Rebecca’s Recipe of the Week: Fermented Carrots | Canalside Community Food

According to Dr Bill Schindler, fermented carrot sticks not only taste more interesting than ordinary carrot sticks, but also contain lots of probiotics. I can’t comment on the merits of this claim, but can confirm that fermented carrot sticks are really tasty. They retain the pleasant crunch of raw carrots, but are a little softer—midway between raw and cooked. The brine imbues each carrot stick with a salty tang, and the short fermentation adds an additional dimension. As fermentations go, this is really, really easy. You basically pack the carrots in a jar, add salty water, and leave them for a few days.

Serve your fermented carrot sticks as a nibble with drinks, or add them to a salad.

Fermented Carrot Sticks

Ingredients

3-6 carrots
sea salt
1 glass jar large enough to hold your carrots
kitchen scales of the sort you can zero

Method

Peel and trim the carrots. Cut them into sticks of a size you’d like to munch on.

Put the empty glass jar on the scales and zero the scales.

Leaving the jar on the scales, stand the carrot sticks neatly into it, packing them as tight as possible. With the carrot-filled jar still on the scales, pour in enough water to cover the carrots but leaving 2cm between the top of the water and the top of the jar. Note down the weight in grams.

Now do some maths to work out how much salt you will need. Multiply the weight by 0.02. This is the amount of salt you need. So, for instance, if the vegetable mixture weighs 1000grams, then you need 20 grams of salt.

Measure out the amount of salt you will need and put it into a medium bowl.

Drain the water from the carrots into that bowl. Mix until the salt is dissolved, and then pour the salty water back into the jar to cover the carrots.

Cover your jar with a piece of clean cloth secured by a rubber band. Put it somewhere tranquil and temperate—an ideal temperature is around 17C. Leave for 3-5 days to ferment. Try tasting a carrot after 3 days, and see if you like its crunchy, salty flavour. Once you’re happy with the flavour, move the jar to the fridge, where it will keep for up to 3 months.

Recipe adapted from Bill Schindler, Eat Like a Human (2021).