Hacking Pickling

As I mentioned in my last entry, this weekend was going to be the one where I’d be experimenting

I made pickled eggs too.

Can't waste the lovely dill.

with making my own lacto-fermented pickles. Before I get into explaining the crazy ideas I’ve had to accommodate for this endeavor, I should speak about how my first trial at it last year. It was the trial where I was stifled from a few errors, but I was still able to salvage some good results. The problem wasn’t in the recipe I fashioned for the experiment; it was a problem with the structural form of my pickling vessel. It all amounted to the ability to keep things submerged: any matter that you are trying to pickle and preserve by fermenting absolutely has to stay below the surface of the liquid brine. Otherwise, the risk of contamination by mold is very certain, which will turn the exposed cucumbers into a gross gooey gray mush. This happened to me last year with a few of them. Those that were inflicted by this problem had to be carefully removed and discarded immediately. The ones in the middle of the solution were still green and kept their form, but lacking in crispiness. According to my research sources, they were still edible. To be resourceful, I took these soft ones and ran them through a meat grinder to simply make a tasty relish* (waste not, want not). The ones on the bottom of the fermenter were solid and of good quality. I made another batch of sterile brine though for keeping them preserved in the jars, to avoid another risk of mold contamination by using their native solution.

If the walls of the vessel were straight, like that of a traditional European or North American ceramic crock, the matter could be easily solved by just fitting a weighted ceramic plate over the mass to keep everything below liquid level. Although there is a useful airlock system in my particular crock’s traditional Asian design, it was still not enough to prevent spoilage. The curved sides coming to a narrowed opening on top of it make it difficult to insert anything inside to keep the cucumbers (which really like to float) under the brine. Trying to tightly pack and layer the contents, and interweaving sprigs of dill to sort of bind stuff together didn’t help at all either. Solving this problem needed an innovative solution. Time to doing some hacking for this year’s pickle project . . .


Objective: With using just the minimal of materials around my home, to somehow make a liquid permeable barrier, that can be flexible enough to be inserted through the narrow opening of my crock jar, but yet can be rigid enough, and can adjust and expand across the surface, to hold down contents, and to prevent stuff from floating up and breaking the surface of the brine. The materials cannot include, or contain, reactive metals that can oxidize: which might impart rust/metallic flavours in the batch, or might even make it toxic. I’m restricted to using ceramics, glass, non-metallic earthenware, wood, or food-grade plastic. Taking a coffee break to think on it now . . .

Eureka! After dreaming and digging around, I found my tools and materials. They are:

• A bamboo sushi rolling mat (a bit of a sacrifice, but they are cheap, and I could use a new one anyway)
• Chopsticks (natural wood; no paint, varnishes, or other finishes)
• A round Pyrex casserole dish lid
• A marker
• Pruning shears (with flat jaw)
• Glass beads (at least a kilogram in weight)
• A food grade plastic Ziploc bag

My Hack for Making a Liquid Permeable Fermenter Barrier

The bamboo sushi mat is flexible enough to be inserted inside the jar, but for it to lie flat in there, and to prevent one’s pickles from probing through gaps, it must be made circular. The procedure to do this is as thus:

1. Roll out the sushi mat flat, and place an edged form that occupies the greatest circular areas positioned from the centre of the mat. I found a casserole dish lid, which worked well because it didn’t stain with marker ink.

2. Trace the marker around the edge of the circle to mark where to trim off the superfluous lengths of the bamboo rods of the mat.

3. Use the pruning shears to cut away the corners of the bamboo mat. Be sure not to cut through the binding chord/string running along the middle of the mat. Keep the extra string trimmed from the mat when cutting away the corners.

4. Take pieces of the trimmed string, and poke them through the spaces between the bamboo rods, making certain that they wrap around the middle binding chord on both distal ends of the mat, and one in the centre along the same axis.

5. Trim the chopstick such that it extends across the full length across the middle of the mat, perpendicular to the bamboo rods, leaving enough length for it to extend slightly at each end. Tie the chopstick to the mat with the pieces of trimmed string inserted through the points in the mat mentioned previously. This will make the surface rigid once it is put in the fermenting jar.

6. Sterilize the glass beads by boiling them in water. Drain them, and then place them in the food grade plastic bag. This will be used as weight to place and distribute across the bamboo barrier once it covers the contents. Just before placing this bag of glass beads on top of the modified sushi mat in the fermenter, set it in a colander in a sink and pour boiling water around it to get it as sterile as possible.

There are a few recipes out there for making one’s own homemade fermented pickles. I’m not sharing mine, as I don’t know if mine will turn out yet to be worth sharing. But from all that I read and accumulated in knowledge, I will add a few tips as to what I did with mine, which is supposed to make (at least in theory) nice firm pickles (and no . . . adding Viagra in the fermenter is not one of them!).

