Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.
Our family loves living on our little mini four acre homestead. We grow gardens, raise animals, and have plenty of room to play. While we are not nearly serious enough to raise all of our own food, we do enjoy being able to raise what we can and teach our children about where their food comes from. As a part of this we enjoy finding ways to preserve our harvest. We enjoy canning, freezing, and dehydrating, but we are also learning about fermenting. We were given the opportunity to review a starter kit from Fermentools to help us with our fermenting.
Last year, we also were able to try out their starter kit to make some delicious kraut. Over the course of the last year, I have played around with the timing of that recipe until I found a combination that was strong enough for my husband’s taste buds but not so strong that my children didn’t like it. I loved that I could make it my own way to work for our family.
With this new kit, I wanted to branch out and try fermenting some additional vegetables. First, since we had an abundance of cucumbers from our own vines this year, I decided to try fermenting my own pickles. I had a hard time imagining that I could truly make dill pickles without vinegar.
In the interest of full disclosure, the first time I tried to ferment this dill pickles, I made a mistake and they ended up soggy and gross. I had to send that batch to the chickens.
I did a little research and realized my mistake. When I added the salt to the water, I did not mix it well enough and a lot of it settled to the bottom of the pitcher it was in. This meant that there did not end up being enough salt in the pickle jars.
The second time around, I was much more careful to make sure that they had plenty of salt and the pickles turned out much better. I was amazed that they went from cucumbers to pickles in just three to four days.
I love that the starter kit included not only the accessories that I needed to get started but also the right salt for good fermenting. All I had to add were a wide mouth jar, water, and whatever veggies I was going to ferment. It also included an instruction manual and the Fermentools website has tons of recipes that you can use.
We are currently working on fermenting our own ginger ale and my children are super excited to give it a try. It should be a fun and healthy treat for them.
Overall, we really enjoyed the Fermentools starter kit. Whether you have lots of veggies in the garden that you need to preserve, you want the health benefits of fermented foods, or you just want to try a new hobby, this kit is a great way to get started with fermenting. It is a simple way to start on a small and easily manageable scale.
I know that the members of the Review Crew tried a variety of recipes with their kits and encourage you to click on the graphic below to see what they tried and how they used their kit.
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