Category: Fermenting

How to Make Fermented Snap Peas

Snap peas or sugar snap peas are one of those “blink and you’ll miss them” kind of produce. While they’re not quite as quickly there-and-gone as things like cherries, they do have a relatively short span of time in which they produce peas, and it’s fairly difficult to maintain that freshness of snap peas for any length of time. Thus the culinary experience of munching on sugar snap peas with roasted garlic hummus is a treat for my family for a few weeks mid-summer.

For long-term storage of snap peas, I shell them and put the peas in a bag and then in the freezer. While we no longer have the whole shell to eat, we at least have peas to keep us stocked throughout the year. (This year I’m attempting pea pod wine with the discard shells—look for a potential update on that in the winter!)

There’s a recipe for preserving snap peas I’ve been eyeing for a while and have finally tried—fermented snap peas.

Fermentation is the process of fostering an environment for beneficial bacteria to take hold in a food and choke out any bad bacteria. Fermented foods can then be stored for quite some time in the fridge, sometimes as long as several months, depending on the specific fermented food.

Fermented foods are loaded with probiotics and eating these foods can contribute to a healthy gut microbiome, which can have a broad impact on general health, including boosting the immune system. Fermented foods can also be easier to digest, which may be of benefit to some folks, and which can also increase nutrient absorption.

But, really, when you find a good recipe, fermented foods can be just darn delicious. Every week I make a batch of kombucha, which is a fermented tea-based beverage, and we drink it regularly.

So when I finally came across this recipe for fermented peas, it checked off a long list of things I was looking for—a new food preservation project, a way to preserve snap peas beyond their small window, and a delicious new food.

The science and art of fermentation

I’ve spoken before about how fermentation is both a science and an art, and it was me eventually coming to understand that symbiosis that led me understand the appeal of fermentation. The science is fairly basic—you use a saltwater brine (or just salt in the case of some foods like cabbage) to create an environment conducive to beneficial bacteria. These bacteria will thrive and outcompete the bad bacteria. That’s the science of it.

The art is where things can get a bit creative. You can flavour your fermented foods in a million different ways. For these fermented snap peas, I threw in some red pepper flakes and a heavy dash of Italian seasoning for some hot Italian snap peas. However, I could have instead thrown in some dill and peppercorns, or some sliced garlic, or the spices used in bread and butter pickles to make bread and butter snap peas.

How to ferment snap peas

The process is pretty simple and mostly requires patience.

You will need a fermentation vessel. I have a cool little Mason Tops kit that has a straight-sided jar, a glass weight, and an airlock for the top. You can also make do with any jar, a Ziploc bag filled with water as a weight, and a loose-fitting lid to act as a makeshift airlock. And, really, given how the peas are packed tightly and unlikely to float, you could probably skip the weight altogether.

Once you’ve got your fermentation vessel selected, start by putting any spices and seasonings in the bottom of the vessel. Then cram the peas in there. You’ll likely want to put them vertically so it’s easier to fill the narrow gaps with pea pods. (If you just dump the peas in, they’re not likely to be tightly packed and the brine you add won’t cover your peas.)

Unfortunately, I forgot to take any photos of this process for this blog. 🙃

In a bowl, combine water and salt (quantities listed in the recipe card below) and stir until all the salt has dissolved. This is your brine for fermenting. Pour the brine over the peas and ensure they are fully covered by brine. If not, you may need to push the peas further down or make more brine to top it up.

Put the weight on top of the peas, close the jar, and let sit in a cool, dark place to ferment. Fermentation will take several days. (If you’re using a regular lid and not one with a built-in airlock / air release, you will want to ensure the lid is loose-fitting to prevent gas buildup. Still, you may want to briefly and very quickly open the lid once a day to vent gasses.)

You’ll know it’s fermenting because of the bubbles that form and rise to the top. After several days, the peas should be ready. There’s no real test of readiness for fermented foods and it’s sort of a “how does it taste” assessment. Fermentation with saltwater creates a vinegar, so the peas should taste pickled, but the degree of “pickle-ness” is up to you. Once you determine it’s ready you can remove the weight and store the jar in the fridge. It should last several months.

How to use fermented snap peas

It was recently pointed out to me that while my recipes sound tasty, some of them would benefit from a section on how to use them—so welcome to a brand new feature to my recipe pages!

