#138 – Fermenting Vegetables – Your Questions Answered (with Holly Howe of Make Sauerkraut)

Fermenting vegetables is a topic we all have questions on, whether we’re just starting with fermentation or we’ve been doing it for years. Today I welcome Holly Howe of makesauerkraut.com and we answer your real-life fermenting veg questions. Holly is amazing. I personally learned so much from the hour and a half I spent with her, and I know that wherever you are in your fermentation practise, you will too.

Supporters can also access an after show – I persuaded Holly to stay on a bit longer and talk to me about how to know if a ferment has gone bad and what steps you can take to combat mould.

Holly is super busy right now organising her upcoming event, the fermentation summit which will run from September the 15th to 17th this year, 2026. If you would like to get access to a whole load of free video presentations by fermentation experts that will move your practise forward no matter where you are at, sign up at ancestralkitchenpodcast.com/hollysummit.

What we cover:

• Equipment for fermentation
• The use of inoculants
• What the best cabbage is for sauerkraut
• What to do if your sauerkraut is dry
• The importance of salt in fermentation and which salt is the best
• What will make the difference between succeeding and failing
• How long to ferment your sauerkraut for
• How to make a year’s worth of sauerkraut
• Cucumber pickles, talking about how to avoid them going soft

The personal views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect our own personal views or opinions. We recognize that our guests are whole persons and this may include views we or our audience actively disagree with; our guests are invited to the show because we feel they have something valuable to share with us all, and we do not ask them to censor their personal views on air. Our sharing of their work is not necessarily an endorsement of their personal views.

Resources:

• To sign up for The Fermentation Summit go here
• Holly’s website
• Holly’s book Mouthwatering Sauerkraut Fermentation Made Easy
• Kitchen Table Chat #36 (about ‘snotty’ ferments)
• Hollys post, How to Make Sauerkraut In a Crock in 7 Simple Steps [Healthy, Flavorful, Easy]
• Holly’s cranberry and orange relish is within this post: Fermented Cranberries

 

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Transcript:

Alison:
Hello and welcome back to Ancestral Kitchen Podcast. I am here today with Holly for a long-awaited episode about vegetable fermentation.

Alison:
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and we have some fabulous questions from listeners and supporters, which I can’t wait to dive into. First of all, let me say hello to you, Holly.

Holly:
Hello and thanks for having me. I’m excited to answer all these great questions.

Alison:
Brilliant okay so holly for those who don’t know her her surname is how holly how and you can find her online at make sauerkraut.com um she started fermenting i think about 20 years ago from what i can tell from reading your stuff is that right holly yes.

Holly:
Right after my son was born.

Alison:
Okay and because you read nourishing traditions is what i think i read on your site, exactly which is how a lot of our listeners um start from that that wonderful book um you have written a book yourself which is called mouth-watering sauerkraut fermenting made easy and which i can actually see in the background because we’ve got the cameras on and you live in canada we’ve known each other for maybe a couple of years we’ve been emailing i think and then last year in 2025 you did an amazing summit of all things fermentation and we were really happy here at ancestral kitchen podcast to let everyone know about the summit and watch it and share information and that’s how we kind of got to know each other a bit more so the first question I always ask our guests is what is the last thing you ate Holly?

Holly:
I assume you’re talking in the fermented foods category it could just.

Alison:
Be the last thing you ate that’s fine if it includes fermented.

Holly:
Foods that’s a bonus, my son made a delicious stir fry beef dish last night with our tender local grass fed beef and then I always put a nice dollop of sauerkraut on there to bring the flavours out so that would have been my last meal how.

Alison:
Old is your son? 25 gosh and he lives with you permanently uh.

Holly:
Currently he knows a good deal when he.

Alison:
Sees it well he’s a good cook by the sound of it does he cook often for you.

Holly:
Um i require it once a week.

Alison:
So uh yeah that’s part of the deal he cooks once a week exactly cool okay that sounds really really nice um let’s talk before we dive into fermenting let’s talk briefly about the summit. As I said, you did it last year. This is now coming up. This will be the second year you’re doing it. And last year, I know a lot of our listeners tuned in and we had a special thread on our Discord forum where supporters who were watching watched kind of together and then talked about what came up for them and what was interesting and really had long discussions about each of the individual sessions. I know that Andrea watched every single session she was so dedicated and she learned something from from every speaker um this year you’re repeating a kind of a similar format i’m actually speaking this year which i’m very excited about talking about oats and fermentation of oats which listeners who’ve been around for a while will know is one of my passions um i know we’re recording this a little bit early because the summit’s not coming out till september this podcast episode will come out in September close to the summit but we’re recording a little bit earlier can you tell us a little bit more about your lineup this year or what your plans are.

Holly:
You are the first person on my lineup. I’m just getting ready to start pitching for speakers. But the idea is to have very actionable content, a wide range from sourdough bread to drinks to different fermented vegetables at all ability levels and to keep them short and actionable.

Alison:
Okay.

Holly:
So people can jump in, see right away what the recipe is all about, learn how to make a ferment, and then jump into our Facebook group that will be running at the same time. If they want to ask the speakers, but it’s to help people at all levels, all different ferments, and it is free to watch. Each session will be 48 hours available, so people around the world at their time zone can tune in and watch it. And then if they want to keep the sessions available, lifetime access to them, then that’s when an all-access pass can be purchased.

Alison:
I see.

Holly:
I wanted to make it accessible to all people around the world with a variety of topics and keep them short and sweet.

Alison:
I think short and sweet is good. And I also think what we gathered from last year, especially what I felt when Andrea told me, you know, she listened to all of them, was that even though she’s been fermenting for over a decade, well over a decade, probably more like two decades, the same as you, she did learn something from every session, you know, by going into it. So it not only was accessible for beginners, but for people who are more used to fermentation, there’s goodies to be found within it, you know, and also it re-cemented her own desire to ferment her own commitment to it and so she had lots of experiments going on after the sessions you know that it reignited her passion for it which was really good.

Holly:
Yeah it was.

Alison:
It was.

Holly:
Fun to have a variety of topics and honey.

Alison:
All the wonderful.

Holly:
Things you can do with.

Alison:
Honey and.

Holly:
It was just like wow I learned quite a bit.

Alison:
So people who are listening now um the lineup will be set by the time this podcast goes out so if you go to ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash holly summit you will be able to see more details on what is actually going on this year what are the dates holly for the summit.

Holly:
Um september it’s a tuesday through thursday september 15th through the 17th.

Alison:
Okay so not long okay we’ll talk about it a little bit more at the end um and i will put the url in the show notes so people can just click through to that and then click through to your site and sign up um let’s dive in now though to vegetable fermentation my questions for the next hour hour and a half are drawn from our community and we will talk about everything i mean there are tons of questions tons of topics equipment salt timings inoculants sauerkraut in particular pickles other vegetables troubleshooting and whatever level you are at there’s going to be something for you um so in advance holly thank you for sharing your expertise with us okay welcome so first of all i wanted to talk a little bit about equipment because um i wanted to know what equipment you use do you use an airlock I don’t I don’t own an airlock and I’ve never used one so if you could talk about the equipment you use and whether you use an airlock do you think there are particular ferments that are better with an airlock and is it worth the effort and money to do so.

Holly:
Well, I like to approach fermentation and present it to people like they’re brand new to it. And I don’t want them to think they have to go out and buy a lot of equipment. So I’d like people to repurpose what they have at home first. The one thing that is very, very helpful and it’s like, you know, we’ll get to airlocks in just a minute. But the foundation for fermentation is a scale, a digital scale. They can be purchased inexpensively. And fermentation, though, our ancestors did not use a scale. it really is a science. We want to be able to use the correct amount of salt for what we’re fermenting. And when we have that nailed in, and we’re using fresh produce, it’s foolproof, really. So if something’s going wrong, we can look at time, temperature, and how much salt we’re adding. But when we use a digital scale, we’re able to add the correct amount of salt for the amount of vegetables we’re fermenting. Because the bacteria, we always have to think about the bacteria there are worker bees we’re setting up a home for the bacteria for them to do the work inside that jar or crock but they have special requirements they like a certain temperature they like a certain amount of salt and so when we can dial that in it really becomes foolproof you can just make batch after batch and if something goes wrong then you can troubleshoot and something will go wrong at times but when we dial in the correct amount of salt by using a scale it makes life so much easier yeah.

Alison:
Okay so i i come from.

Holly:
Europe where.

Alison:
Scales are much more um common than in the states so i’ve i’ve got a scale and i’ve always used.

Holly:
It exactly in.

Alison:
Over the other side of atlantic um scales aren’t so common so asking to use a scale like you said it’s inexpensive but it’s extremely helpful definitely so yeah thank you for cementing that.

Holly:
Yeah, that was, I was thinking as I was preparing for this today, like, what was the game-changing equipment in my kitchen for fermentation? And I would look at three things, and one would be the scale. Everything changed dramatically when I started using a scale. I started with a mechanical scale, so I didn’t dial in as nicely as I can now with my digital scale, but definitely that was one game-changing. And then um on equipment even though i’m saying not to buy anything um a fermentation spring which is a weight to hold things below the brine and i can go into detail on that just a bit and then um for making sauerkraut uh a slicer uh wooden cabbage slicer was another game-changing piece of equipment so that’s interesting but really just grab well i i think it’s interesting because i’ve I’ve not.

Alison:
Used either of those things. So I have pickle pebbles, which maybe is kind of the same idea as a spring. They’re glass circular weights that you put on top that keeps it under the brine. Not a spring, but it’s just a weight. So that’s a similar thing. And I would say that is absolutely essential for me. I mean, I don’t make sauerkraut without using that weight.

