Author: Papa Sandemano

Remember (a few posts back) about those lacto-fermented pickles I made? Yeah—not a success.

Batch #1 came out technically pickle-shaped, technically fermented, and pretty fucking insipid. I threw some apple cider vinegar into the jar in an attempt to rescue them and gave the whole experiment about a 5/10.

Naturally, my response was:

Okay. Let’s do this again. 

~Papa Sandemano 

But before Batch #2, I went looking to see how other people were doing this.

I pulled out Joshua Weissman’s An Unapologetic Cookbook and looked at his recipe for lacto-fermented vegetables. I wasn’t really looking for another recipe to copy. I wanted to see what he was doing differently—and whether that might explain why Batch #1 had been so fucking insipid.

Then I worked through it with ChatGPT using my own notes from Batch #1, comparing what I’d done, what Weissman was doing, and what I actually wanted to change. Between the book, my notes, and a lot of back-and-forth, I came up with a process for Batch #2 that made sense to me.

Or at least, that was the plan.

A few weeks later, I finally got around to it.

I had another batch of Costco cucumbers (less than three bucks—a steal), and while I was hunting for 1-litre jars big enough for my pickle pipes, I stumbled across these cool fucking flip-top jars I’d been wanting to try, and to prove to Mrs. Sandemano that there was a point to owning so many of these. 

I figured, why not? The pickles fit. It’s got a seal, they’re easier to burp, and it’s less hassle. Right?

Cool. Rock on.

So I started loading everything in. Measured the spices, added the garlic, packed in the cucumbers and filled the jar with water.

Which is when I realized I’d designed myself a pretty fucking stupid process.

I needed the weight of the water so I could calculate the salt for the brine. Which meant I now had to pour the water back out of a jar I’d already filled with dill, coriander seeds, garlic and cucumbers.

Fine. Strain it, weigh the water, calculate the salt, whisk it together and pour the brine back in.

Except I was making two jars.

And on the second one, I forgot the fucking strainer.

So now I’m standing there whisking salt into a bowl of water with dill and coriander seeds swimming around in it, thinking:

There has got to be a less stupid way to do this. ~every time a good cook learns how to do a new task

And there is.

I could have just weighed the fucking spices and garlic first, accounted for that weight, and saved myself this entire exercise.

Lesson learned.

Anyway. Brine made. Pickles packed.

Then the fucking cucumbers (and spices) started floating.

Fuck!

I hadn’t thought about that.

The cucumbers wanted to come up. The dill and coriander seeds wanted to come up. And I suddenly realized that these cool fucking flip-top jars had one fairly significant disadvantage:

I had absolutely nothing to keep this shit under the brine.

So now I’m troubleshooting live. I remembered reading that you could use a Ziploc bag filled with brine as an improvised fermentation weight. Fine. I’ve got Ziploc bags. I figured that Gemini could give me the quick low-down. 

After a ten-minute dive into a rabbit hole, I came out the other end with indeed—you could use Ziploc bags as an impromptu fermentation weight—the caveat is you need to ensure there’s fresh brine inside as the weight. (This way, if the bag breaks you’re safe.) 

Easy. In goes the bag.

Cucumbers down. Spices mostly down. A massive pain-in-the-ass to close, brine everywhere.

Or, as it turns out, problem relocated.

A couple of days later, I noticed the jars were leaking brine.

Every time I messed with the lids, I seemed to lose a little more, so eventually I put the jars on a pizza pan, covered the whole thing with a towel and left the lids open rather than constantly burping them.

Then I left them alone to ferment.

On Day 5, I came back to check them.

Jar #1 looked pretty much like I’d left it.

Jar #2 did not. When I opened the lid, my brain saw (with a little imaginative help from Firefly) 

Uh oh.

There, sitting right at the surface amongst the floating spices, was a nice little fuzzy white patch. This is what I really saw :

Well, fuck.

Jar #2 was done. I’m adventurous, not stupid. That one was going in the bin.

Jar #1 didn’t have the same fuzzy patch, so I dealt with the frothy shit floating at the surface, got everything submerged again and decided to see where it goes. This time I was taking no chances, and seeing if the ramekin I’m using as a weight will work out. 

Which left me wondering what the fuck had actually gone wrong. Too many variables at once? 

And then, because apparently the universe has a sense of humour, I went downstairs.

So, I’m putting stuff away and finally decide it’s time to throw out the Mutti bottles I’d been saving for passata. (Fuck it. I’ll use Mason jars.)

And sitting there was a neatly tied plastic bag. Guess what’s inside?

Two 1-litre wide-mouth Mason jars.

For those of you saying (rightly) “You have got to be fucking kidding me…” in my defense, I forgot that before we left for vacation back in June, my mother-in-law had sent these home with Mrs. Sandemano for me. I’d put them downstairs because I already had all those Mutti bottles and figured I probably wouldn’t need them.

These were the exact fucking jars I’d been looking for when I started Batch #2. The ones that fit the pickle pipes I already own.

Of course they were sitting in my basement the whole fucking time.

So, yeah. There will be a Batch #3.

Same experiment. Fewer variables.

One-litre wide-mouth Mason jars. Pickle pipes.

As for Jar #1 of Batch #2? As the French say—À venir!