Cucumber Ferments

I just couldn't finish making cheese and pickle sandwiches fast enough to get down here and let everyone know how good they were!

The other night I listened to:
Preserving Food With Fermentation with Wardee Harmon . After making a few hasty notes I quickly collected the piles of cucumbers I had stashed, waiting for the right time, and got started. Never mind that it was almost 9:30 and passed everyone's bedtime, no one wants to cooperate with that time schedule anyhow.

I know that fermentation is all the rage now and there is a load of information to read on the internet. So I'll not bog this down with all the reasons why we should be preserving our food this way.
But I will interpose this question:
 Have you ever put off putting preserving food because there wasn't enough produce for a full canner load?
I have many times and put the quality of my product at stake to boot. This way you can make any amount you have need to preserve!

Today is day 4 on the cucumber adventure. They are sooo good! Maybe not crispy but definitely crunchy, not too salty and perfectly tangy with out being too far out. I could handle a wilder taste but my kids, well, they have a more delicate palette (spoiled, sheltered ingrates...sorry). So it was a perfect time to get them used to it!

This is the basic information:
Ingredients:
Vegetables ~ cucumber, carrots, peppers, cabbage, beets green tomatoes, turnips, the list goes on...
Spices ~ (optional) garlic, caraway, celery seed, dill peppercorns, mustard seed, and so on...
Brine ~ 6TBS per 1/2 gallon of water
Tannin ~  oak leaf, grapes leaf, or 8 tsps of black tea or 3 teabags (I think you could leave the tea in the bags!) this is for the crispy texture.

• Wash vegetables. Soak in ice water to crisp 

• Slice, chop vegetables or leave whole. Trim ends of cucumbers regardless

•  Pack tightly into jars 

• Fill jars and cover vegetables completely with brine, leave 1'' head space

• Cover with a lid - plastic doesn't rust

Leave this on the counter at room temperature (no hotter than 80 degrees - this will affect the texture) for 3 to 5 days. "Burp" everyday by opening and releasing the pressure. Then move to the refrigerator or cold storage.

As easy as that!

Notes on ingredients:
Unrefined salt and filtered water...but, the Berkey was dry and I am not currently blessed with unrefined salt.

See the loose tea floating around in my cucumber pickles in the top photo? I felt pretty dumb that I did it that way, it didn't occure to me to leave the tea in the tea bags! It is currently disguised as spices!

Imagine what you could do with eggplant, green peppers, zucchini, more garlic, okra! It's going to be fun experimenting!