Alison:
But I don’t use a cabbage slicer. I will talk about this later on about how I make sauerkraut. but um interesting that you say a cabbage slicer.

Holly:
That actually, you know, we can stay on topic here, but that actually, I had one, a wooden cabbage slicer, I don’t know, depending on the view, I have one in the back here. And it was gifted to me through Stone Creek Trading. It’s a company that makes fermentation crocks. And I never used it. It was just decoration. It’s too big and bulky. And when I went to republish the book, I had to make every recipe again multiple times to refine it, but then to ship off to the photographer and do this in a very short time frame. So I pulled it out, and it was another game-changing piece of equipment. 20 years into fermentation, I’d been slicing with a mandolin, which is a board with a knife across a blade, and you slide the cabbage across. I’ve been using that for many, many years. But this is how traditionally they made sauerkraut.

Holly:
Big crock and the wooden cabbage slicer and it has three blades on it. And what’s really cool about that is each time you draw the cabbage across, you get three slices. So that’s how I was, I mean, literally in 10 to 15 minutes, I can have a batch of sauerkraut in my jar ready to ferment because of how efficiently I’m slicing. And then also this is on kind of the dry sauerkraut. The key to beautiful sauerkraut is thin, long slices. And so you can put the cabbage into the box and slide it across the three blades and get nice, thin, long slices. So you’re opening up the cells in the cabbage and allowing it to release more liquid to make your brine to have more liquid for your sauerkraut when you’re fermenting.

Alison:
Fascinating.

Holly:
So not only was it more efficient, but I was shocked at the difference in flavor of some of the sauerkraut I had made with that form of how the cabbage was sliced when I went to taste it. Because we have these thin, even slices. They all ferment at the same time. And they’re thin enough to really open up all the cells in the cabbage.

Alison:
So I can see the cabbage slices behind you. And I would say it’s, you know, maybe it’s at least eight inches across and really quite long. It’s like a huge supercharged mandolin, like, you know, 10 times the size of a mandolin. And those blades, there’s three of them, whereas on my mandolin, there’s only one. And do you chop the cabbage into chunks before you start using it? Or do you put the whole or half a cabbage on it?

Holly:
It’s going to depend on the cabbage itself, but I tend to quarter it and fit a quarter in there and then that and put the quarter in there lengthwise and slide it across.

Alison:
Okay. Okay. Wow. That’s really interesting because we’ve got a question later on about cabbage not creating its own brine. So when we get to that, we shall refer back to that cabbage thing, I think. Do you want to talk briefly about airlocks and then we’ll take a break?

Holly:
Yeah, so airlocks. So an airlock is put on the top of your jar. There’s many different types of them. And the idea is to, fermentation is an anaerobic process, vegetable fermentation, which means without air. And so we want to seal the jar with our lid to make sure no air enters the jar during fermentation. But while fermentation is happening, the bacteria are munching away at the sugars in your cabbage and vegetables and they’re creating carbon dioxide that has to go somewhere so we have to let that out of the jar if we put a basic lid on super tight we can risk explosion because there’s no place for that carbon dioxide to go it bubbles up out of your ferment makes a nice layer on the top of your ferment to seal it but the excess one’s going to leave the jar so the different ways we can make sure that the air leaves the jar during the active part of fermentation is either to put the lid on a little loose. And that’s how I teach fermentation. That’s how I’ve done it for many years. Or we can use an airlock. There’s many different types of airlock. There are the three piece airlocks that we’ve seen in the wine fermentation where they stick up high and you fill them with water and.

Holly:
A little, oh, it’s a company they make, it’s like a little nipple, and there’s a crosshatch in the top of that. You put that on the type of the jar and screw that in place, and the force of the air will open up that nipple and find its way out. There’s little valves you put on top. So these are all different ways for the air to get out of the jar during fermentation.

Holly:
I personally don’t go out of my way to use an airlock. With the weight that I use, a lid comes with that, that does have an airlock in it. But I find that just leaving the lid loose allows for the air to escape and no great amount of air is going to make its way into the jar. So personally, I don’t tell people to go out of their way to go buy an airlock. Just put the lid on loose and let the air escape that way. If you have an airlock, fine, use it. They can be difficult to clean. And so you do risk spoilage and microbes and stuff. The sticky brine, as it moves out, it can during active fermentation the brine can actually get stuck into your airlock and then you have a mess there to clean up so i think there’s some things you can run into by using an airlock of keeping things clean then also there is a group that believes you have to seal the jar and they use the phyto jars and swear by those these are these bar clamp jars and the pressure of fermentation will lift the lid enough because it’s, it’s not completely sealed down there to let the air escape that way. So I would not overcomplicate life with an air lock. If you have it, use it. If it’s working for you, fine. Um, But that’s where I stand on the airlock.

Alison:
Yeah, OK, that’s really helpful. I mean, like I said, I’ve never used an airlock. Interestingly, I’ve been making a lot of sauerkraut just this last week because a friend who’s been doing us amazing favours, like carting our sun places in a car because we don’t have a car. I thought I said, what can I do for you? And she said, well, my kids like pickles. And I was like, OK, I’ll make you some sauerkraut. So I’ve been finding all the jars we have. And I found one big two litre, which is two quart jar. I couldn’t find a lid anywhere so I literally just covered it in some like a muslin and put elastic band on it um so I’m quite easy I either screw the lids on not very tightly or like this week because I couldn’t find the lid I just put a cover on it which is keeping all the kind of dust and stuff out which is actually letting that exactly I.

Holly:
Right and you have to think too that the brine is preventing that’s sealing the jar for.

Alison:
You so.

Holly:
When the ferment creates the brine and that sits on top of your packed ferment it’s still under the brine and that’s where the anaerobic process is happening you may end up with mold growing etc because you have the air exposure but in essence it is.

Alison:
Below the.

Holly:
Brine where it’s safe away from.

Alison:
Harm exactly great okay let’s take a quick ad break and we will come back with some more topics okay so i want to start by talking in this section about inoculants because i know that nourishing traditions talks about using whey to start ferments and a listener called christine asked me she said can holly tell me more about inoculants and she said in brackets i know it’s a no-go for sauerkraut um but i do know the nourishing traditions recipe for sauerkraut has whey in it so talk a little bit about, inoculants when to use them do we need to use them and do you use whey.

Holly:
Okay, so we’ve come a long way since Nourish Your Traditions and Sally Fallon have learned quite a bit about fermentation since then. When she put the book together, that was her way of making sure there was bacteria in the ferment. So, whey is a dripping from yogurt, and it has active bacteria in it. Bacteria that make dairy ferments, not bacteria that you’re going to find on vegetable ferments. And so, initially, I dripped my yogurt and used whey and added it to my ferments because that’s what I was taught in the book Nourishing Traditions 20, 25 years ago.

Holly:
We now understand that the vegetables come with their own bacteria, inherent bacteria. Those bacteria live close to the ground, that cabbage, those carrots, etc. They’re rife with bacteria, especially the closer to the picdate that we’re using it. Those bacteria, they’re ready to work for us. So when we add in whey, not only are we don’t need to, that’s an extra step and feels counterintuitive because I even bought little packets of bacteria for my vegetable ferments. And it just felt weird to be pouring that into the jar. It intuitively did not make sense. And so we’re introducing the bacteria that live in a dairy into our vegetable ferment. and it can taste kind of musty and off because it’s not the bacteria that are going to ferment the bacteria. I mean, they work in there, they do solve the job, etc. But I like to, as much as possible, do wild fermentation, which is working with the bacteria that are on the…

Holly:
Vegetables that were fermenting. But when you go to make yogurt, cheeses, ketchup, etc, where you’re dealing with dead bacteria, because you are cooking the milk generally, some people make a raw type yogurt. And so you’re killing the bacteria that are there. So you need to add a culture. That’s why when we make kombucha, we’re using a hot sugary tea, but we’re adding a culture from a pre-spatch kombucha to it to inoculate it. So that’s where it makes sense to me. I don’t use it anywhere else like never in a vegetable ferment never in a vegetable, pickles, etc. I do know I had some listeners who lived in the hot heat desert, etc. And they found that they needed to introduce bacteria into the vegetable ferment to have success with it. So I haven’t dealt with that personally. But I do know that’s when some people have used a inoculant or a culture of some sort in their ferment.

Alison:
That’s really useful. Thank you. Okay, specifically, let’s let’s talk about sauerkraut for a bit. And the first thing that i’m going to talk about is the type of cabbage because there was a very heated discussion on the supporter forum of discord about the types of cabbage um and i generally have used the kind of the hard cabbage that you see that you know if you squeeze it it doesn’t squeeze much and generally it’s either a really light greeny white or you get the red purpley ones andrea however said she uses Chinese Napa cabbage or Savoy cabbage. Now, Savoy cabbage is a cabbage I’ve never used for sauerkraut, you know, the really dark.

Holly:
Bubbly one.

Alison:
She doesn’t use the cabbages with the brittle leaves, which are the ones that I use, which we call white cabbages in Europe. Andrea said that the white cabbages and the hard cabbages, she said, rather than getting the flavour she likes, they tend to get bruised instead, and they sometimes taste metallic. But the curly cabbages… She feels like when she bites into them they crush really nicely under her teeth whereas the hard cabbages squeak and and I wondered first of all I wondered whether what your opinion on this was but I also wondered whether it’s tied into another question which I will read and we’ve just talked about a bit already which is whether cabbages get juicy because Francine who’s in Australia said to us I need help with dry kraut I can’t get mine to sweat so that what she means is when she’s putting the salt in she’s squeezing it or pounding it and she’s not getting much of the liquid out she’s having to add extra liquid into it in the form of brine now I’ve experienced that with my white or purple hard cabbages but maybe it’s the way I do it I don’t know maybe it’s the cabbage, and I can’t imagine ever using a savoy cabbage and I wondered if you could just wade into this debate and talk to us about types of cabbages and what you use.

