Help me make my first good pickle - with Rutabaga

I'd really like to be able to preserve vegetables by fermenting them - my harvest of 'neeps' (Rutabaga/Swede) includes lots of little ones that I think will be ideal for preserving this way. It's nice to have a way of storing them at ambient temperatures, rather than filling the freezer full of veg - and they won't keep whole like the bigger ones should, at least for a while.
I've tried to make sauerkraut a couple of times but have not yet got the hang of it. So can anyone help me get it right with these roots?

The first step I suppose is cleaning and cutting them up. Can I just use tap water? What size pieces should I make them? Do I need to peel them?

What form-factor do you want them in for use? If you want a kraut, shred them with a grater. If you want rounds for snacking, slice them thick or thin. You can also ferment them whole, but they'd need to be immersed in brine or in a "solid state" medium like kraut.

Tap water will work fine. The skin will provide the healthiest starter culture of bacteria, but it probably isn't needed (especially if you're retaining those green tops to go into the ferment) so you can get rid of it if you expect it to be too tough to eat.

What equipment will you be using? Open-top ceramic crock? FIDO jar with bale-top and seal? Water-sealing crock? Something fancy?

What went wrong in the past?

My tap water is chlorinated so I make sure to leave it out overnight first so I don't kill off my little microbe buddies for these types of things. I don't know how much it matters but I do know that sometimes I can smell the chlorine in the water and sometimes I can't.

On water: The first sixteen years that I was an avid fermenter I lived in town and had very hard, very chlorinated water. There was a nice natural spring two towns over where we filled carboys for our drinking water. As a matter of principle, I mixed brine with that spring water when we had it, but we were often out, and when that happened, I'd use tap water. I never, not once, observed any deleterious effect of using it. I understand the impulse and I'm glad to be on a sweet, clean well now, but I really don't think it causes much microbial inhibition in the food-fermenting context.

(I'd say the same thing about using iodized salt. It's not what I choose, but I've done it a bunch of times and it always worked.)

I have a couple of Harsh crocks and Chinese pickle jars that I use. My brine starts out at 5%. The silicone fermentation lids for wide mouth canning jars work well too. Into the brine and in a week the magic has happened.

You can use tap water to remove soil, but don't work too hard on cleaning. You want to use dechlorinated water for the brine.
If you are making chunky pickles (whole roots if they are small, sticks like carrot sticks would be my recommendation) you want to make a brine and then you just need to figure out how to keep the veggie chunks submerged.

I love “torshi ” Lebanese-style pickled turnips and beets. Same technique would probably be good on rutabaga. It’s a basic salt brine (de chlorinated water and non-iodized salt for best results). Torshi usually includes garlic and hot pepper for flavor.  Might switch that up for the rutabagas, maybe caraway and mustard seed?

Needs to ferment about three weeks for best flavor in my opinion.

Thanks for all the great answers, I've still got loads of questions! It seems there is not one right way of doing things, so I just need to find my right way.

So I think I'd like pickles as an accompaniment for my meals, maybe chopped small enough that they could go in a wrap perhaps. On a side note I need a way of describing the result that doesn't involve 'pickle' as that would make my husband think he won't like them......

Jars - Am I right in thinking that it would be better to have several smallish jars on the go rather than one big one? Do I need to exclude air while it is fermenting or do I need to let it breathe? I've got some 1 and 1 1/2 pint preserving jars that would probably do (or I may treat myself to a couple of new jars for 'xmas'). Is there an optimum size?

these are the ones I sock inmy shop

image source


So 5% salt would be one teaspoon (5g) in about 2 pints water (1l) (that doesn't sound very salty at all!)

What about temperature? We're pretty cold here at the moment, but that means I have the kitchen stove on - so I can put them in a warmish place. Do they need to be consistently warm, or will it matter if they get a bit cold over night?

