Fermentation Journeys with Sandor Ellix Katz
Kenny Coogan: [00:00:00] Home fermentation is great in the fall, but also year round. What are some of your favorite vegetables to ferment?
Sandor Ellix Katz: You can ferment anything you want at home. I would say, firm vegetables, definitely are the most straightforward ones to ferment. I love to ferment cucumbers, but, cucumbers are among the more challenging of vegetables. The hot weather, watery vegetables can easily get soft and mushy. When you ferment them, and there’s definitely lots of techniques for keeping them crispy, but it’s a little bit more challenging, but I love to ferment radishes. Every year I visit my friend’s farm. About an hour from where I live and fill up a pickup truck with daikon radishes and some cabbages, but mostly radishes. And then I make a big batch of Radish Kraut. So this is a jar remaining from last October that I made of Radish Kraut. And it’s it’s incredibly delicious.
Welcome
Josh Wilder: [00:01:00] Welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. At Mother Earth News, for 50 years and counting, we’ve been dedicated to conserving the planet’s natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources in this podcast. We host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.
Kenny Coogan: Good day, everyone. I’m Kenny Coogan, and joining me on this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends is Sandor Elix Katz, a fermentation revivalist. He is the author of five books, New York Times bestseller, The Art of Fermentation, Wild Fermentation, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, Fermentation as Metaphor, and his latest, Fermentation Journeys.
Sandor’s books, along with the [00:02:00] hundreds of fermentation workshops he has taught around the world, has helped to catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. Today, we’ll be talking about home fermentation. Welcome to the podcast, Sandor.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Thanks so much. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Kenny Coogan: So can you start off the episode with telling the listeners, what is home fermentation?
What is Home Fermentation?
Sandor Ellix Katz: Fermentation is the transformative action of microorganisms as applied to in food and beverages and home fermentation is when you do that at home and all of the fermentation is practiced everywhere in the world. There’s nothing you could possibly eat that cannot be fermented.
In a variety of ways, and these processes were pioneered, not in laboratories, not in factories, but in people’s homes. And anything you’re interested in fermenting, you can ferment at home.
Benefits of Home Fermentation
Kenny Coogan: So [00:03:00] it’s a very old process, a very old technique to preserve food. What are some of the benefits of doing it yourself at home?
Benefits of Home Fermentation
Sandor Ellix Katz: Fermentation is a great strategy for preserving food, but, not every fermentation process is about preservation of food. Fermentation has so many practical benefits. Fermentation, unlocks nutrients, makes food more nutritious and makes the nutrients in them more bioavailable.
Certain foods that have toxins, fermentation removes toxins from foods. Certainly now we’re understanding the probiotic benefits of eating live fermented foods that can increase biodiversity and help improve digestion, immune function and other aspects of our being. Fermentation creates alcohol. And we can’t forget fermentation creates delicious flavors now in terms of home fermentation my major emphasis is that there’s nothing to be afraid of, because fermentation has been practiced for thousands and thousands of [00:04:00] years.
We’ve only known about the existence of bacteria and other microorganisms for about 150 years. Unfortunately, as science delved into the world of microorganisms, the first microorganisms that became widely known where the pathogenic organisms that can be vectors for disease. And so in the popular imagination bacteria became associated primarily with danger, disease, and death. And as soon as I got interested in fermentation and especially when I started sharing my excitement about fermentation and teaching about fermentation I started realizing that a lot of people project all their anxiety about bacteria onto the idea of fermentation, which is, really cultivating bacteria, in, in a jar or a crock or some other kind of a vessel.
And I just want people to not be afraid of fermentation and anything you’re interested in learning how to ferment, you can learn how to ferment it [00:05:00] safely. at home. Fermentation is a strategy for safety. I’m not necessarily looking to convince everyone in the world that they have to start fermenting.
If you’re interested in fermenting, you should do it at home. If you have a garden or other ways that you can access an abundance of produce at the time when it’s in season, fermentation is a great strategy for it. preserving the harvest. Fermentation is a way to make things that are delicious and distinctive.
And of course, fermentation is a great way to encourage biodiversity in your gut. And and it’s a really effective strategy for improving digestion, overall immune function and wellbeing.
The Cost of Home Fermentation
Kenny Coogan: So on this podcast, we’re a little bit money conscious. Is one of the benefits of home fermentation- does it have to do with money, because we all know that book, the $64 tomato, where a gardener spend that much money growing a single tomato [00:06:00] is fermenting affordable option?