Holly:
Okay, well, there’s a lot to unpack here. And a lot of fun, fascinating little tidbits for people to learn here because, you know, 20 years making dozens, hundreds of batches of sauerkraut, I’ve, you know, played around with many different little aspects of it. So, first off, we have to think of fermentation as a way of preserving the harvest. What we picked at that time was fresh, ready to go, generally done in the late fall. And that was the, we kept that, we preserved that cabbage as sauerkraut. So we had something to eat through the long winter season, et cetera.

Holly:
The cabbage, and so when you’re using cabbage freshly picked, it’s going to be high in moisture because it’s not sit in a storage facility somewhere. The longer it sits, it’s going to dry out. So one thing we have to think about is really fermentation is a seasonal practice. Though I have to say I used to practice it seasonally. I don’t anymore just because the way my life has gotten. So when we’re using cabbage that’s picked at the height of perfection and we’re using it soon after it’s been picked, it’s going to be full of moisture. And we won’t have trouble getting the brine. But when we go to make sauerkraut in March and that head of cabbage has been stored for five months, It’s lost a lot of moisture just sitting there during that time period. Wherever it was stored, it was brought to your store to buy, but it’s been stored for months because it was harvested in the late fall. So that’s going to be a factor in the moisture content.

Holly:
Traditionally, we’ve always used the hard cabbage seeds. The green round head cabbage kimchi is another beast and that does use the napa cabbage but that is done in it as a different ferment etc so sticking to sauerkraut i prefer the green cabbage it’s a personal preference is andrea is fermenting with her savoy and a napa cabbage and is loving her results fine but you have a thick rib in the cabbage and then you have the little leaves that are very fine. And so your finished ferment is going to, the texture of it is going to be different. With sauerkraut and using the green cabbage, you get a nice even texture the whole way through.

Holly:
And if you’re using the softer leaves, those are going to break down faster, they’re thinner, and they’re going to turn a little bit mushier versus the ribs that are going to be thicker. So it’s a texture preference. If it’s working, go for it. You know, go with what you like. but so that is my preference. Red cabbage is great to use. It tends to be a little tougher and it will take longer to ferment. Red cabbage is much higher in vitamin C. So some people prefer that if they’re looking to maximize the vitamin C content they’re getting out of something. But I’m making sauerkraut as a condiment. I can eat with my meals and, one, two, three times a day, every day throughout the whole year. I want to efficiently produce lots of sauerkraut, so I have it, and I want to know I can have consistent results with it. So when I use that green cabbage, I’m getting this nice thin slice, as we talked about earlier, and they’re fermenting all at the same time. The vegetables that I put in to flavor that sauerkraut are shredded and done about the same texture, so everything ferments at the same speed. So then And when I go to eat my sauerkraut, I have this nice, evenly textured ferment. So that’s why I tend to use the green cabbage because of what I’m looking for at the end, etc. So that’s it on the type of cabbage I use.

Alison:
Let’s talk a bit about the second part, which is Francine’s problem with the dryness. So you’re saying that if the cabbage has been freshly picked, it’s much less likely to have that problem with not creating its own brine. But i also feel like you know what we talked about before the ad break with your cabbage slicer, making really thin uniform um slices like you said it breaks down the cell walls more which makes that moisture that is there available so it sounds like you’re more likely to or less likely to have a problem with dry kraut if you’re using a cabbage slicer or some other thing that will make really really thin slices am i right.

Holly:
Right, exactly. So I’ve seen some people, sauerkraut is a dry ferment, a dry salted ferment. If you make pickles, we’re cutting up the pickles or whatever vegetables fermenting. We’re adding a brine so we don’t have to worry about how much liquid those are producing.

Holly:
And with sauerkraut, you’re not adding any liquid to the batch. You’re slicing things thinly and you’re salting them and mixing in that salt and the salt’s going to pull the water out of the cabbage cells to create your brine.

Holly:
And so you do want to thinly slice things so you can open up those cabbage cells to pull out plenty of liquid. So that’s one thing to think about when we’re making sauerkraut. We want to extract the liquid out of the cell. So it needs to be there and we need a mechanical way to get to it. You can slice it thinly with a knife. You can slice it thinly with a mandolin or the cabbage shredder you can also put it into a food processor and use either the slicing blade or use the s blade you just don’t want to over process it but i know some people elderly that have cannot chew the tougher quote sauerkraut will process it in the food processor so it’s a different texture but again you’ve opened up the cabbage cells to let out a lot of liquid you should not have to add brine to sauerkraut. When you slice it thinly, what I do is I put in my flavoring vegetables and those help if you’re adding, if you make just plain sauerkraut with just maybe a spice in there and there’s no other vegetable in there, you have no other way to get liquid in there. So we could combat the dry sauerkraut by adding in shredded carrots, shredded beets, radish, etc. Those are ways to add.

Holly:
Liquid-rich vegetables to ferment to guarantee that we have a brine. So that’s something to think about. If you’re making cabbage and you feel that it’s a little dry, it’s going to have the moisture, add in moisture-rich vegetables or even squeeze in a lemon and add that in. And that’s going to be another way to add liquid to it. And so we have to kind of think, how am I going to make sure I have enough liquid in here? I don’t want to add brine because it can kind of shift the flavor.

Holly:
And then how thinly we’re slicing it. You should not, Once you mix in that salt, my first step is to just mix it carefully. I’m not squeezing at all. I have put in all my shredded vegetables. I’ve added all my sliced cabbage, and I’ve salted it. And then I just mix it with my hands. I’m just turning the bowl, the vegetables in the bowl, making sure that the salt is evenly dispersed. As I’m doing that, it starts to glisten. You can see it start to shrink down, and you see it glisten because the water’s coming out mixing with that salt. Then I leave it set for 20 minutes. an hour, or like you said, overnight. But 20 minutes later, you should come back and be able to just squeeze it a little bit. I mean, two or three minutes of just gently massaging it with your hands and be able to tip that bowl to the side. And there should be a nice puddle of brine, you know, two, three inch puddle of brine.

Holly:
Making sauerkraut is not an exercise in pounding it with the pounder, unless you want it softer. It’s not having to really work it hard with your hands and wear your hands out. It’s a very gentle process that the bacteria doing the work for you and the osmosis, the salt pulling the liquid out of the cells, it does it on its own. So if you’re having to work to get liquid enough brine, then you have to backtrack and go, how fresh was the cabbage? How thinly did I slice it if I’m not getting any brine well maybe I should grab a radish or some carrots and stuff and shred those and add those to the mixture because I need that puddle of brine so when I pack it in the jar everything stays below the brine the bacteria can do their anaerobic work so that’s if you’re having dry sauerkraut the cabbage is too old, or you need to slice it thinly, et cetera, or remediate it with some of those

Holly:
liquids that you can add in there.

Alison:
So there’s so many things in what you just said, and I’m just trying to order in my head how I can ask them. So I hadn’t previously thought about adding extra veg, but I can see how fresh radishes that are really liquidy, sliced in there would really help. You mentioned that you shouldn’t need to add extra brine. Adding extra brine can change the flavor my question is what if someone has done what you’ve said and put the salt in and left it um either overnight or you know just for 20 minutes and they’ve massaged it and they’ve added in the extra things and maybe they’ve even put a lemon in there and there’s still not enough liquid because we know how important it is to keep that vegetables to keep that cabbage under the brine that is the key to not getting mold and so if you haven’t got if you still haven’t got enough would you then resort to brine or what would you do.

Holly:
I would resort to brine then. You would add a 2% brine where you’re mixing salt, weighing out your water and adding a 2% salt.

Alison:
But you’re saying that would change the flavor, so it makes it more salty, I presume?

Holly:
You’re not really, by adding 2%, you’re not really making it saltier. I guess when I found the changing of the flavor is, I was trying to keep my sauerkraut below the brine from day one of fermenting it to look out in the refrigerator until I ate it six months later. I still wanted that under the brine. That’s not going to work.

Holly:
It really just needs to be under the brine during the first week of fermentation. And this is where we can talk about the fermentation springs and weights and stuff. During that first week is when most of the activity for keeping it safe is going on. That’s when the pH drops and lots of acid is produced. The acid by the sugars in your cabbage. If you don’t have enough sugar in your cabbage, the bacteria don’t have as much food to eat, it won’t get quite as sour. But during that first week, it’s generally very easy to keep things under the brine with just about anything, with a small little jar, with a pickle weight, etc. Pickle pebble. Because the bacteria are very active. And so the brine levels are high, they spill over your jar, etc. But by the end of that first week, the pH has dropped to down below 4.0, which means it’s acidic and the pathogenic bacteria have been killed off, they’ve left, they’re not there any longer. And it has that tangy flavor, the colors have faded, etc. That all happens within that first week.

Holly:
And so if things don’t stay, and then the bacteria slow down, they’re not as active. So the brine levels may drop. So that’s when I was trying to go, how come my brine levels are dropping? Well, it depends on the temperature in your house. It depends on how far along you are in the process. When it gets cooler, the liquid goes back into the cabbage cells. Things slow down. When it’s warmer, you’ll see a higher brine level. I actually did, you know, I have quite extensive posts called dry sauerkraut. It’s on my website. I did extensive work on figuring this all out. And I took the temperature of my ferment in the morning and marked the brine level. Then as the kitchen warmed up, the brine level went up and the temperature, as the temperature of the house went up. So there’s a lot of factors at play on that brine level. But to get back to if we get through that first week, that’s been fermented safely. and if it’s no longer below the brine after that first week, you don’t need to add brine. It’s safely fermented, and no mold should be growing on it. If mold is growing on it, then you did not get enough action in the bacteria to get that pH down to turn it into a safe, preserved food.

