Full of probiotics, fermented foods are super helpful for digestion, the gut biome, boosting the immune system, reducing inflammation and more. You can ferment all kinds of vegetables. Experiment! Start with your favorite kind. You can make one kind at a time, or you can mix them. Then, try the vegetables you don’t really like. Being fermented, they change taste and you might like them that way.
You need a big glass jar to ferment all your vegetables together, and a few smaller airtight jars for ease of consuming and for storing.
Vegetables: small cucumbers, young carrots, radishes, turnips, artichoke hearts, green beans, asparagus, okra, pearl onions, garlic cloves, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, etc.…
Spices: lemon (falls between vegetable and spice), garlic, thyme, rosemary, laurel, cilantro seeds, juniper, caraway, dill, fennel, anis, mustard seeds, dry red pepper, black pepper, white pepper, clove… So many different spices. Choose according to your taste, and then, experiment…
Salt: Use a fine grain pure sea salt. Don’t use common table salt, it is a poison. Its second ingredient after pure sodium is dextrose, which is a refined sugar from the corn industry (GMO, glyphosate). It also contain heavy metals (neurotoxins) as free flowing agents.
Directions:
• Chop up or slice your vegetables about a bite size, or use whole if small and young.
• Put them in a mixing bowl with a fair amount of salt. Not too much either, just about twice the amount you would normally use for cooking. Add your spices of choice and be extremely generous for the amount. Spicing will prevent molds to corrupt your fermentation.
• Fill up your jar and let it sit around at room temperature for a couple of hours. Vegetables will start to reduce and their juices start accumulating at the bottom. Pack up with more veggies and top up with water. Add an extra teaspoon of salt.
• Don’t close the jar. Cover with a plate just to protect the content, but let it breathe.
• Put a plate at the bottom to collect the overflow of water that will come during fermentation.
• Wait for two days and taste a piece of vegetable. I like my fermented vegetables still crunchy so I usually give them only three days. After five days they become softer. It depends of the king of vegetables: artichoke heart will need longer than asparagus, and depends mostly of your taste. The longer they stay in brine the more fermented and softer they’ll get. The maximum time I left mine is five days.
• Drain the vegetables in a colander but don’t rinse off the juices.
• Put in smaller jars, sprinkle with your favorite olive oil, add more or different spices (some people like to add some vinegar- I don’t). Close the jars tightly, give them a shake and put them in the bottom of your refrigerator where you can keep them for a year or so.
• Start another batch.
Enjoy and be well!
Gilles Marin
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