There are a variety of ways to use fermented snap peas:

  • When I do a BBQ or a dinner for a group of people, my appetizer is usually a baked brie with crackers, and whatever random pickles and preserves I have in my fridge. So this would go great paired with a baked brie, pickled beets, and sugar-fermented blueberries or Saskatoons.
  • Depending on how you flavour them, they would go great as a side of topping for dinner. I made spicy pickled snap peas with cayenne pepper and Italian seasoning, so it would go great paired with a stir-fry (the spice is more prominent than the Italian seasoning). If you’re eating fermented foods for the beneficial probiotic bacteria, you’ll likely want to add the peas when serving rather than cooking them in the stir fry, since the heat may kill the probiotic bacteria.
  • Fermented snap peas would also make a wonderful addition to a packed lunch or a bento box, as a vegetable side with a bit of a kick.

Fermented Snap Peas

Fermenting is a great way to preserve snap peas for months beyond their season. Plus, they're tasty!
5 from 1 vote
Prep Time 10 minutes
Fermentation 7 days
Course Appetizer

Equipment

  • Fermentation Vessel, with Weight and Airlock

Ingredients
  

  • 2 cups Water
  • 1 Tbsp Sea Salt
  • 2 cups Snap Peas
  • Seasonings, To Taste (see notes)

Instructions
 

  • Make the brine by combining water and salt, stirring until salt is dissolved.
  • Place seasonings in the bottom of the fermentation vessel. See notes for some ideas for seasonings.
  • Tightly pack peas into the fermentation vessel and cover with brine until peas are submerged. If peas are not submerged, you may need to pack them down tighter or add more brine. Putting the fermentation weight on top may push the peas down too.
  • Put the weight and lid on and store in a cool, dark place to allow peas to ferment. Check daily. You should see bubbles form after a few days; this is from fermentation.
  • Start tasting the peas after 5-7 days and then taste daily until desired fermentation has been reached. Once done, store peas in the fridge.

Notes

Spice options:
  • Spicy: 1 tsp red pepper flakes and 1tsp Italian seasoning
  • Garlicky: 1-2 garlic cloves, sliced, and 1 tsp peppercorns
  • Bread and Butter: 1 tsp mustard seeds, 1/4 tsp celery seeds, 1/4 tsp turmeric
Fermentation vessel:
If you don’t have a fermentation vessel you can use any large jar. In place of a weight, you can use a Ziplock bag filled with water or, if it fits, a small ramekin or other small dish. In place of an airlock lid, you can use a loose-fitting lid, but you may want to vent built-up gasses once per day, even if the lid is loose-fitting.
Keyword fermented snap peas, snap peas

How to Make Fermented Garlic Scape Hot Sauce

The garlic scapes are up and this year we got quite the haul, coming in at around 1.5 kg, or about three pounds. Normally we get just a smattering and they’re usually quite thin, but this year we have at least double the garlic planted and these scapes grew nice and thick.

Scapes are the flower stem of the garlic plant. They grow nice and tall and then curl in on themselves. At the end is a bulb that will form garlic seeds. Once that bulb flowers, the garlic bulb underground will stop growing, so you want to harvest the scape before that happens.

In my previous post about pickling garlic scapes, I talked in depth about the process of harvesting them. In a short summary, you’ll want to cut or break the scape where it emerges from the top leaf of the plant.

Scapes have a strong garlic taste and can be used multiple ways. They grill up great on the BBQ, they have a wonderful garlic bite to them when you pickle them, they make a zesty pesto, and there’s a garlic scape jam I want to try next year that I think would go great on a baked Brie.

Garlic scape hot sauce

A few years ago I tried doing the farmers market thing, selling jams, pickles, and preserves. It was an interesting experience but ultimately not one I’ll likely return to. While there, I made some great connections with local food folks and got to try some amazing foods.

A highlight for me was the garlic scape hot sauce that I bought from the hot sauce guy. While his prices are affordable and I continue to buy garlic scape hot sauce off him, it was a hot sauce I wanted to see if I could make myself.

In my research on garlic scape hot sauce recipes I found that there’s almost nothing. I did come across one fermented garlic scape hot sauce recipe, and so my variation is based on that one.

I made a couple alterations in the batch I made for this post and have noted further alterations for next year’s batch that I’ll make. The recipe on this post is for what I’d do next year.

The art of fermenting

Fermenting is very much a science. You create an ideal environment for beneficial bacteria to thrive, which then outcompetes bad bacteria, preserving food for weeks, months, or even longer.

