Lacto-Fermentation (with pictures!)

Last week I talked about lacto-fermenting vegetables for probiotics. Now that I’ve done it and tasted the results, I’m going to share pictures and some details of my process. For full instructions, see Nourishing Meals.

I first cut up a ton of vegetables – broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, celery, and half a cucumber. The picture below shows 3 quart sized mason jars of vegetables:

My mom laughed at me when I asked if this could be done with a food processor. Nope, just good ole elbow grease.

I didn’t want to do too much with spices and such. I didn’t know how strong the flavors would be or how they would mix. I’d rather have too little flavor than too much! I did a jar a broccoli and cauliflower with pepper corns, one with carrots, celery, and cucumbers with dill, and one with everything left and peppercorns. Here’s a visual of how much I added (the dill was dried, fresh would probably be preferable):

Other herbs and spices can go on top or within the veggies.

Peppercorns go on the bottom to keep them from floating up

After compiling the vegetables, spices, and brine (I used 1.5 tbsp salt:2 cups filtered water; the last jar was slightly more dilute since I was a tablespoon or two short on brine), I added the cabbage leaf. It was hard to nicely fold it. I mostly just shoved it in so that the water was mostly above the cabbage and there was no air below it:

After this all that was left was putting the lids on and letting it sit for a week! Look at how pretty my jars turned out:

I don’t know how much of these vegetables one should consume in a day, but I plan to have about a 1/2 cup a day. I figure that’s a good amount without me overdosing on salt. In that case, with 3 quarts of veggies these will last me 24 days.

After a week of letting them sit, I tried the veggies. I was worried because, well, they smelled like cabbage. But they tasted like pickles! I’m very pleased with how these turned out. And since apparently everything with food needs to be a learning experience for me, the lesson this time around was that these did not travel well. We put them in a backpack and rode a motorcycle to my dads house and the backpack ended up covered in brine. Good to know. Here’s what they looked like after one week:

You can definitely tell something was happening!