2025, Family, Food, Uncategorized

Fermentation

46 Comments

Sunday night I received a cryptic message from our daughter that said “Breaking News: I love sauerkraut”.

She had an out of town friend visiting a week or so ago, and the friend just whipped up some sauerkraut and left it to ferment. I like the taste but not the texture of sauerkraut, but I never had it homemade. Maybe it is crisper than the store bought variety. Husband sneaks a jar into the fridge every so often. I think that this is perhaps the only time Daughter may have eaten sauerkraut.

I stopped making pickles quite a while ago, since we always ended up with too many to eat in a year. My favorites now are cornichons from France. They come in a small jar so you aren’t left with too many. Husband occasionally teases about home brewing beer. He never has fermented anything on purpose. I wonder if Daughter’s discovery means she is going to start making her own kraut.

What are your favorite pickles? Ever done any fermentation?

46 thoughts on “Fermentation”

  1. I like pickles. I’m the person who will take the pickle spear from your plate at a restaurant if you don’t want it.

    Unfortunately, I have a history with pickles. When I got married and out on my own, I realized I love the idea of putting up food. Wasband #one and I bought a cooker and I did dilly beans and tomatoes and pickles. Wasband # one really liked my pickles. He had pickles on his sandwich for lunch every. single. day. And because he was beyond frugal, he hated the idea of buying pickles so over the years even if I wasn’t in the mood to make pickles, he was very insistent When we split up, I quit making pickles and haven’t done it since. And don’t have any nostalgic desire to do it again either.

    And it’s just pickles that I’m resistant about. Still doing tomato sauce and pesto and jams galore. My freezer is full of berries and veggies and herbs that I’ve put up.

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  2. i met a guy who told me how to make sauerkraut. 5 gallon bucket. layers of cabbage salt cabbage salt til the five gallon bucket is full then fill a garbage bag with water and set it on top to weigh down the kraut as it ferments and to block out air during the frrmentation process. i like kraut but not a 5 gallon jugs worth and i dont have many ideas on what to do with it other than throw it on a veggie brat. i keep the veggie btats by beyond sausage on hand at all times. kraut would be welcome. costco offers a very good one . ill fix it im betting. pickles… grillo are incredible. the refrigerator pickles at costco are great. vlassic dills are good but a 6 in comparison.i heard about a guy in nyc who has a pickle store where he pickles everything. i have recently done asperagus, cucumbers, and an onion pepoer combo. id enjoy a pickle vinagar and olive oil store. there used to be an oil store on 50th and xerxes. i love the idea but it feels a bit like the scotch tape store on snl. but ill bet if you put a business plan together it would look pretty good. 20 cucumber plants in a warehouse with lighting. vinegar and 5 & 10 dollar size jars. 1000 jars a month pays the rent and makes 2nd, 3rd and 4th location possible. the guy in nyc kept his pickled stuff in 55 gallon drums and fished out the pickles as folks came in

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  3. I do like sauerkraut, especially with the veggie Brotz that Tim mentioned. But not enough to make it myself. Too much trouble. I do find that I like the sauerkraut that comes in the glass jar, but not the sauerkraut that comes in the can.

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  4. Dill pickles
    The pub just down the block now makes sauerkraut/pineapple pizza for me.
    I tried making watermelon wine several times. Just not enough patience to rack it properly but I still have the 3 gallon Crown labeled crock. It’s worth about $140 not counting all the change I put in there.

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  6. There are different kinds of pickles?
    I learn so much from you people.

    I used to make refrigerator pickles from cucumbers, is that what you call it when you slice them up and add vinegar and sugar? But I liked them too much and after about three days I would get dyspepsia.

    So I’ve just gotten out of the habit of that.

    And sauerkraut. Not interested. At. All.

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  7. I love pickles too. I always bought Claussen Kosher dills in Hearty Garlic, but the Hearty Garlic variety disappeared during the pandemic and hasn’t returned. The kosher dills are good, but I really liked the hearty garlic ones. I still buy them in the sliced variety. I like Spicy Black Bean Burgers on a thin bun with a bit of mustard, two pickle slices, a tomato slice, and a slice of cheddar cheese.

    I’ve found some kimchi at the Co-op that I really like. There’s a yummy beet variety that is my current favorite.

    Like others, I’m interested in how sauerkraut is made, but I don’t need so much and it seems like an awful lot of bother. Glass jars are best for fermented foods.

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  9. In my college years I tried brewing beer. I used a large plastic garbage can ( bought for the purpose). There weren’t stores supplying equipment for home brewing back then but I could get a can of a dark malt called Stoutex at the local grocery and I used regular baking yeast. The product tasted acceptable but I could never figure out how to prevent the beer from foaming up and disturbing the sediment when I opened a bottle.
    I made sauerkraut once many decades ago in a crock with a plate on top, weighted to keep the kraut below the liquid but I can’t remember (can’t even imagine) what we did with all that sauerkraut.

    We used to make various kinds of cucumber pickles and pickled green beans but we just don’t eat them much anymore. That’s the case with store-bought as well. We get them for some specific occasion but then they languish in the back of the refrigerator until we finally set them free.

