1. soak cracked olives in fresh water for two days to debitter them.

2. 10% salt brine (of the water weight) with lemon slices & green chilli pepper + any aromatics of your choice.

3. they're ready to eat at 3-4 weeks. and can keep fermenting for up to 2-3months.

Cool fact: traditionally to measure 10% of salt, they used to put an egg in the water and keep adding salt until the egg floats since scientifically eggs float at 10%-12%.

My girlfriend and I have gotten into a discussion about the impact of fermented food on your gut health. The positions are between A) it is more beneficial for your gut health due to it being fermented or B) there is no documented benefit that goes beyond what eating a similar serving of raw vegetables would do.

Can you help us settle this?? Thanks in advance

It came out absolutely delicious. Its a shame i discovered this right before planning on going keto/low carb 😭😭

I’m in search of kefir grains in the Katy, Houston area. I want to attempt making kefir at home. TIA.

I started this process by making a batch of tepache and then I reused the fermented pineapple from the tepache to attempt a batch of pineapple vinegar.

My pineapple vinegar has been in the process for 23 days now.

Is this skim (mother? scoby?) what I want in vinegar? It was sitting on the bottom until I stirred yesterday. I never had anything on the top like I see in some photos, it's always been on the bottom.

I've been stirring these every other day and they are covered with thin cotton cloth. This layer occurred early this week for the first time.

(in one of these photos you can see my fresh batch of tepache in the background)

I started this by putting my basically completely fermented pineapple from my tepache into a new batch of sugar water and once that batch of sugar water started smelling vinegary then I strained all of the pineapple out of it.

I split it into three jars. One jar I left with nothing in it, the other two I added a few additional spices and in one of those I also added a dried Thai chili pepper.

It smells like vinegar.

I am wondering if I should re-strain out the added spices now? Do I put the stuff on my fork in the pic back in if I do? Do I put on proper lids or do I leave them covered in cloth a bit longer?

Next question: since I'm starting a new batch of tepache while I'm currently brewing a batch of vinegar, do I need to be careful not to get the two things too close to each other in the same room or can I keep them on the same heating pad? (I'm in Vermont, the heating pad is necessary as "room temperature" is below 60.) Will I risk my tepache turning into vinegar if I keep it too close to vinegar? I'm thinking it might be okay to leave the vinegar at a lower room temperature since it's turned into vinegar now?

Hello, I'm making a batch following the recipe in the book. I used some maitake that I had frozen so not fresh to start off with but also not bad. I used dried koji rice i bought from my local Japanese grocery. So far it is fermenting (the recipe did say this had some aspects of lacto-fermentation, which I have done before) very strongly. When I stir it fizzes. I started it on 9/27 so 18 days in. My concern is the smell. It smells like off mushrooms (if you're a forager you know) i.e. that sour smell when you have mold on your mushrooms. I know sometimes ferments go through bad phases so is this to be expected or should I toss it? Garbage day isn't until next week so maybe I persevere until then.

Was gifted these, I have some jalapeños as well along with a pellet smoker and a vacuum sealer. I was thinking of either doing my first ferment of peppers and making a sauce or should I just make a jam. I’ve never fermented before

For the first fermentation stage, I use a black tea infusion with 12% sugar. For every liter of water, I use 11 grams of black tea and 120 grams of sugar. I let it ferment for 7 days. In the second stage, I bottle 250ml of kombucha and 50ml of TPT simple syrup (50% water/50% sugar) and let it ferment for 3 to 5 days at room temperature. After all this, I refrigerate them. I'm thinking of reducing the amount of simple syrup a bit to lessen the sweetness without sacrificing carbonation...

so i peeled a bunch of ginger and blitzed it up with lemon/lime juice and some thai chilies. added a little salt and sugar and put in an airtight container with one of those rubber seals. my plan is to just leave it on my countertop for two-three days, burping in the morning and at night. my only other experience with fermentation is kimchi which i’m pretty familiar with making, but i’m hoping some of y’all can shoot me some advice. should i ferment it longer/shorter? is there anything else i should add? is this a terrible idea that will poison and kill me? let me know

When I slipped it in little bits of course escaped to the top so I just drained the salted brine into a cup to remove them and added it back. And wahlah. No bits.

