Lately I’ve been feeling like my gut and digestive system could use a tune up (not to mention dealing with a recent bout of heartburn/GERD), so I decided to make a nice root vegetable ferment. My body loves lacto-fermented foods, and I had some beautiful carrots and rutabagas from the CSA this week, plus onion, garlic, and ginger were in the house. I also added some red pepper flakes to make it a little spicy.
I washed off the vegetables (and got rid of the carrot hairs), but didn’t peel them, since there are microbes on the outside of the vegetables that help in the fermentation process. I grated the rutabagas and carrots, chopped the onion into small pieces, and minced the garlic (2 peeled cloves) and an inch chunk of (unpeeled) ginger.
I added a good shake of red pepper flakes—maybe 1/2 a tsp. Then I added 1 tbs of kosher salt, which doesn’t have iodine (that also interferes with the fermentation process). Continue reading “Making a Root Vegetable Ferment”
A couple weekends ago, I visited the Socrates Greenmarket for the first time – what a great market! It’s small, but packs a punch in its offerings. There, you can find all sorts of vegetables, fruit, bread, honey, juice, and even duck.
Apart from wanting to check it out for personal reasons, I went there as part of a meetup event with the Traditional Community Kitchen, a Meetup group focused on real, whole, unprocessed and traditional foods (I’m a co-organizer with them). Members come from a wide range of backgrounds – from those that follow a Nourishing Traditions way of eating, to Paleo, to vegan and vegetarian. Our events are a lot of fun, and the meetup at the Greenmarket didn’t disappoint.
We met around 11am and proceeded to take a tour of the market with the market manager, Markella Los. She took us to each stand and talked a little bit about the farmers and the farm and what they had to offer. It was really interesting and so nice to have more insight into each market vendor.
One of my favorite summer vegetables – apart from tomatoes – is the tomatillo. Tomatillos are those seemingly green tomatoes that grow with a papery husk around them… but they are not unripe green tomatoes at all! They are actually really different from tomatoes.
With their husks on
They are in the nightshade family – just as tomatoes, potatoes, and eggplants are – but resemble ground cherries more than tomatoes. They are more solid than tomatoes, sometimes a little sticky under their husk, full of tiny seeds and have a tangy taste. They are also very high in pectin, and that helps to thicken salsa verde. Some people like to eat them raw but I don’t care for them that way.
I’m a big fan of lacto-fermented foods, and I especially like lacto-fermented vegetables. I love sauerkraut but I especially love fermented root vegetables. I fell in love with them after the fermentation workshop I took with Andrew Faust a few years ago. There is just something magical about how all vegetables change in the fermentation process.
Of course, lacto-fermentation shoots up the nutritional value of what is fermenting, especially the vitamin C levels. Natural probiotics and beneficial enzymes also flourish. This is yet another reason to consume such foods.
When I got back from Washington, I looked in the fridge and saw that I had some CSA carrots and radishes left over. I thought fermenting them would be a great way to preserve them. The carrots were tiny, so grating them would have been a pain (perhaps even literally, as I was using a box grater), so I decided to slice them thinly into rounds, just as I was slicing the radishes. Then I figured that onions and garlic would be a nice addition.
Finally, I wanted to make them spicy. I didn’t have any fresh peppers on hand but I did have a bunch of dried ones. I love smoky and tangy together, so I chose to use a few of my dried chipotles.
I also wanted to use a brine with a smaller percentage of salt. More salt means the food with ferment faster, but lately I’ve been dissatisfied with the saltiness of the end product. I’d been using this brine: 1 tbs of salt to 1 cup of water. I referred to Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation, and saw that he uses a weaker brine for some things: 3 tbs salt to 4 cups water. I decided to try it out, though I did halve it, as I wasn’t making a huge batch of vegetables.
I am very happy with the results of this ferment! It took a little longer to get to where I wanted, but I love the salt level, flavor-wise. But I love how it’s turned out – it’s not overly salty at all, it’s smoky, spicy, and tangy. Perfect!
Carrot Radish Chipotle Ferment
1 pound carrots, cleaned and thinly sliced (do not peel)
1 pound radishes, thinly sliced
1/4 white onion, sliced
4 cloves garlic, peeled and cut in half
3 chipotle peppers, softened in warm water
1.5 tbs sea salt
2 cups warm water
Combine carrots, radishes, onion, and garlic in a large bowl.