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  10. My favorite pickles to make were my Aunt Elaine’s, which were pickles that had to soak in a crock for several days with alum, and were seasoned with allspice berries and mustard seeds. They were cut in chunks and were crunchy and sweet/tangy.

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    2. I think my Grandma made a version of these, too. I wonder if it was a recipe floating around that Pipestone, Luverne area. I have not had those pickles anywhere else.

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  11. I can take or leave most pickles, except pickled beets (which are a nice additions to salads), and maybe Kosher dills. I just forget about them.
    I’ve heard the homemade kraut is far superior to the usual storebought stuff.

    When I met Husband, he was just coming of the hippie “farm” and owned a 5-gallon pottery crock, in which he had made sauerkraut (or so he claimed). We were always going to do that but never did.

    I think I tried small batches of pickled beets early on, but they never were as tasty as the store kind, so I gave it up.
    We did try our own wine at some point, still have a bottle of something that I’m afraid to open…

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  12. When I was milking cows and making silage, both haylage and corn silage, they would both ferment in the silo’s. It was becoming a thing to add ‘innoculants’ to promote the proper bug growth. I did that a little bit… adding some powder to the loads while unloading. These days it’s added at the chopper.

    The haylage didn’t off-gas enough to be an issue. But corn silage gasses were bad. We’d run a blower to provide fresh air before going into the silo’s for a month after filling. You could smell the gas, it was kind of sweet. I’ve seen pictures, it’s a sickly yellow/greenish gas… it will kill you.

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      1. I always loved the smell of silage. I would help one uncle feed his beef herd. This was a non-automated process of filling up a wheel barrow with a load of silage at the silo, then pushing it down the feed trough and dumping it, over and over. I loved doing that with my uncle because I thought the silage smelled good.

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  13. Husband is the pickle expert in our family. He makes dill pickles and cornichons. It’s hard to find tiny cucumbers for the cornichons, so he hasn’t made them in a few years. We buy cornichons from Trader Joe’s most of the time; they’re made in France and very tangy.

    If you’re near the Twin Cities, Krista, you can find Claussen Hearty Garlic pickles at Jerry’s supermarket.

    There’s a vendor at the Minneapolis farmers’ market called St. Martin Olives who sells a large variety of pickles in addition to olives.

    We eat quite a bit of sauerkraut but I’d never dream of making it. We get it at Aldi in glass jars.

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  14. I like pickles of various kinds, and have made an assortment of them over the years. I also like good sauerkraut, and good sauerkraut doesn’t come in cans, IMO. Glass jars or plastic bags in the refrigerator section are the way to go if you don’t happen to have a friend who’ll give you some home made stuff.

    One of my favorite winter soups is a Polish sauerkraut soup called Kapusniak. My friend Tia, whose parents were both both born and raised in Poland, is an excellent cook, introduced me to it fifty years ago. It’s an old family recipe, and it’s delicious. Even people who are not fond of sauerkraut are amazed at how good it is.

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  15. Busy day here. It turns out playing with a puppy just takes all kinds of time. He is sleeping now.

    Refrigerator pickles are my favorite. I make them from cucumbers, small zucchini, onions, peppers and hot peppers. You sprinkle them with salt and leave them for several hours, rinse them several times, then put them in a jar with a syrup. Leave them 5 days and gobble them down. They are great on sandwiches.

    I also like dill pickles, but I do not make them. I am allergic to fermentation, especially yogurt, so I have to eat pickles in small amounts, and I do not eat yogurt at all. It took a long time to understand that it made me quite sick. I thought the problem was dairy, but it was fermentation. I only eat sauerkraut on a Rueben sandwich.

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  16. My mother served cucumbers with a solution of vinegar, water, and sugar, and a sprinkle of pepper. I still prepare them that way. She would always slice the cucumbers and soak them in salt water first. For a long time I always thought of that as a necessary step, until someone told me that’s an artifact from the days when most cucumbers had a bitter taste. The salt was to reduce the bitterness. But today’s cucumbers have had the bitterness bred out of them, so I skip that step now.

    I haven’t been much of a sauerkraut fan, but I might try the Kapusniak.

    I’m fond enough of pickles to have written a blog post about it. Long ago. If you would like to revisit and read comments by some old friends….https://trailbaboon.com/2017/12/02/a-pretty-pickle/

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      1. Yep! I’m in New Orleans. I’ve done everything from jalapeños to superhots. This year my hottest pepper was chocolate Trinidad scorpions. MUCH hotter than ghost peppers. I processed one batch with plenty of fresh, sweet pineapple which toned the heat down and gave it a delicious flavor!

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  18. I made kefir for a number of years. I loved it, and it was so good; I loved it. Unfortunately Hans would never even try it, so I ended up having to drink it all myself, and it just became too much. I could slow down the process by refrigerating it, but eventually I gave up.

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    1. I made kombucha in a one gallon jar back in Carbondale for a short while. But neither wasband or I were crazy about it, and that SCOBY floating in it really grossed me out, so that didn’t last long. The kefir, on the other hand, was really good. Loved it.

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