Because of this careful balance needed and the fact that this whole preservation method relies on bacteria, I’d always been quite intimidated by it. I’d follow recipes to the T and never vary.

A couple years back, a local chef loaned me a copy of The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz and even on just the cursory flip-through that I gave it, the book opened my eyes to the fact that while fermenting is very much a science, it is also very much an art. As long as you’re following the basic science of fermenting, there’s tons of wiggle room to customize what you’re creating and make culinary works of art.

This recipe relies on creating a salt brine with water and submerging the foods in it. (Versus something like sauerkraut that relies on salt drawing the moisture out of cabbage so it’s in a salt brine of its own juices.)

That brine will create the environment for beneficial bacteria to thrive, allowing us to then create some artistic customization in what is being fermented.

Making the ferment

Before we start making the ferment, we’ll want a vessel to do the ferment in. I have a Mason Tops fermenting kit that comes with a jar, an airlock lid, and a glass weight. Here are some kits on Amazon that can be adapted with a regular mason jar. In a pinch, you can jerry-rig a ferment vessel by using a mason jar, a Ziploc bag of water as a weight, and a loose-fitting lid that will keep bad bacteria out but still allow venting of gas.

The first step is prepare the veggies going into the ferment. This recipe calls for 175 grams each of garlic scapes and jalapeno peppers. The scapes can be chopped up in small pieces. The exact sizing doesn’t matter too much because at the end you’ll be pureeing everything. The peppers can be stemmed and then sliced in half—and keep the seeds so they add heat to the sauce. They can be chopped up smaller if you’re having difficulty getting everything nicely in the ferment vessel.

While the recipe calls for jalapeno peppers, you can use any green-coloured hot pepper. This is a hot sauce that gets its kick from the garlic scapes, so it’s more of a flavour with heat than pure heat. That being said, with my initial taste-test of the final product, I felt it wasn’t quite hot enough, so next year I’ll look at either a hotter pepper or adding more jalapenos.

And while ideally you want a green-coloured hot pepper, this is purely to maintain the green colour in the final hot sauce. If you don’t care so much about the colour, you could put in any hot pepper of your choice. I grew some scotch bonnet hot peppers and discovered they have an interesting flavour along with their intense heat—they’d go quite well here, but the green scapes and red pepper might create a muddied colour.

In a pinch, if you don’t have fresh hot peppers, you could use pickled hot peppers, but I would add them at the blender step. After the full ferment, you add some vinegar before you blend it, so you could add pickled hot peppers at this stage.

Anyway, back to the ferment!

Put the scapes and jalapenos in your ferment vessel and then chop and add a few green onions.

Now we’ll create the brine, which should be 2% by weight. To do this, add two teaspoons of salt to two cups of water, and heat it in a pot, stirring until the salt dissolves. Allow the water to cool a bit and then pour it into the ferment vessel, ensuring everything is submerged. If you add the brine immediately after boiling, the heat may kill the beneficial bacteria you’re trying to help.

Add the fermenting weight on top, as well as the airlock, and store in a cool, dry, dark place for 7-10 days. You may want to put a plate or bowl under it as ferments sometimes bubble over. You can check on it every few days; if you see bubbles, you know it’s working and it’s fermenting. After seven days, start tasting the scapes to see if you’ve got a good taste going. Mine took eight days.

Once things taste ideal—and this is another place where the art of fermenting comes in since “ideal” is completely up to you—the ferment is done and we can move on to making the hot sauce.

Turning the ferment into hot sauce

Strain the ferment, reserving the liquid.

The scapes, peppers, and green onions are then put into a blender. (If possible, use an actual blender. I used an immersion blender / stick blender and it didn’t work that well, so next time I’ll dig out the actual blender.) Add in half a cup of vinegar and 2/3 cup of the brine.

The choice of vinegar is up to you. The original recipe calls for apple cider vinegar, but I found the apple taste clashed with the garlic and jalapeno. I’d strongly suggest white vinegar or unseasoned rice vinegar, or a vinegar with a complementary flavour profile.

When I make this next year, I’m going to either use my homemade chive blossom vinegar, which would add a chive flavour, or I’d use my homemade sinamak. Sinamak is a Filipino vinegar infusion; white vinegar is infused with hot peppers, ginger, garlic, and black peppercorns. I made a batch a while back with some thai chili peppers and it has a real kick to it that would go fantastic in this hot sauce.

