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Fruits & Roots

Ten Easy Fermented Vegetable Recipes for Beginners

Get ready to become a confident home fermenter with these easy fermentation recipes for beginners. You’re guaranteed to get great results on the first try.

Recipe Index | Ferment | Fruits & Roots

Ten Easy Fermented Vegetable Recipes for Beginners

Get ready to become a confident home fermenter with these easy fermentation recipes for beginners. You’re guaranteed to get great results on the first try.

Fermentation Recipes for Beginners

The best fermentation recipes for beginners are sauerkraut recipes! After you master sauerkraut, I suggest trying out fermentation for pickles and other “vine-growing” vegetables. By vine growing, I mean it grows on a branching plant from a flower.

Here are my top five easy fermented vegetable recipes for beginners.

I advise starting with number one, then working your way through number ten.

By the time you make the tenth recipe, you’ll feel like a cultured guru too!

The main supplies you need for these recipes are a large mason jar, a fermentation weight, some sea salt, and a kitchen scale.

How to Make Old Fashioned Sauerkraut with Caraway Seeds

Enjoy this delicious Bavarian-style sauerkraut recipe made with caraway seeds. In this step-by-step recipe, you will learn to make old fashioned sauerkraut with caraway seeds in a mason jar.

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Roasted Garlic Sauerkraut with Black Pepper

This recipe is a traditional, wild fermented sauerkraut with roasted garlic and black pepper incorporated. If you love garlic, crisp sauerkraut, and a light pepper flavor then this Roasted Garlic Sauerkraut with black pepper recipe is for you!

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Homemade Kimchi Inspired Spicy Sauerkraut Recipe

What does kimchi taste like? It’s spicy, umami, sour and absolutely delicious! Learn how to make kimchi sauerkraut, a spicy sauerkraut recipe with delicious kimchi flavor.

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Fermented Beet and Red Cabbage Sauerkraut

This fermented beet and red cabbage sauerkraut recipe is the best way to make fermented beets and cabbage. Beet sauerkraut is ready to eat in three weeks.

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Turmeric Napa Cabbage Sauerkraut

If you ever wondered if you can make sauerkraut with napa cabbage, the answer is yes! This delicious turmeric sauerkraut recipe is a simple napa cabbage sauerkraut, perfect for preserving in-season fall and winter cabbage.

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How to Ferment Sauerkraut with Orange, Sesame, and Ginger

Learn how to ferment sauerkraut with orange sesame and ginger. With only six ingredients and some patience, you can make this flavorful sauerkraut incorporating fresh orange, sesame seeds and freshly grated ginger root at home! Wild fermented sauerkraut contains billions of gut-healthy microorganisms, lots of vitamins, and prebiotic fiber.

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Fermented Cucumbers: Fermenting Sliced Cucumbers Two Ways

This fermented cucumbers recipe makes it easy to ferment pickles that stay crunchy and crisp. Learn the best techniques for fermenting sliced cucumbers.

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The Best Lacto-Fermented Green Beans with Ginger and Scallions

Green beans are one of the best and easiest vegetables to ferment! With just salt, water, fresh green beans, spices, a fermentation weight, and a mason jar you can make these probiotic-packed fermented green beans at home. This recipe requires a kitchen scale for measuring ingredients and two weeks of fermentation at room temperature.

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Pepper Fermentation Recipe: Learn How to Ferment Any Type of Pepper

How do you make fermented peppers? What is the best salt ratio for fermenting peppers? how long to ferment peppers? With our Easy Pepper Fermentation Recipe you’ll have the best fermented peppers in just 5 weeks! Learn how to ferment peppers at home.

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Easy and Nutritious Fermented Giardiniera

Giardiniera is a mix of pickled vegetables in vinegar or oil in Italy, but here we used wild fermentation to create a delicious fermented Giardiniera. For this recipe, we developed a spicy, pleasantly sour preserved vegetable mix, made even more nutritious through fermentation. By the way, in Italian, it is pronounced jar-din-AIR-ah, and it literally means “from the garden.”

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More Fermenting Recipes for Beginners

  • How to Ferment Sauerkraut with Blueberries and Açaí
  • Fermented Baby Bok Choy
  • Fermented Pepperoncini Recipe
  • Fermented Spicy Garlic Pickle Spirals
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Kaitlynn Fenley Author, Educator, Food Microbiologist
Kaitlynn is a food microbiologist and fermentation expert teaching people how to ferment foods and drinks at home.
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welcome!

hey i’m kaitlynn, i’m a microbiologist and together with my husband jon we are cultured guru.

