What to do With All These Radishes?

We grow French Breakfast Radishes in the garden.  Radishes are one of those crops you grow that is one of the fastest maturing things I can think of.  We cut them up in salads and we also enjoy them in a radish dip we make.  I highly recommend it.  The recipe is from a blog post back in 2017 you can see by clicking HERE. 

We still have a bunch of radishes in the garden.  We'll make another dip or two, but wanted to try our hand at lacto-fermenting some.  We have used lacto-fermentation in making Sauer kraut, kimchi, pickles, and gingered carrots.  Now, we'll do radishes.  This afternoon we picked a colander full.

We washed them up and scrubbed the dirt off of them with a stiff-bristled vegetable brush.

We wanted to see how much we picked.  A hair over 2 pounds.

I cut the bottom root off as well as the top.  In probably an unneeded step, but I like to follow directions, I peeled the radishes with a potato peeler.  By the way, I want to give credit, we're using a recipe from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon coupled with one from The Survival Gardener's Blog.

We cubed up the radishes and packed them in wide mouth quart sized jars.

The recipe calls for 1 Tablespoon of salt, 1/4 of whey and then fill with water.  A little backstory on the whey.  We make the whey as a byproduct of making kefir yogurt.  Whey is what drips off, leaving the curds behind.  Whey is a natural preservative.

The whey and salt and water are added and thoroughly mixed to ensure the salt dissolves.

Then the mixture is poured over the radishes in the jar until it fills.  You want to make sure the radishes are beneath the surface.  To accomplish this, you'll need a follower.  We don't have any followers, but we improvised.  In the jar on the left, we used a crystal napkin ring to weight down a pint size lid to hold all the radishes under the fermenting liquid.  A few cubes escaped.

For the jar on the right, I used a leaf of cabbage torn a little larger than the size of the jar to push all the radish cubes down.  This worked much better!

We'll allow to sit at room temperature for five days and will then place in the fridge where they'll last for months.  Anxious to try them!  They are supposed to be tart and tangy.  We'll report back if we were successful (if they are tasty).