Blend until smooth.

From here, you have two options.

If you like a smooth sauce, you can strain the pureed sauce through a strainer or cheesecloth. If you like a chunkier sauce, you can transfer the whole thing to a jar as-is.

The original recipe calls for the sauce to be strained and then xantham gum to be added, which would thicken it and give it some consistency. I chose to go without the xantham gum and without straining. The hot sauce I buy always needs a good shake because it settles easily, but then you get all those garlicky bits from the pureed scapes and it’s oh-so-good.

Because it’s a ferment that’s ultimately preserved in vinegar, this should last in the fridge for weeks, if not months.

Garlic scape hot sauce can be used the same as any hot sauce, but the garlic taste opens up some ideal pairings. This goes great on any food where garlic is a complementary taste, such as on pizza.

Fermented Garlic Scape Hot Sauce

A hot sauce with the mouthwatering tang of garlic makes for the perfect topping on things like pizzas and burgers.
5 from 1 vote
Prep Time 20 minutes
Fermenting Time 10 days
Course condiments

Equipment

  • 1 Fermentation Kit / Vessel, see notes for alternatives
  • 1 Blender

Ingredients
  

  • 175 g Garlic Scapes
  • 175 g Jalapeno Peppers, or other hot pepper, preferably green
  • 2-3 Green Onions
  • 10 Peppercorns
  • 2 tsp Salt
  • 2 cups Water
  • ½ cup Vinegar, see notes

Instructions
 

  • Chop garlic scapes and add to fermentation vessel. De-stem jalapeno peppers and quarter or chop and add to fermentation vessel. Chop green onions and add to fermentation vessel.
  • Add salt and water to a small pot and heat, stirring until salt dissolves. Let the saltwater brine cool, then add to the fermentation vessel.
  • Place the weight in the vessel, ensuring all vegetables are below the water line. Close with an airlock. Place on a plate (in case it bubbles over) and put in a cool, dark, dry place to ferment.
  • After a few days, you should start to see bubbles in the ferment. This means it's working.
  • After 7 days, taste a scape to test for readiness. (There's no real measure of when it's ready, you go by taste and preference.) Ferment should be done in 7-10 days.
  • Strain vegetables, reserving the brine.
  • Add vegetables to a blender, vinegar, and ⅔ cup of the reserved brine. Blend until smooth.
  • If you prefer smooth sauce:
    Strain though a strainer or cheesecloth, then store remaining liquid in a bottle or jar in the fridge.
    If you prefer chunky sauce:
    Transfer blender contents to a bottle or jar and store in the fridge.

Notes

If you don’t have a fermentation kit, you can piece one together using a large jar as the fermentation vessel, a Ziplock bag filled with water as the weight, and a loose-fitting lid as the airlock.
For vinegar, white vinegar is usually best, but any vinegar with a complementary flavour profile would work well, such as chive blossom vinegar or sinamak.
Keyword garlic scape hot sauce, garlic scapes, hot sauce

How to Preserve Saskatoons (Serviceberries, Juneberries) in a Sugar-Kombucha Brine

Saskatoons are a blink-and-you’ll-miss-them crop.

We have a large saskatoon bush in our front yard. About a week ago, I was looking at the bush on a Saturday afternoon. The berries were starting to ripen—they’re perfect when they’re so dark-purple that they’re almost black—and decided I’d start picking the ripest ones the following day.

Well, Sunday morning rolls around and I head outside to discover that the birds had stripped the entire bush in less than twenty-four hours. Not only did they eat all of the ripe and almost-ripe berries, but they ate all of the completely-unripe berries too.

I had plans for those berries. I make a super-tasty saskatoon and Grand Marnier jam that some friends look forward to every year, and I had hoped to try making a batch of saskatoon wine.

Thankfully, a family member came to the rescue. He knows a good spot to find wild saskatoons and not long after the birds had devastated my crop, I was handed buckets and buckets of berries. I had enough for the jam and the wine, with plenty left over.

“Saskatoons” is apparently a very regional name for these berries. Whenever I would search for Saskatoon recipes online, the options were extremely limited—basically just pies or jam. My husband and I aren’t really dessert people and I’ve never baked a pie in my life, so I never knew what to do with these and we’d just eat them as-is.

One day I encountered a blog post about something called serviceberries and there was an off-hand anecdote in the post about how some people know them as saskatoons or juneberries. Suddenly I had the key to finding more recipes and posts about this little short-season fruit.

