Fermenting Fun

When I get bombarded with messages about the same thing for a very long time, I eventually sit up and take notice. Recently that message was fermentation. It was right on the tail of me giving up a fairly entrenched habit of drinking fermented grape juice, so I put it down to irony.

But fermented vegetables kept coming at me from every direction. Cookbooks, blog posts, emails, magazine articles... whooping it up about the amazing health benefits of eating shredded cabbage left to ferment at room temperature in an unsterilised jar. Yikes. It was too intriguing not to try. But I didn't want to write about it here until I was sure it wasn't going to kill anyone. I grew up with a palpable fear of what could go wrong in the kitchen, and fear of botulism from improper preserving is tattooed on my heart.

Anyway,I've been eating home made fermented vegetables almost every day for two months now and I'm still alive and thriving. 

They are easy and fun to make -- interactive like bread and yogurt -- with happy bacteria doing happy things in those jars. They taste wonderful -- tart, vinegary, salty and sour. They're amazing for digestion because they give the gut the bacteria it needs to do its job properly. And perhaps most astounding to me, they have cured my sugar cravings.

I've never liked the sound of sauerkraut. It sounds grumpy and cross, it's a pale shade of beige, and I just don't feel inclined to put it in my mouth. Kimchi on the other hand, sounds cute and cuddly, and appetising. Sauerkraut and kimchi are just fermented vegetables from different countries. The internet is awash with video tutorials about how to make them.

Here's my recipe for Hot Pink Kimchi, based on a bunch of reading from all over the place. It's really hot pink, with a good balance of hot and sour flavours, and has great crunch. I can't get enough of it.

Go to the farmers' market and buy a red cabbage, a big bunch of green onions, a few big carrots, a big bunch of radishes, a knob of fresh ginger, garlic and two or three fresh red chillies. Quantities are roughly:

• a red cabbage
• 2 grated carrots
• 4 grated radishes (nice big ones)
• a large grated beetroot or a couple of smaller ones
• 6 green onions
• garlic if you like. It's good with or without.
• three tablespoons ginger (or more if you're a ginger nut)
• chillies to your taste -- I use two or three, depending on how ouchy hot they are. You can also use dried chillies. 

UPDATE
I've experimented with adding:

• a sprinkle of cumin seeds. Infuses the fermented veges with that musky earthy sweetness. A little bit goes a long way. I think maybe the fermenting process intensifies the flavour. I just use untoasted seeds.
• thinly sliced red onions. A mistake I think. Even a little bit takes over the whole party. I'd go easy on the onions unless you're really into pungent.

You'll also need 2 tbs sea salt OR 1 tbs sea salt + 4 tbs whey.  I've now tested this recipe without whey and it's totally great, so forget the whey. Keep it simple and just use salt.

Shred, grate and chop all the vegetables, and put them in a container that's big enough for your to get your hands into and give the veges a good massage. If you're squeamish or lack upper body tone, you can instead bash them with a wooden mallet or your bashing implement of choice. The point of this is to release some of the juices, but not to mush everything to a pulp. The cabbage will start to look a bit translucent and watery; that's when you can stop.

Just in case anyone thinks my kitchen is always pristine, it's not.

Fill a clean, wide-mouthed jar with the grated veges, and press them down really really tightly, until the juices start to come up to the top of the vegetables. The quantities listed above should be enough for about a 1.5 litre jar. Really squash them in, and fill a second jar if you've got too many veges.

At this point, there are all sorts of conflicting instructions on the internet, so here's what I did:

Use a skewer or chop stick to release any air bubbles around the side of the jar. Leave a decent space at the top of the jar -- at least an inch -- rather than packing it full, as there is going to be some fermentation happening, and you want to make room for it.

Seal the jar tightly, leave on the counter at room temperature, and wait. How long?

It depends. Most of the recipes I read say three days, then move to the fridge or other cold storage. But mine start bubbling away after 24 hours (maybe I do have the central heating up too high!) so I put it in the fridge at that point to slow the fermentation down.

Burp the jars -- just open them quickly to let the compressed air out, a couple of times a day. If you don't do this, the jars will start burping themselves and leak pink juice everywhere.

Taste it.  After a few days, have a little sample. See if it's sour enough, or pickly enough for you. How's the crunch factor? When it tastes good to you...

Put it in the fridge. And eat it.

I've been eating the kimchi as soon as it's chilled down in the fridge. It's stayed tasty and crunchy for the couple of weeks that each large jar has lasted. I've read that it tastes better and develops better health-giving properties the longer you leave it, and that it can last for many many months, years even. I'm not testing that theory.

Be warned, it does smell of cabbage burp (OK cabbage fart might be more accurate) when you open the jar. But it's not a bad smell, just a distinctive one. I have read that if the kimchi has actually gone bad, it will smell so putrid you'll never be convinced to eat it. A healthy cabbage fart isn't putrid.

There must be hundreds of ways to eat kimchi. Here are my favourites so far:

• On hot buttered toast -- an exotic taste and texture fest. 
• Sprinkled over a salad -- you won't need a vinegar dressing as there's a wonderful vinegar flavour in the kimchi itself. 
• Just serve yourself a little bowl and eat it neat. 
• Not too much at once! It's supposed to be used as a condiment, not a main event.

When I tried the first batch, I immediately got a craving for it. It was like my body kept saying "Give me more of that pink stuff right now because I need to have it!" Seriously. My body needed whatever was in that jar. It must have restored whatever was out of balance, because those voices have gone quiet now.

And the sugar cravings? They're gone too. They were pretty bad for a while. When I stopped drinking alcohol, I promptly started eating a lot of chocolate, and craving sweet things. One day I was having a sweet craving and I thought "how about some of that pink stuff instead?" Two spoons of kimchi and the craving went away. I did this for a while, and now I'm not having sweet cravings at all. That's a big, welcome change. The pink stuff is setting some things right in my body.

I need to stress that while Hot Pink Kimchi hasn't killed me or my loved ones, and has cured me of my sugar cravings, I am not a fermented vegetable expert. So if you want to give them a go, please have a good read about the subject and pick a method of making and storing them that appeals to you.  The authority on this and many other traditional food preparation methods is the Weston A Price Foundation.

I love slicing red cabbage nice and thin. So pink. So satisfying.