Fermented Daikon with Ginger
by Erin
Every food has a story right? On Sunday Sam and I had the luck to hear about a fellow farmer’s misfortune turned local delight. Her produce truck broke down so she couldn’t bring all her delicious vegetables to NYC, so she opened her home up to sell them to all who came. We are living off our kale right now, which is awesome, believe me, but we could not imagine passing up the opportunity of having salad everyday this week (although we consumed a pound of pea shoots in the first 24-hours). We bought over two pounds of fresh baby greens and some Japanese radishes.
Unfortunately, we did not grow enough Japanese radishes this year to have any for ourselves over the winter, so we were really happy to see large, beautiful daikons for sale. (The daikon we bought is in the post below, next to Scout.)
We have seen lacto-fermented daikons with ginger in the produce section of our local health food store and thought that they would be a good addition to our lacto-fermented foods. We bought the biggest daikon we could find and sliced it up with a lot of ginger and added a sea salt water brine. (I used 2 TBS of salt water per quart of water for these.)
Daikon with ginger! The small jar has daikon, ginger, garlic cloves and two Thai chilies.
For more detailed instructions, see the “Lacto-Fermented Carrots” post. The carrots, by the way, are amazing and almost gone. I let them ferment for a full month before refrigerating them. One more gorgeous picture of the fermenting daikons:
They remind me of preserved lemons in the light of the afternoon sun.
awesome. i’ve got some daikon lacto-fermenting right now.
i just tried one and i think you did the right thing loading up on the ginger.
my recipe only told me to put in 4 slices of ginger – thin ones – and only 2 thai peppers.
i could taste neither gin nor pep, so as of day 3 (recipe says to stop here, but they ain’t sour enough for me) i am adding more ginger and more peppers to see what happens.
lactofermentation for the win. i should have been doing this for years.