Tried some at a food producer market and copying their recipe. Swapped out nappa cabbage for white cabbage to create that smooth consistency. Home grown chives and chillies plus miso paste rather than fish sauce to keep it vegan.

Just poured some old red wine into a jar and let it do its thing. What is this? Smells like yeast.

( l The date is today's date because I just topped it off with more juice since I was running low)

I made a pineapple cranberry probiotic soda with my ginger bug starter and a lot of this brown stuff settled to the bottom. I'm not sure if this was a SCOBY, Yeast, or just some discard from the pineapple juice I use.

This hasnt happened to my cranberry ferment or ginger beer, was wondering if this might just be something that happens to pineapple when you ferment it.

It doesn't taste bad or anything, just a slight bitterness that tastes like beer wine.

Im making a jar of fermented pineapple habenero hot sauce for the first time. https://cultured.guru/blog/fermented-pineapple-habanero-hot-sauce#tasty-recipes-55168-jump-target

I dont have a fermentation weight so I used some small glass jars to hold all of the ingredients below the brine. All of the veg and pineapple is below the weights well underneath the brine but some of the tops of the jars are exposed above the brine. Is this ok? Or should the weights also be fully submerged.

Thank you in advance

I’ve had this sitting for a month. First 2 weeks, burped it every 2 days. Now I’m burping roughly every 4-6 days. How do I know if it’s safe to consume?

Left to right, we have:

A hot pepper sauce ferment that has been fermenting for at least four years.

A cranberry ginger, black pepper, honey ferment, that has been going since October 2025.

And a red sauerkraut that has been going for at least four years.

Photos are of the top of the ferment, followed by the pH strips.

I live in Southern New Hampshire if anybody wants any of these

One garden zucchini, plus a long hot, shallot, garlic, fresh turmeric, fresh oregano, mustard seeds, red prettier flakes, other stuff I'm probably forgetting, and 2% salt by weight.

Fermented for 6 days.

Crunchy, tangy, spicy. A nice little experiment. Goes well with no-salt-added cottage cheese.

See you in one month!

Made honey garlic for the first time with garlic I grew and honey from a local farm. I usually do canning and this is my first solo attempt at fermenting. It's been 4 to 5 weeks - I'm sick and figured it's time to try it out. I used a sanitized wide mouth mason jar, wide mouth Sauer stone, and a Sauer System airlock. All the garlic settled to the bottom 2/3 of the jar somewhere around the end of week 2. I cannot get the stone out and now it's fallen on its side down at the bottom. Do I just leave it? Also why am I nervous to try my honey garlic? It smells great and looks fine.

First time running an airlock, doing sauerkraut, the airlock turned yellowish.

Anyone know why or how this could happen?

No mold or anything, kraut tastes fine.

A week ago, I decided to ferment some cucumbers and today I opened them up to try them. They were at a 3% salinity of weight of water and cucumbers. The first picture was cucumbers, fresh dill, garlic cloves, and one small serrano pepper. The second picture was just cucumbers and fresh dill at the same percent salinity. I’m using weights, nothing was above the waterline and I’ve been keeping them in a closed cabinet in my kitchen. I also sterilized the jars, the weights, and the vent lids as well. Any ideas is to why this could’ve happened? I’m definitely tossing the batch in the second picture. I’m just surprised that everything was the same other than a couple of ingredients and one jar ended up moldy.

I try to limit myself to only a few forkfuls of saurkraut a day, but I end up eating the whole damn cup in one go. I have a real hard time stopping myself. I can't say I feel this way about any other food I eat.

I skimmed the foam and cleaned out some loose cabbage. Also carefully pushed the weights back down.