#fermented pickles

[ketoandme]

So dinner was very, very simple tonight. Ground beef browned in a skillet, served over lettuce with pickle spears (not fermented, unfortunately), sour cream, and sliced avocado.

The ground beef was cooked with butter and bacon fat, homemade chili powder, Allulose mixed with citric acid, ground up fried pork rinds, and shredded Parmesan cheese stirred in. Also a heavy lacing of apple cider vinegar.

It didn’t raise blood glucose at all, but instead lowered it by 20 points, down into the 80s and 90s. Yay keto!

[jazzeria]

Doing a "perpetual pickle" jar by adding fresh cucumbers and salt to an already established, active dill pickle brine.

I started with some slightly sad dill cucumbers from the store, knowing I'd be hitting the farmer's market on the weekend. At the St Norbert Farmer's Market, I scored a big ol' bag of tiny dill cucumbers. The next day, I visited my partner's grandmother who gave us some home-grown pickling cukes too! So I staggered these over about a week.

My personal preference is "half-sour" dills, about 3 days of fermentation, when the flesh looks creamy and opaque, perhaps hints of translucent regions. It's crisp, tastes cucumber-y, but isn't too "juicy" the way a full-sour often is.

I'd extend this project for even longer, but my partner gently reminded me that my pickle cravings often come in waves. I go on a bit of a #picklerampage for a few weeks, then it fades for a while. But now I have lots of brine ready for whenever I want to start again.

[lorib643]

Fermenting

Image: mason jars with fermenting sauerkraut and pickles My friend ferments pickles and sauerkraut. He gave me the directions so I set some up. It is pretty simple. Sauerkraut is cabbage and salt. I added some carrots and ginger for flavor. Pickles are salt water and some spices. I watched videos on YouTube and joined a Facebook group for beginning fermenters. There is some conflicting…

[cardofrage]

Fermented Pickles

[actualdirtfromtheground]

If the pickles are fermented they're good for you

If the pickles are fermented the pickles juice is good for you

You can drink it, and you should

Please appreciate the fermented pickles

[hiddurmitzvah]

I wanted to celebrate with these two prints that I made, a long history that jewish people, garlic and pickles have. You can purchase these print via my Etsy shop.

And here's the history:

Already in ancient times, garlic was a central part of celebrating Shabbat. The Talmud devotes several passages to talking about garlic, explaining that it is a key part of Shabbat meals. “With what does one delight in the day of Shabbat?” the Talmud asks, recording an answer provided by Rav Yehuda, son of Rav Shmuel bar Sheilat, who recalled the words of his teacher Rav: “With a dish of beetroot, and a large fish, and heads of garlic” (TalmudShabbat 11b). Elsewhere, the Talmud refers to Jews who celebrate Shabbat as “garlic eaters,” so closely identified was Shabbat dinner and lunch with this fragrant vegetable. (Talmud Nedarim 31a)

Even later on, in the medieval times, the conncetion between jews and garlic was quite close. In fact, it helped the community to survive!  In Istanbul, when Jews avoided the plague during a terrible epidemic, it was said that the virus did not penetrate the Jewish area because of the smell of garlic. Jews hung bulbs of garlic outside their doors to ward off the plague as a talisman and sign of good luck. The food historian Gil Marks adds: “Historically, the addition of garlic was among the typical Jewish touches that enhanced local dishes. In many cultures, the presence of garlic marked a dish as Jewish.”

In Germany, in the towns of Speyer, Worms and Mainz were home to large, vibrant Jewish communities. A popular acronym for these areas took the first letter from each town – S, W (which is written with a double “U” sound in Hebrew) and M – echoed the Hebrew word for garlic, shoom. The area was known as Kehillas Shoom (or SchUM) – the community of “Shum”, or garlic in Hebrew.

So identified were German Jews with garlic that some anti-Semitic images persist from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, depicting Jews holding or posing with bulbs of garlic.

But jews and pickles go back for a long time too. Eastern European Jews brought their pickle-making traditions to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and made it famous there. Pickled cucumbers were an important part of their diet due to the need for preserving food in harsh climates in Eastern Europe, where was a common practice to collect and preserve pickles in order to survive winter. Everything could be pickled, from lemons to carrots, with varying degrees of culinary success.

Some took the cucumber, a cheap, accessible vegetable, preserved it in the spring to make them last through the winter and feasted on it throughout the year. Some of those people were Jews and thus the Jewish love affair with pickling began, as a way of keeping vegetables hygienic and healthy.

Fermantation itself as has a biblical orgin in various places.  Perhaps the best-known early reference to fermented food is the Passover story in Exodus (12:39): When the Jews were "thrust out of Egypt, and could not tarry," their dough could not rise (through fermentation). We know this unleavened bread as matzo. But when they left Egypt, after some time, their longing for these goods came up: "We remember the fish which we were wont to eat in Egypt for nought; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic” It’s likely that the cucumbers mentioned by our Jewish forebears were pickled in some way. Ancient cucumbers tasted extremely bitter and the ancient Egyptians “cooked” their cucumbers by lightly fermenting them. The resulting pickled vegetables were slightly alcoholic, and were seemingly eaten for their mind-altering properties.

[eggroll-sama]

So we all know that Kuras sucks at cooking and honestly funny, but you would think someone as intelligent as Kuras would know how to cook. I think the developers did that on purpose tho, bc if you think about it, humans are the only animals that cook their own food, and the fact that Kuras, an angel that’s lived for centuries and probably the wisest and intelligent creature on the planet can’t cook to save his life, it just highlights how at the end of the day, he isn’t human.

[toxictoxicities]

What is it called when you turn a cucumber into a pickle?