If you’ve never had saskatoons before, I sort of think of them as similar to a blueberry. However, that similarity is more in the size, shape, and colour, though to me the taste isn’t super dissimilar.

My saskatoon bush produces nice, plump, juicy berries. The wild ones are considerably smaller, as is often the case with wild versus cultivated fruit.

Back to the cooking adventure:

After making the jam (which I didn’t photograph, so I won’t get a blog post about it this year, but if you’re curious, it’s this recipe), setting up the wine (which I’ll post about in several months when it’s ready to drink so I can also comment on taste), and flavouring a batch of kombucha with saskatoons and blueberries, I was still left with more saskatoons than I knew what to do with.

I decided to give preserving them a try. It had worked well with blueberries, so theoretically I might get the same result with saskatoons.

I pulled up the recipe and set out to experiment. The photos in this post are of a double-batch of the recipe at the bottom.

To start, mix unflavoured kombucha, sugar, salt, and water together and set aside. Rinse the berries and then put them into the fermentation jar. Pour the brine on top, make sure everything is submerged (preferably with a weight), close it (with an airlock), and let it sit for a few days. Taste it daily until desired doneness, which for us was three days, same as with the blueberries.

This was a bit of a disaster in the process, requiring quick thinking to make things work.

The first is that since I wanted a double batch, it was too much for my fermentation kit. That was easy enough to solve—I’ll just use a bigger jar.

I got everything mixed up and put inside. When I went to put the fermentation weight on top of the berries, that was my next problem—the weight was designed for a wide-mouth jar and I was using a standard-mouth jar. I also didn’t have any wide-mouth jars on hand to just switch jars.

You can usually use a ziplock bag filled with water as a weight, but there wasn’t much room in the jar, so I decided to risk it and skip the weight. I made sure to stir the mixture with a spoon every twelve hours or so, to push the top berries underneath so nothing was floating on top too long.

Then came the problem with the lid. The fermentation lid, similar to the weight, was manufactured for a wide-mouth jar, so it didn’t fit the jar I was using. Luckily I have some wine-making equipment on hand, so I poked a hole in a mason jar lid and stuck an airlock in it. (In the absence of that, the next best thing would be to loosely put on a two-part mason jar lid. Theoretically, the weight of the lid would keep it down and keep out unwanted air, but also be loose enough to allow gas build-up inside to release.)

All potential disasters overcome, the project succeeded.

Once the berries are ready and fully fermented, I replaced the makeshift airlock lid with a regular lid and stuck it in the fridge. If you’re using a fermentation kit, you might want to transfer the berries to a new jar to free up the kit for the next fermentation project.

The fully fermented berries are wonderful on their own. The kombucha sugar brine gives it a sweet juicy taste, and as they continue to ferment (albeit more slowly) in the fridge, they may develop a fizzy texture felt on the tongue when eating them—some folks dislike this and some enjoy this.

Other than eating them straight out of the jar, they make a great topping for yogurt, ice cream, overnight oats, or any other food where you want a little bit of fresh fruit mixed in.

Even if the birds hadn’t stripped my berries in under twenty-four hours, the saskatoon season is so incredibly short. Last year, the birds left the bush alone and I got to harvest the berries—I got buckets of them off only one bush—and we enjoyed our saskatoon harvest for about a week and a half. After that, they were finished with until this year.

This spring we planted two more saskatoon bushes in our yard. Either we’ll have so many berries that even if the birds raid a bush we’ll still have some for ourselves, or we’ll just attract more birds and they’ll all know our yard is the place to be. As frustrating as it is to have the birds abscond with the harvest, we do appreciate that someone enjoyed the berries, even if it can’t be us.

Sugar-Brine Fermented Saskatoons (Serviceberries, Juneberries)

With sugar, kombucha, and a few other ingredients, saskatoons (also known as serviceberries or juneberries) can be easily fermented and last for weeks in the fridge.
Prep Time 5 minutes
Fermenting Time 3 days
Course Fruit
Cuisine Fruit

Equipment

  • 1 Fermenting Jar or Fermenting Kit See notes for alternatives

Ingredients
  

  • 2 cups Saskatoons / Serviceberries / Juneberries
  • 6 Tbsp Kombucha, unflavoured
  • ¾ tsp Salt
  • 6 Tbsp Sugar
  • 9 Tbsp Water

Instructions
 

  • Mix all ingredients except for the berries.
  • Clean berries and then put them in the fermentation jar.
  • Pour the kombucha-sugar mixture on top.
  • Put the fermentation weight on top of the blueberries.
  • After twenty-four hours, taste-test daily until desired doneness. For us, we determined this was after three days, but the length of time will vary based on the temperature in your kitchen and various other factors.
    Transfer to a clean jar and store in the fridge.
    I'm not sure of the shelf life, but the jar in our fridge has been there a month and they're still good.

