I haven’t tried yet. Do you have any good tips for translating one’s pickling skills to fermentation? Or any fermentation tips in general - I’d love to know more about your process if you feel like sharing!
I feel like they’re related in technique but have fundamentally different results. Pickling can enhance and sharpen flavours but fermentation, at least the salt anerobic kind, tends to mellow flavours. I found it helped to start with some pretty simple stuff. Just a single ingredient and salt (and water). It’s Alive, the old Bon Apetit (booo!) show, has some really helpful starting recipies. Noma’s guide to fermentation really emboldened my fermentation choices.
I got one of those fermentation kits of Amazon that has a couple of jar lids with a one-way valve, some glass fermentation weights, and a large syringe to pull air from the jar. I was much less worried about turning something poison with the added help from those tools.
My process is usually when something is going to go bad I put it in a jar I know the weight of, add a spice or something that may taste good then add water. Then weight it and calculate 2.5% salt of the item+spice+water. You can go lower than 2.5% but that’s a pretty safe number.
Then I’ll look at it and taste it a couple weeks in, decide if it needs more time and keep going. Some things have a tipping point where all of a sudden they taste really different. Other things have a more linear progression.
Seems like fermentation takes a little more care than I expected, but not in a bad way! I hadn’t realized there were fermentation kits out there and I’m so glad to have gotten that information before I got excited one day and decided to just wing it. It’s also good to know I should probably be thinking of this more like baking than like cooking, since I’m gathering from your description that more precise measurements are called for to get the right result.
Thank you - I really appreciate you taking the time to write out this great advice!
Ooh, experiments in fermentation are high on my list but I haven’t tried yet. Do you have any good tips for translating one’s pickling skills to fermentation? Or any fermentation tips in general - I’d love to know more about your process if you feel like sharing!
I feel like they’re related in technique but have fundamentally different results. Pickling can enhance and sharpen flavours but fermentation, at least the salt anerobic kind, tends to mellow flavours. I found it helped to start with some pretty simple stuff. Just a single ingredient and salt (and water). It’s Alive, the old Bon Apetit (booo!) show, has some really helpful starting recipies. Noma’s guide to fermentation really emboldened my fermentation choices.
I got one of those fermentation kits of Amazon that has a couple of jar lids with a one-way valve, some glass fermentation weights, and a large syringe to pull air from the jar. I was much less worried about turning something poison with the added help from those tools.
My process is usually when something is going to go bad I put it in a jar I know the weight of, add a spice or something that may taste good then add water. Then weight it and calculate 2.5% salt of the item+spice+water. You can go lower than 2.5% but that’s a pretty safe number. Then I’ll look at it and taste it a couple weeks in, decide if it needs more time and keep going. Some things have a tipping point where all of a sudden they taste really different. Other things have a more linear progression.
Experiment and have fun!
Seems like fermentation takes a little more care than I expected, but not in a bad way! I hadn’t realized there were fermentation kits out there and I’m so glad to have gotten that information before I got excited one day and decided to just wing it. It’s also good to know I should probably be thinking of this more like baking than like cooking, since I’m gathering from your description that more precise measurements are called for to get the right result.
Thank you - I really appreciate you taking the time to write out this great advice!