Hi, this is Kirsten Shockey, coauthor of
Fermented Vegetables, and I want to show
you today how we can take a vegetable — in
this case, a carrot — prep it differently,
and get three entirely different flavors.
So the first one — the carrot kraut — is
very kraut-y in that we are grating
everything, making it into small bits, and
there will be lots of extra fermentation
action on all that surface area that
you’re exposing. So you’re going to grate
the carrot and the apple as well as the
ginger and then you’re going to add some
salt to all of this and you’ll see that
quickly a brine is developed and once
this brine is nice and juicy you’re
going to press it into the jar. Now the
whole thing here is managing for that
brine and you have plenty of it, and
keeping everything anaerobic. There’s a
few different ways to do that with
weights. I’m going to show you one
strategy today and that is the bag
method. You just take a simple ziplock
bag and you open it up on the top of
your ferment and pour water. What this
does is it seals that top and at the
same time the little wrinkles in the bag
allow for the C02 to escape. In this next
recipe — a spicy carrot salad — you’ll see
that by slicing the vegetables super
thin you will get a whole different
texture and flavor as well. You’ll see in
this ferment we’re also slicing the
ginger super thin. The peppers are going
to get sliced. It’s nice, in a salad-type
ferment, to keep your vegetables a little
larger, a little more distinctive than in a
kraut where everything sort of gets
mashed together. We’re adding lime juice
in this ferment. It is for flavor and if you
want more lime flavor go ahead and grate
in the zest as well. The salt ultimately
is still what’s going to be making our
brine. So once everything is in the bowl
you’re going to squish it around
and make your brine. I’m going to stuff
it into the jar again pressing as you go
so that you end up with no air pockets.
The strategy we’re going to use in this
particular ferment is to fill the jar up
all the way. I like to add a little
weight — there are little ceramic weights
and glass weights — but today we’re just
going to use the lime that we have and
it will get discarded at the end.
In this last recipe the brine that you’re going
to make is one pint of water to one
tablespoon of salt and you’re simply
going to cut your sticks, wedge them into
the jar so that they’re nice and tight,
and pour that brine over the carrot sticks.
I hope you try these carrot
recipes. Most important thing to remember
is have fun, enjoy the process, and enjoy
the flavor.
you
