Anything worth doing well is worth doing terribly. And I sure as hell fucked this up big time!
So, I was itching to get into fermentation, because I was reading
Nourishing Traditions by
Sally Fallon, and I really wanted some "live" food.
It is accurate how one of my friends described me as a Golden Retriever, because I got a tad too excited about this project of mine and forgot to take note of one important detail:
The surface I was working on was a piece of glass.
This mistake of mine resulted in:
-the breakage of the surface I was working on (which I will have to pay to get replaced)
-the loss of two mason jars
-two cut fingers-
an hour cleaning up my floor and the broken glass
-and one inedible fermentation jar (because of the risk of glass shard being inside of it)
-and one greatly humbled human being who has learned several lessons the hard way
So, the hope was to make a good big jar or maybe three jars of vegetables to ferment. As I was finding out, I learned that vegetables are extremely compressible. I thought that my big bag of all organic foods: chives, dill, green onions, dino kale, regular kale, collard greens, dill, and cilantro would make a large batch. But I was able to compress it all into one jar and use enough force to break a pane of glass. I hurriedly stuffed everything back into the onyl jar that survived, which was a bag idea. But maybe not, I have a good observation piece. The general recipe I did was add a whole bunch of unrefined sea salt to a bunch of filtered, stuff veggies in a jar, fill with
water, stuff in more and more until all the veggies I possibly can were in the jar.
Now, I won't be giving up. I am still going to use this piece as an observation piece to learn more about the fermentation process, and I will continue my adventures with making fermented vegetables, while living at college. But I will do so more carefully and pay a lot more attention.
So, this was my first attempt at fermentation and it went spectacularly wrong! I hope this brings to some people a few laughs and perhaps memories of their fervent youth!
What's gone wrong when you've tried to preserve food by fermentation?