[afurtivecake]

my perfect court (plus neil) headcanon: not a single one of them knows that dill pickles are made from cucumbers.

how pickles are made was not a part of neil’s evading the mob education.

jean has literally never thought about pickles in his life.

riko and kevin didn’t grow up watching TV and so never saw that episode of magic school bus.

andrew doesn't make fun of them for not knowing like the other foxes when they find out about this gap in knowledge. he doesn't say anything. but it's the only time he's truly looked at kevin and neil as if they were completely stupid.

[tenmillionpoundsofsludge]

What's everyone's opinions on pickles. Do I have any pickle fans following me

[scrawnytreedemon]

Decided to nail down my design for this dingus, lol. I think he's face turned out a bit more robust in that 3/4ths view than I intended, but hey! It gets the idea across.

I'm really proud of this :}

A humble doodlesheet beneath the cut [minor alcohol cw]:

Life is hard as an 18-yro ex-hero apocalypse refugee trying to rent his wares. No friends but your bird(?) and this child you pay rent to.

These games are something else.

Now, onto the rambling proper:

I wanted to further the contrast between Link and Ravio even further. I gave Ravio a stockier frame(what else do I do with robed characters?) and made him a few years older. He looks stronger, sturdier.

And yet, he's actually quite sickly. His dark skin is pale and blotchy, with circles under his eyes. He suffers from malnutrition in the wake of Lorule's ongoing famine, and as such, despite his formidible strength, is saddled with frequent fatigue. That man sees shrimp colours when he stands up. He is a worn, weary, wary thing.

Regarding his garb, I took a page out of Yuga's book when it came to the undergarments you can see peeking from beneath the robe, as well as the shape of the boots. Lorulian fashion, baby! The world may be ending, but at least we have our colourful stripes and pointy shoes.

Also pulled minor inspiration from the Happy Mask Salesman, what with the gold ornamentation(especially near the wrists and throat) on his own purple garb. While not nearly as cumbersome, I gave Ravio some sacks, pouches and pockets. He's a travelling merchant! Where else is he gonna keep his stuff?

May or may not give Ravio a cooler skintone, but I don't want to lose the contrast against the purple.

I could probably go on and on, but I'll leave it here <3 Hope he brings you Joy.

[jazzeria]

My first time making lacto-fermented dill pickles!

In Winnipeg, local pickling cucumbers became available in early July. I bought a few pounds to try pickling.

Some of the pickles were quite large, so to help them fit, I cut them into quarters.

I'd never made nor eaten this type of pickle before, so I decided to try different seasoning combinations. The base recipe (left) contained: yellow mustard seed, black peppercorns, coriander, cloves and scapes/flower of garlic; and dill seed, leaves, and flowerheads. The middle jar doesn't have coriander. The right-most jar also contains grated and salted horseradish which I froze in fall.

Unfortunately, the horseradish flavour did not survive the freezer, and was barely detectable in the finished product.

After a few hours in the brine, the cucumber skins turned an unbelievably bright, deep green, which was surreal to see! This happens as the acidity increases and microbes begin eating the surface of the cucumbers.

On day 3 or 4, the brine turned cloudy, which happens as lactic acid is produced. I've read a few different explanations for the cloudiness:

It's the high density of active, living microbes

It's the high density of dead microbes still suspended in the solution

It's lactic acid (I don't really believe that)

Numbers 1 and 2 seem the most plausible, because the cloudiness clears up a little after a few days, and a whitish sediment can be seen settling. If #3 were true, that wouldn't explain why the brine clears up after a few days.

Because this was my first time, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to make "half-sours" or "full-sours".

Half-sours are fermented for about 4 days. The pickles still have a whitish (or marbled) flesh, instead of being uniformly translucent.

Full-sours are fermented for about 7 days or longer. The flesh is more uniformly translucent. In order to match this longer ferment time, the salinity is typically increased (compared to half-sours). But hypothetically, you could use the same salt content and just ferment longer--at the risk of a softer (less crunchy) pickle--which is what I did.

Here in Winnipeg, with a room temperature below 23C (air conditioned), the quartered cucumbers reached half-sour by about Day 3-4:

And the intact cucumbers reached half-sour by about Day 5-6:

These half-sours were mild, but still pleasingly crunchy!

Putting them in the fridge on Day 6 didn't halt the fermentation soon/fast enough, and these pickles turned full-sour in the fridge, and got a little softer. So my next batch of intact cukes will go in the fridge on Day 4 or 5.

I've also learned that I want a really dilly dill pickle, so I should add more dill than I think I need! I wonder if toasting the dill seed will alter the flavour of the finished product very much?

The taste was different from storebought garlic dill pickles (vinegar-pickled) that I've tried. The acidity was less harsh, for one! There was also an additional flavour, which I guess was the "fermented cucumber" flavour. It's difficult to put my finger on what that means exactly.

The quartered pickles got a little soft, so I minced them and will be turning them into relish (a future blog post, once I've figured out a recipe!).

[kitsuna21]

[foldingfittedsheets]

A discord server I’m in posted this recently, thoughts?

That is an affront to the natural order. Who inflicted this tertiary order evil upon the masses of the world? Absolutely wretched.

[hou-ting-wu]

i am a couple days late i think but here is a little thing for @wukoweek2024 Day 6: Family, an old lunar new year greeting card

Happy year of the dragon from the family! Mako & Wu, their cat Go chu jang, mako's spicy pickles, and wu's kombucha culture or ' the mother' 💛❤️

[layzeal]

having a giggle at how, if for some reason, the coffin doesn't get opened after 100 years and nieyao stay locked and buried, archeologists of the future would find their remains interlocked and name them "the lovers or yunping"