Sandor Ellix Katz: When you ferment at home, it’s free. Your only expense is the expense of the foods that you’re fermenting.
And, if you go into a store where you can buy a jar of live fermented vegetables, and there’s lots of excellent small scale producers of fermented vegetables. But, typically you’re going to pay, somewhere between eight and 10 for a pint jar of fermented vegetables.
If you make it yourself, you can probably buy those vegetables for a dollar or two. It’ll take you 15 minutes of your time to chop them up, salt them and pack them tightly into the jar. And then you can. Eat a wonderful homemade version of that for a fraction of the cost.
And if you’re growing it yourself, I would urge people with gardens, not to try to, price in their time. But if you’re growing it yourself, it’s even cheaper.
Kenny Coogan: You also mentioned the flavor profile. If you’re growing rare heirlooms or fruits or vegetables [00:07:00] that aren’t easily available at the local market, your home fermentation is going to taste even that more special.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, if you’re someone who’s, interested in, growing different varieties, growing unusual herbs, you really can make totally unique creations. This is one of the reasons why, chefs at some of the finest restaurants in the world are embracing fermentation because they realize that it’s a way that they can, create really distinctive, unique flavor profiles and have signature flavors. And you can do the same thing at home.
Basic Supplies for Home Fermentation
Kenny Coogan: You mentioned a couple of things like a crock, a vessel, a bottle, salt. Are there, and fermentation is a huge category. Are there some basic supplies that the listeners will need to home ferment?
Sandor Ellix Katz: If we’re talking about fermenting vegetables, the things you need, you already have in your kitchen. You can get beautiful [00:08:00] crocks. I have a wonderful selection of ceramic crocks, but you don’t need a crock. At the scale that’s appropriate for, most small households you can just do it in a jar. And my favorite kind of jar to use would be a wide mouth Mason jar. But honestly, you can work with a mayonnaise jar or, anything that that you have lying around your kitchen. So you know, sure you need salt, but you probably already have salt.
You need a cutting board and a knife. You probably already have a cutting board and a knife. You really don’t need anything special to get started with fermentation. The process could not be simpler. Now, if you get deeply into it, if you start wanting to make, larger and larger batches you might want to, invest in a ceramic crock.
If you can sometimes find those in hardware stores. You can find those in antique malls. But, you don’t need anything special. You don’t need anything like that to get started, start simple.
Kenny Coogan: How do you feel about those single use [00:09:00] kitchen appliances or equipment? I’ve seen those fancy plastic Mason lids that have holes in them. And then you have the little clear puck is it necessary?
Sandor Ellix Katz: There’s a lot of specialized tools that people have been making that can be very helpful. That can make your life a little bit easier. You don’t need any of it. When I work with a jar like this, just using the standard lid that comes with it.
There’s a little bit of work. You have to manually loosen it to release the pressure every day or two, especially at the beginning, because the process produces a lot of carbon dioxide, and it needs to escape. Now, people are making, clever specialized lids for the jars so that you don’t have to do that.
Sure there’s great tools that you could buy if you. You want to, but you don’t need any of those tools. Like people have done these processes in extremely simple ways. Another tool that I love when I’m working in a jar is [00:10:00] just a simple ceramic weight.
To keep the vegetable submerged because that’s really the key for vegetable fermentation. Here’s a nice homemade one. Somebody gave me out of clay. Here’s a commercial glass one that you can buy. But again, until I started seeing products like this on the market, I was just using an outer saving an outer leaf of the cabbage and Using that heavy spine of the outer leaf, like folding the leaf so that the spine functions as a spring to hold the vegetables under the brine.
And if anything is poking up, it’s that sacrificial leaf of cabbage. There are always improvisational methods and you definitely can work with common things that are probably in your kitchen already.
Kenny Coogan: How long do you think people have been putting that cabbage leaf on top of their ferments?
Sandor Ellix Katz: Oh,
Kenny Coogan: thousands and thousands of years.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah. It’s it’s hard to say but yeah, certainly that, that is like an old tradition that I’ve heard, a lot of [00:11:00] people tell me their grandparents and their great-grandparents showed them that’s how you do it.
There’s no singular way to do this. Remember people ferment everywhere in the world and, the techniques are actually quite varied. And there’s a there’s a lot of different ideas out there. And, the origins of fermentation are really shrouded in in mystery because it’s so ancient.
It’s certainly older than recorded history because, the oldest surviving documents in lots of different parts of the world all reference ferments that were important in those parts of the world, at the time that people began writing
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Favorite Vegetables to Ferment
Kenny Coogan: Home fermentation is great in the fall, but also year round. What are some of your favorite vegetables to ferment?
