Brine-Pickled Sliced Cucumber with Garlic

It's been a couple years since I started this lacto-fermentation journey and I've perfected my technique by now such that I can select just the right foods, mix the brine, and have a culture started in less than 30 minutes now.  Today's batch - in less than 30 minutes from counter to fermentation wait...


The first step is selection, cleaning, slicing, and filling.

Pick a nice firm vegetable (in this case a cucumber with a few cloves of garlic) and slice it fairly thick on the mandolin.  Clean an appropriately sized wide-mouth jar and filter about a half-gallon of water.  Layer the vegetables into the jar.

No particular OCD is required in the layering - just get them into the jar whole and shake it around some to settle.

I measure my salt by weight and I want a brine of just about 2% with most vegetables.  To get that percentage I use 5g per cup of filtered water of salt.  "How many tablespoons is that?"  DON'T MEASURE THAT WAY!!!  Weigh it.  Different salts and salt grinds have a vastly different volume capacity than each other at the same weight.  Use a scale and weight your salt or you risk destroying a batch because of too much or too little.

Here I'm making a half-gallon and needed one-and-one-half quarts of filtered water to fill the jar after the veggies were added.  A 1.5 qts is 6 cups.  6 cups x 5g per cup is 30g of salt.  I'm using a plain, cheap, coarse sea salt.

You can use Kosher or fine imported Sol de Mare or some magical pink Himilayan or Celtic Grey or...  table salt is probably a bad call, it has anticaking agents in it that will discolor your brine.  There's just something nice about the ease of using a plain sea salt - it doesn't have to be any imported specialty either.  Just make sure it's food grade salt for people.

Then I fill the jar to the lower edge of the rim, add the salt, add whatever herbs and spices I'd like (this batch has 2TBS of standard store-bought pickling spice), and cap it.  Invert it, roll it around, shake gently, etc to distribute everything...

Put on the air-lock system lid (which don't have to use if you don't want but it makes everything much easier and keeps nasty-bits out of your pickles) and set it in a correct temperature area for a week.  Leave it alone for the week - don't sneak a taste, don't open it up, do nothing but make sure the air lock has water in it.  It should bubble and brew within two days and will be rather tasty in five.  How long it takes to finish to your tastes depends on factors like your tastes, the temperature of the spot you put it in, and the vegetable's biocontent when you added them.  A particularly cold spot will take longer than a particularly hot spot.  A hot spot will ferment some mushy pickles though.  Store in the fridge until they're gone or for four months - probably won't last four months.

That's it!  No complex ingredients list.  No complicated process.  Not even a lot of your personal attention. 

Pickled Sliced Red Onion

There are tons of books, blogs, and discussions all about lactofermentation.  Many are heavy on the health benefits.  That's not my concern.  I'm interested in learning the old-school foodways of generations now gone and in tasting the food I remember my grandmothers made.  This is the way grandma did it except she wasn't doing as much trial-and-error as I now have to.

This is my third experiment with lacto-fermentation and for now I'm at 50%  75%.  My sauerkraut is aging well and delicious but my kimchi didn't do well in the jar and was tossed out.  Since I had a nice big red onion laying around, I decided to give it a go.  These onions brought the success rate up - they came out perfectly and were much easier to do than kraut or kimchee.  Next experiment was garlic - it too came out very well but there were some methods changes - stay tuned.

• one onion, sliced very thin on the mandoline  
• two whole cloves of garlic
• four oregano leaves, minced
• one quart of onion stock made from said onion's scraps in the pressure cooker
• 15 grams of sea salt
• filtered water for onion stock
• two clean quart jars with lids and rings

pressure stewed onion parts

 
First I trimmed the onion and tossed the scraps and outer skins into the pressure cooker with 1 quart of filtered water and let it go under pressure for one hour.  After the hour I strained out the onion scrap, pressed what I could from it, and then strained the onion stock to a quart mason jar and tossed it in the fridge to wait.

ready for the fridge to cool

remove large pieces

strain into a jar
compost the debris

sliced veggies in quart jar

tamping down

While the stock was stewing I put the sliced onion, whole garlic cloves, and minced oregano in a clean quart jar, sprinkled it with the 15 grams of sea salt, paddled it down with a wooden spoon, and then tossed it into the fridge to wait for the stock to stew.







Why 15 grams of salt and how many tablespoons is that?

Using the formula of 5 grams per cup to reach a 2% saline brine, I estimated that the fill on my jar would take 3 cups of liquid.  I over estimated by one cup (it only needed 2 cups) so my saline solution is slightly high but not high enough to present an issue.  Considering the liquid released by the onions, it may not be high at all.  I don't test the saline or Ph but may buy some gear to do that in the future.  At a final 7.5 grams of salt per cup of water, I should have a solution that is 3% brine but topping off the jar for overflow replacement in the coming week should reduce that level some.

weighing salt

Since salt comes in all sorts of grinds, using dry measure instead of weight isn't a good idea.  Weighing it is easy enough on any kitchen scale and much more accurate.  Any salt will work but sea salt is reportedly the best for the process and is probably the least processed.

