Beet red

My life is full of oft-neglected things. Yesterday I came home to some softening potatoes and beets that silently cried for my attention. Actually I imagine they'd rather I left them alone to sprout in the cupboard than face me and my knives and grater and fry pot. Many of us foodies know the pleasure of spending the afternoon working on a culinary project with a few ingredients. There's a simple therapy evoked when you work by hand, slowly, alone in the kitchen with a warm French press and the din of listener-supported radio. The idea is to make sauerkraut except with beets instead of cabbage. I keep calling it beet-kraut which isn't right (sauerzuckerruben?) and it is very good and very simple:

Take a few beets. Peel them if you want to (I did, but they weren't from my garden). Shred them up. Add a little or a lot of salt (or none). Put them into an earthen crock or a big glass jar or perhaps a small clean barrell and compress them until the juices that escape are enough to cover them completely. Find a plate or something that fits on top and press it down with, say, a big jar full of water, or other heavy objects. Wait a few weeks. Now eat, or seal away in sterile jars.

What is this all about? Well, it's not a pickle but a ferment. The microbes are already present on the vegetable that will help it to sour. Contact with air will cause unwanted airborne microbes to grow which is why we keep the vegetable shreds submerged in water. The salt helps too. It staves off unwanted bugs, pulls moisture out of the plant cells, and affects the osmolarity of the brine, not to mention the flavor. If some colorful blooms of growth appear at the surface of your brine, gently spoon them out and add a little more water if needed to keep everything submerged.

The first time I tried this I was touring Blue Moon Farm on Waldron Island and Rebecca Moore gave me an enormous red beet, the biggest I'd ever seen. "Nobody will buy it," she told me. "I'm going to ferment it," I exclaimed. It seemed funny but I was serious. This is a great way to increase the flavor and shelf-life of the less loved vegetables among us. The absolute best resource to turn to when it comes to fermenting anything is Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. I met Katz 2 years ago at the Synergy Sustainable Living Conference and he certainly stoked my fermentation ferver.