New Ferments

I am thoroughly hooked on fermenting! I mentioned that since so far the only ferments I had made and completed were sauerkraut and piccalilli, I had been looking for more things to make and try, adding in more variation to my diet. The sauerkraut is stupendous, and the piccalilli is a tie for great flavor, but even alternating them each day, I get a little bored. So, I am trying out new things, since variety is the spice of life.

I first tried some onion relish. I found the recipe online at "Killer Pickles": http://www.killerpickles.com/hot-pink-onions/ and followed the recipe just about exactly, except I cut the recipe in half. Having no idea what this onion relish will taste like, I preferred a smaller amount to start with. Easy enough to put together, for sure.

The recipe uses red onion for the relish and they call the recipe "Hot Pink Onions." Anyone who has used red onion in a food will know that once cooked or in any way soaked or heated, red onions will turn a fairly ugly purple-grey color. Adding in vinegar will perk up that color in no time, giving you some gorgeous pink color. The thing is, in fermenting, vinegar is not used. 

1-day into Pink Onion Relish and Salsa Verde fermenting

To get around this, they used a slice of beet, both for color and also as a disc for pressing down the mixture to submerge. The onions do all the work of releasing juices. I had no trouble at all with them being completely covered with liquid the morning after putting this together. I have become a great fan of using a cabbage leaf to completely cover the tops of the food, so it can be weighted more easily. After placing my slice of beet over the onions, I covered that with a cabbage leaf, and then added some rocks (well washed, bleached, washed, soaked and then boiled!) as the weight to keep things under liquid. 

After this, I went and forged ahead with some Salsa Verde, or Green Sauce. My Salsa Verde is a Guatemalan style recipe, and I have been making it for some time. I absolutely love the flavors. But that is a cooked recipe. This time I wanted to try with basically the same ingredients, but ferment them instead. I have air conditioning running in the house, though I only set it to about 76 degrees, so the kitchen is warm. In order to slow the fermentation process, thereby hopefully giving the ferments enough time to develop plenty of pro-biotics, and also more flavors, I moved these down to the basement, where is is most definitely cooler, though I do not have a thermometer down there (yet!). The amount given for the vegetable ingredients is 'as is' (as they come from store or market), and afterwards in brackets is the weight after peeling/coring/de-seeding or any other prep work to be done. The weight of the actual prepped veggies is needed to determine the amount of salt to use. The salt weight should be 2% of the final weight of the vegetables.

Much, much later:

I deleted this recipe, as it was not nearly good enough to replicate. I found that most of the greens and herbs did not make the best of mixes, just too sour to enjoy. 

My passion is teaching people how to create a harmony of flavors with their cooking, and passing along my love and joy of food, both simple or exotic, plain or fancy. I continue my journey in ethnic and domestic cuisines, continuing my journey to explore diverse culinary experiences and hopefully to start you on a journey of your own. Join me also at A Harmony of Flavors on Facebook, and Pinterest.