1. Begin pickling the cucumbers as soon as possible after they’ve been picked (easier said than done) – I made a mad rush to get to the Farmers' Market as early as I could to get my produce while it was still fresh.

2. Plunge them in ice water before processing them – allegedly this is somehow beneficial to get crisper pickles. I presume it slows down the effect of the enzyme activity in them that can possibly soften them, see next point.

3. Get rid of the blossom end of the cucumbers – while scrubbing and inspecting each of the cukes for defects (don’t use any blemished ones), I take and pare away the blossom end of the cucumbers. Not only does it facilitate the brine to permeate the cucumbers more easily, but the blossom end is full of enzymes that soften the fruit body of the cucumber once it’s taken off the vine. Just lightly paring away the skin from the tip should work; you don’t have to get crazy and peel away so much that it looks like you are giving the thing a circumcision. If you aren’t sure which end is the blossom and which is the stem end, just be safe and trim both ends the same way.

4. Cherry leaves – I “borrowed” mine from a neighbour’s tree, whose branches were sticking out into the alley. Cherry leaves are full of botanical tannins that work like a more natural form of alum, a more refined chemical used in pickling used for making crisper pickles. Leaves of other plants, like grape, oak, and horseradish, apparently work too.

My spices and salt mixed together, plus garlic, cherry leaves,

and most importantly, lots and lots of dill . . .

The Process

1. Boil a large pot of water and then allow it to cool to a temperature that won’t scald anything, but remains warm enough that will allow it to dissolve course salt, and can allow infusion and release the aromatics of the pickling spice blend, garlic, dill, and also releases the tannins from the cherry leaves. It will also purify the water, boiling off any residual chlorine, which makes for better brewing project results.

2. Weigh out the salt** and blend pickling spice mix. I like salty and sour pickles, so a 9 - 10% weight of course salt of the total mass of cucumbers should work.

3. Soak cucumbers in ice water, scrub them and remove the blossom ends (as mentioned above), throw aside any with any blemishes, mushiness, or signs of insect activity.

4. Place the cucumbers in the fermenter in layers, alternating with dill, garlic and sprinkling salt and spices between each layer. Don’t allow the contents to pile up! Make sure that the surface is spread level. The final layer of cucumbers should have no pieces of stems from the dill or cucumbers poking above the even surface. Top the last layer with any remaining salt and spices.

5. Place permeable barrier on top of the contents, and secure the crossing piece of chopstick to secure the barrier in a rigid form. Place the sterilized bag of glass beads on top of the barrier, and spread the glass beads evenly on the top of the surface.

Seems to fit very nicely . . .

6. Slowly pour in the warm water from the pot into the fermenter until it reaches above the bag of glass beads***. No cucumbers should be exposed at all.

7. Put the cover on the fermenter, and add water around the lid, creating an airlock. Gases from the lactobacillus bacteria that are metabolizing sugars and fibre can then escape, while (hopefully) no foreign and harmful strains of microbes will be able to enter and contaminate the batch.

I expect some burbling and burping

sometime tonight.

From there onward, it is just a waiting game involving monitoring, assuring that things haven’t shifted, and the removing any weird looking scum that looks like it doesn’t belong there.

*- This relish + mayonnaise + minced onion + ground black pepper + salt to taste = Awesome homemade Tartar Sauce.

**- Shame on you if you don’t have a kitchen scale, and yet still want to brew things! What the hell kind of chef/brewer/fermento are you?! If your kitchen doesn’t have a scale, I guess you don’t want to be a good one. OK, I’ll be kind this one time and give you a hint: 1 cup of course salt weighs about 250 grams. Shame on you again if you’re still stuck in the Stone Age, and not using the metric system like a scientific mind should, and 98% of the globe already does. I draw the line here, and I’ll just let you figure out the conversions yourself.

***- I suppose you are wondering why I have a bunch of glass beads in my kitchen. Remember Aesop’s fable about the crow that was dying of thirst, who found a pitcher, but the water in it was too low for him to be able to drink from it? So he added pebbles in it bit by bit to raise the water level. Same principle applies here: fluid displacement. In brewing, some recipes leave behind a lot of sediment, which cuts down the volume when the beer is transferred to a carboy. The air space and extra surface area from the diminished volume can risk spoilage of the beer. One can top up the volume with water, but that of course dilutes it, and no one wants that! So instead, dropping in sterilized glass beads into the carboy raises the level and shrinks surface area and space between the airlock without diluting it. That’s what this old crow has learned anyway.