Sauerruben! Self-Fermenting Pickled Turnips

When I got Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation almost two years ago (Christ, in the midst of finishing the diss) I got inspired by the sauerruben recipe, which is a sauerkraut style self-fermentation of turnips. I followed the recipe, which called for too much salt for my taste, and shredding the turnips (5 lb or so). I didn't realize how much carbon dioxide they were going to put off in the first day, and as you see below, one of the jars got so over-pressurized it dented the lid out. And in the end, a couple of weeks later the stuff was too salty (3 Tbsp salt / 5lb turnips) and too stringy/hashy to enjoy. It looks beautiful, with that pink color being a dilution of the purple top of the turnip. But really not much fun to eat.

I revisited this recipe after getting a bunch of turnips a few weeks back during a mammoth pickling session, and decided to go with roughly 1/2" x 1 1/2" chunks of turnip, and bought an awesome little ceramic crock to brine them in. Ceramic crock is pretty hardcore. It does for me what Chewbacca does for Han Solo: It keeps it real; it doesn't promise anything it can't deliver; and if I'm being a dumbass it will let me know but still backs me up. It is literally and figuratively solid.

I had maybe 3 lb of turnips, and decided to use about half the salt since it's less necessary in colder weather. I think it was 2 tsp or 1 Tbsp of Morton's canning/pickling salt. I coated the chunks in this and then packed them in the crock, weighing them down with a clean plate and a clean growler full of water. Then I wrapped the top with clingwrap to keep crap and flies from getting into it. After 2 days the slat had drawn out enough water to make a brine that covered (and protected) the turnips. Then I just let it go, checking a couple of times along the way and stirring it up so everything got a good brine soak. I pulled them out tonight and let them continue fermenting in jars so I could use the crock for sauerkraut tomorrow. The big shot glass on the right has the remainder of the brine, turned a beautiful pale pink. This tastes delicious, and if I can save any of the brine, I would make a dirty vodka martini with this. Maybe strong, but definitely a Russian reverberation.

Sauerruben rocks.

Kim Chi Madness

A few years back I got somewhat obsessed with making kim chi. I'm not sure what triggered this since I wasn't eating a lot of Korean food back then ... but now that I think of it I was watching many Korean films at the time like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and some other one with two girls at a lake house and a mean step-mother. The latter film I associate with giant jars of kim chi, fermenting underground for years. The idea of home-based mass production fills me with a particular lust. Perhaps this was the trigger.

I found a basic kim chi recipe on the website of a certain Dr. Ben Kim*. It's a simple recipe, and kim chi is an easy self-fermenting DIY type of pickle that is delicious and therefore awesome. Obsessed as I was, over the next several years I recorded the variations and results of many batches in a text file and the proportions used in an Excel spreadsheet (called Kim Chi Quest), so I could eventually standardize and replicate my ideal standard kim chi. Here's my version adapted from that recipe:

A Napa cabbage - about two pounds
Brine of 2 tsp salt (not iodized) per quart of cold water, at least 4 quarts for starters
5-6 cloves fresh garlic, minced or pressed
A thumb of fresh ginger, minced
8-10 fresh scallions, moderately chopped (incl. greens)
2 tsp dried red chili pepper flakes
2 Tbsp paprika
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt or to taste

Assume a 2 lb cabbage will fit into a quart jar and a pint jar, and a 1.5 lb cabbage may go into a quart jar. I put ~5lbs into a half-gallon jar recently.

Half gallon of Kim Chi next to a quart jar for scale.
This is how you deal with a 5lb Napa cabbage.

Separate, wash, and chop cabbage leaves as desired. Sprinkle 2 teaspoons salt evenly on this in a non-reactive (glass or ceramic) bowl and add water to cover. Weigh this down with a CLEAN plate or similar to keep the cabbage submerged. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

The next day throw all this in a colander and rinse well. Back in the bowl or whatever, add the other ingredients and mix this together to coat evenly. I typically use a slotted spoon for this -- I have one that fits into a wide-mouth Mason/Kerr jar and is very convenient for packing the mix into the CLEAN jars: which you will now do. Pack that stuff in there with force to get out any air pockets and add any liquid from the bowl as well. Ideally there's a layer of liquid submerging the kim chi.