Alison:
Yeah, okay.

Holly:
And so I used to try to add brine at the end of fermentation before I put it in the fridge, and that’s where I started noticing the flavor loss and the color shift, etc., because it didn’t need any more brine in there. I watered it down, and things just changed to a different flavor. So it’s that first week that’s important to keep.

Alison:
Everything below the brine and um i wanted to ask something else that was in my head before um i’m going slightly off piste here um and i have to remember we’ve got a lot of questions so i’m going to ask it very quickly um sometimes i have had people say to me and i’ve experienced it myself on random batches of sauerkraut the brine’s been fine at the beginning and there’s no mold it’s lovely it carries on and you know that you don’t need to put extra brine in because that first week is gone but yet perhaps you know a few weeks in or a month in the top third or the top quarter of the jar will turn a slightly different color like a kind of a gray more gray color as if it doesn’t have any liquid in it whether that is the case or not i don’t know and it tastes different to the stuff that’s right at the bottom which has more liquid in it yeah do you um know what that is and how you can stop that happening and whether it matters at all.

Holly:
That’s the oxidation. So that isn’t exposed to air, and that’s where it’s getting oxidized in essence, losing a little bit of its vitamin C content. Some people toss that out, some people mix it in. This is where I go back to my fermentation spring. So when we first started fermenting in jars, and Amazon came out with all their cool equipment you could go buy and add to make your fermentation easier, one of the first things they made were pickle pebbles, a glass disc. That you would put in your jar and keep things below the brine. The thought of that glass disc, most of us today are fermenting in jars. Traditionally, we ferment it in large crocks. We put a plate over the top of that crock. We put a heavy can on top to keep everything below the brine. They were thinking, wait, let’s keep things below the brine. When you move to a small jar, you don’t have the surface area to put something real heavy on top. So that glass pebble is actually fairly light. The bacteria are strong. They blow those bubbles, and they’re mighty. They can lift that sauerkraut up out of the brine. It’s called heaving. It’s actually happening because they’re blowing these little bubbles and creating air pockets and things that heave and move up and out of the brine. So your weight after that first week, generally, not always, but the sauerkraut heaves and it moves up and out of the brine.

Holly:
A fermentation spring the company the original company that made them is trellis they’re available on amazon there’s a couple uh states uh stores in the states that sell them too but um it’s a spring and so when you put the spring in there it’s exerting force down on the top of your ferment and any air pockets that formed are kind of pushed up they can’t form because so much pressure is being pushed down on your ferment with the jar lid on there. And so you can keep everything under the brine for the three or four weeks that it ferments. And that’s why I really like those fermentation springs. A way you can do the same thing without buying a spring is to use a little shot glass jar or a smaller 125 milliliter jar. Put that on top of your packed ferment. Don’t put a lid on it. I mean, the little jar, put it upright. Don’t put it, you know, You want the opening on top or else you’ll never get it out of your jar. And you put a lid on. So that’s exerting force again by using that jar is pushing

Holly:
down on the ferment with the jar lid to keep everything below the brine. The same idea as that fermentation spring. I call them fermentation gates. But that’s…

Holly:
If you’re concerned about the dryness, keeping things under the brine, about the discoloration that happens from oxidation, by using some type of strong force that those bacteria can do nothing against, then we keep things below the brine throughout duration. But when you move it into the fridge, that liquid’s going to get pulled back into the cabbage cells and you won’t see that brine as you would see during fermentation.

Alison:
Wonderful. Okay, thank you. sometimes with my pickled pebbles i do a similar thing to the shot glass in that i will use two, big ones and therefore it’s pushed against the top of the jar so it’s actually exerting that heavy thing it’s not just the weight of the thing in itself but it’s pushing against something which is a useful thing to do okay let’s talk a little bit more about salt before we move on because you’re saying that if you add a brine if you do have to add a brine to sauerkraut you’re using two percent brine salt so that’s two percent salt to the weight of to the weight of the water is that the same concentration that you use on the sourca on the actual cabbage itself and tell us what type of salt you use and whether that’s important.

Holly:
Right. Okay. So I do use, I like 2%. It seems to work well. Back to microbiologists that have studied fermentation, they have noticed anywhere from like 1.5 to 2.5% salt. It’s a nice range. We’re taking, we’re talking salt. We’re talking salt concentration. We take the weight of our vegetables. So for a jar of sauerkraut, a one liter, one quart jar, typically you can fit 800 grams of ingredients in that jar. That’s the shredded cabbage, the seasonings, shredded carrots, et cetera, all mixed together. We weigh everything that goes in that jar. So typically, that’s 800 grams that fits. That’s how I do my recipes in my book. It becomes so easy. Every time I go back to make sauerkraut, I just made three batches this weekend for a Parkinson’s talk coming up. And I realized how easy that process is when you’re using that scale and you’re sticking to this amount. It just goes together so easy. So then I’m adding 2% salt concentration to that. If you get too low, then the mold and yeast grow too easily. If you get too high, then fermentation slows way down. So I find that the 2% number works great. So we have 800 grams of ingredients.

Holly:
You multiply that by 0.02, that’s 16 grams of salt, which is about a tablespoon. So initially I used a tablespoon, but it’s going to depend on the density and type of salt you’re using. I used to use a wet type salt, and it had so much moisture in it, I was not getting enough actual sodium in my ferment. I was getting messy kind of moldy ferments. So first off, the salt concentration would be 2% for sauerkraut. Fermented vegetables are a little bit different. And then my favorite salts, just like I don’t eat processed foods, I don’t like to eat processed salts. They work. You can pull Morton’s sea salt with the iodine off your shelf if that’s what you have in your kitchen. You don’t want to go out and buy anything. Yes, that iodine might interfere with fermentation, but go ahead and use it. Don’t get in the way of stopping ferment to find the perfect salt. But I like to use a dry, non-processed salt. So that would be Himalayan pink salt or real salt. They have the complete mineral-rich profile in them and the flavor of them I like. It’s a wide range of nutrients in there. We have not taken out all the minerals and left just the sodium.

Holly:
I don’t use the gray, Celtic gray salt. I did for years. But again, we’re looking at um our sodium levels not being consistent because of the when it’s um dehydrated we’re not always pulling out all the water it’s like very wet salt so i found i was not getting enough sodium in my ferments i was probably more like at 1.5 or lower not knowing it and um i just found i had better results with the himalayan pink salt or the real salt.

Alison:
Okay can you explain to listeners you’ve kind of mentioned that the gray salt was a wet salt and the two salts that you like the himalayan um and the the real salt are dry can you explain the difference between a wet and a dry salt what you mean by that.

Holly:
So the dry salts are coming from rock beds mined deep within the earth. And they’re taking the rocks in essence and grinding them finely into your salt. The wet salts are coming from evaporating seawater. So they have these big clay beds that the water sits on and evaporates, then the salt’s left behind. And so it’s going to depend on the drying process how much of the moisture is left, evaporated out how much of the salt is left and so we’re ending up we need the correct salt concentration which is your sodium concentration and so that can vary greatly from salt to salt and so when we’re evaporating it with a moist salt I find personally there’s people that love it and use it but i find it’s not getting enough sodium in there i’m not getting a consistent result as i am with the dry mineral rich okay that’s.

Alison:
Really helpful thank you so we’ve got a question from rebecca who’s um in the states and you’ve kind of answered a lot of it she asked why is there such a wide range of salt amounts recommended you said you know the kind of the range is the ideal amount to use and you think two percent is the ideal amount she also said i’m also confused by recommendations to add a certain percentage of salt per weight of vegetables because some say to include any water in that weight and some say to weigh the vegetables alone, so are you saying just weigh the vegetables is that your recommendation.

Holly:
So we’re talking two different things okay one is dry salting making sauerkraut so we’re looking at the weight of the ingredients we’re not adding any water to that we’re weighing our vegetables we’re adding our two percent salt right, Then we have pickling, which is a brine ferment. So we’re packing vegetables into a jar. We’re adding brine to that, fermenting in the brine. We’re not using salt to extract the liquid out of those carrots or those cucumbers, etc. And so I think Rebecca is referring to making pickles, whether that be carrot sticks, a medley of cauliflower and everything mixed together. So that does get confusing yeah i developed a pickle class and played around with it quite a bit so when you’re fermenting sauerkraut we’re going by the weight of it we’re doing two percent, when we’re fermenting and that cabbage is a harder vegetable we’re slicing it thinly, when we’re fermenting vegetables carrots cucumbers uh peppers etc etc., we’re chopping those up into little chunks or long spears or adding a brine to them. When we’re doing a brine ferment, we weigh all the ingredients and we weigh the water.

Alison:
I see.

Holly:
Because we want everything in that jar, whether the water was extracted out of the cabbage cells or whether we poured it in, we want everything in there to be the same salt concentration.

Alison:
Right.

Holly:
And so we do weigh the vegetables. because if you pack just one big carrot in that jar and added a brine, a 5% brine over the top, your final salt concentration is going to be different if you pack 20 carrots tightly in that jar and pulled over a 5% brine. There’s two schools of thought, two ways of teaching it out there. One is you add a certain concentration of brine to whatever’s packed in the jar. And then the camp I’m in, We weigh the water and the vegetables together, and we figure out the salt concentration that way.

Alison:
Okay.

Holly:
It’s a little bit of a hassle because… You need to pack everything in the jar and add the water to know how much everything weighs. And then you’re trying to add salt. You’re trying to get it all to dissolve. I shake it.

Alison:
Okay, clever.