Notes

A fermentation kit usually has a jar, a weight, and an airlock. This is the one I have and it worked perfectly for this. (I can’t find it on Amazon, but if you’re in Canada, I got it at Canadian Tire. Alternatively, here’s a more expensive and more complete kit from the same company available on Amazon, though it looks like it’s several lids and weights but you provide your own jar.) If you don’t have a fermentation kit, you can use any jar that’s big enough to hold all of this, and then use a Ziplock bag filled with water as a weight. You might get scum forming on the bag and that’s okay.
Keyword juneberries, preserving berries, saskatoons, serviceberries

How to Preserve Blueberries in a Sugar and Kombucha Brine

A while back I tried fermenting blueberries with a salt solution. While it worked and the blueberries were fermented and were able to sit in the fridge for several weeks, it wasn’t my husband’s favourite. He could never really get rid of the salty flavour of the brine.

I was determined to make this work. My husband loves blueberries, but he eats them slowly, so they’re at risk of going bad before he finishes them. Plus, when they’re on sale it’s always tempting to buy extra and save some money.

Thankfully while researching salt fermentation, I’d also come across a sugar fermentation method that used sugar and kombucha. Since we brew our own kombucha (and that’ll eventually get posted on this site), this seemed like an easy one worth trying.

As long as you have kombucha, this one is easy and simple to put together. If you’re buying your kombucha in the store, you’ll want to make sure it’s pretty fresh bottle so that you can be reasonably sure that the beneficial bacteria is all still alive. You’ll want unflavoured / plain kombucha so that you don’t end up flavouring the blueberries with whatever flavour you purchased (though that might be an experiment worth trying someday—I bet ginger kombucha would make lightly gingered blueberries). If you’re home-brewing your kombucha, I scooped some out for this recipe right before adding the fruit into the kombucha.

The one piece of equipment you’ll need is a fermentation kit. Here’s the one I have. (I can’t find it on Amazon, but if you’re in Canada, I got it from Canadian Tire. Alternatively, here’s a more expensive kit from the same company available on Amazon, though it looks like it’s several lids and weights but you provide your own jar.) However, this is also optional—you can just use a large, clean jar, and when it comes to the step where you need the fermentation weight, you can use a Ziplock bag full of water.

This recipe really couldn’t be simpler, provided you have the ingredients and fermentation kit.

In a bowl or large glass, store together kombucha, salt, sugar, and water until everything is dissolved and nicely mixed. Then rinse or wash the blueberries to ensure they’re clean, then put them into the fermentation jar. Pour the kombucha/sugar solution on top, close the lid, and let it sit on your counter.

After a full 24 hours, taste test it daily until you reach a desired doneness.

In everything I’ve read about this, similarly to when I tried the salt fermentation, there’s never a definition of what doneness is and how to tell if it’s ready. So… my recommendation is to just wing it. With a full 24 hours on the counter, the beneficial bacteria and yeast from the kombucha will have fully established itself in your jar of blueberries, so you’ll have some of that preservation effect even if you call it done too early. At a worst case scenario, if you call it done way too early, the blueberries might go mouldy like they normally would, so next time you just let it ferment a little longer.

For us, it took about three days till my husband felt they were fermented enough and ready to go.

I transferred the blueberries and brine to a new jar and put it in the fridge. Even if you didn’t let it fully ferment before putting it in the fridge, that fermentation action will continue to happen, just at a much slower pace due to the cold of the fridge.

I think it’s been about three times now that my husband has said to me “That new way of fermenting blueberries is really good.” To me, that’s the mark of success.

For longevity of the blueberries… I don’t really know yet how long they last. The jar pictured here is still in our fridge (though much emptier now) and it’s been a full month, and the blueberries are still tasty and delicious.

Kombucha eventually turns vinegary, so if left a really long time, these might taste a bit pickled. If you reach that point, it’d probably be best to throw them out and start a new batch.

