What even is lacto-fermentation?

Pickling is the act of preserving foods with acid. You can do it as simply as soaking foods in vinegar or lemon juice for a long time, as long as you get the pH below the magic number of 4.6, you will have pickles, but. some people would say those are not real pickles no, no, they would say that real pickles are preserved by an acid created by bacteria within the food itself, lactic acid, that's

what

lacto

fermentation

is, it's a pretty magical process that produces some of the most delicious foods humans have ever invented, it was one of the only ways people had to preserve vegetables until refrigerated and when it comes to us modern people, there are scientists who believe we would be healthier, our intestines would be healthier if we ate more of these.

Lacto-fermented foods again, although it's not necessary anymore because you know we have the refrigerator that says it can be a little scary to eat something wet that you just left at room temperature for a few weeks, how do you pickle them safely? And how big are the risks? Well, field trip to the University of Georgia Extension, where food microbiologist Dr. Carla Schwann directs the National Center for Home Food Preservation, when she observes the microflora, the indigenous flora on a cucumber , for example, or if you know cabbage. When making sauerkraut, there are about 10 million cells of indigenous bacteria that are not lactic acid bacteria, so E coli coliform with cholesteria, yes, you heard that right, a lot of bad bugs inside vegetables usually not enough to make you sick to a healthy person, that's why we can eat raw.

However, with these cucumbers you have to make sure you remove those little trichomes that are very, very sharp, and to pickle cucumbers you have to cut off the flower end, not the stem end, but the end where the flower used to be. Why always delete? the flower end because it can have certain fungi present and they have enzymes that basically break down the pectin, plus the flour itself produces some of these enzymes that could make the pickles soft and slimy, so that's not good, that's why We cut the At the end of the flower, there is not a huge amount of bad bacteria in most vegetables, but

what

matters is the proportion in which there are millions of bad bacteria, as opposed to maybe only a thousand or a few thousand of good bacteria that we want.

Lactic acid-producing bacteria, there are only a few. of them relative to the bad ones, so we have to give them an advantage, we select the good bacteria and we suppress the bad bacteria that are present there, so how do we do it? We use salt. The trick is how much salt if you completely pack food in salt you will kill everything salt pulls water out of cells bacteria shrivel and die you preserve food basically forever what people have been doing for thousands of years , this may be how some of them accidentally invented

lacto

fermentation

, maybe someone did. trying to salt cure their food, but they didn't have enough salt that day and they didn't put in enough salt to kill all the microorganisms, it was just enough salt to kill the bad ones.

Lactic acid-producing bacteria can tolerate a little salt. As? It depends on the species, but here is an example: some lactic acid bacteria are able to absorb compounds from their environment that balance the osmotic pressure of the salt water around them, such as the amino acid proline, for example, they absorb it into their cytoplasm, it does not hurt. They keep them there like salted wood and yet it is able to balance the osmotic pressure of the salt outside the cell. It's like two people leaning on the same swing door from both sides. The door remains closed and the water does not. it escapes from the cell, so the sweet spot where the bad bacteria die and the good bacteria thrive is between two and two and a half percent salt by weight for pickled cabbage, that's very easy to calculate, just weigh the chopped cabbage and calculate what 2.5 percent of that is, and sprinkle that amount of sodium chloride (it's the weight of the salt, not the weight of the sodium, specifically in the case of European-style pickled cabbage sauerkraut).

This is basically what you let sit for a while, maybe mash it up a little to draw on. it draws out the natural water inside the cabbage. I love sauerkraut and kimchi, but at this stage it really smells like farts, you know what smells better? but today I'm going to try the sea salt and cedar it smells like a beach without the rotten seaweed note of course check out that luxurious foamy lather

even

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I know it seems like we're canning, but we're not canning. Canning is totally different. This requires using heat to sterilize everything, among other steps, and you can't really do that with fermentation because you'd kill the bacteria you need to ferment your food and make lactic acid canning. It also requires completely airtight seals, but we can't. do that in fermentation no no no yeah you're not going to seal in the glass jar because you have CO2 production and that could potentially explode so you don't want that so some people ferment pickles just in a glass jar loose. jar to let the gas escape, but Dr.

Schwann says that's not really the best practice, like here is my Kraut after it's been fermenting about six weeks and you can see the dry cavities that have developed mold and other bad things They could grow where there is air, so what you really want is a weight that will push all the solids under the brine as they crumple. There are pickling weights you can buy. They are generally ceramic, which is heavy and chemically non-reactive. I should have made this Crouch smell. Cool, but probably a little risky. I don't think I'm going to eat it. Let's do better with cucumbers.

Whole cucumbers are a little more difficult to pickle because there won't be enough water coming out to keep everything submerged. You'll have to use a little bit of water, add a little bit of water to get enough brine, and you need to factor that water into your calculations. We need the total contents of this pot to be between two and two and a half percent salt by weight, not just the water. so I need to weigh the cucumbers with the water and then calculate 2.5 percent of that or I can simply follow a time-tested volume-based recipe like those provided by Dr.

Schwan's National Center for Food Preservation home. They have a book you can purchase, but they have tons of free recipes on their website tested and trusted by scientists. I'm following your recipe for pickles, fine sea salt, it dissolves easily and has no additives like iodine or anti-caking agents that can cloud the brine and then this is strange, a little bit of vinegar. I thought the point of lacto pickles wasn't the vinegar. Well, Dr. Schwann says that, like commercial pickle makers, they generally use a lot more salt, maybe up to five percent salt, which is a little more reliable.