Probably, the size doesn't matter much unless you want to do something like bury whole swedes among a kraut. *I* would ferment them all in a single crock for five weeks and then divide them into small jars to go into a fridge or cold cellar.

The ferment doesn't need to breathe and in fact you'll find an awful lot of people on the internet telling you must be entirely anaerobic, under an airlock, sealed in a vacuum or with argon, or whatever. That's all nonsense -- fermentation was probably done for thousands of years without the ability to do any of that. An open jar with cheesecloth tied over the top works fine. But like Julia mentioned, you have to keep the produce 100% under the level of the brine. Even tiny floaters will provide an anchorage for mold spores.

I discovered the wonderful Fido jars fifteen or twenty years ago and do most of my small-batch fermenting in those. After finding them, I thought any bale-top jars would be great, but none of the discount ones I've encountered have just the right gasket. The Fido jars' gasket prevents air from entering the jar, but when the CO2 pressure gets too great inside, it deflects and allows the pressure to equalize a bit. So you'll hear them hissing from time to time. I bought a crate of similar appearing jars from Ikea and they didn't work like that at all -- they just sealed things up and became timebombs. Another cheap brand that I bought didn't even really seal properly and let atmosphere mix too much. So I can't say how those specific jars you stock will work, but I'm doubtful. (But as mentioned, the sealing airlock is just a nice-to have feature, not an absolute necessity.)

Your cold environment is perfect! I mean, they only ferment (or later, degrade) slowly below 10C, but I assume your kitchen is warmer than that.

Two tablespoons of salt in a quart of water yields ~3.6% brine. That's what I'd recommend. Depends on the makeup of your salt and crystal size and stuff. A lot of people online will insist you use a scale instead and also weigh the produce, but it's up to you to treat this as a science or an art. If you just toss a fistful of salt into a jar of water and decide it tastes sort of like the ocean, you'll get pickles!

There are a lot of tricks and equipment to help you keep the produce under the level of the brine. You might find a large outer cabbage leaf over your floating rutabaga chips below a cross of two wooden skewers sized to fit under the shoulder of your jar works. If using a straight-sided crock, a plate atop your swedes with a jar of water on top of that will do the trick if you size it right. You can buy stainless steel springs and glass weights and those things all work fine, but so does wrapping the produce in cheesecloth with some marbles. Sometimes I fit a small glass jar into the mouth of a large glass jar to keep the produce down and the brine up. And sometimes I ferment without worrying about floaties -- just stir it up twice a day and sure, mold spores land in there out of the air, but they never get to take hold because they're mixed into the acid brine where they fail to thrive.

Great information Christopher!

Do I need to worry about timebombs? If I decide that the ferment is good, can I just seal the jar, or do I need to carry on 'burping' them every few days even in the cold?

Depends how cold and how long. Once I put something in the fridge, I never burp it. In the cellar, which is quite a bit warmer, I've needed to sometimes. It also depends how much of the fermentation you get out of the way before you start thinking like that. But you'll find people telling you fermentation takes a week or two, and I tell folks five weeks is the baseline for when a vegetable counts as fermented and it's OK to leave it a year.

One thing I have done is julienned carrots or daikon radishes in a ferment. If you are sneaking in pickles. Spicy dill julienned carrots replace relish on hotdogs.
The ferment might go a bit faster. with the smaller cut.
My wife can't take spicy so I have to allow for that when adding peppercorns or chilies to the brine. Spicing up the brine is something that is a personal taste thing but garlic, caraway, chives find their way into some of my ferments.
Keeping the pickle under the brine with weights, an onion or citrus round, cabbage leaf helps if I don't have an airlock of some kind.
Cheesecloth and a jar was my first ferment vessel.

I use fresh grape leaves in between the cucumbers and the weights that push them under the surface of the brine. If you don't have weights designed for your container (I have a few that fit in a wide mouth quart mason jar and then I have a 2 gallon fermenting crock with a three piece weight set) you can use a ziplock bag full of water.