In this video I wanna talk about
fermenting some celery.  Fermenting's a super way to preserve vegetables but also
a way to 
create probiotic vegetable
that is delicious to eat and really good for you.
So, what  I wanna do is use some organic celery.  
I like the orgainc celery.  It's a lot cleaner has, you know, no chemicals
or anything on it
...some ginger I think would be delicious
in it.
I've got some leeks and about two heads of  garlic then I've cleaned - 
Watch my video that cleaning garlic heads
if you're interested.
The method is basically to clean all the
vegetables.  Chop them up.
Brine them and then
we'll go ahead and a little bit of
live culture to them
which we'll look at it minute and then put
them
away in a warm, dark place to ferment. so
let's get 
any kinda bad looking parts and
vegetables off.
Just pull them off.  They'll break at the place where their where they're not so dry.  Remove the roots.
Remove, basically,
kind of like you're making a nice salad. You
know cut-up the leeks.
Split them like you normally would.
Inspect them for sand.  These are pretty clean--
we'll probably be fine.  
Just go ahead and and split them and chop
them.  Yeah, these are nice and clean.
A little tiny bit of grit in there that we can rinse out,  I guess.
But basically, take your leeks, 
split them like you normally would
and then go ahead and chop them try it
was you making
your chop to ferment trying to get
your pieces even as you can on the
pieces
little pieces because just like as if you were
cooking you want to make sure that
everything
ferments even rate in all the pieces are
equally
softened by the fermenting.
So, we'll add that to our mixing bowl.
Of course, everything you're
seeing here in the video has been pretty well scrubbed down.
You don't want dirt coming in or any bacteria from your
counters. Make sure your tools are clean
and your bench is clean and your
counter-top's clean - your hands are clean. You don't want to introduce any
bad bacteria into the process.  The salt will pretty much protect you from anything
evil but try to do the job with
what you're going to be eating here. So just a quick rinse on everything to 
get that the sand and get that grit out of it.
Believe it or not, a lot of people say that
that
bacteria's a good culture for the fermenting pot.
But I don't like to have an awful lot
of dirt in my diet so I like to give everything a fair rinse.
Save these little leaves.  They're delicious. They add a nice flavor to the mix.
to the mix.
Once you've got the bulk of the dirt off your
vegetables, you can put these down and cut these up as well.
these up as well.
I like these little leaves.
You might wanna
cut your salary up in two batches. 
If you have big enough hands, you can hold it all down once.  Watch your thumb.
Thumbs do not ferment well.
 
IF you have a mandolin, break that out.
and slice up your vegetables. I have one but I'm just doing it by hand 
for the purpose of demonstration for the video.
You can even use a food processor if you're doing a bunch.
Put the chopping blade and cut all these vegetables up that way.
and get nice consistent, even slices. Again,
cut up the size you like. We're kinda making a
fermented slaw is going to be our finished product in a couple weeks.
So, kinda' fork-size pieces here.
Get out all the weird-looking pieces - the dried, brown, pieces are not going to be delicious.
Ginger.  
Give it a quick rinse get the big pieces off
The brine in the ferment will
kill anything bad living on it.  When you're  fermenting you find that the 
good bacteria really take over pretty
quickly.  Unless you've gotta lotta bad bacteria on your
vegetables
you can get away with a little bit of dirt
here and there.The salt in the brine will kill off a lot of the "baddies".
The good bacteria, the probiotics are really going to take over in this
ferment pretty quickly and you don't have to worry about it too much.
I've been fermenting for a while and 
I'm yet to make myself sick with any kind of a bad bacteria.
You'll know it after a couple weeks if you've got a bad ferment.
Just pitch the whole pot.  But let it ferment for a couple weeks in
a give if a whiff.  If it smells good
it's probably okay to eat.  These little garlics are probably fine.
I'll cut  the big ones in half.
Again, just aiming for a consistent size for everything.
Close is close enough.
Alight, we've got our "salad" here: celery,  leeks,
ginger, garlic...
A quick toss to get everything mixed up.
My bench is clean.  I promise.  This is an Anchor-Hocking
glass jar with lid. Check my links below - I've got some links to Amazon
 if you wanna pick one of these up.  You can get one  for under fifteen or twenty dollars
I like them because they're glass.  They run through the dishwasher.
And with that lid...
 you know that you're going to be giving off carbon dioxide from the ferment and you wanna keep the bugs out...
the dust out...
on you wanna have a kinda
loose-fitting
lid so that that carbon dioxide get
out
as vegetables ferment. 
That was a perfect amount of vegetables  from my gallon jug.
BRINE:  let's do a gallon of water.
These's are my shoes.
Per a gallon water, I would like to use
about 3/4 cup of salt.
Not iodized salt.
Iodine kills bacteria - not gonna'
work.
Here's some Moldon's Sea Salt.
Great salt.  I paid about 8 dollars for
this six ounce box.
I think I want to save this to
decorate pretzels with.  That's not going to work.
Kosher salt is usually a pretty good deal.  
Check your ingredients. Some kosher
salt have "anti-caking" agents.
 I'm not quite sure that is...
 
Here's some Pure sea salt -  100 percent fine grains.
yeah pure sea salt - so no
added ingredients. Let's us this.
Like I said, about six-ounces
by volume for a gallon water and go ahead and 
mix this up and we're going to use this to
submerge
our vegetable mix underwater.
This is a completely anaerobic process.  The bacteria we want
really don't mind the salt too much so
and
of course, the salt adds a nice flavor.  Some people say
you get good at this, you kinda' 
 get a feel for how much salt
is too much salt.
 
THIS is whey. I made yogurt yesterday and I saved some of the whey.
Believe it or not, the same bacteria
that naturally occurs on vegetables that you can ferment with is also the same
Lactobacillus that happens
in yogurt so I like to dumb alittle of my whey in.  It kinda gives a little 
kickstart - a little added insurance policy
that I got the right bacteria growning in there.
Put this up in the cabinet.  There's my kombucha!
which is fermenting.  Watch my videos about kombucha making.
and this will ferment.