2-3% brine is sufficient for lactofermentation of most vegetables according to my readings and doesn't bring the salt level too high for taste comfort.  More onion or less water (the two should be related) or a different sized jar will neccesitate changing the amount of salt but using 5 grams of sea salt per cup of water should provide a 2% result while 7.5 grams should provide a 3% result.  You'll want to be somewhere between those two percentages.  DON'T TRY TO PRESERVE MEATS AT 2-3%!!


Adding the Liquid

add cold stock to onions

fill to 1" from top

Since I already added the salt to the vegetables, I didn't add any salt to my stock.  You can, just stay aware of the overall salinity of your brine if you do.  My jar needed 2 cups of stock to top the jar 1" from the top.  The 1" head spaces is needed to allow CO2 to escape during the fermentation process.  Cap and lid the jar but only lightly hand tight.  CO2 must be able to escape.  [an airlock system is handy for this but I don't have one yet]  Burp the lid daily by unscrewing the ring a couple turns and then screwing it back to be sure to release an built up pressure.
Some folks device all sorts of methods for keeping the sliced veggies submerged and in the anaerobic environment they need.  I haven't yet and that omission is exactly what led to the molding of my kimchi experiment.  Had I thought about it, I'd have left a thick slice of onion to sit on the top of the thin slices holding it all down.  Next time...


Any stock leftover can be refrigerated or frozen and used later as an ingredient in soups, stews, beans, etc...  Since there's no salt in this stock, use it fairly soon or freeze it. 

 WAIT!

The fermentation needs to happen in a fairly cool (slightly less than typical room temperature) ideally in the 60's to low 70's F and will occur over about a week.  You'll know it's happened from the bubbles coming up from the onions and from the overflow leaking around the lid and down the bottle.  [don't use that overflow liquid - yuk!]  You'll know it's over when the bubbles stop and the onions taste the way you'd like.

To keep the potential mess down, put the jar in a class casserole.  This is also useful if your room is too warm and you need to cool the ferment with some cold water.  I keep an easy-to-read thermometer there to know what the temperature is doing.


 
TASTE, PACKAGE, STORE

day four and they taste excellent!  Very much like an Italian Viniagrette but crunchy.  No molds whatsover and no floaters.  I'm going to let it go for a day or two more and see what comes of the flavor and the Ph.

FINAL PRODUCT:


I let it all go for six days total and then put it in a fresh, clean jar.  Capped it, refrigerated.  It's VERY good as a raw side or on sandwiches.  It's also a very simple ingredient supply when some onion is needed in a recipe.  Three weeks in the fridge with no signs of any changes at all...  We won't know how long they'd keep - they aren't going to last that long.






Important Note:  ANYONE that tells you that the only way to achieve an anaerobic environment for this process is by using a specific product made by a specific company that is impossible for you to self-create may well be trying to take your money.  Consider, if you put some H2O in their product; what, exactly, does it do to remove that molecule of oxygen that other products don't?  Nothing? Then it's also not a perfectly anaerobic environment.   If a completely anaerobic environment is what we wanted to accomplish then we'd not be doing this in a solution that contains all these molecules of oxygen, we'd start with a different solution altogether. This process MUST have some oxygen in order to get started.

So, while the various alternatives out there may be more or less aerobic (contain oxygen) than each other (usually due to surface exchange issues), and while it's true that surface oxygen exchange as well as atmospherically introduced organisms may effect your end product, there is no way to put two hydrogens and an oxygen in a jar and not have any oxygen in it at all until you do something (such as convert it to CO2 gas and release it - which is what we do but it takes time and there MUST be some O2 there to get CO2) to remove the oxygen.  It defies logic to suggest such a thing as an fully anaerobic environment that has water in it.  What we achieve here is a sufficiently anaerobic environment and hopefully sufficient to accomplish our goal.

But, all sorts of critters in your ferment do indeed use up the oxygen present in your brine and convert it to other things.  This is what makes the acid that creates our pickle.  The main objective of any device you use to do this with is to provide a suitable environment for the production of those acids while at the same time providing an unsuitable environment for introduction, growth, or production of other things (such as botulism or molds) -- some devices, especially those with air lock systems do a better job at this than others.

Note that since my interest is in food and not "miracle diet" - I'm not at all interested in whether certain devices are better for certain "gut health" additions or not.  If you are, then read about those.  This isn't about those.  This is about, "people thousands of years ago made pickles that tasted really good in an open crock in the cellar (sometimes outside) without any sort of expensive extra gear and didn't die from it."

That said, many of those devices ARE better than a mason jar and lid.  Not because they create an anaerobic environment though - because they aid in maintaining a barrier to the introduction and/or growth of things you didn't intend to be in your pickles - like molds and yeasts which exist in the air you're breathing right now but would like your pickles as a snack and will reproduce like bunnies if they get into it.  Some of those things can and will make you very sick if they take up residence in your ferment, so keep them out.  $150 setups aren't required to accomplish that task.

If you like the Pickle Master 3000 XL (I made that up) as your preferred method then fine.  If you prefer an old earthenware pot sealed with some sheep hide over a layer of fat and then buried in the yard over winter - fine too.  [mmmmm Kimchee]  If you'd like to sell me something I don't really need, go talk to someone who failed science class.  ###end rant###