After the chipotles have softened a bit, slice into four pieces, stem to blossom end. Add to the vegetables.
Mix the sea salt and water until the salt dissolves. Add it to the vegetables.
Scoop vegetable mixture into washed, sterilized mason jars – either two pint jars or one quart jar. Top off with remaining liquid.
Tighten lid – but not too tight – and store in a warm, dark area for 3-5 days. Check after a few days and see if you like it. Leave a little longer if you don’t. Check each day, and when it is to your liking, store it in the refrigerator.
Makes 4 cups.
This post is participating in Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
Recently, we hosted an event thanking friends who had given to a great project, the Astoria Park Shore Fest. It was a really fun time, and part of the fun was preparing the food – I love making food for parties. I used to spend at least a few days preparing the food for my grad school recital receptions, and the food would be gone in about 15 minutes. It was very satistfying.
One thing I learned to make in those years was tapenade. Tapenade is an olive spread – here’s more of a description from Wikipedia:
Tapenade is a Provençal dish consisting of puréed or finely chopped olives, capers, anchovies and olive oil. Its name comes from the provençal word for capers, tapenas (Occitan pronunciation: [ta?pen?]). It is a popular food in the south of France, where it is generally eaten as an hors d’œuvre, spread on bread. Sometimes it is also used to stuff fillets for a main course.
The recipe I use doesn’t have anchovies, but I can see how they would be a wonderful addition to this spread. This recipe I use is from a terrific vegetarian cookbook by Deborah Madison’s called Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. Deborah Madison cooked at Chez Panisse and was the founding chef at Greens restaurant, two of my favorite Bay Area restaurants.
This tapenade is spicy and lemony and uses an unusual ingredient – green peppercorns. These are tiny little things that are preserved in a salt water brine, and they add a wonderful salty peppery flavor to the tapenade. I’ve never seen them in another recipe; I love their flavor.
I enjoy this savory spread immensely. It’s especially good with chevre on bread or crackers.
Hot and Spicy Tapenade
Slightly adapted from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
This tapenade is best prepared by hand – the texture is much more satisfying made with a knife than a food processor. I also prefer to use Kalamata olives to any others – I think they are the tastiest olives for this tapenade.
1/2 lb Kalamata olives
1/4 cup capers, preferably salt packed (brine packed work, too)
2 -3 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon chopped green peppercorn, drained
1 grated large lemon, juice and zest (preferably organic)
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
Rinse and soak the capers in a bowl of water. Chop the olives as finely as possible with a knife.
Drain the capers. Add them, the green peppercorns and garlic cloves to the olives and continue to chop the entire mixture until everything is fully incorporated.
Add the lemon zest, lemon juice, and olive oil to the olive mixture. Mix together until fully combined. Add the red pepper flakes, 1/2 tsp first, taste, then add more if you desire more heat. I personally like it with the whole teaspoon of spice, but you may prefer it less spicy.
This tapenade is delicious right after it’s made, but also very good after it rests for a few hours.
I love carrots – after parsnips, they are my favorite root vegetable (apart from potatoes, sweet potatoes, and those kinds of tubers) to roast. Whenever I see crudités, I head for the carrots first. I’ve eaten more than my share of carrots at recital receptions, and I never tire of them. I do find packaged “baby carrots” to be a bit amusing – big carrots whittled down to become small carrots (I have no idea how they do it exactly). Actual baby carrots right out of the ground are a totally different creature and are sweet like candy.
I made a carrot cake the other day, from Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks site. It’s a wonderful cake, very earthy and sweetened with bananas and dates – there’s no refined sugar (or unrefined sugar, actually – it’s just fruit sweetened) in this carrot cake. It’s one of my favorite things about this cake.
Carrot cake from 101 Cookbooks
I did make a maple syrup sweetened mascarpone frosting for it, but after tasting the whole shebang, I found it made the whole thing too sweet, so I scraped a lot of it off. There’s only a thin layer now, and it’s perfect.
