Beets Part II
Introduction
In the Beets Part I you will see I made fermented beets with a 2% brine and they came out pretty well. Sandor Katz has a version with just salt made in the way kraut is. The salt encourages the beets to release water thus creating a brine. (NB: the brine will be syrupy because of the sugar content in beets.)
Katz can be pretty loosey-goosey with his measurements but he does provide some volume measurements for salt to go with the grated beets. The annoying thing about volume and salt is the inconsistency and I talk about this a bit in The Salt post and it reared its ugly head here.
For the amount of grated of beets I had prepared Katz would have me use about 1.5 tsp sea salt. I don't have sea salt and...
1.5 tsp of Diamond kosher = 5g
1.5 tsp Redmond = 9g
2% of beet weight =6.4g (if following this heuristic)
So how much salt do I need????? I threw a dart in the middle and used 7g Redmond salt.
Getting Started: Tools, Ingredients, and Method
320g grated beets
7g Redmond salt (see "explanation" above)
Cabbage floatie trapper
mason jar, pickle pipe, glass weight
Results
After 2 weeks of fermentation I tasted the beets bearing in mind the veg+brine took 3-4 weeks to ferment. The beets were mushy. There's no way I would ever wind up eating them. Further fermentation could make more sour but not crunchier. I tossed them.
Question: Is the mushiness because I grated instead of julienned on the mandolin? Would more salt have been better? I should repeat and adjust salinity and cut just so I know.