Sandor Ellix Katz: You can ferment anything you want at home. I would say, firm vegetables, definitely are the most straightforward ones to ferment.
I love to ferment cucumbers, but, cucumbers are among the more challenging of vegetables. The hot weather, watery vegetables can easily get soft and mushy. When you ferment them, and there’s definitely lots of techniques for keeping them crispy, but it’s a little bit more challenging, but I love to ferment radishes.
Every year I visit my friend’s farm. About an hour from where I live and fill up a pickup truck with daikon radishes and some cabbages, but mostly radishes. And then I make a big batch of Radish Kraut. So [00:13:00] this is a jar remaining from last October that I made of Radish Kraut. And it’s it’s incredibly delicious. I love it. Let me just say no traditions anywhere of people fermenting things that are rare or precious. People ferment what is abundantly available to them. Some of the kinds of vegetables that have the most widespread traditions of fermentation would be cabbages, radishes, turnips, but you don’t have to limit it to that. You really can experiment and mix vegetables together and ferment whatever is abundant in the environment where where you live, home fermentation should be driven by the abundance in and around your home.
Dry Salting Method
Kenny Coogan: Can you give us, maybe not a fermented food recipe, but maybe like a pattern? Or something to follow through to figure out on our own how to ferment some of those root vegetables or those sturdy [00:14:00] vegetables you’re mentioning?
Sandor Ellix Katz: The sauerkraut method would be called what would generically be called dry salting. And what distinguishes that is that typically you don’t add any water. You’re using salt to draw water out of the vegetables and really the key to fermenting vegetables is to get them submerged under brine. So in the dry salting method, you’re getting them submerged under their own juices. So you need to create surface area. You need to cut up the vegetable. Really you can do it coarsely or finely. They don’t have to be evenly shredded. You can have some course, some fine, but you need some surface area in order to be able to draw the juices out of the vegetables, fresh vegetables always have plenty of juice. Sometimes if you’re buying vegetables that have been in a refrigerated warehouse for months, they might be a little bit drier. You might find that you need to add a little bit of water, but fresh vegetables are always extremely juicy. Chop them, shred [00:15:00] them, cut them up however you like to do it. Lightly salt them. There’s no magic number with salt. In fact, there are some traditions that ferment vegetables without any salt. I wouldn’t really recommend those. A little bit of salt is fine. A lot of people who, let’s say, made, make sauerkraut, learned from their grandparents, who learned from their grandparents, tend to use a lot of salt, because you go back just a couple of generations, and this really was a survival practice.
Maybe the only vegetables that people would have over the course of a long, harsh winter. But if you’re making them in 2024, and you’re in a position to be watching a video like this, chances are the vegetables you’re fermenting are not survival through a long, harsh winter. There’s something you’re making to for your family’s good health because you enjoy eating it because you have some abundance from the garden that you want to preserve. And salted to taste. It doesn’t take a huge amount of salt. Generally, I would say I, I don’t usually measure the salt, but I like [00:16:00] a kraut best if it has, somewhere around 1 percent salt which is a lot less than a lot of traditional ferments have. You can add any other seasonings you like. I love caraway seeds with cabbage. You can make it spicy with chilies. You can be wildly experimental, once a young woman presented me with a jar of kraut where she had minced a vanilla bean into it and it was shockingly good.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with the seasonings. Don’t be afraid to mix vegetables together. The point is you lightly salt your vegetables and get in there with my hands, mix the salt around, but squeeze, massage the vegetables at the same time. And what this does is it releases juice.
It breaks down cell walls. It helps get the vegetables really juicy quickly. And that makes it easy to get the vegetables submerged under their juices. Once the vegetables are nice and juicy and make sure that they’re submerged, whether you use some improvisational method like the cabbage leaf that I just described earlier. Sometimes I’ll take like the [00:17:00] end of an onion or the end of a root vegetable, whatever I’ve been eating and have scraps of I’ll use to hold it down or some sort of a weight. A river pebble is great. Just don’t use limestone because as this acidifies, if you use limestone, it’ll just dissolve into it. So you want to get the vegetable submerged. And then the big question is how long and there’s no, there’s no objective answer to that. Basically, you need what you need to understand is that the acidity, the lactic acid will accumulate over time. And if you like it very mild, only a little bit acidic, you might want to just ferment it for a few days. If you like it extremely acidic, you can ferment it as long as you like.
