Fermenting: How to Ferment Vegetables

I love fermented foods but have not made a lot of them from scratch to date. In spite of being an avid cook and cookbook author, it's something I always thought was too much work and not really worth the effort. But after reading: Fermenting: How to Ferment Vegetables, I'm ready to give it a go! Author Rashelle Johnson has done a great job explaining how to go about the process of home fermenting vegetables in an easy to understand and straightforward way. She has included an extensive (very!) Q and A section that I found most helpful in addition to the many recipes. This is a lot more than just a how to guide for the basics like sauerkraut and pickles. There are recipes for a variety of fermented veggies including some of my favs like: beets, kohlrabi, carrots and zucchini...and all of them sound so yummy! I need to get a good size crock to work with then I'm going to give this collection a good kitchen workout. ;-) Only one question I could not find the answer to, perhaps I missed it. I would still like to know if the actual crock used to hold the foods needs to be sterilized before use, as is the case with making pickles etc, with regular pickling methods? If the author could answer this, that would be great. Geraldine Helen Hartman author of The Groovy Green Kitchen and Not Just for Vegetarians.

This book gives detailed instructions for the novice on how to ferment vegetables. It describes the fermentation process, the steps require to get the process going, and why each step is important to the process. There is a bit of redundancy in the different chapters of the book. You will never forget that 1-3 t of salt per quart of water is required to make brine, and that any more salt will cause fermentation to "grind to a halt." This information is repeated at least 5 different times. But redundant info would be helpful for the novice who is skimming or Skipping chapters. The recipes are diverse. I wish there was an attempt to describe the flavors of each fermented recipe to help me decide which ones to try. The recipes don't specify what size container you need to ferment them in.

This is the perfect book for anyone starting out fermenting vegetables. It has good quality information. That’s easy to understand. I highly recommend this little book.

I am about 1/3 way through the book and the author has a HUGE BLIND SPOT. He keeps going over how important it is to submerge the vegetables. Yes mold can form on vegetables that float to the surface and become dry on one side. The author blind spot is not understanding that when the ferment bubbles that is carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide weighs 50% MORE than oxygen. And pushes any oxygen up and out of the crock or jar Once the ferment is bubbling shortly the empty airspace will be replaced with CO2 and the empty airspace will be a fully anaerobic environment. There are several options to prevent mold If you don’t have weights to hold the fill a plastic bag with water to use as a weight. Remove the lid daily and use a clean spoon or fork to push the vegetables back under the water every day. Also Amazon has some fermentation lids that fit large mouth mason jars and comes with a vacuum pump to get as much air as possible to prevent mold When the ferment starts bubbling the oxygen will be pushed out of the fermentation container by the carbon dioxide.

The beauty of this book is in its brevity and organization. This book is ideal for beginners or as a quick reference for more experienced fermenters. I own a handful of fermenting books, (I am a bit obsessed), and this one has been the most helpful. As much as I love the in depth discussions of history, chemistry, and personal stories in some of the others, it is great to have a book where I can just find a specific bit of relevant info and then get to work. The recipes are great go-tos.

If you are not already familiar with fermenting, or if you just want to have a lot of your information on fermenting in one place, this is a good book for you. The book explains the difference between fermenting and pickling and why fermenting is actually the preferred approach to food preservation. Fermenting is a form of food preservation that works using lacto-bacillus. Two kinds of bacteria are all around us and even inside us. One kind is pathogenic, meaning it will make you sick or even kill you (think botulism). The other kind, however, not only live in our guts, they are actually helpful in digestion and in fending off the pathogens. These bacteria are referred to as pro-biotic. The advantage of lacto-fermentation is that it creates an environment in which it is hard or impossible for pathogens to grow, while at the same time using pro-biotics to preserve the food. I would have given this book five stars had it been better laid out for kindle. Some of the chapters and chapter divisions break at funny places on my phone app. That is not serious enough to lower the rating to three starts, but it does keep it from getting all five stars. The book contains numerous excellent recipes that give you not only a list of ingredients, but also step by step instructions on how to combine the ingredients and ferment the veggies.

This is one heck of a good book, and yet I either got this one free, or paid next to nothing for it. Funny thing is, I refer to this book more than I do ones that I paid about $20 for! Sometimes less is more and in this case, I think she delivered a good book that is helpful, useful, and best of all - easy! I say, if you're looking to just dabble in some fermenting here and there, start here. You might not even need to go any further than this. You might find that this is all you really were looking for after all!

I have had some disastrous experiments with fermenting before but this book has helped me to understand where I went wrong and so I am going to have another go at fermenting now. Some really useful and easy to follow recipes which adds to my love of this book. Thankyou

It’s a good beginners and intermediate book, basically has all the info you need and recipes to make the majority of what people preserve

A nice little book. Concise and straightforward. Gives the essentials of fermenting all kinds of veggies - variations on the traditional sauerkraut, beets, carrots and dill pickles plus some unusal ones like jalapeno, mushrooms, garlic, ketchup, salsa and kimchi to name a few. There is even a recipe for natto (fermented soybeans). Then there is a simple troubleshooting section at the end about what can go wrong. I don't think I needed more than the information presented in this book, though pictures would have been positively appealing. A fine book for beginners.

I bought this kindle version and am pleased with it. I want to start fermenting some veg, rather than pickling and it has lots of great information inside. Personally I do prefer a paper version of a non fiction book so that I can thumb through time and time again. So I may have to buy a proper paper version. Looking forward to starting some fermentation..........

This little book contains excellent and comprehensive information. I've paid a lot more for large hardbacks on fermenting vegetables and have not had as useful content. Highly recommend.