Fermented veg: Not just sauerkraut

After my early enthusiasm for fermenting all of the vegetables, I settled down to just sauerkraut. However, seeing that carrots were going cheap in the supermarket recently, I bought a second bag and had a go at fermenting those.

Roughly following a recipe that someone shared in a facebook group, I added small quantities of onion and celery as well as a couple of pieces of crystallized stem ginger (the recipe had root ginger, but I had a jar of the sweet kind in the cupboard). There was something else in the recipe, too - I forget what it was, but I didn't have any.

I wanted to be sure that the ginger (grated, and rather sticky) was evenly mixed with the carrot so, instead of my usual method of adding ingredients in turn to a jar and pressing down as I go, I sprinkled salt over the grated carrots in a bowl first, then mixed the ginger through, and added the other vegetables last, and mixed it all up with my hands. Finally, I packed the mixture into a jar and pressed down. It released enough liquid to submerge everything when it was well squashed.

Fermented carrot salad. The stones are used to keep it under the liquid.

After about a week I tried some and really liked it. I'd wondered whether fermenting the sugar out would lose an essential feature of carrotiness and leave it dull and possibly bitter, but not at all. It just tastes like a tangy grated carrot salad, as if I'd added a good vinegar dressing. It's nice on its own, with cheese or cold meat in a sandwich or, less obviously, as a substitute for chopped tomatoes in cheesy pasta. In fact, I'd say this makes a pretty good alternative to tomatoes in salad, which is great, since I've had no success in growing tomatoes. Unfortunately, I haven't done very well growing carrots, either, but at least they're cheap to buy.