Give yourself an inch or two of headspace, close the lid (tight but not white-knuckling tight), and let it sit in a room-temperature place for 3-4 days. Each day I check this and use the CLEAN slotted spoon to compress it and expel CO2. If it's hot and/or the lid is too tight and/or there's not enough headspace and/or you've forgotten to vent it for a few days, expect it to erupt like a warm carbonated beverage: i.e., take it to the sink FIRST and vent it slowly. I've cleaned trails of kim chi brine off my counters, cabinets and floor enough to now take this precaution seriously.

Kim chi stores well in the fridge, becoming more sour over several weeks, and the rate of fermentation slows to non-catastrophic levels. That's it. You have your own basic kim chi. I like adding kim chi to noodle soups, and I wrote a good deal of my dissertation eating ramen with a dashi stock and this kim chi on top. I have been thinking about a cabbage salad with sesame oil/rice vinegar dressing that includes a ton of kim chi as well. Kim chi is down-home, good stuff. It will probably make you happy when you make it yourself and eat it.

Rock!

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*I don't wholeheartedly endorse his site because he's always going on about superfoods and Omega-3 fatty acids and this sort of crap that I hate.

Leftover Vegetable Soup of Doom!

Just before I left for Fresno for the holidays (so called) I checked the fridge and saw that I had accumulated a variety of vegetables. I envisioned two alternate futures for them:

1) I could just leave it all and let it funk out while I was gone, and then throw it all away when I returned, or

2) I could chop it all up and cook it in a big pot and then have several quarts of soup in the freezer for the coming winter months.

What hung in the balance on the purely material level, you ask? Dear reader, you should know that I had carrots, celery, a parsnip, two crowns of broccoli, and three Russet potatoes. I also had a half head of garlic and an onion that probably would last another week without much harm (they weren't in the fridge though). Luckily, I was carried along by a slowly building agitation and excitement by the idea -- and the clear prospect of mass-production awesomeness -- and I went for option 2. In the alternate PKD universe there is a very depressed person blogging his regrets about leaving good food to rot over the holidays, and probably vowing to not waste food and to not be so lazy in the future, and writing a hollow but emphatic manifesto about improving his quality of life from a behavioral perspective. But none of you have to read that blog. You are in the beneficent parallel universe thanks to my bold actions, and you can leave praises to me in the comments as is your wont.

Leftover Vegetable Soup of DOOM!
I pureed this at the end, so broad strokes in prep and cooking are all that's required. Peel as necessary/desired and chop up into more or less medium/small pieces and throw into a big old pot, mine being a cheap-ass ersatz (cf. PKD) lobster pot:

4 carrots (organic, whoop-de-doo)
6 celery stalks
9 cloves of garlic
1 big old parsnip
2 broccoli crowns (stalks were roughly peeled and the cores were chopped into the soup)
1 big yellow onion
3 Russet potatoes
Not chopped:
2 bay leaves
12 whole black peppercorns
2 Tbsp canning salt (NB: This was slightly too much. I say 1-1.5 Tbsp or salt to taste only at the end.)

Add 4 qt of water and bring to a steady boil for about 30 min.

Add (all dry):

1 Tbsp basil
1 tsp tarragon
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp dill
1/4 tsp cumin

Stir in and turn down to a simmer/low boil for 30 min or so. Remove bay leaves and puree it all in a blender in batches and remix it. Salt, etc., to taste.

This made about 5qt, which mostly I froze in ~1 qt increments. As I note above, this was a bit too salty, but not to the point of being inedible, to my taste anyway.

Frozen quanta of soup, in situ, next to quanta of Amish chicken.

I'm pretty happy with the mix of herbs here, since I always have a hard time getting the distinctive dill, sweet tarragon/basil and earthy cumin flavors to have any balance. Probably the mix of sulfurous brassicas, sweet roots, and smooth alliums make a complementary set of contrasts to them. Anyway, Rock!