I sometimes ferment things for months and months, but it’s rare that I wait months before I eat it. I’ll usually start, eating some after a few days or a week and then pack it down and let it go a little bit longer. Taste it again. What I recommend for people trying this for the first time at home is just, taste it every [00:18:00] few days.
And familiarize yourself with the range of flavors that are possible. And if it reaches a level of acidity where you think wow, that’s strong enough for me, that’s strong enough for my partner, my kids, whoever Stick it into the fermentation slowing device that you already have in your kitchen, which is your refrigerator, and that won’t stop the fermentation, but it’ll just slow it down to an imperceptible rate.
Saltwater Fermenting
Sandor Ellix Katz: That’s the basic pattern for for dry salting. Now, if you want to leave vegetables whole or in big chunks, then you need to put them in a brine, a saltwater solution. So then you mix up a saltwater brine and you put your vegetables in it. And just remember, you want to use it. As little brine as possible to cover the vegetables, imagine, a string bean floating in a swimming pool. The flavor will dissipate infinitely. You really want, as little brine as possible to keep the vegetables covered. Let me just say that, this is what I’ve just described as one way of cooking fermenting vegetables. There are a lot of different methods that [00:19:00] the people use. I don’t think that there’s one best method. I think it’s fun to experiment. It’s fun to have a palette of different kinds of flavors. I make lots of kimchi. Kimchi is the Korean style of fermenting vegetables. Typically, when I make kimchi, I’ll soak the cabbage or whatever vegetables in a brine on day one.
And then I’ll strain out that brine. And then I’ll mix a little spice paste and mix the spice paste with the vegetables. I love this Chinese style of fermenting vegetables, which which I detail in my latest book, Fermentation Journeys. But is the name of the style of Chinese fermented vegetables that I like to make.
And that involves like a spiced brine that becomes a perpetual brine. So actually the brine that I, the brine that I use is actually. Five years old. And then I periodically add more salt. I periodically add more seasonings, but then I put vegetables in them, leave them in there [00:20:00] for, a few days or up to a couple of weeks and then take them out and enjoy them.
There’s just no sense. Singular way to do it. There’s lots of information. You can find it in my books. You can find it in other books. You can find it on the internet. Don’t be afraid to experiment. That would be my, that would be my my, my biggest lesson. And, and the timeframe is never fixed.
It’s highly subjective. Trust your taste buds and taste it at different intervals and, see what kind of time frame tastes best to you.
Kenny Coogan: So you can home ferment foods like vegetables and cheese. But we can also be fermenting drinks. What are some of your favorite drinks to ferment?
And I saw that you offer a workshop on wild soda. And I make, and lots of our listeners make, kombucha every seven to ten days. Is there a difference between wild soda and kombucha?
Sandor Ellix Katz: Sure. Kombucha is, one, [00:21:00] wonderful style of lightly fermented beverages.
That’s what I call, this category of, of beverages that are fermented. But typically for a pretty limited amount of time and enjoyed for their probiotics and flavors, but not for alcohol. You asked me about fermented beverages. I make some, I make wine.
I make what are called country wines out of blackberries, blueberries. Actually, I just noticed outside my house, there’s all of these sumac flowers. And I’ve made a beautiful wine. Or more frequently a mead, which is a honey based alcohol using the flavor of sumac. But I could just as well make a lightly fermented soda out, out of sumac.
Basically I would just mix a sugar water solution. And then add the sumac and the flavor of the sumac or the blueberries or the blackberries or the raspberries, or the rose petals or the elder flowers. The flavors infuse into that [00:22:00] sugar water solution. If it’s something sugary like berries, the sugar will infuse into that solution. But also, the source of the yeast and bacteria is the botanical ingredients. Any kind of, fresh raw, botanical product, carries a diversity of microorganisms and can initiate the fermentation. Sometimes people will use their Kombucha and do a secondary fermentation where they introduce some other kind of a flavor. So yes, you can make a a wild soda that way you can use the organisms that are present on the botanicals that you’re using as the starter you can use a previous soda as a starter.
My single favorite lightly fermented beverage is this Caribbean beverage called mobi (or mauby) in English or mobi in Spanish and it’s made from the bark of a tree that it’s in the U. S. a little bit in South Florida, but it’s a Caribbean tree known by the same [00:23:00] name and you do a decoction, you boil a little bit of that bark. It’s bitter. I’m usually I’ll add some other seasonings. I love star anise in it. I’ll put a couple of cloves in it. And then after I simmer that for a little while I’ll strain it out, I’ll add sugar I’ll let it cool down, and then I always keep a jar in the fridge of the previous batch of Mobi that I made, and I’ll add that previous batch into the new batch as the starter.
