April Newsletter is Out!

April Newsletter is out. I've had fun with this newsletter as it involves spring gardens and fermentation ideas. Enjoy! Click here for the link

New Book!! Lacto-Fermentation Through The Seasons

This book of 23 recipes includes the basics of lacto-fermented vegetables starting with spring vegetables like rhubarb and snap peas, moving into summer with cucumbers and summer squash and on into the fall with cabbage and root vegetables.

Includes recipes for other less commonly fermented vegetables like swiss chard, garlic scapes and daylily buds!

The book highlights my favorite fermenting technique using a salt brine and glass jars. I like this technique best because the amount of salt can be carefully controlled.

Click here to learn more and purchase!

March 2012 Newsletter!

Finishing up winter and getting ready for spring in the March 2012 Newsletter


Click Here to read

February Newsletter

Hi All,
I have begun a free monthly newsletter about allergen friendly cooking, helpful tips for the kitchen and the home garden and gluten-free sourdoughbread. Take a look! Subscribe if you are interested!

Click Here! February Newsletter

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Lacto-Fermenting in warm weather

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My good friend, Peggy Matthews, is guest posting today about lacto-fermented salsa. Read on!

I finally harvested my heirloom garden tomatoes (grown from seed!) which I planted very late in the season. They grew to be large, heavy, and funnily-shaped which I was glad about since hybrid varieties tend to be smooth, perfectly round, and tasteless. These babies had FLAVOR!

I don’t know why I grew tomatoes as I am not very fond of them. But I do like tomato salsa. So I decided to mince them up and make a large, half gallon jarful, of it.
After assembling all of the ingredients I realized that I had a dilemma: I needed to keep it at a steady 70 degrees Fahrenheit but we were having a bit of a late September heat wave and even the coal cellar in the basement was a balmy 75 degrees.
What to do?

After exercising my grey matter for a while on this problem, I came up with the idea of placing the jar in a large, flat-bottomed glass bowl that was first lined with refreezable ice packs on the bottom and then layered with a folded dish towel to diffuse the chill. I put the jar of salsa on top of that cold layer and wrapped another dishcloth around it all to keep out the ambient warm air.

It’s still early days yet (just 3 days into the fermentation) but I have a good feeling about this. I periodically feel the outside of the jar to be sure it’s not too cold and I let the ice packs warm up overnight before replacing them with new ones. Luckily the weather is now turning cooler so I may not need to babysit the jar this way, but I will definitely keep this method in mind for next year when I am in the mood to lacto ferment in the middle of summer!

Peggy’s Lacto Fermented Salsa
3 Cups filtered tap water, boiled and then cooled (to evaporate off the chlorine, which can kill the microbes I want to grow!)
¾ Tablespoon Pickling Salt added to the water and stirred until dissolved.

Into a clean, glass, half-gallon, wide-necked jar I added:
• 3-4 large diced Garden Tomatoes
• ½ large diced Vidalia Onion
• 6 medium Garlic Cloves, peeled (3 whole, and 3 smashed once with the flat of my chopping knife)
• Fresh rosemary from my garden, unchopped leaves
• Fresh parsley from my garden, unchopped leaves
• 3 garden-fresh Hot Red Peppers*, whole, with the top chopped off to expose the seed core
• 1 Tablespoon dried Basil
• 1 teaspoon dried Oregano

To the salt water brine above, I added one packet of Caldwell’s Starter Culture for Fresh Vegetables, available at Cultures for Health.
After the starter culture was thoroughly dissolved, I poured this brine-culture mixture over the vegetables in the jar (I had leftovers because the tomatoes took up so much room in the jar!)
I didn’t weigh the vegetables down; I just secured the screw-on plastic lid containing a water trap air vent so that gasses can escape but air can’t get in.

The instructions for using the starter culture say to keep the ferment at a steady 70 degrees for ten days, and to then cure it in the fridge, preferably for a few months. Actually, that was for their cabbage sauerkraut recipe so I think my salsa will be ready much sooner as the tomatoes have more readily available sugars for the microbes to feast on (and ferment) and they are much softer than cabbage leaves.

Fingers crossed that my salsa comes out yummy and perfectly fermented!

(*gift from Sharon’s garden)

New Potatoes from Old Potatoes

I just harvested my little potato patch this morning. These potatoes were from store-bought potatoes that were rotting in the cellar in the Spring. I cut off the rotten parts and put the remaining pieces in 2 short rows in my lemon balm garden. I basically ignored them except for watering them a few times when it was dry. After a few weeks I realized I hadn't planted them deeply enough so I weeded around them and used the weeds as a mulch to keep the tubers cool. (potatoes need to be planted deeply because they won't grow properly when the tubers are close to sun-warmed soil)

We won't cure them, just eat them over the next few weeks. I'll use the potato cooking water for gluten-free sourdough pancakes.

Now I'm having dreams of fingerlings and creamers for next year.

Hot Summer Tips for Fermenting

 

Zucchini Ferment

Just a few quick tips for fermenting in the heat of summer:

Avoid fermenting during a heat wave:
Fermenting during a heat wave is difficult at best unless you have an area that consistently stays below 70 degrees for that first 3 day fermentation period. The last time I tried it, my kitchen was in the 80's, way too hot for the first fermentation period. I moved everything to the basement, which was significantly cooler but apparently I was too late or it wasn't cool enough. The cukes became moldy and slimy.

Usually the cukes are coming fast during a heat wave and it seems the best time to be processing them. We often have to harvest twice a day during that wonderful high summer heat. Now, I store the cukes in the fridge until the heat wave breaks and then I ferment.

Avoid using the cukes that form during heavy summer rains:
These cukes are full of water and won't ferment well. My experience is that extra water seems to upset the salt/water balance.

Use onions with your cukes and summer squash ferments:
To avoid mushy cukes and summer squash ferments, add a little onion to each jar.