Six Reasons for pickling and fermenting food

• #1 Fermented foods are amazing for your health, especially for your digestion, due to the probiotics they contain! It seems counter-intuitive, but they can really help with bloating. Pickling and fermenting foods before eating them can boost your immune system: good digestions = healthy you!
  
• #2 Preserving food by pickling and fermenting can help fight food waste. Let’s be honest: It’s really hard for a single person to use up a head of cabbage alone. Or a damn pumpkin! Gardeners often deal with crazy amounts of harvested produce. Preserving foods is a nice alternative to freezing things or just throwing them away.
  
• #3 You’re not just preserving food. You are preserving entire seasons! Pumpkin may not be seasonal anymore come summer, but opening a jar of pickled pumpkin will make you feel like raking colourful leaves and drinking pumpkin spice lattes all over. We can’t wait to preserve our summer vegetables to forever reminisce about our first gardening success.
  
• #4 Pickling food saves the environment and your wallet. By freezing food, you need a continual supply of electricity. And if your freezer is as old as ours, it’s probably mostly wasting energy! Storing pickled foods doesn’t require any electricity. Though, that’s obviously this is a calculation that depends on the quantities of pickled goods, as well as the cost of your jars. But jars are something that we usually just have laying around in our kitchen anyways.
  
• #5 Fermenting and pickling has a long tradition in many cultures. Eastern Europe is notorious for anything pickled cabbage-related. Asian, especially Japanese, cuisine has known fermenting for thousands of years. What about pickled eggs and onions in England? Or that weird Scandinavian pickled herring that you never want to try but you probably should? By trying out this technique, you’re stepping into the footsteps of your ancestors. Imagine how proud your grandmother would be of you!
  
• #6 Nervous before a presentation? Or before meeting your partner’s family? Or before making important phone calls? Just eat some kimchi. A study suggests that eating fermented foods is linked with fewer symptoms of social anxiety! The contained probiotics lower perceived stress and can help alleviate anxiety-related digestive problems. Who knows if this is actually true?! But it’s just once more good excuse for eating delicious pickled and fermented foods.
  

The Crucial Difference Between Pickled and Fermented

Foods that are pickled are those that have been preserved in an acidic medium. In the case of various types of supermarket pickles on the shelf, the pickling comes from vinegar. These vegetables, however, are not fermented (even though vinegar itself is the product of fermentation) and hence do not offer the probiotic and enzymatic value of homemade fermented vegetables.

Vegetables that you ferment in your kitchen using a starter, salt, and some filtered water create their own self preserving, acidic liquid that is a by-product of the fermentation process. This lactic acid is incredibly beneficial to digestion when consumed along with the fermented vegetables or even when sipped alone as anyone on the GAPS Intro Diet has discovered (cabbage juice anyone?). In other words, homemade fermented veggies are both fermented and pickled.

What about alcoholic fermentation? In the case of wine and unpasteurized beers, fermentation occurs as the result of certain yeasts converting sugars into alcohol but there is no pickling that takes place despite the common expression that a person who has had too much to drink is “pickled”.

Home fermentation of vegetables preserves without the use of any pressure or heat unlike supermarket versions of the same foods. It allows the ubiquitous and beneficial lactobacilli present on the surface of all living things – yes, even your own skin – to proliferate creating lactic acid which not only pickles and preserves the vegetables, but also promotes the health of those that consume it in the following ways:

• Enhances the vitamin content of the food.
  
• Preserves and sometimes enhances the enzyme content of the food.
  
• Improves nutrient bio-availability in the body.
  
• Improves the digestibility of the food and even cooked foods that are consumed along with it!