Generically, in the world of fermentation, when you add a little bit of an old batch of something to start the new batch, that’s called back slopping. And that’s a, it’s a great way of starting, all kinds of different ferments.
Kenny Coogan: Back slopping sounds delicious. And now we’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor. And when we return, we’ll be focusing on what you asked for cabbage ferments.
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Fermenting Cabbage
Kenny Coogan: We’re back with Sandor Ellix Katz, a self taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee. Sandor is the recipient of a James Beard Award. For more information, check out his website, wildfermentation.com. Sandor we alluded to that we’re going to be talking about cabbages. And I also love a kimchi. And most kimchi has fish or [00:25:00] shrimp, and I like mine to be vegetarian. So I made one with cabbage. It was like half cabbage, half radish, and then just a little bit of garlic carrots, and hot peppers. And a lot of salt. I got the kimchi to be very funky, and very smelly, and very tangy, and I loved it, but it was too much salt. Do you think I should be washing it off? Because when I wash it off, I’m thinking I’m washing off all the good stuff.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Okay. I don’t know anything about the specific recipe that you were following. From what I know of typical Korean methods, there, there’s two stages of the process.
The first stage is brining the vegetables often in a quite salty brine. I don’t typically measure the salt, but as I’m mixing my brine, I’m tasting it and I’m really aiming for the flavor of the sea. That would be somewhere around 6 percent salt and that’s pretty salty. Depending on how long you soak the vegetables, if you soak it for depending on how long you soak the vegetables, if you soak it for less than [00:26:00] 12 hours. Often there will be barely any salty flavor in the cabbages. But the longer you soak it, the saltier the flavor can become. Typically in the Korean recipes that I see, it calls for rinsing the vegetables after this first stage of salting. And then you mix up your spice paste, whether you include fish or whether you keep it vegan. You mix up a spice paste and and then you cover the vegetables in the spice paste, mix the vegetables into the spice paste, stuff the vegetables with the spice paste. There’s, there’s a lot of different, kinds of kimchi, you have to be the authority about what flavors taste good to you and, I love all different kinds of fermented vegetables if they’re extremely salty I’ll have just a tight taste and generally mix it up with other food to distribute that saltiness if you found it to be too salty I would say the next time you do it, I would rinse it off not at the end of [00:27:00] the whole fermentation with where you’ll be rinsing off the seasonings and rinsing away bacteria and everything, but I would rinse it after that initial brining.
But let me just say, cabbages are one of the most versatile vegetables that exist. I love cabbages. I always have cabbages in the kitchen. I use them in all kinds of ways, but they can be fermented in a lot of different ways. I just reviewed the dry salting method the sauerkraut method. When I visited Croatia some years ago, I learned that in that region of Europe, people typically ferment cabbages whole. They don’t shred them. And what they do is they cut the core out. They make a conical cut and remove the whole core. And then typically they’ll fill, pack that core with salt. Pack the whole heads of cabbage with the salted cores up into some vessel, put a heavy weight on it and let the salt pull juices out. Sometimes you could [00:28:00] add a salt water brine instead, but they ferment the vegetables whole and then if they want sauerkraut, then they can shred the cabbage into sauerkraut, but then they do all these other wonderful things, particularly sarma stuffed cabbage and and that has so much more flavor if the whole cabbage leaves are fermented first and they’re pliable as a result of the fermentation. So then the way I’ve done that is I mix up some uncooked raw rice, some meat, some vegetables together and put a scoop of that in each cabbage leaf, wrap them up, stack them up in a big pot, put a little bit of tomatoey sauce over the vegetables and then just, stew them for a couple of hours while everything cooks incredibly delicious. When I use cabbage in my paocai, typically the way I do it is I cut little wedges of cabbage. I leave the core on and I put the wedges in and then it’s much easier to fish them out. If I cut it into tiny [00:29:00] pieces and then I’ll slice that wedge into smaller bite sized pieces, at the table for us to enjoy eating. When I make kimchi, sometimes I’ll ferment a whole head of cabbage or halved or quartered heads of cabbage. And in the brining step, the leaves become pliable enough that you can open up a whole head of Napa cabbage like a flower. And then I’ll have my spice paste and I’ll just use a spoon or my fingers and just spread that spice paste like, through each leaf and close it back up again. And that’s, an incredibly beautiful presentation to serve at a party or something because you have the whole head of cabbage and then you slice it and people eat little pieces of it.
