/kitchen/ - tasty morsels & delights

I love fermenting. I usually make sauerkraut and beetroot kvass. Very good for a light lunch.
I recently bought to big glass jars for my ferments, but the lids are made of cheap metal that rusts immediately, and the lid gets stuck on the jar, and at the same time they don't shut the bottle tight, so my last ferments have all failed. I'll try "fixing" the lids somehow for my next batch.
I also want to make ginger beer. I've made ginger bugs in the past but they always end up overflowing. I suppose I let them sit for too long instead of just using them lol. But I am thinking of trying again.
Sometimes, when there is pineapple, I also like to make tepache. That usually turns out good and tasty.
I also ferment vanilla and cacao. Well, this year I neglected polinizing the vanilla flowers so I didn't get a single pod T_T. As for the cacao, this is the first year that my tree yielded fruit, but I opened them much too late and they were already germinating. I did try germinating them but some stuff weren't right. I used a cardboard shoebox, which ended up sagging and so it didn't store the heat properly, and I ended up throwing them all away.
Next time I'm using a wooden box. If I can get one.
Finally, I want to make a grains ferment for my ducks and chickens, I tried doing that once and it kind of worked. I might try that again.

How risky is fermenting your own stuff? I feel like it would be too easy for mold to grow without having careful control over the environment.

>>1275
Fermentation process kills most harmful things. It's one of the reasons why fermented foods were so common, it made food safer to eat and possible to store for longer periods of time.

>>1275
it's generally very easy to tell when a ferment goes bad. Just use your senses. Does it smell really bad? can you see visible mold on top? Does it feel slimy? does it taste rotten? Evolution actually gave us very good tools for detecting off food. If it seems off, just don't eat it. It can be a little annoying to throw out a ferment that's taken some time, but ultimately, if you have to throw away some veggies and salt it's not gonna break the bank. But, as long as you have a scale and can follow instructions, chances are it won't go wrong. People have been fermenting foods for thousands of years without the precision instruments and information than we have now. It turns out it's extremely easy.

>>1273
I was going to make plum wine, but my tree is sick. Some kind of fungal disease from what I can gather online. Doing what I can to make sure the disease doesn't get worse. See attached pics.
Even though the plums aren't ripe at all they deteriorate and die.
At least some of the harvest is still okay, and if the net is to be trusted it gets killed by 3min at 43°C, so I made jam of the okay seeming fruit instead. The jam making entails simmering temps for half an hour, so I feel safe to eat that, but I'd still feel icky about making plum wine out of it.

>>1274
If you have an ikea near you they have nice jars with glass lids that last forever (except they (at least here) have stopped selling the replacement gasket seals on their own, but with things like ginger bugs you can just omit the gaskets anyways and just place the glass tops on top, if you'd seal with gaskets they'd explode)
On the ginger bugs, I would guess rather than letting them sit too long you just had the fill level way too high. The time I had a ginger bug it was fizzing too much not to hear it when in the room but kept within it's jar all the same.

>>1283
Weck is a well known brand for jars around here. They are made of heat resistant glass with glass lids and there are rubber rings and clamps to seal them.

For my fermentation projects I usually just use a commercial, cleaned pickle jar. They are basically free and can safely be used at least once for your own stuff. By the time I make a new batch, I have another empty pickle jaw, because pickled cucumbers are delicious and not too expensive to buy from the store. There is also no concern about microbe cultures with them, so I only pickle stuff, I can't get from the store right away, like eggs or cabbage.

>>1283
That sucks, looks like it might be "brown rot". At least it's one of the more treatable plant diseases.

Any recommendations or links for how to get started with pickling? Maybe with kimchi or sauerkraut.

>>1290
For my first kimchi I used this recipe, however the amount of garlic, onion and chili should be kept within reason.
https://www.maangchi.com/recipe/easy-kimchi

Pickling is so easy, I didn't even look up anything and just went with what the industry does: Liquid should be sweet, sour and salty to equal amounts. Spices are up to taste. I usually use mustard seeds, onion, garlic and peppercorns.