🥒 Glut busting: Cucumbers 🥒

Yay more lactofermentation!

The cucumbers have pretty much finished in the polytunnel now, the last ones are quite small and to preserve the summery feel that you get from eating them I thought some fermentation was in order!

Lactofermented Cucumbers

Ingredients

Cucumbers

Salt

Water

Herbs or Spices *optional

Method

Everything needs a good clean, the cucumbers need a good wash, everything you’ll be using needs to be thoroughly cleaned and sterilised to avoid a less desirable bacteria or mould colonising the brine.

Next you’ll need to make a salt water brine of at least 2.5%, there is a handy calculator here if numbers are hard. You can play around with your brine, between 2.5-3.5% is good but don’t drop too low as you need the salinity to create the right environment for the bacteria we want rather than all the others we don’t want. I aim to make more brine than is needed, it is only salt and water so the excess can go down the drain or as a soup or stew base. If your jar is a litre then make a litre, you will use a lot less.

Now to assemble, start by adding in your cucumbers first and when the jar is full you can add your aromatics.

The aromatics you use are totally up to you, some tried and true would be: garlic, chilli peppers, peppercorns, bay leaves, lemon and herbs (dill is popular).

I find it easier to lie the jar on its side to keep the cucumbers straight so that you can fit everyone in. You want a very tight fit so that they don’t float up, everything will need to be submerged under the brine to ensure it doesn’t go mouldy.

When everyone is tucked in then pour your brine over and give the jar a few good taps to knock out any air bubbles, make sure that all your cucumbers are under the brine. If they are not covered then you might need to rearrange and poke them down a little bit.

You can chose to put either a lid or an airlock on at this point, if using a lid you will need to remember to “burp” regularly to prevent the gas from building up which can actually cause a lot of mess and sometimes a mini explosion.

Now they are ready to be tucked away, they will prefer somewhere dark and without extremes of temperature. Ideally this is also a place that isn’t too out of the way so that you can remember to check on the cucumbers, if it is then I would set a reminder on your phone so you don’t find a horrible mess later down the line.

If you have a normal jar with a normal lid that will need burping then you might need to “burp” as often as twice a day for the first week when things are really active, the bacteria are going to be hard at work and farting away.

During your burps it is worth checking if any cucumbers have floated up to the surface and if they can be resecured down again or if they need to be weighed down. You can purchase very expensive fermentation weights but I haven’t tried them yet, I am too much of a cheapskate. It is quite common to use another vegetable or (I have also used a slice of lemon) to wedge everything down under the brine level again.

These cucumbers should be ready to eat in 2 weeks but are better after about a month, this will of course be different depending on your personal preference as well as a host of other factors (cucumbers, salt, water, temperature etc).

Weird and wonderful

You might find that your brine has gone cloudy during the fermentation, this is quite normal and can be due to several causes such as additives in the salt used or exposure to sunlight

You may also find a filmy, almost stringy, white coating on the surface of the brine, this is most likely Kahm yeast and is very normal. You can skim it off if you would feel more comfortable but it isn’t harmful and it should not alter the taste.

If it looks fuzzy and mouldy then it is mould and you have to chuck everything away (or compost) there is no point in risking it.