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  1. Pattie
    08|08|2022

    I’ve been making beet kavass for a while now but my last two turned from beautiful red to brown. It tastes watery. Any ideas why.?

    Reply
    1. Kaitlynn Fenley
      08|09|2022

      I don’t have a beet kvass recipe here yet. My guess is that you made it with salt, and beet kvass is supposed to be made with sugar.

      Reply

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Gosh I hope I pronounced Giardiniera correctly. 🤗 Gosh I hope I pronounced Giardiniera correctly. 🤗 

This jar I made was in my fridge for over six months, and it was time to do something with it. When I don’t know what to do with a ferment, pasta salad is usually the answer!

Get the recipe from the link in my bio! #pasta #salad
Healthy poop potion? I really do think my gut is Healthy poop potion?

I really do think my gut is loving this sauerkraut because of the celeriac (celery root), and I don’t have a science based reason for why. I saw this celery root in the store and had a gut feeling that I should make sauerkraut with it, and that’s how we got here. I guess my microbiome knew what it wanted!

Type “root vegetable sauerkraut -ai” into google and you’ll see my recipe! It’s also on my website homepage, also linked in my bio, and if you’re seeing this on Facebook, link is in the comments. Enjoy!  #sauerkraut
A lot of people think vinegar kills all microbes b A lot of people think vinegar kills all microbes because shelf stable pickles do not contain microbes. But with shelf stable pickles, it’s the pasteurization/sterilization via hot water bath or pressure canning that makes shelf stable pickles free of microbes.

Hot hot hot acid in a pressurized environment does kill, well…most microbes. 

Think about “refrigerator pickle” recipes, though. They need to be stored in the refrigerator because vinegar alone doesn’t stop fermentation.

Fridge pickles are made without pasteurization/sterilization (canning) so they will wild ferment without refrigeration, and not necessarily in a good way because there’s not enough salt. 

All vinegar is made via fermentation too, and vinegar fermentation involves acetic acid bacteria, but also a ton of LAB, mainly Lactobacillus, Pediococcus, and Leuconostoc (the same genera you’d find in fermented veg.)  I linked a reference paper in my fermented mushroom recipe blog, so you all can read about the LAB involved in vinegar fermentation. 

Try 🍄‍🟫googlin’🍄‍🟫“fermented mushrooms” and you’ll see my recipe, it’s the first result (usually) 🤗

#mushrooms #fermentation
I will not ever wild lacto ferment just beets agai I will not ever wild lacto ferment just beets again lol. Mixing with cabbage for beet sauerkraut is the best though! 

“Lacto fermented beets” was the first ferment I tried to make after learning sauerkraut in college. My best friend Sidney came over and we used these gorgeous beets from the farmers market, with 2.5% salt, and some spices. Well, it ended up tasting like beet moonshine and it was just… not good.

But it was a conduit for learning. Those beets were my first lesson in how different sugars and growth in the rhizosphere vs the phyllosphere influences fermentation. 

Cabbage and the cabbage microbiome offer a lot to balance out beets in fermentation, and I think mixing into a sauerkraut is the only way to go for lacto fermenting beets! 

Try googlin’ “beet and red cabbage sauerkraut” and you’ll see my recipe, I’m Cultured Guru.
Squash is the secret ingredient! My Roasted Butte Squash is the secret ingredient!

My Roasted Butternut Squash Hot Sauce recipe is free on my website! I didn’t cook this one, so yes it’s still probiotic.

When lactic acid bacteria ferment the starches in winter squash, they naturally convert them into emulsifying compounds called exopolysaccharides. So when we blend our hot sauce after fermentation, there’s no watery separation in the bottle. Roasting the squash with the garlic for the recipes also adds such good flavor! 

Definitely make sure it’s fully fermented and not bubbling anymore before you blend and bottle. Otherwise, it’ll carbonate in the cute little hot sauce bottles.

#hotsauce
Myth Busting: Yes, the SCOBY IS the pellicle! Plee Myth Busting: Yes, the SCOBY IS the pellicle! Pleeeease stop saying it’s not. 😌



Watch till the end, I show you how to grow one!



This is a little tidbit from what I teach in the Kombucha lesson in our Fermented Drinks Semester online course!

I also share this recipe FOR FREE just ✨GOOGLE✨ “cultured guru SCOBY” and you’ll see my full recipe with the perfect sugar to tea ratios for growing, feeding and maintaining a kombucha SCOBY.

#kombucha
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