Friday 7 June 2013

Fermenting vegetables

At one of our Simple Living Toowoomba group's swaps I picked up a bottle of sauerkraut which piqued my interest in fermenting vegetables.

Sauerkraut


I spent four years of my youth in a German community where I was introduced to strange foods like sauerkraut, quark, black bread and blutwurst (don't google the meaning of that)! Having been brought up in a family which ate meat and three veg most of the time, it was quite a shock to the system. Thankfully I didn't actually know what blutwurst was at the time. I have vague memories of carrying large buckets of quark down to the cellar but I wasn't quite sure what happened to it after that and, to be quite honest, I wasn't particularly interested at the time.


Strangely enough, I now find myself interested in researching how these foods were made (apart from the blutwurst) and have searched multiple websites trying to find easy methods geared for the beginner. I have found some excellent videos including this one from Sandor Katz.


Fermenting vegetables with Sandor Katz

As several decades have past since those years of my youth, I am also trying to cut down on the amount of salt I consume as I get older. So I was very pleased when checking out Green Living Australia to discover that they sell a vegetable culture. At our recent Simple Living Toowoomba mozzarella cheese workshop, the presenter had bought the rennet she used from Green Living Australia so I put in an order for both the vegetable culture and rennet as well as some cheese salt for use in pickling. The order was placed at around midday on  Wednesday and, at 7.15am the following morning, there was a knock at the door and I was surprised to find that the products had arrived already. What a great company to order from!


 

On  their website there are instructions for making cultured vegetables and also information on what type of containers to use. As we have no shortage of airlocks due to hubby's wine making experiments, I am going to try using the foodsafe, sealable plastic bucket. So there will be some interesting days ahead and hopefully not too many interesting smells from failed fermenting experiments.






 

5 comments:

  1. Hi Nana Chel - have never tried fermenting foods b4,must give it a go one day.

    Hugs

    Gail

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd never heard of vegetable culture. I need to look into that.

    After you mentioned it several times, of course I was going to google brutwurst! I'm of an English background and used to eat black pudding until I realised what it was!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi, Hubby brought home some cabbages yesterday and I was thing of making sauerkraut . You have inspired me to do it. Would love to have got to the Simple living morning today but boys have soccer and football. Will try to get to some more though as I had a lovely morning.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hope the sauerkraut goes well. I have just bought a container for the vegies I am going to ferment and hubby is going to put the airlock in the lid for me. The swap and morning tea was great and I hope you can make it to the next one.

    Alison, I told you NOT to google brutwurst! LOL!

    Gail, I have been procrastinating about making sauerkraut for some time but have no excuse not to try it now.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Just made {?} sauerkraut this afternoon. Just half a cabbage in case it turns out to be one of my disasters.

    ReplyDelete

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