Fermenting vegetables is good for you and cuts down on food waste | Gardening Australia

Fermentation is one of the world's oldest ways of preserving food. Fermentation can transform ingredients that would typically go to waste into a delicious and nutritious condiment or snack. If your kitchen bench or fridge has ever overflowed with a glut of fresh produce, then fermentation is for you!

Adam James sold his inner-city café to start his own business fermenting fruits and vegetables full time. Adam has converted his small home in Hobart into a small-scale fermentation station, packed with jars of colourful ferments.

Tino and Adam gather end of season produce from a friend’s local farm. The produce has past it’s prime and can’t be sold at restaurants or shops, but they are perfect for fermenting.

Adam is going to share a simple technique known as wild fermentation.

Wild fermentation makes use of the naturally occurring bacteria already present on fresh food. This style of fermenting is all about creating the ideal conditions for the good bacteria (Lactobacillus) to thrive. In doing so you create an environment that is inhospitable to bad bacteria.

No matter what your ingredients are, the principles of wild fermentation are the same: veggies + salt + time = delicious and healthy ferments!

What you need for wild fermentation:

Vegetables + salt and, depending on your vegetables*, filtered water.

To know how much salt to add calculate between 2% and 5%** of your total vegetable weight.

Using kitchen scales add the appropriate amount of salt to your vegetables

In this video Tino and Adam are making a salsa, so they blend the vegetables using a food processor or stick blender.

Pour your vegetable salt mix into a large fermenting croc or into sterilised jars

Add a sprinkle of salt onto the top of each jar/croc to discourage bad bacteria

As your vegetables ferment, they release a very small amount of CO2. It’s important to loosen the lid and release the gas daily to prevent a build-up of gas (otherwise you may have a fermented explosion on your hands yikes!)

Adam notes, “It’s common for a whitish mould to form on the surface. This is called kahm yeast and is completely harmless. Simply pour/scrape off the surface. If other colours of mould appear then best to discard and start again”.

Pickling Brine recipe

Vegetables, filtered water + sea salt

For a pickling brine it’s best to use a 2% salt brine. For every 1 L of filtered water add 20grams of salt.

Bring water to the boil, remove from heat, add salt and stir to dissolve.

Allow the brine to cool to room temperature before adding it to your vegetables. You can leave the vegetables whole or dice them up. The smaller your vegetables are cut the faster the fermentation will happen.

Put your vegetables into a clean jar or fermenting croc and top with your 2% brine.

Make sure all vegetables are submerged and leave at room temperature for between 1 week and 2 months.

*Vegetables naturally high in water such as tomatoes, will not need to be fermented in a brine. Vegetables such as carrots and radish don’t naturally hold enough moisture so it’s best to ferment them in a brine. Whether you use a brine or not also depends on what kind of ferment you are making. Eg. pickled radish you would make a brine but a fermented hot sauce you would use naturally occurring moisture in the vegetables.

**the amount of salt you add depends on taste but somewhere between 2-5% will provide the ideal conditions for good bacteria to thrive.

The salt is the preservative. Depending on the vegetable, you would add a filtered non chlorinated water.

For a chilli ferment you can afford to add extra salt making the salt to veggie ratio about 4-5% but if you are fermenting root vegetables like carrots you would want more of a 2% ratio.

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