Holly:
Which can be a little bit of a mess, but I’m shaking that jar until it dissolves. Some people pour the water back out, stir in the salt, but you know, it’s highly concentrated. So it doesn’t actually completely dissolve and then you’re pouring it back in. Or if you know the exact weight of your vegetables and the weight of your water, you can kind of do everything ahead of time. I haven’t developed my recipes to that point, but if I know I’m putting 400 grams of carrots in that jar and I’m putting 400 grams of water into that jar, I can put in my 16 grams of salt and everything’s good. So that’s the basic concept, but then we have to look at what we’re fermenting.

Holly:
Watery vegetables are going to behave differently than solid vegetables so like a solid carrot’s going to behave differently than a watery pepper or cucumber they break down quicker and so we need more salt in there to slow that process to make make the ferment work okay and so it tends to be if you have a denser vegetable they don’t have as much access to the microbes so like for sauerkraut We slice that cabbage thinly, but if you have carrot sticks in there, those microbes are packed in there. They don’t have as much access, and things are going to be a little bit slower. So we have to look at the density of the vegetable, how we chop, slice that vegetable, the sugar level of the vegetable, and how we’re fermenting it. So in a typical brine ferment, we’re going to use a different salt concentration because the density and the sugar and everything are different and the accesses of microbes are different depending on how we chop it up, etc.

Alison:
So that explains why Rebecca’s heard lots and lots and lots of different salt concentrations. Now I get it. Okay.

Holly:
And so it’s something to experiment with and play around with. I tend to recommend a higher salt concentration for cucumbers, etc., and a lower salt concentration for, like, it’s hard because the carrots are sugary, so you want to slow things down a little bit. So the salt concentrations vary, and I experiment a lot with my recipes to play around with it because they can tend to be rather salty, more salty than, say, sauerkraut. Ferments are salty because we need the salt to preserve it, but I find that pickles can tend to be a little more salty than, say, sauerkraut. So I prefer to make a vegetable medley when I do my ferments. I like to chop up a variety of vegetables, say like the cauliflower, red onion and chopped apple in there. I wouldn’t shred the apple because it’s going to open it up too quickly. So you have to play around with that. And then I’ll add like a 3% salt concentration to that. And so you’re…

Holly:
By doing a medley of vegetables, you’re not stuck on just the cucumbers that are going to break down easily. You have to use a higher salt concentration for that. So you look at what your primary vegetable is and use that salt concentration and play around with it. Temperature, most of the time we’re fermenting these in summer when it’s warm. So if I’m doing cucumber pickles, they’re going to go into an ice chest. And I’m going to put a frozen ice bottle in there to keep my temperature down, to slow things down.

Holly:
So that is part of playing around with having those microbes work at the right temperature and the right speed. But that’s why Rebecca’s getting confused because we’re talking a brine ferment versus the dry salt method.

Holly:
And then we’re talking different vegetables and then what sides you have chopped those vegetables into.

Alison:
Yeah okay that that’s really clear thank you holly thank you okay let’s take a break and we will come back and talk about length of fermenting and then also making a year’s worth of sauerkraut, okay so another question that came up recently on our discord forum was how long should i ferment my sauerkraut for um this person said i feel like i’m never able to get it as sour as i want it to be i think my last batch sat for six weeks and the flavor did not change but it took on a kind of a musty funk instead of tasting truly sour my kimchi can get really fizzy and sour tasting in just four days um help so um, Talk to us about how long you ferment your cabbage for and what the kind of variables are about fermenting it short for a short period of time and fermenting it for a long period of time.

Holly:
Okay, you ferment it to your liking so that you enjoy it and you eat it. So that’s kind of one level of answer to the question. And then the second one is for sauerkraut, when you’re fermenting it in a large crock, you have a very stable environment. and it tends to be cooler, and I’ll tend to ferment in a large crock more like six to eight weeks. I feel like I get better flavor development going on. But it has to be in a cool area, and I will kind of check it to make sure. I don’t like soft, over-fermented sauerkraut. So I do want to catch it and not have it go too long. You kind of get to know on your temperatures how long to ferment something. When we’re fermenting in the jars, which most of us are doing now, it tends to be a shorter ferment. You don’t have the thick, stable porcelain walls. the temperature will sway a little bit more. And I tend to ferment those three to four weeks.

Holly:
We’re learning more and more as time goes on, and we’re researching on how many probiotics are in that ferment. What is the best length to ferment it? How am I going to maximize the number of probiotics? I’ve gotten to the point where I really don’t worry about that. We don’t know. There’s different ferments. There are different bacteria at different stages. The dead bacteria are good for us. The even heated, the recent research came out that even heated ferments, so like cooking your sauerkraut into this beautiful dish. Stir-frying it with whatever, there is still benefit to what’s in that. So I don’t think we can nail it down and say, I’m going to ferment this for 28 and a half days at this temperature and I’m going to get the most probiotics out of it, etc. So the bacteria are too smart. They know what they’re doing. We can’t outsmart them that way.

Alison:
Right near the house.

Holly:
Yeah. And I know that the question she talked about, kimchi getting that bubbling right away kimchi has other ferments in it if you’re making kimchi in a traditional fashion you’re adding in fish sauce you’re adding in salted shrimp, to develop this deeper flavor profile but you’re adding in extra bacteria that are going to help the process kimchi’s done in a little bit different manner so you will get kimchi i ferment for five to seven days and move it to the fridge for flavor development but it’s got Different beasts in there It’s got the, Gochugaru The Korean red pepper So it’s going to Behave differently So that’s, why they’re going to ferment different. But then you go back to the quality of the vegetable. There’s got to be sugar in there for the bacteria to eat. So if that cabbage, who knows what variety it is, or maybe just the growing conditions for it that year. But ideally, we’re back to fermenting seasonally in the fall. Cabbage, there’s winter cabbage and there’s summer cabbage.

Holly:
Summer cabbage is grown during the summer. It grows rapidly, and it’s going to be thinner leaves, and it’s going to be very airy when you cut open that head of cabbage. Winter cabbage is harvested in the late fall after a few hard frosts. The cold nights are going to sweeten up that cabbage and make it much sweeter than, say, even that summer cabbage just won’t have the same sweetness to it.

Holly:
The bacteria, we’re back to what do the bacteria need? They need sugar. They’re not going to produce lactic acid unless they have sugar to eat, the sugar found in your cabbage. So if that cabbage that you bought, and I always forget to do this to kind of sample it before I actually use it, if it doesn’t have sugar in it or high levels of sugar in it, the bacteria don’t have as much food. They’re not going to make as much lactic acid. It’s not going to be as sour. And so you have to look at, again, what do we need for that bacteria? They need sugar to make that sour tang, and it’s going to ferment faster when there’s more sugar in there. If your batched cabbage doesn’t seem sweet enough, put a teaspoon of sugar into your sauerkraut before you pack it, your mixture before you pack it into the jar. That’s extra sugar for the bacteria. Kimchi, you add sugar to the seasoning paste, or you add a sweet onion, or you add a pear to it. So they are adding more sugar to that ferment, which is why you’re going to see it bubbling quicker than you would with a sauerkraut.

Alison:
Okay.

Holly:
Does that cover what we want?

Alison:
It does inside that there was another question from christine which was what’s the minimum ferment time to get some health benefits and i feel like you’ve kind of answered that because you’re saying look there the science isn’t saying you need to ferment it for seven and a half months but you know you’ve also said earlier on that really you know that brine is bubbling up for a week and after that the the fermentation is slowing down greatly and so from my perspective in my kitchen I leave my sauerkraut on the side for probably about 10 days I would say and at the beginning of that you know the the brine’s coming out and it’s on a tray and it’s going everywhere and then it slows down and usually if I’ve run out of sauerkraut my son’s there going is it ready yet is it ready yet and he’s trying to open it and taste it a bit he’s like no it’s still cabbage still cabbage and I’m like no it’s not ready yet stop um but after about 10 days he’s usually happy, And I feel like any time after that, you know, he’s eating it, it’s in the fridge, there’s another jar that stays on the side maybe for another four or five days before I put it in the fridge. It feels to me like…

Alison:
At least that week or 10 days is what I feel is the time that’s needed for the probiotics to have done their initial real, you know, heavy lifting work. But I don’t feel like there’s a reason to leave it for, you know, a year and a half. And I generally don’t like sauerkraut that’s when left a year and a half. And I feel like you’re basically saying the same thing, that there’s no minimum, there is a minimum time to make it ferment. But other than that, it’s up to you.

Holly:
You know i would go with typically if you said give me a number i would say three to four weeks okay it’s going to depend on the temperature in your house it’s going to ferment quicker when it’s warmer but like like we say during those last few weeks you’re getting more lactic acid you’re getting a deeper flavor profile going on whether you can taste it or notice it who knows but I do know when you said that, no, it’s still cabbage, it’s still cabbage, it’s not ready yet. It is good to taste it along the way, because all of a sudden you go, wow, this tastes so good. There is a shift, it shifts from tasting like salty cabbage, just something just outstanding out of this world that you just go, wow, it’s delicious. And that’s why if I forget to put a ferment on my plate, the whole meal has shifted. When I add that ferment to my dinner plate, the meal tastes better. All of a sudden, you’re a five-star chef because you’ve added this umami-rich ingredient. So what you’re tasting is that shift to that umami, that pleasant, savory taste. It is switched from salty cabbage to that, and that, Opens up the taste buds and life is good because we have that flavor profile going on.

Alison:
Great. Thank you. OK, the next question is really an exciting one for us, you know, considering we’re an Ancestral Kitchen podcast.

