#fermented pickles

That pickle drank is ready, and now strained off.

That was an easier job than I expected, and had actually put it off for a day or two. Just took pouring it through a strainer to catch the pickled vegetables, then again through a stainless coffee filter to get most of the finer seasonings because I'm persnickety that way. Was seeing a lot of the Indian food bloggers just serving it with mustard seed pieces floating around in there.

We also got a side bonus baggie of yummy pickled carrot and beet sticks. For quick consumption, both because they are light on the salt and because they're liable to start molding sitting out of the brine like that.

Also started, as of last night:

Working roughly off this recipe, with all plain rock salt because I'm really not much of a fan of black salt.

I saw that turn up on r/fermentation a while back, and was intrigued. It's basically just spiced less-salty pickle juice made to drink. With some pickled carrots/beets as a side bonus.

I'm not in any of this for any supposed probiotic benefits. Just gimme that sweet sweet (sourish) pickle juice. Though the extra electrolytes probably would do me some good.

Wasn't quite sure how much salt to use, because the different recipes I was seeing used wildly different amounts by taste AND measured by volume using who knows what kinds of salt. A tablespoon of table salt will give you very different salt level from a tablespoon of the coarse kind I was using. Want enough to keep it from going bad, but not full regular pickle brine level unless you're actively going for salty as hell.

So, I decided to go ahead and roll with 1.5% salt by weight, where most fermented pickles use like 2-3℅ or a little more--and we'll see how that turns out.

This got a combo of yellow and brown mustard seeds, as you may be able to see. I wasn't quite sure if a couple of beets would be enough with 2L of water, but this was the color after only about 5 minutes in the jar.

More pickles underway! This time, some vaguely kimchi-themed daikon and carrot. I prepped those two in advance last night, but ran out of steam and couldn't find the jar lid I wanted. Those are a few more from the frozen stash of homegrown mystery chiles off a now-gone ornamental plant, btw. They tasted decent, and just those few little ones should give the brine a decent bit of heat.

Ignore the dirty dishes. That's what I'm doing today. 😏

Salted to wilt down, so they'll pack down into the jar better. Pretty sure that should all fit into one of the liter Kilner jars once it does wilt some. (Euro equivalent of Mason, more or less.) Plan is to cram that in, then top the jar up with some brine I mixed up, which is now cooling.

I was just going to make some regular red kimchi with that radish, but Mr. C doesn't like something about the kimchi flavor. So, I decided to try this approach instead.

May actually throw in a little piece of kombu seaweed for the touch of unami, now that I think about it. May also add some peppercorns, because they are hard to resist. Definitely throwing some frozen chopped garlic in the bottom of the jar, because we're out of whole cloves. That should work fine.

My first time making lacto-fermented dill pickles!

In Winnipeg, local pickling cucumbers became available in early July. I bought a few pounds to try pickling.

Some of the pickles were quite large, so to help them fit, I cut them into quarters.

I'd never made nor eaten this type of pickle before, so I decided to try different seasoning combinations. The base recipe (left) contained: yellow mustard seed, black peppercorns, coriander, cloves and scapes/flower of garlic; and dill seed, leaves, and flowerheads. The middle jar doesn't have coriander. The right-most jar also contains grated and salted horseradish which I froze in fall.

Unfortunately, the horseradish flavour did not survive the freezer, and was barely detectable in the finished product.

After a few hours in the brine, the cucumber skins turned an unbelievably bright, deep green, which was surreal to see! This happens as the acidity increases and microbes begin eating the surface of the cucumbers.

On day 3 or 4, the brine turned cloudy, which happens as lactic acid is produced. I've read a few different explanations for the cloudiness:

It's the high density of active, living microbes

It's the high density of dead microbes still suspended in the solution

It's lactic acid (I don't really believe that)

Numbers 1 and 2 seem the most plausible, because the cloudiness clears up a little after a few days, and a whitish sediment can be seen settling. If #3 were true, that wouldn't explain why the brine clears up after a few days.

Because this was my first time, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to make "half-sours" or "full-sours".

Half-sours are fermented for about 4 days. The pickles still have a whitish (or marbled) flesh, instead of being uniformly translucent.

Full-sours are fermented for about 7 days or longer. The flesh is more uniformly translucent. In order to match this longer ferment time, the salinity is typically increased (compared to half-sours). But hypothetically, you could use the same salt content and just ferment longer--at the risk of a softer (less crunchy) pickle--which is what I did.

Here in Winnipeg, with a room temperature below 23C (air conditioned), the quartered cucumbers reached half-sour by about Day 3-4:

And the intact cucumbers reached half-sour by about Day 5-6:

These half-sours were mild, but still pleasingly crunchy!

Putting them in the fridge on Day 6 didn't halt the fermentation soon/fast enough, and these pickles turned full-sour in the fridge, and got a little softer. So my next batch of intact cukes will go in the fridge on Day 4 or 5.

I've also learned that I want a really dilly dill pickle, so I should add more dill than I think I need! I wonder if toasting the dill seed will alter the flavour of the finished product very much?

The taste was different from storebought garlic dill pickles (vinegar-pickled) that I've tried. The acidity was less harsh, for one! There was also an additional flavour, which I guess was the "fermented cucumber" flavour. It's difficult to put my finger on what that means exactly.

Image: mason jars with fermenting sauerkraut and pickles My friend ferments pickles and sauerkraut. He gave me the directions so I set some up. It is pretty simple. Sauerkraut is cabbage and salt. I added some carrots and ginger for flavor. Pickles are salt water and some spices. I watched videos on YouTube and joined a Facebook group for beginning fermenters. There is some conflicting…

If the pickles are fermented the pickles juice is good for you

You can drink it, and you should