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.