My husband eats these straight out of the jar with a spoon—they’re that good—but this is also an excellent way to preserve blueberries for smoothies or to toss on top of ice cream.

I’m tempted to try this same preservation method with Saskatoons (sometimes known as serviceberries). We’ve got a bush in our front yard and last year got quite the harvest. They’re similar in size to blueberries, though I think with less moisture content. If I do try it and if it’s a success, then stay tuned for the recipe!

Sugar-Brine Fermented Blueberries

With sugar, kombucha, and a few other ingredients, blueberries can be easily fermented and last for weeks in the fridge.
Prep Time 5 minutes
Fermenting Time 3 days
Course Fruit
Cuisine Fruit

Equipment

  • 1 Fermenting Jar or Fermenting Kit See notes for alternatives

Ingredients
  

  • 2 cups Blueberries
  • 6 Tbsp Kombucha, unflavoured
  • ¾ tsp Salt
  • 6 Tbsp Sugar
  • 9 Tbsp Water

Instructions
 

  • Mix all ingredients except for the blueberries.
  • Clean blueberries and then put them in the fermentation jar.
  • Pour the kombucha-sugar mixture on top.
  • Put the fermentation weight on top of the blueberries.
  • After twenty-four hours, taste-test daily until desired doneness. For us, we determined this was after three days, but the length of time will vary based on the temperature in your kitchen and various other factors.
    Transfer to a clean jar and store in the fridge.
    I'm not sure of the shelf life, but the jar in our fridge has been there a month and they're still good.

Notes

A fermentation kit usually has a jar, a weight, and an airlock. This is the one I have and it worked perfectly for this. (I can’t find it on Amazon, but if you’re in Canada, I got it at Canadian Tire. Alternatively, here’s a more expensive and more complete kit from the same company available on Amazon, though it looks like it’s several lids and weights but you provide your own jar.) If you don’t have a fermentation kit, you can use any jar that’s big enough to hold all of this, and then use a Ziplock bag filled with water as a weight. You might get scum forming on the bag and that’s okay.
Keyword Blueberries, fermented blueberries, preserved blueberries

How to Ferment Blueberries Using Salt

I try to buy food in smaller quantities because we hate food waste and we also don’t like having to overeat something just to avoid throwing it out.

But a sale is a sale.

Blueberries were dirt cheap a few weeks ago and my husband eats them. I decided to buy more than double his normal amount and I intended to experiment with preserving them via fermentation.

Fermentation typically preserves fruits and vegetables by allowing good bacteria to thrive and destroying bad bacteria. The good bacteria is typically probiotic bacteria, so in addition to being good for food preservation, it’s also good for your gut.

There are apparently two ways to ferment blueberries—one is with 2% salt by weight and the other is with a sugar brine. For this, I decided to go with the salt process, and I’ll try the sugar brine next time blueberries are on sale (update: here it is).

Blueberries, salt, and a fermentation kit are all that’s needed.

A couple years ago I received this handy fermentation kit for Christmas. It comes with a large glass jar, a glass fermentation weight, and an airlock lid.

While this specific recipe doesn’t include submerging blueberries in liquid, most fermentation recipes do, so a fermentation weight helps keep the food below the liquid level. The fermentation process creates gas, so the airlock lid lets the gas escape without worrying about pressure building up.

If you don’t have a fermentation kit, you can easily construct a makeshift one.

You’ll want:

  • A large glass jar, preferably with a wide mouth.
  • Something to act as a weight; this could be a Ziploc bag with water in it, or a smaller jar that can fit inside the fermentation jar, or if you’re using a really large jar with a really large mouth, you might even be able to fit a small plate in there.
  • In the absence of an airlock lid, you can just use a normal lid, but you’ll want to “burp” it regularly, which means opening it to allow the gas to escape. In this recipe, you can have the lid slightly loose so gas can escape on its own, or you can burp it every twelve hours or so.

As far as fermentation projects go, and I haven’t done a whole lot but I’ve done some, fermenting blueberries is reasonably simple. You need a weight for the blueberries and then you calculate 2% of this weight to figure out how much salt to add.

Mix it all in a bowl, transfer to your fermentation jar, and you just let it sit for a few days.

It took us about four days until we felt they were fermented. You can see in the photos that the level of the weight sunk a bit, which I think was caused by blueberry juice being expressed.

