I love fresh vegetables. It's one of the adult things I look forward to in the summertime. Sadly school days are long past, and Summer no longer holds its magical status as an untouchable time where I could drink in as much vacation as I wanted. Now I have alcohol... which is not what this post is about! The drinking kind anyway.
OK, sticklers, I am patently aware of the use of lactic fermentation in brewing. Brewing discussions will come. But this is about food preservation.
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As usual, I have more things to do than I imagine. Will I take vegetables when offered? Of course I will! Of course I can use them! And believe me, I have every good intention to do so, but the reality is that I cannot realistically eat 8 pounds of fresh tomatoes and peppers and more in the time that it will take them to naturally ripen, over-ripen, and begin to ferment.
No problem, I can use them for stuff! I can make sauces and salads, casseroles, and salsa -- but, nope, I didn't. No, these sat on my counter under a towel for a week. I picked at them when I wanted a snack, and enjoyed some gorgeous salads. But the majority of them sat here. A lot of these tomatoes were green when I got them. I had all the best intentions to make green tomato pickles. Green tomatoes are perfect for vinegar pickles because they are firm and crisp. But red tomatoes will turn out mushy and aren't suitable.
Realistically they wouldn't go to waste even if they had gone beyond edibility. They'd wind up in the compost pile (yet another future post 💬). I could freeze things. That is a perfectly good solution, However my freezer is already full. So what's left to do?
Let's talk about fermentation for a bit. As you probably know, it's a method of preservation. Discovered long ago, our ancestral people preserved food in a multitude of ways, and whether by using moisture removal, heat canning, fats and oils, vinegar, salt, or sugar, the aim was to preclude the growth of bad bacteria by encouraging the growth of good or beneficial bacteria. Think about yogurt makers. They proudly proclaim on their packaging that it's got live and active cultures, in other words, bacteria, and sometimes will list them out. L. acidophilus, L. brevis, L. reuteri are some. Beer makers sometimes purposely will introduce brettanomyces, and almost always, saccharomyces.
The reason is that getting these good bacteria to get a foothold on the product early in it's lifecycle will prevent bad (i,e,, spoilage) bacteria from taking over and ruining food.
Have you ever found a bad potato in a basket? The spoilage bacteria in one spreads to the adjacent potatoes -- and usually quite rapidly. By encouraging beneficial strains of bacteria to grow, they crowd out and produce acids that slow or stop the growth of bad bacteria.
What in God's name am I showing you here? Bear with me, I promise there's a good point. On the left is a tepache I made back in April. Tepache is a Mexican fermented drink, using pineapple rinds and the naturally-occurring yeasts found on the skin, and sugar, for a wild fermentation. Sometimes, wild fermentation doesn't turn out well. Sometimes you get good results with it, sometimes not so good. But the addition of sugar helps establish the strains of bacteria that are generally considered "good". I also added a bit of brewer's yeast to ensure good growth, though it was not really necessary.
On the right are those same pineapple rinds with just a tiny amount of liquid remaining. All but an inch of rinds are uncovered in the jar. I have opened the lid several times, exposing the contents to oxygen, airborne bacteria, dust, etc., and yet even though the rinds aren't covered, no spoilage or mold growth is occurring. This has never been refrigerated, and my house gets rather warm during the day. Even I am amazed that it's lasted this long without being a disgusting mess, although admittedly, it's not particularly pretty -- typical of preserved food.
More to come in Part II!
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