After I made this carrot cake, I had a bunch of carrots left over, so I decided to make soup out of them. I whipped up this cream of carrot soup the other day and it turned out to be simply amazing. It’s basically carrots and onions cooking in milk and then pureed. Cooking vegetables in milk and pureeing them is one of my base recipes – it works well with broccoli, cauliflower, root vegetables, and even dark leafy greens.
My bet is that one could make this dairy free by using homemade almond milk in place of the cow’s milk. Carrots and almonds go so well together. Maybe garnishing the soup with dukkah would be nice in that case, too!
Cream of Carrot Soup
1/4 white onion, preferably organic, chopped
carrots, preferably organic, washed and grated enough to make 1.5 cups
1 tbs unsalted grass-fed butter (I like using Kerrygold)
1 tbs extra virgin olive oil
juice from 1/2 orange
1/2 tsp coarse sea salt/kosher salt
1/4 tsp Aleppo pepper/red pepper flakes
2 c. whole milk (mine is raw, but any kind of grass-fed milk would work just fine)
salt and pepper to taste
whole milk yogurt (I used raw yogurt, but regular whole milk yogurt would work, as would strained yogurt)
za’atar (optional, but delicious; fresh thyme leaves would be an alternative)
Melt butter in a medium saucepan, then add the chopped onion. Cook for a few minutes until softened, and add the grated carrots. Cook for a few minutes until they soften, too.
Add the olive oil and stir until combined. Squeeze half the juice of the orange (so, juice from 1/4 of an orange) onto the onions and carrots. Add salt and sprinkle on the Aleppo pepper.
Add the milk and combine everything in the pan together. Turn the heat down on low (do not let this mixture boil), put a lid on the pan, and simmer for 20-30 minutes until everything is soft. Note: you may have to place the lid on the pan at an angle if things are too hot, to let the steam out, and so as to not cause over-boiling (milk burns easily and smells terrible when it does).
Take the pan off the heat and blend everything in the pot with a stick blender (you could do this with a regular blender, too, but it’s just more work). Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Ladle into bowls and top with yogurt and za’atar (optional) to taste and squeeze a little more orange juice onto the soup.
Serves 1-2 people.
This post is participating in Real Food Wednesday hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
Lacto fermented ginger carrots is one of my favorite ferments. It’s got the sweetness of the carrots, the piquant nature of the ginger, and the tanginess that comes with fermented foods. Plus all that extra vitamin C and probiotics from the fermentation process.
The jar of ginger carrots in the photo was made during a fermentation workshop I taught a couple of weeks ago. I decided on ginger carrots because they are easy to make and get one’s head around – a few simple ingredients, easy to mix, and easy to get a brine out of it. It was fun to prepare them as a group, too, with everyone contributing to the grating and mincing. And I learned how to peel ginger with a spoon! It’s freakishly effective.
I enjoy ginger carrots on lots of things, from eggs, to roast salmon, and it’s a nice snack all by itself. It also goes great in a bean salad, the recipe for which I’ll share soon
The process is very simple – mix everything together and let it sit and ferment. The ferment shown in the picture above – which was made during the fermentation workshop I taught a few weeks ago – took about 6 days to get to my liking. It continues to get better and better as it ages, too.
Lacto Fermented Ginger Carrots
4 c. grated carrots
1 T ginger root
1T sea salt
4T whey
Grate carrots on the large holes in a box grater (or use a food processor). Peel the ginger and mince it. Mix the carrots and ginger in a non-reactive bowl (glass or ceramic) until well-combined.
Add the sea salt and whey, and pound it all together to release the juices, which will turn into a brine. Stuff the mixture in a jar – a pint jar should fit it all. As you’re stuffing the carrot-ginger mixture in the jar, be sure to firmly press down to further help release the brine. When you’ve stuffed it all in the jar, be sure there is a brine covering the vegetables.
Cover with a lid and let it sit for a few days in a warm dark space. Check it to see what it tastes like – if you like it the way it is, put it in the refrigerator. If you want a stronger fermented flavor, leave it out and check it each day for progress.
Regarding the salt you use for your fermentation: you can also use kosher salt or other salt as long as it has no iodine and no anti-caking ingredients. One caution about Celtic or grey salt – moist salt is sometimes known for carrying bacteria and mold that can ruin your ferments.