Alison:
It’s from Nicole, who’s a listener, and she says that she’s grateful to be part of our lovely community. And she also says, I’m looking for advice on how to best make and store a year’s worth of sauerkraut, which is amazing. She lives in wisconsin and she tries to eat locally but fresh cabbage is only available here in the autumn fall this year she says i tried storing my garden cabbage in the fridge wrapped in plastic not ideal but it became dry and resulted in a funky ferment when i made it into kraut in the midwinter possibly the lack of freshness affected the fermentation she then says i’m considering making one large batch in the fall instead when the cabbage is freshly harvested and she would greatly appreciate any insight including the storage containers what’s better for her to use the recipe and the method is there a specific way she should be doing it when she’s thinking about doing it for a year and is there a variety of cabbage that’s better suited for long-term fermentation so holly could you you’ve talked about it being a seasonal thing you know historically it was a seasonal thing could you talk a bit to um this question from nicole.

Holly:
Yeah, this is great. I love it, because this is how we should be thinking. But, you know, our society today, that’s, yeah, that’s a tough question.

Holly:
Number one, you need a second refrigerator. Yeah, you got to store all this. If you’re going to go to all this work, you want to store it at a stable temperature, which is your fridge temperature. If you’re storing it down in a basement, that’s when you’re going to store it in a large crock to help it, but it’s about 10 degrees warmer Fahrenheit than your fridge. And so things are going to soften up and shift in flavor and consistently over time. So number one, you need a place to store it. I like talking storage, I like to store it in quart liter jars. That makes it easy. So I’ll decant it. I have large crocs that I fermented in, and then I decant it into quart liter jars. That makes it easy to grab and use and put with meals. If I’m having to go scoop it out of a large crock somewhere and figure out where to store that, etc. So store it in the containers in which you’re going to serve it in. And that’s going to help with that.

Holly:
And then I do have a post you can direct to people on my website, Surefire Sauerkraut in a crock, where I go over the whole process of figuring out your crock size and how much cabbage to put into that. Recipe-wise, you’re just doubling, tripling, quadrupling your recipe. I like to work with a triple recipe. So all my recipes are for one quart, one liter batches. And so if it calls for 200 grams of carrots, I’m going to triple that and I’m going to put in.

Holly:
600 grams of carrots if it calls for 20 grams of garlic i’m going to triple that and put in 60 grams of garlic i’m making a triple batch the reason why i make a triple batch even though i may need two or three triple batches to fit in that my huge crock the bowl i have at home is going to work with that triple batch so i’m not having i have a large bowl i could fit triple the ingredients into that large bowl and then you can mix it nicely you’re not ending up with this huge tub that it’s just hard to get in and mix everything evenly and get the flavor profile and the salt dispersed evenly throughout it. It also works on my digital scale. I can put that triple batch on my scale. It still works. It’s not too heavy for that size batch. And then it’s doable. I’m not overwhelmed with 20 heads of cabbage. I can make a triple batch at once, pack it into my crock. And if I’m done for the day, then I put the lid on, I do the next triple batch the next day so it’s um doable and then um what else was i thinking on that so it fits in nicely etc and then what i’m doing is putting enough triple batches they end up being five pounds or what 2400 grams into my crock layering it one batch at a time until i’ve got a knife two to three inch space at the top of the crock there to um leave for air expansion and stuff and.

Holly:
You’re going to be doing it in the fall it’s nice to hook up with some local farmers visit your farmers markets and find somebody that will grow a winter cabbage you may not find winter cabbage like that I’m finding most of the stores do stock winter cabbage, something very heavy for its size and when you slice it open there’s not a lot of space between the leaves, and I’m trying to think what else.

Alison:
Are you, your crock, do you put a plate and a weight on it and then you’re leaving that on the side or somewhere else in your house? Whereabouts are you doing that?

Holly:
I’m using a water sealed crock. They’re newer. The first original ones came out of Germany, a harsh crock. But what these have, they have a moat around the side of it.

Alison:
Yeah, okay, I’ve seen them, yeah.

Holly:
And then you put the lid in the moat and you fill the moat with water and you get to hear it bubble and make music as it’s fermenting. You have to be careful that you don’t overfill that crock and the water drain down into the crock. You want to jiggle that lid before you add any water and make sure it kind of moves around and that you’re not adding excess water to your moat there.

Holly:
So I’m using the large crock and I’m finding a cool place in my house. I may let it ferment at a warmer temperature, the good room temperature that first week, but then ideal temperature would be like 65, what is that, 18, 19 degrees, 65 degrees Fahrenheit is the ideal temperature. So that might be a garage or something. You don’t want it to get too cool. And you do want to check that crock. So periodically, I know you’re opening it up and letting air in, but again, you can have heaving going on. So you want to make sure you’re using a heavy enough weight to hold things below. And maybe after that first week when all the activity is slowed down, to push everything back down into the brine again and push that down on that weight because of that heaving that may happen. You don’t want to open up that crock and, you know, after you’ve done a few batches, you know what happens. But you don’t want to put in all that effort to discover something went off. You do want to make sure you’ve perfected your process with the one quart one liter jar, and understand that you’ve gotten your salt numbers dialed in if you have a flavor you like etc don’t experiment and make your first batch of sauerkraut ever in a large crock because you don’t want the learning curve from that um there are some varieties of cabbage that are grown just for sauerkraut but generally what i’m fine at the grocery stores nowadays are nice green or lighter heavy heads of cabbage you’re buying cabbage that feels very heavy for its size okay.

Alison:
And then once it’s fermented for the three or four weeks that you’re saying is the way that you like it you’re then decanting it into those liter or quart jars and.

Holly:
Putting it in a second fridge yeah yes and i might even ferment it longer more like four to six weeks just depending on temperature and stuff and if you don’t have a second fridge initially when i first fermented, I fermented with the moon. I had my harsh crock and every full moon I made a batch of sauerkraut.

Holly:
And I had just one fridge at that time. You’d be amazed if you do a little cleanup in your fridge and you line up your jars kind of against the back of the fridge. You can fit seven, eight jars in there. So if you’re fermenting every few months, you can… Still do it with a single fridge if you’re organized and get rid of the extra stuff and stay stay on top of how things are organized in your fridge.

Alison:
I like doing that i like rob my husband rob says oh there’s no room in the fridge for anything and i’m like yes there is let me in there i’m going through there’s an entire shelf now you know where did that come from yes exactly.

Alison:
There’s one other thing i wanted to say about you’ve answered nicole’s question really beautifully there’s one other thing i wanted to ask you about which was um several years ago i fermented a whole head of cabbage without chopping it i listened to a talk by irina georgiescu who’s an eastern european um recipe developer and cookbook author and she talked about how in her culture and in her family they used to have a balcony and then have this massive like you know container the size of an oil drum out on the balcony and they used to have their cabbages the whole heads and just throw the cabbage heads in this thing and then fill it fill it up with the brine and there were literally like you know tens of cabbage heads fermenting on their balcony all winter and i got i actually wanted to make cabbage rolls and you know usually in cabbage rolls you don’t ferment you just boil the cabbage leaves and then you wrap it up in the pork and cook it but i wanted to make it properly with fermented whole cabbage leaves so i got a big jar for me it was big it was five liter just a bit over five five quarts and i put a whole cabbage in there and i fermented the whole cabbage and it worked absolutely brilliantly and the leaves were amazing and i wrapped them up and i made somales which is the eastern european kind of you know stuffed cabbage thing um have you ever tried with whole cabbage heads and would you recommend it.

Holly:
I’ve never tried it, I have not tried it. And, you know, just a few things I’ve read is I think you have to remove the core so you can get things, you know, that’s why they have the core. And I’m eating sauerkraut, as you can see, if you ever leaf through my book or see some of my recipes for the flavor. To me, just a plain cabbage leaf on its own without any, like, you know, I make sauerkraut with pineapple and lime zest and juice and stuff. And it’s like, I’m not going to eat. That’s not going to appeal to me. I’m using sauerkraut for my gut health. And I want to eat something that I like and my family likes. So that just, I have no desire. I wouldn’t mind a cabbage roll with all those goodies inside. But I want something to put my gut health on autopilot. I want something I can grab out of my fridge, effortlessly add it to whatever I’m eating, whether that’s a hamburger, a Buddha bowl, a salad, or my fried eggs. And literally, I’m putting my gut health on autopilot with very little effort. My main ferment I make throughout, you know, I have throughout the year we eat with all our meals is sauerkraut. And it keeps my life easy. I’m not having to, the actual reason why I got into making sauerkraut was not only because when I read about it, the gut health and nourishing traditions was.

Holly:
I jumped into nourishing traditions. All of a sudden I had sour cream going, kefir, souring milk for the first time, grinding my own grain to make my breads and stuff. And then a little toddler in the house. And it was like, I can’t do this. This is not helping my health to be overwhelmed like this. So then I dialed it way back and I said, I’m going to focus on one thing.

Holly:
And that one thing became sauerkraut. And that’s where I am today. I do not have a gazillion things fermenting on my sauerkraut I’m not a fermentista I’m, a mom at home who wants to keep my family healthy. And I love fermented foods. And I love what they add to my meals and the flavors, but I don’t go overboard with it. I have other things I want to do with my life.

Alison:
Yeah, I get that. And I have to say, you know, perusing your website, it’s quite clear from the recipes on there that you are excited about the flavor of fermented vegetables. You know, just in your newsletter that came out like yesterday or something, there was a carrot and radish ferment and you know I looked at it and it’s got three different green herbs in it and and lots of different flavours and you know something that I wouldn’t naturally or automatically think of so it is very clear from your recipes you know if people go to makesauerkraut.com that you’re you’re you’re in it you’re in it for the gut health definitely but you’re in it for the flavour too not because you’re going down some crazy rabbit hole like I often do okay um we’ve talked a little bit about other vegetable ferments from a salt perspective but we had a question here from lorraine who says i’ve been fermenting sauerkraut for years now but i was wondering whether there’s a key to knowing how long to ferment other vegetables for example zucchini carrots green beans radishes is it just a matter of the percentage of water vegetable has should I experiment and stop fermenting when it smells pleasantly sour she said I often tire of looking at recipes and want to experiment but can’t experiment if you don’t know the basics and she said she’s looking forward to the episode so can you talk a bit about the length of time for the different vegetables.

