When life hands you, uh, grape tomatoes…
I’ve been fermenting various veggies from our CSA (Philly Food Works) for a bit, now, but we’ve also had vegetables in the garden.
Unfortunately, the tomatoes we wanted lots of didn’t have a good year…the yellow cherry tomatoes, though, have been doing well.
…as have volunteer red cherry tomatoes :)
Cucumbers and peppers have been chuggling along, too, though as with the tomatoes, our preferred peppers - Jimmy Nardellos - just didn’t have a good time of it, but the fish peppers are doing well.
So…time to harvest and ferment.
The right-most jar started out as peppers from the garden and was augmented a few days later with leftover bell peppers from PFW. The left-most jar is cucumbers from the garden with a pepper or two for fun.
The 3rd jar is whole tomatoes in a 3% brine, which is in line with everything else (though all of the veggie ferments are sliced veggies plus salt, no added water; the brine develops over a few hours or days). After reading a recipe, though, they mentioned a 5% brine, not 3%, so the 2nd jar is going with the higher percentage, see how that all goes.
There’s also an unpictured experiment: fish pepper fermentation in a vacuum seal bag. Just salt and sliced peppers with the air extracted and the bag sealed… We’ll see how that goes; the bag is supposed to keep air out but the CO2 will puff the bag up, too, so…