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Pickled Ginger

June 1, 2019

Nell was wondering about this so I decided to give it a go. I scrounged around recipes online just to confirm that it’s no more complicated than vedge, salt, water, and time.

Fermented pickles are magic! Put your vegetables in salt water and lactobacilli will eat sugars to produce lactic acid. The acid and salt transform the vedge into tart, crispy pickles that last forever in the fridge.

Preparation

Choose “young” ginger without big thick chunks or lots of “nubs”, they are too woody. You want it fresh as possible, the skin on the ginger should look taught and waxy.

Use a good quality salt like sea salt. Kosher salt works too. Don’t use iodized salt, iodine is an antiseptic and will kill the helpful bacteria. Other table salt may have strange additives.

Don’t use tap water for the same reason, the chlorine will kill your helpful critters. Filtered water is A-OK or any flat bottled water.

Ignore recipes that specify the salt amount by volume. The salinity of your brine is the most important thing about pickling. A tablespoon of fine salt has more salt in it than a tablespoon of coarse salt. Metric measurements make it really easy to calculate the salinity of your brine.

This chart from Probiotic Jar is great!

Jar Your Ginger

  1. Peel your ginger.
  2. Slice it super thin with a mandolin
  3. Fill a mason jar up to 3″ from the top. It’s OK if you don’t have enough to fill the jar.
    1. UPDATE: No, no it’s not. Whatever you’re pickling, pack the jar. Get a smaller jar if needed. Otherwise the lactobacillus won’t have enough sugar from the vegetables to acidify the brine.
  4. Add filtered/bottled water to fill the jar.
  5. Put a bowl on your scale and tare it.
  6. Empty the jar, water and all into the bowl.
  7. Calculate the grams of salt you need for 2% solution: vedge+water / 100 * 2
  8. Weigh out the salt and mix it with the vedge+water
  9. Pack it all back into the mason jar.
  10. Add your glass weights, plastic bag, or my favorite: QRP Pickle Cups
  11. Screw on an airlock lid.

I’ll taste it in about a week when primary fermentation is done and report back.

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Ginger at right, oniony kraut at left.

Ginger at right, oniony kraut at left.

Started a batch of shallots too.

Started a batch of shallots too.

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1 Comment

  1. Morgan July 6, 2019 @ 7:27 am

    Well, the shallots and kraut are delicious… but the ginger turned into a nasty, smelly mess.

    After a week I fished some out with my fingers to try it. This has never been a problem before but maybe I introduced some bad bacteria. After another week it had a white film on top and smelled REALLY gross. In the interest of science I will reluctantly describe it. Smelled like poo. Or maybe like rotten potatoes. In other words, ugh so bad.

    I tried skimming the top but the ick dropped down into the ginger. After a few days it still smelled vile so I decided it wasn’t worth it.

    I am undeterred… I’m taking another whack at pickled ginger. Details in the latest post, upping the salt to 3% to ward off baddies.

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