1. Cut vegetables of your choice
2. Weigh an empty jar. Tare weighing scale
3. Pack veggies & add water till it fills the jar
3. Weigh the veggies + water. Pour water into a cup
4. Add 2% (of total weight) of salt
5. Add water back in & ensure full immersion
6. Wait 1 week

The 2% salt will keep nasty bacteria and fungi out while letting friendly lactobacteria ferment your vegetables, turning sugars into lactic acid and also producing a ton of other complex flavours. Refrigerate when it’s as sour as you like it.

This is nothing new, if you have seen literally any tea shop in Kerala

And all that precision weighing is aimed only to ensure that you don’t undersalt, because if you do, it will be a messy microbocalypse and you will have to discard your veggies, and if you oversalt, even lacrobacteria won’t survive

Cucumbers need only 48 hours to lactoferment into perfect pickles. Use slightly more salt because molds seem to love cucumber.

400 ml water, 20g sugar and 20g chopped ginger (with the peel). Feed sugar and ginger every 24 hours for about a week to get a Gingerbug, that is the ginger equivalent of a Sourdough starter. You can then use it to make any mildly alcoholic, carbonated beverage

Boil orange, sweet lime and lime peels, crushed coriander, cinnamon, brown sugar, chopped ginger in water, bring to room temp, add nutmeg, citrus juices and gingerbug. Bottle & let ferment for 2-3 days to get...homemade cola

2 days seems to have been enough for the perfect balance of fizz, sourness and mild alcohol production (1.5 bottles have already been demolished)

Pineapple ginger soda. 1 entire pineapple juiced + enough water to make 1.9L (for 2 1L bottles), 100g strained gingerbug, 100g sugar. 24 hours fermentation.

Watermelon ginger ale. 1 smallish watermelon + enough water to make 1.9L, 100g strained gingerbug and 100g sugar. The microbes ate almost all the sugar in 24 hours of fermentation! Crisp, fizzy, boozy with a watermelon aftertaste

Hard Apple Cider with what is proving to be a rather versatile gingerbug starter. I’m going to let it ferment for 24 more hours though. In contrast, pineapple and watermelon took just 24 hours to get to the perfect balance of fizz, sour & booze

If you make your own naturally fermented fizzy drinks, you will never go back to enjoying artificially carbonated fizzy drinks. Even if you ignore the alcohol, just the depth of flavour from fermentation reactions cannot be matched by pumping in CO2 into fruit juice.