The recipes I looked up all said something along the lines of tasting it daily until it’s ready…but never really defined how you determine if it’s ready. It takes three to seven days, so I would say that it’s reasonably safe to assume that anytime after three days, if it’s tasting reasonably good, it’s likely safe to call it ready. By that time, the beneficial bacteria will have already taken over and gotten a good start at doing their work of preserving the blueberries—in other words, if it’s not perfectly fermented, it’s likely fermented enough to get the preservation effect that we’re after. If you find you enjoy fermented blueberries, you’ll develop a skill over time of determining by taste if the blueberries are ready.

If you used a Ziploc bag with water as your weight, you may find some scuzzy growth on there. Before I got my fermentation kit and I was fermenting tomatoes, I found this to be the case. As long as the blueberries look and smell fine, simply clean off the bag and reuse it.

If at any point there is fuzzy mould growth on the berries or if it ever smells or tastes like something’s gone wrong, dispose the berries and start over. The old adage of “when in doubt, throw it out” holds true here.

When the berries are ready, simply remove the weight, seal the jar, and move the blueberries to the fridge. For me, that meant transferring the blueberries to a new jar so my fermenting kit isn’t taken up with storing blueberries.

Ready to go in the fridge

One of the byproducts of this form of fermentation is acetic acid, or vinegar. So the final result is a little bit sour. Understandably, the final result is also a little bit salty from, well, all the salt. It should also be a bit sweet. It’s an interesting mix of flavours. They’re probably best eaten on top of oatmeal or mixed in a smoothie where some of the “unique” aspects of the taste can be masked by the other ingredients.

My husband isn’t really a fan of blueberries preserved like this because he likes to eat the blueberries straight and that sour-salty tang isn’t his thing.

When I was researching this, I came across a second version of fermenting blueberries that uses a sugar brine as well as some kombucha, or water kefir, or whey. I brew both kombucha and water kefir, so I’m eager to try this alternative method. Of the two of them, I’m likely going to try the kefir version because kombucha can taste a bit vinegary, but with my extremely limited water kefir experience, there’s no vinegary taste there. Watch for that recipe to appear here in coming months. (Update: here it is.)

Lacto-Fermented Blueberries (2% Salt Method)

If you have an abundance of blueberries, fermenting them is a great option to preserve them and enjoy them for weeks, plus fermenting creates beneficial probiotic bacteria for a healthy gut.
Prep Time 10 minutes
Fermentation Time (Estimate) 3 days
Course Snack

Equipment

  • 1 Kitchen Scale
  • 1 Fermentation Vessel with Weight This can be a fermentation kit or simply a jar with something to weigh down the blueberries, such as a Ziploc bag with water in it, or a smaller jar that fits inside the fermentation jar.

Ingredients
  

  • Blueberries
  • Salt, non-iodized

Instructions
 

  • Rinse and dry blueberries.
  • Place blueberries in a bowl and weigh them. (Be sure to hit the "tare" or "zero" button before adding the blueberries to the bowl so you are weighing only the blueberries.)
  • Calculate 2% of this weight and add that amount of salt. (For example, if you have 800g of blueberries, use a calculator to do 800 x 0.02, to get 16g of sat.)
  • Thoroughly mix the blueberries and salt. You can slightly crush the blueberries if you'd like.
  • Transfer the blueberry and salt mixture to the fermentation vessel. With a spatula, scrape out any remaining salt in the bowl so it's all in the fermentation vessel.
  • Cover with a fermentation weight. Close with a lid. Fermentation kits often have an airlock built into them; if you're using a regular lid, don't close it super tight so that built-up gas can escape.
  • Taste the blueberries daily until they've reached an appropriate level of fermentation for your taste (see note below); this should take three to seven days, depending on the temperature. When fermented, store the jar in the fridge. Blueberries should remain in good condition for several weeks.

Notes

I found it took four days before we felt it was fully fermented. The taste test assessment will be a bit of a trial and error because it’s difficult to know what tastes ready if you haven’t tasted it before. Even if you’re uncertain, having the blueberries ferment for a minimum of three days means there’s at least some fermentation that’s occurred, so if you put them in the fridge a little too early, you’ll still benefit from a partial fermentation.
We found that salt fermentation led to a bit of a salty-sour taste that isn’t super appealing when eating the blueberries straight (versus in yogurt or a smoothie), so our next attempt will be fermenting using a sugar brine. (Update: here it is.)
Keyword Blueberries, Fermented Fruit