Another Way to Preserve the Harvest

At certain times of the year, we have more vegetables coming in than we know what to do with.  We eat all we can, and it is fun to look for new recipes.  We've found some things that are fantastic, like zucchini bundt cake!  We give away a lot to our neighbors and our church family.  We blanch and freeze some.  We dehydrate some.  We pickle some.  Another way of preserving is lacto-fermentation.  

Lacto-fermentation uses whey and salt and the lacto-bacillus bacteria in the vegetables.  The bacteria converts the sugars in the vegetables to lactic acid and thus, preserves or ferments the vegetables, preserving their shelf life and giving you some healthy probiotics to populate your gut.  They are delicious, too!

When we milk LuLu, our Jersey in milk right now, or our goats, Tricia makes kefir.  She strains off the whey, and we use the whey for lacto-fermentation.  Below you see a gallon jar of fermented pickles and banana peppers.  The recipe is real simple.  You fill the container with vegetables and add 1/4 cup of whey to the quart jar.  Then add 1 Tablespoon of salt.  Finally, fill the rest of the jar with water, put a cap on it and sit at room temperature for two days.  At the end of two days, put in the fridge. (By the way, why does fridge have a "d" in it, but refrigerator doesn't?)  We find that if you leave it in the fridge for a month or two, the flavor gets better.

Here is a quart of cut up yellow squash that we lacto-fermented.  There's no end to what type of vegetable you can try.  We tried beets several years and made beet kvass using the same recipe.

Now if you pound the shredded vegetables and they make their own juice, you can do this without using water.  Just add the whey and the salt and use a glass weight to keep the shredded vegetables beneath the liquid line.  Here is some sauerkraut that we made back in early spring when the cabbage came in.

And here is a quart of ginger carrots that we made back in February.

Any of the above is cool, tangy, tasty, and refreshing for lunch on a hot, summer day.