There is definitely no way any bad insects can survive in such a salty environment. The problem is that pickles come out inedibly salty, so what they do after fermenting them is put them in pure fresh water to remove the salt. We probably are. We're not going to do that at home so for us that little bit of vinegar is just an insurance policy, it controls the bad bugs before the lactic acid bacteria can take hold and start making your own sour dill pickles, they have dill , maybe a little bit of spice and then a lot of garlic, that's what makes a New York Jewish deli style pickle, to me, some people use food grade lime to get crunchy pickles, but people say that the tannins in black tea leaves have a similar effect, I have no idea if that's actually true, on cucumbers.

They really can't be any bigger than that or they will take a long time to strip and you can see that they are floating. We need to agitate them with something to keep them in that anaerobic environment. The metal would react with the acidic glass. It is chemically inert and will provide a window through which we can observe the basement closet with you. Normal room temperature is generally best for lacto fermentation and we'll see you within a few weeks for the first week or so. break down chlorophyll, anyone can see it, but a trained eye like Dr.

Schwans sees something else. Those little bubbles that I don't know if you can see here could be gas escaping from the inside of the cucumber cells, but it could also be CO2 that could be created. by our first chain of good bacteria, low type of stock messengers, yes what she said, that species or a similar one will dominate for the first week producing CO2 and lactic acid, when that happens you also see, let's say you have coliforms present , you also see the coliforms. Dying coliforms would be bad things like E coli, bad soil bacteria. Those first good ones can only handle a little bit of acid, so once the environment gets to one percent lactic acid, they shut down and some more acid-tolerant species take over, like Lactobacillus brevis and Lactobacillus plantarum .

They eat the sugar out of cucumbers, yes there is some sugar in a cucumber, they create lactic acid as a waste product and

even

tually bring the pH below 4.6 which is crucial. You may be wondering why Dr. Schwann is charting a downward trajectory. to describe the increase in acid concentration is because as the acid increases, the pH decreases and we have to get the pH closer to less than 4.6 to make the matulina not grow below 4.6, so if your pH is above 4.6, you need to worry about clostridium and you know. that botulinum clusteriana produces a neurotoxin that causes botulism.

I would definitely have another that there are also other pathogens that will survive and grow at a higher pH. so you're talking about listeria, you're talking about E. coli salmonella, so it's a whole bunch of bacteria. um, that could be a giveaway if you stop the fermentation too early. That says that for many years the Jewish delis in New York have sold these things they call half sours, which is a pickle that they take out before it completes its fermentation process so that it is not so acidic and is a little more crunchy and green and As far as I know no one has contracted botulism, there are no case reports that I can find crucially, although those delicatessens put them in the refrigerator and the refrigerator would also slow the growth of the botulism bacteria, that is really very important.

In the past they didn't have refrigeration, so they had to keep fermenting until the pickles were very sour, somewhere between a pH of three and four is where the good bacteria can't take it anymore, they shut down and the pickles are done. ever they will be they should smell sour they should taste sour at this point it is safer to can them or transfer them to the refrigerator because bad things could happen wait for it wait and mold the giant mold Bloom about six weeks later the spores could have been floating in the air or they could having been in my spices.

Mold or other fungi can grow on any surface exposed to air. You're supposed to remove them as soon as you see them, but I didn't. I want to mess up the time lapse and as a result, things got out of control. Now, a lot of the fungal growth will be harmless things like yeast and Dr. Schwann says that even dangerous fungi generally won't create mycotoxins in salty conditions, but only if you skim frequently, you don't want to have that, you know different layers of mold. because that top layer of mold could be producing mycotoxins and you know it's not in contact with the brine or anything and yeah, I wouldn't eat that if you had to remove it. over time constantly, so yeah, um, but like this after eight weeks definitely not, yeah, I'm just going to have a little bite, it tastes really good, too bad, this is what Dr.

Schwann likes to use asweight, a sealed plastic bag filled with 2.5 percent. brine fits into the container completely covering the surface, although gas can still come out and if the bag leaks it is no problem because it is filled with brine and not plain water which would dilute the brine if you do that and follow a time tested recipe like the that they have from the National Center for Home Food Preservation that will keep you out of trouble. Dr. Schwann is not aware of any documented cases where anyone has gotten sick from eating properly lacto-fermented vegetables—meat, sure, but not vegetables—and I've been looking through the literature and can't find anything.

I've talked to other food microbiologists. They don't know of any cases. It's just not something that seems to happen. These pickles are really safe as long as you do everything basically right. Use your senses. Although if the pickles smell like they're rotting, don't smell or taste very sour, that's an indication that your good bacteria has lost the battle against the bad ones, but follow the recipe and that probably won't happen, what's more likely. What happens is that all of these live beneficial bacteria and their metabolites will end up in your intestine where they will improve your gut health and that's a really complicated topic that we'll talk more about another day, but that's real science.

There have been some studies that show that I think if you consume 120 grams of kimchi, I think it was the study. I saw one day that you will have health benefits and I was trying to do it for a while and there's a lot of kimchi that I couldn't keep up with but yeah in South Korea that's the average and of course kimchi is basically. Sauerkraut with much more interesting flavors, delicious, but all thanks to those lactic acid bacteria that have co-evolved with us humans for millennia and that we will long benefit from each other.