The Fermentery
Thu, Jan 10, 2019
Recipes from this article
Towards the end of last week I found myself with a little time to spare and running low on several of the pickles that I like to keep on hand. So I took a walk down to the market and brought home a bounty of different vegetables to start working on some old favorites and some new experiments.
Fermented Peppers
One of the first videos in Bon Appetit’s It’s Alive web series that captured my attention was the fermented pepper sauce. Since seeing that for the first time, I’ve made sure to keep myself stocked up on my own version. The first step in the production of said sauce is, of course, pickling peppers (perhaps a portion poor of a peck).
I use mostly fresno peppers (for flavor), plus a few habaneros (for heat and for thier beautiful floral aroma). One big departure from Brad Leone’s version is I include more garlic than he does, as I like it when the garlic flavor is more assertive.
Once the peppers are done, I’ll blend them up with the garlic cloves and a little bit of the brine to make a sauce, then I’ll bottle the remaining brine. I use it in just about every soup or stock I make.
Fermented Peppers (Batch 1)
Garlic Dill Pickles
I ordered some dill from Imperfect Produce and thought they’d send me a reasonable (read: small) amount of it.
I was wrong.
Now I’d never made my own pickles before. Well, I’d made pickles, but not pickles pickles—not the kind of pickled cucumber that you’d expect to get when a restaurant tells you your sandwich comes with a pickle. But here I found myself setting up to start a bunch of new fermentation projects and trying to use up a ludicrous amount of dill, so it seemed the natural thing to do.
Rather than basing it on a specific recipe, I googled cucumber pickle brine concentration and decided to add my own spices. From my brief research, I learned a few things:
- I wanted to make a half-sour pickle, as opposed to full sour, because I wanted them to be a little bit crisp.
- A common brine concentration for half-sour pickles is 4%.
- To aid in retaining that crisp texture, I probably needed to add something tannic, like a bay leaf.
Based on all of that, here’s what I came up with:
Kimchis
Finally, I was running low on homemade kimchi, so while I was working on the above two things, I figured why not go crazy?
First off, I needed to replenish my supply of traditional napa cabbage kimchi:
But beyond that, since I was already buying cucumbers for the dill pickles, it occurred to me that I might try making some cucumber kimchi. I’d had it in Korean restaurants before, but it had never crossed my mind to try making it myself. So now I have two kimchis fermenting:
I think this means it’s time to pickle some daikon radishes, right?
Maybe after taking a few days off.