Holly:
Um, you know, one to two weeks seems to be the range, but you’re going to look at how soft it is. And I think she answered her own question. It’s going to be just experimenting with it and going to you like the flavor and the texture of it. If you let it ferment too long, it’s going to get too soft. And to get it to ferment longer, you have to add more salt to it. So you’re looking at your salt concentration, the higher it is, it’s more, it’s going to slow down, you’re going to need a higher salt concentration the softer the vegetable is the more watery it is so like zucchini and cucumbers need a higher salt concentration because they’re very soft and we need you know we can add tan and soon to crisp them up but we have to look at that salt to slow things down and it’s going to be um how uh what you um which shape and size you’re chopping them into a shredded ferment you’re not going to go shred um.

Holly:
Zucchini unless you want like a relish with it that’s going to be a different ferment where you’re going to do more of a dry salt with that if you want a pickle relish you’re going to chop up those cucumbers so it’s it’s playing around with it it’s looking at controlling temperature i know why i just had a webinar with kirsten shockey and she for her pickles she has has the book fermented vegetables i’ve written quite a few books very knowledgeable and she now moves her cucumber pickle spears into the fridge after 24, 48 hours and lets them slowly ferment in the fridge. So somewhat like kimchi, where you’re fermenting it for a shorter time period, you know, five, six, seven days, and then moving to the fridge for the flavor development. She’s now doing the same thing with her cucumber pickles, fermenting them for a shorter time period and moving them to the fridge. Pretty much like what I’m saying is keeping them in a cooler spot to slow down fermentation. But… You know, I would start with like that 3% number for brine pickles, 3% salt concentration, and then play with it, go, did it ever get to what I wanted to? Maybe I need to use less salt, etc. And there’s general guidelines out there how much salt to use. But, you know, you’re anywhere from 2%, 3%, 4% and the weight of the vegetables plus the water and looking at how you’re preparing those.

Holly:
In my mind I would love my next book would be like a salad in a jar type.

Alison:
Thing yeah where.

Holly:
I do all these different vegetable medleys different chopped together and then I’m not having to battle the mushy cucumber I did because I mixed that cucumber in with.

Alison:
Something else.

Holly:
And I have those harder vegetables to kind of combat the softness of the cucumber or the peppers.

Alison:
That’s helpful um what I want to do is we go to an ad break a little bit early and then I want to come back and talk a bit more about pickles because we do have some specific questions on that, okay so you talked a bit about pickles and kind of mixing them up and putting them with other harder vegetables I feel like pickles are an area where a lot of people struggle, and particularly cucumbers and making and them getting squishy and you’ve mentioned tannins and And I remember, you know, hearing a long time ago that introducing tannins into the fermentation can help. Christine asked, how can I stop my cucumber pickles turning into water balloons? She said when she uses vinegar, they’re absolutely fine. But when she ferments them, they always go mushy and fizzy. No, that was Hannah. So there’s two people, Christine and Hannah, both having problems with their cucumber pickles. Could you talk a little bit about cucumber pickles and how to do them the fermented way without them getting too watery or getting all mushy?

Holly:
Okay, so number one, forgive yourself if you never can get cucumber pickles working, you never liked them, and you end up buying vinegar pickles, because that’s just a flavor profile and stuff you can’t duplicate, because you’ve never figured it out. Forgive yourself, it’s okay, you’re eating other ferments. A friend of mine who loves pickles, I kept giving my jars of pickles to her, and her daughter wouldn’t eat them, because she’s used to the Klausen whatever pickle. So sometimes we can’t get past that childhood flavor that we’re trying to introduce these wonderful fermented foods into our diet. And we still like, you know, that store-bought pickles. So that’s okay. Don’t feel bad about enjoying your store-bought pickles. But to make them fermented, a couple little tricks are to cut off the blossom end. That’s where the pectinase that breaks down the cell walls there’s a higher concentration of that there so that’s one thing to help out is to cut off the blossom and if you get mixed up which one’s the blossom end or not just cut off both ends you don’t need to take off much but sometimes you look at it you go i don’t know what’s the blossom end how does a pickle grow what you know it can be confusing when you’re trying to do all these things and figure it out it’s like then cut off both ends, that makes it easy.

Holly:
Soaking them in cold water, the fresher they are. If you’re going to make cucumber pickles, you’re either growing your own cucumbers or you’re buying them locally at the farmer’s market. When you’re dealing with fresh picked cucumbers, 99%, just like other ferments, really, 99% of your issues go away. When I can go out to my garden and pick my cucumbers I’m growing, I’m growing little cucumbers, not the big watery ones with the big seeds in them. If you slice it open, it’s watering, it has huge seeds in it, you’re fighting already. That’s not designed for making fermented cucumber pickles. And the cucumbers designed for commercial canning or the big Kirby’s, those are different than what you’re going to ferment with. Those are designed for vinegar, sugar, pickles. They’re not designed for salting and doing a brine one. So you want to get nice small little snacking cucumbers that when you slice it open you can barely see the seeds in them that they haven’t even formed yet that will help on the crispiness of them soaking them in cold water before you ferment them will help chill them down that helps too cutting off the blossom ends and then you can also if you see a lot of seeds you can scoop those out.

Holly:
And then using a tannin of some sort, a tea bag, those all will help with keeping things crispy. We all end up with mushy pickles. And if you do, you can always turn them into cucumber relish or try Kirsten’s trick and move them into the fridge after 48 hours. And definitely if I’m making cucumber pickles, I’m doing them in an ice chest. It’s a hassle but when you can control that temperature remember you’re slowing down the work of the bacteria you’re giving them a cooler home a temperature they prefer if you’re trying to ferment in summer when they yeah have freshly picked those cucumbers it’s warm your house is going to be warm so cool it down and find a cool spot and that’s going to help slow down fermentation allow for more flavor development explain.

Alison:
Briefly how you make the ice chest.

Holly:
Um so just your cooler that you take camping or whatever with you I use a smaller one because I’m only doing like two or three jars so I put um so get the size cooler that you have handy that works for the number of jars you’re putting in there I throw a couple towels in there to kind of absorb some of the coolness but I freeze one or two for my small little six packs cooler I do it in I just freeze a small little juice jug so one or two of those and I’m putting a thermometer are in there just to kind of monitor the temperature and then once a day i’m swapping out the ice okay so i put the jars in there i kind of wrap the towel around it so i’m not i don’t have my um jar straight up against the frozen ice jug and then that’s just cooling things down enough to more like 65 to 68 to slow down fermentation so there’s frozen jugs that you swipe swap out daily,

Holly:
and then your jars in there fermenting.

Alison:
Okay and how long would you leave them in there.

Holly:
Cucumber pickles um to the flavor you’d like so that’s like a week to one to two weeks is generally vegetable ferments seem to work that one to two weeks but uh the pickles are going to go faster so start tasting them around day three four when you’ve done it a while you don’t need to taste them but you’re not going to learn about that flavor shift and the texture change and what’s going on unless you’re opening up that jar sticking your hand in there and trying it i know it breaks all rules, but that’s how you’re going to learn.

Alison:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Wonderful. Thank you. Okay. We do have some more questions about kind of troubleshooting and mold and how do I know if the ferment’s gone bad? What I’d like to do because we have gone kind of over time is if you still have time to take those questions and we’ll record an after show just when we finish that we’ll go on our private podcast. Are you okay hanging around to do that for like another 10 or so minutes after we finished yeah yeah that’s fine okay so in that case we will cover kind of slime and mold in the after show um what i did want to talk to you about was um what are your favorite vegetable ferments you know what it sounds to me like sauerkraut is the thing but oh oh.

Holly:
What I just thought of, because we were talking about mold, cranberry relish.

Alison:
Oh, okay.

Holly:
This is one I make in the fall when you start seeing cranberries at the market for Thanksgiving, Christmas meals. And I throw them in my freezer and then make a big batch at a time. But it’s cranberries. There’s a recipe on my website for it. Cranberries and orange juice and cinnamon and some sugar and candied ginger and dried cranberries pureed together. I’m adding salt. This is a paste ferment. We’re not going to get a brine with it. And you puree it all together and ferment it on your countertop for, I kind of freak out how long I do it, one to two weeks. And…

Holly:
It’s like having, I use it as my dessert on my dinner plate. I put just a dollop of it and I can’t wait to the end of my meal to eat it because it’s got this tangy and it’s a little bit of sweetness to it. People always say, well, can’t I make it without the sugar, without the candied ginger in there, without the dried cranberries? I go, well, that’s part of the flavor profile and that’s sugar for the bacteria and they’re going to eat most of it anyway. But I love that and I just, the flavor of it is so good. I haven’t made a jar recently. I do have an old jar in my fridge, and I’m sure that jar has been there like five years now.

Holly:
There’s just a few little bits of relish left in it, and I haven’t reused that jar yet, but there is no mold. There’s no growth in that jar. And so when you ferment something properly, you don’t end up with mold, even exposed to air, because a lot of times you read that you’re supposed to eat your sauerkraut and move it to a smaller jar, push everything down, et cetera, to prevent, you know, Molds are growing in it. If it’s fermented properly, it’s preserved. There’s nothing that’s going to grow. If there’s mold growing, something has gone wrong in the fermentation process. But yeah, so that’s one of my favorite ferments. That and garlic paste we make when we harvest our garlic, which is, again, pureed garlic with a 2% salt. And that becomes an instant easy way to add garlic to my sauteed greens. I don’t have to peel my garlic. It’s already been peeled and pureed. It’s a mellow flavor taste um the garlic bite is not as strong and it’s a nice caramelly looking color to it and it’s a great flavor to add to a dish at the last minute wonderful.