But, you’re taking pieces off of a whole cabbage rather than having something that’s pre shredded. A cabbage is incredibly versatile. There’s a lot of different varieties of cabbage and you can really, ferment with any of them. Different ones will have different [00:30:00] characteristics in terms of flavor, texture, appearance.
Cabbage is one of the most wonderful vegetables that you can ferment at home.
Kenny Coogan: When you were talking, I quickly Googled the cabbage that I used, and it was Napa cabbage, like that beautiful Chinese cabbage, and it was also the whole pieces. And when you’re first making it, you’re thinking, wow, this is going to be a lot of food. But that drying and the fermenting kind of makes it a little smaller, easier to eat. And then, of course, you can chop it up and serve to your hearty guest goers.
Is there any other cabbage recipes or fermentations that kind of get overlooked or, applications that we can be doing with all of the cabbage that’s coming in this fall?
Sandor Ellix Katz: The possibilities are endless, but I think that’s really the basics. Shredding cabbage and dry salting it, the sauerkraut method. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll bury one head of cabbage in a small crock, I’ll shred some of the cabbage and then bury [00:31:00] one whole head with the core cut out so that, it’s very easy to get it submerged doing it that way. So you can do sort of hybrid methods. I like I love kimchi. I love that sort of whole head of Napa cabbage style of fermenting it, but I think you just can’t go wrong. I hope that we’ve given your viewers, plenty of ideas of places to to start, but don’t be afraid to experiment and don’t be afraid to mix different kinds of vegetables together.
It doesn’t have to be. just cabbages or just radishes or just peppers. You can mix them together. And I really like to do that.
Kenny Coogan: That’s a good point because it’s fun to be preparing your 15 heads of cabbage. But then when it’s time to eat it, you might have wished you added some onion and other things.
Storing Ferments for a Long Time
Sandor Ellix Katz: Let me say one thing about like your 15 heads of cabbage. Fermentation is a great strategy for preservation, it won’t automatically [00:32:00] preserve every kind of vegetable forever. And a lot of it depends on your environment and the temperature in particular. You’re living in Florida, if you were to fill up a big, five gallon crock with 40 pounds of cabbage, and, leave it in your house that probably stays relatively warm most of the year it’s not going to have a great texture after six or nine months. The idea of preserving vegetables for a long time generally comes from temperate places with cold winters. Where people have cool places to store them. So you can definitely extend the life of your vegetables in any kind of environment. But, the cooler the environment where you’re fermenting, the longer you can expect your ferments to maintain a pleasing texture. It’s never an issue of It becoming dangerous, like once your vegetables, get to a pH of under 4. 6, which generally happens within a couple of [00:33:00] days. There’s no question of safety, but, there’s still are questions of aesthetic appeal and in a warm environment or a very low salt fermentation process.
These enzymes that break down the pectins and can make vegetables get soft and mushy will happen faster. And so that’s just something to be aware of, fermentation is not canning where you can just stick things in the closet and forget about them for months or years.
It’s a much more dynamic process. process. I think it can result in things that are much more delicious, certainly in things that are much more supportive of our good health, but they are more dynamic and we need to be a little bit thinking about what’s the temperature where we’re storing them and the cooler the temperature, the longer you can store them.
I was once visiting a farm in Vermont and the farm farmer pulled out this three year old kraut that had never been in a refrigerator out of his root cellar in Vermont. If you live in a cold place and you have a good root cellar, you really can store things indefinitely. If you live in Florida, if you [00:34:00] live in Tennessee, if you live in somewhere where you don’t have a root cellar, then, you have to be more like modest in your horizon of how long to ferment for.
Kenny Coogan: Thank you so much, Sandor, on this excellent discussion on home fermentation. To learn more about his work, books, and in person fermentation workshops, visit wildfermentation.com. Thank you, Sandor.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.
Credits
Josh Wilder: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit www.MotherEarthNews.com/Podcast. You can also email us at podcast@ogdenpubs.com with any questions or suggestions. Our podcast production team includes Kenny Coogan, Alyssa Warner, and myself, Josh Wilder.
Music for this episode is the song Hustle by Kevin MacLeod.
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The Mother Earth News and Friends podcasts are a production of Ogden Publications.
Ogden Publications strives to inspire “can-do communities,” which may have different locations, backgrounds, beliefs, and ideals. The viewpoints and lifestyles expressed within Ogden Publications articles are not necessarily shared by the editorial staff or policies but represent the authors’ unique experiences.
