Pickle Fanaticism

By Caitlin O'Brien

4/10/09

I love pickles. As a child, I received gallon-sized jars of pickles as Christmas presents, wrapped under the tree--they rarely lasted more than a few days. I could be bribed with pickles, or punished with pickles withheld. I had very specific tastes, in those days: Vlasic Kosher Dills, preferably whole rather than spears. Vlasic used to have a little gauge on the jar that ran from one to five, showing--I think--the level of sourness. Mine were number three. Under duress, I would eat number fours (which my grandmother always had in stock) or other, inferior brands; I refused to touch sweet pickles or relish.

When I first left home, one of the greatest delights of independence was the fact that I could eat as many pickles as I wanted, and nobody could stop me.

In college, my tastes broadened somewhat: I discovered new brands and styles of pickle that met my approval. Specifically, I ventured into brine pickles, the kind with the cloudy juice that supermarkets tuck away in strange refrigerated places, like with the sausages or orange juice. I still kept away from pickled items that strayed from the traditional cucumber. No dilly beans, pickled beets, or sauerkraut for me.

All that changed a few years ago, when a boyfriend forced me to try some sauerkraut. It turns out, I love sauerkraut, too. From there, the whole pickle-snobbery house of cards collapsed--it turns out, you see, that I love all pickles. Beans, beets, cabbage, onions, garlic, turnips, carrots, even eggs--you name it (and pickle it!) and I like it.

Soon I found myself spending exorbitant amounts of money on pickled items. When my sauerkraut habit alone started costing us more than the electricity bill, it became painfully obvious that something needed to be done. I looked at the cost of a jar of sauerkraut and the cost of a head of cabbage, and the answer was clear: I needed to make my own.

I had been canning some food in the summer, and had made a batch or two of pickles. But the whole process of canning--the boiling vat of vinegar with fumes choking the kitchen, the boiling vat of water scalding me, the worry about poisoning myself to death if I made a mistake--it sort of put me off.

Fortunately for me, sauerkraut is absurdly easy.

How to Make Sauerkraut: Cut up a bunch of cabbage. Stuff it in a jar. Add salt. Come back in a couple of weeks.

Okay, maybe it's slightly more complicated. You want to wash your jar first (and make sure you use something glass or ceramic, as the salt and acid will react with metal). And you want a particular amount of salt (a teaspoon and a half to two teaspoons for every pound of cabbage). You want to stuff the cabbage in good to bruise it and draw out its juice. You want to make sure that your cabbage is submerged under the juice, and add water if it isn't. And you want to check on it every day or two, and scrape off any of the harmless white scum that is likely to form.

But really, that's it. Because, in the case of sauerkraut (and, as I soon learned, brine-fermented pickles) bacteria do all the work for you. The bacteria in question vary slightly depending on your location and the stage of fermentation, but they are generally Lactobacillus, the same type as those that turn milk into yogurt. They're found naturally in the air and especially the soil--you'll find that organic and freshly-picked vegetables make much better pickles--and they make pickles sour by producing lactic acid. They also happen to have very specific and unusual habitat requirements: they need an acidic, anaerobic environment. We achieve this by adding salt and keeping the vegetables submerged. Conveniently for pickle-lovers (and, actually, human kind, which I'll get to in a moment), very few other bacteria can survive in such an environment. Specifically, a salty brine is entirely inhospitable to dangerous bacteria such as Clostridium botulinum, that scourge of canners everywhere and the cause of potentially-deadly botulism infection.

Plus, you don't have to stand over the stove for an hour. Or at all.

Which brings us to what I think is the most interesting part of brine-fermentation: People have been doing it for a long, long time. Before refrigeration, before Ball jars and propane stoves, people made pickles and they made them with brine. A well-salted crock of sauerkraut can last months and months--up to a year--if kept in a cool location, with no fossil fuels involved! Brine pickling was a safe, reliable and delicious way to preserve the harvest--and it still is! Give home-made sauerkraut a try, and see if you don't become a fanatic, yourself.

For more information on fermentation, brine pickles, and old-timey preservation methods, check out Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz and Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning by Terre Vivante.