Alison:
Um i will link to that cranberry relish that’s on your site i’ll find the recipe and put it in the show notes so people can go to it um we haven’t, We haven’t talked about all the vegetable ferments. And one that I really like that we haven’t talked about is beet kvass. Are there any other vegetable ferments that we haven’t talked about that you think are really great that you want to kind of just hang the flag for? I would hang the flag for beet kvass. But are there other ones that you really like?

Holly:
Beet kvass, I need to get back making that. And I might actually do that as my demo at the Fermentation Summit. But, you know, I think one thing for people to be aware of is we don’t have to ferment everything.

Holly:
People harvest their garden, they want to ferment the kale, they want to ferment the broccoli, they want to ferment everything. And again, that goes back to my simplicity and why I ended up focusing on sauerkraut. Not everything should be fermented. It can be, but you may not like the results. Kale, the bersagia vegetables can be very sulfur-rich, and they can be very smelly when they ferment, and their flavor can be rather off-putting. So I think we have to go back and keep our lives simple and not try to ferment everything out there. Sometimes I prefer my onions caramelized. I don’t need to ferment them, Though I do love to have, say, fermented onions done in like a lemon juice is what I ferment them in. And they’re great to have on hand when I’m trying to make my tacos. So I guess when I’m looking at ferments, I’m looking at ways to have that umami punch. To make my meals easier. So like I wish I did keep a nice stockpile of fermented onions to add to those dishes, the sauerkraut to add to the meals, the refreshing drinks, you know, to get enough liquid in my body to have the beet kvass or the oat maker’s water or the, oh, what is it with the sprouted grain where you ferment the wheat grain?

Alison:
Rejuvelac, yeah.

Holly:
Yeah, et cetera. So to round out my day and have those flavors throughout the day is what I would be looking at to more like a variety of ferments versus fermenting more vegetables. We did kombucha for the longest time, and that’s a nice refreshing drink and very energizing and very refreshing. So that’s what I would look at is branching outside the range of vegetables, and looking at other ferments to add like that too.

Alison:
Easy to your.

Holly:
Flavor profile for.

Alison:
The day i find it’s easy to get stuck into a rut you know that i make sauerkraut and you just do the sauerkraut you can do it on autopilot and then you realize that’s the only thing i’m doing but to to have that little burst of flavor like the garlic paste is just there and the and the cranberry relish is there for you to put on the side of your plate and the beaker vass is there for us to have a you know a shot glass of it in the morning it, it brings so much kind of vitality in life and variety to your your practice and your kitchen um Rebecca Lett who’s in Ireland had a question about beet kavas and I wanted to ask you um if you knew anything about it she loves to drink it which is understandable because it’s delicious but she said she’s a bit worried that I’m consuming too many oxalates what are your thoughts on beet kvass and fermented beets from the perspective of oxalates.

Holly:
You know, I guess you’d have to look at your overall diet if you’re getting a lot of oxalates. I don’t tend to worry about it. And I don’t know what happens with the fermentation process with the oxalates. But like people worrying about their sodium content, when they, say, consume a lot of fermented vegetables, their condiments are added to the meal. We’re not eating a sauerkraut salad.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah.

Holly:
So we’re not getting a high amount of sodium. and we’re adding sauerkraut to our salad to bring out the flavors of everything else in it. So beet kibosh, when I’m regularly drinking beet kibosh, I’m drinking just a small glass of it once or twice a day. So you’re not consuming a lot of it. And then also, there’s not that much beets you’re getting from that beet kibosh. Yes, it’s not like you’re eating two pounds of beets. You’re drinking the… What comes off those beets which is just you know a couple beets in a two quart two liter jar of kvass so you’re not getting a huge concentration of it.

Alison:
Yeah I kind of feel the same about it I feel like you know it is the liquid and there’s not so many beets in it and when I make beet kvass I put in garlic and lots of different spices and things and so I am only having a small glass of it because it’s really quite strong um i i was quite curious about this so i did a bit of digging, and found out that um fermentation reduces oxalates breaks them down but that obviously if you’re sensitive to oxalate because you’ve potentially got kidney stone problems you still should be careful and i also read some advice that um you could have calcium at the same time was having it because calcium binds to it but i do feel the same as you really that it’s like you know if you talk about well should i nixtamalize my corn because people in northern italy when they ate corn three times a day every single day they got pellagra because they didn’t their corn but the point is we’re not necessarily probably eating corn three meals a day every day and because of that we don’t need to necessarily unless we’ve got a specific problem that we know about we don’t need to necessarily pay that that minute attention to it you know because we’re only having a shot glass of the juice from the beak of us you know a couple of times once a day

Alison:
so that’s how i i feel about that and i think you kind of feel the same right.

Holly:
Exactly if you look back to Weston A. Price and the cultures he studied, what were they eating? How was it prepared? They weren’t making kale smoothies, you know, a quart glass of kale smoothie with two heads of kale in it to drink every day. That just wasn’t.

Holly:
So I think we have to be careful with, there’s so many health fads that come through and I jump on them and I explore them and stuff. And it just, it’s like, well, I don’t know, If we’re eating a balanced diet and most of those foods are properly prepared, we’re doing good. We’re staying away from all those processed foods that we’re hit at today. I think we’re miles ahead of the general society out there eating the standard American diet. And being hard on ourselves, worrying about the oxalates by drinking two cups of beet kibasa in a day versus the 10 sodas that somebody else is drinking.

Holly:
We’re nourishing ourselves and when we think about when we obsess too much about what we’re eating that’s doing more harm than good for us i think and uh stick to our good nourishing foods and be grateful for what we’re eating and i i always think back um a book oh what is it the full moon feast yeah jessica prentice one of my favorite books from years ago and in there she has a story about a couple she saw on the train sitting down to prepare a meal they put down their suitcase put a tablecloth over it got out their silverware and their plates and then open up their bags of mcdonald’s hamburgers and put everything on the plate to consume it so i i think the joy with we consume our food can do a lot more good for us than obsessing over all these little things that we need to be aware of if we have health conditions we’re working with but i think it’s with look at that bigger picture yeah.

Alison:
Absolutely thank you for that wisdom okay I wanted to ask you one more thing about the work that you’re doing before we um say goodbye and kind of head off to the to the after show which was why did you start a business focusing solely on fermentation it’s quite a unusual thing to do and you’re obviously very very passionate about it and I’ve put a lot of your um your life’s energy into it and I wondered how it kind of came about and while you’re doing it.

Holly:
We touched on a little bit earlier, but it came about because I saw an article in Nourishing Traditions, and I was actually thinking it was family traditions to do with your family, helping them grow up. It had nothing to do with food, just nourishing healthy traditions. Read the article and then deep dived into learning more about Sally Fallon and came across.

Holly:
I’ve always been into health and to read about Weston Price and that he went around searching for healthy societies and then looked at what they ate. To me, it was, we’ve been doing it backwards. We think, well, we should be eating this and we’re going to find a study to prove it. He went out to look for healthy traditional societies and what did they eat and how did they prepare it? And so sauerkraut, fermented foods ran through all 14 cultures that they all prepared and ate some type of fermented food. It was different depending on where they were living. And here I am raising a family, wanting them to be healthy. I went, okay, I’ll add fermented foods to the diet. So, I added Bubby’s sauerkraut, bought that off the shelf back 25 years ago. There was not much out there, not many books to learn from. And that started getting expensive. And so, I started learning to make it from Sally Fallon’s book, bought The Big Harsh Crock. And then friends started asking me, how do you make this? And I started helping friends out. And before I knew it, I was having kraut-making parties at my house. And then somebody wanted, you know, I started doing workshops and you know just gradually sped and I stuck to that one thing the one ferment because of that overwhelm I felt with trying to do all of nourishing traditions that I that to focus on one thing and keep my life simple so uh focused on that and uh here I am today with uh it keeps growing with the website with all these recipes it’s so rewarding just classes.

Alison:
Kind of and the summit.

Holly:
Just incredible.

Alison:
How it’s grown.

Holly:
Yeah exactly, Well, it’s amazing. It’s so rewarding to have people email me and say, I finally learned to make sauerkraut. It’s easy. We added it to our meals and my husband’s digestive issues are gone. You know, to actually see health changes by just a simple change of taking care of your gut health. And today we now know why Weston Price only found cultures that added fermented foods to their diets as being healthy because we understand how important the gut health is. And, you know, that’s where the serotonin is. There’s more brain, you know, the enteric nervous system, more information going from your gut to your brain than the other way around.

Holly:
And so those cultures knew intuitively what was healthy for them. And I’ve always known that food was important. And I’ve always focused on good food for myself and my family. So it’s just a way to help others do the same.

Alison:
Thank you, Holly. I want to just remind people again about the summit. Do go and look at the show notes if you want to be able to just click on the link because it’s in there but if you want to remember in your head and type it when you finish listening it’s ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash holly summit it’s on very very shortly later this month and people who receive our emails either mine or the podcast will be hearing more about it in the next few days because both of us both andrew and i are very excited to see the lineup and the information that you’re giving this year so thank you for doing that Holly and thank you for all of the work that you do and for taking time to come and talk to us today and we will say goodbye now on the the main show and then I will kind of hold on to you to talk about mould on the after show but thank you very much for for this Holly I really appreciate it.

Holly:
Oh, you’re welcome.