Making Ginger Carrots

We're blessed to have a bumper crop of carrots this year.  Today I picked a nice bucket of cosmic purple carrots and berlicum carrots, washed them up and cut the greens off and fed the greens to the cows.  Even the chickens ran to eat the carrot tops that the cows didn't immediately gobble up.

A nice haul of carrots

Since we've already blanched and frozen several bags full, we decided to make some Ginger Carrots.  These lacto-fermented vegetables are the best and a real favorite of ours.  Benjamin helped me to prep the cosmic purple carrots by slicing off the top and bottom with a sharp knife.

Once they were prepped, we put the shredding blade on the food processor and shredded all of the purple carrots, yielding 16 cups of shredded carrots.

Shredded carrots

I grated 4 tablespoons of fresh ginger.  Ginger smells so good.

Grated Ginger

I poured 16 cups of shredded carrots, 2 tablespoons grated ginger, and 8 teaspoons salt into a big plastic container.

To this I added 1/2 cup of whey.  This was whey that we separated when making kefir.

Adding whey

Next I used the wooden head of a meat tenderizer to pound the carrot mixture together in order to release the juices of the shredded carrots.

Pounding on the shredded carrots

Then I spooned the carrots into jars.

Packing into jars

Using the wooden handle of the meat tenderizer, I packed the carrots into the jar so that there was 1 inch of head-space below the rim.

The 16 cups of shredded Cosmic Purple Carrots filled four pint jars and a half pint jar.

Here is an up-close photo of the Shredded Ginger carrots.  The purple skins of the carrots give the concoction a pretty color.

Beautiful!

We put the lids and rings on tightly and we'll leave at room temperature for 2 - 3 days.  Then we'll place these in the back of the refrigerator and patiently wait for at least 3 months before we open up a jar and begin eating.  Ginger Carrots are so sweet and tangy and delicious.

They've become a favorite of ours.  Tomorrow I'll go buy some more fresh ginger and we will make some more ginger carrots with the remainder of the orange carrots.