 It was really by accident and it's also a bit about being lazy. We have a small farm in Southern Oregon like any small farmers. We tried to figure out how to make it pay for itself, which is a really tough thing to do. So we made a lot of artisan cheeses, which was great for us, but we didn't sell much. And our kids were starting to get to the age where they weren't going to want to do all the milking. So that was going to fall to us. So we knew we needed something else. I trained as a cider maker and we put a lot of cider trees in, but those take years to come in. While we were waiting, Kirsten had been making sauerkraut and pickles for a long time. So we thought, well, we'll just start this until the trees start producing. And then that business took off and my cider business didn't. So she's going to tell you that story of how she puts the flavors together. I worked the crew in the kitchen, which is the knives and the boxes and the jars. And then we were in a business a couple of years. My hat's off to anybody that can make it, doing organic pickling business. It's a lot of work. Every one of those jars is stuffed by hand. And so it's in gallon crocs. So there were some days where you just saw a wall of jars and giant crocs, and you thought, this is so great. We're living the dream. We've got to get out of the dream soon. The other thing was we would start bringing recipes and say, hey, here's how you make this, real simple recipes. And people just kind of freaked out because they thought you're not supposed to teach people how to do this. But this has been done for 4,000 years or more. So we did not invent this product. Just some of the flavors, putting them together. So we started doing that. And then we actually enjoyed more teaching people how to do it than we did doing it. So we decided to write a book to get out of the business as fast as we could. And so unfortunately, it's hard to write a book when you're in the business. So we'd only do it in the wintertime when the cabbages weren't in season. And then finally, it got picked up by Story Publishing. It came out last October. And the first run sold out in five months, six months. And we're on the second run right now. And a little shout out to America. It just came out in German. So there are Germans who are learning how to make sauerkraut from a couple of hippies in Oregon. Just pretty cool. So that's the story about that. I think the best thing we want to do now is not teach you any longer. We brought a lot of varieties for you to taste. And so what we're going to do is pass these out and get your taste buds going. And then Kirsten's going to tell you what you're eating. So the first thing that I'm going to tell you about is it looks like regular sauerkraut. You may or may not have a carrot. It's going to have sort of a salsa-esque flavor. That is credito. That is from El Salvadorian tradition. It's a traditional flavor. And I think there were a lot of German immigrants back in the day. And so they brought this and the flavors mixed. It has cumin, oregano, onions, garlic, some carrots, a few red pepper flakes. You can make this super hot. We don't, especially when we're sampling it to folks. What I love about this one is in the winter time, if you're trying to eat kind of local, fine. It gives you that same flavor on your meal that a fresh salsa might. You're not getting those yucky, hot house tomatoes. You're getting this live, probiotic, rich food. The really dark purple one, any guesses? Beets, yep, beets and cabbage. I brought a really unusual one tonight because we had it and because it's really a fun thing to see, it's leeks. So if you have, you might have a few little shreds of something you don't recognize. And that's a leek kraut. And it's all leeks. And it's just sort of to show you how delicious these vegetables that we wouldn't normally eat raw are when they're fermented. There's a spring kimchi. So if you have a piece of nappa or some carrots or some things like that, there's just a really mellow kimchi. This other purple one is a radish kimchi. And then, and nothing is, nothing is spicy and like I said, we do that not because that's how we like to eat things, but that's how it's, it makes it easier to sample. And then if you have a piece of cauliflower or a bright piece of carrot all by itself or a piece of onion, those are just simply pickled vegetables, just done in a brine. So let's talk really quickly about why you might want to ferment your vegetables. Like Christopher said, originally they were fermented for the very basic need of needing to preserve our harvest, needing to preserve our foods, taking us through the months when we don't have fresh vegetable growing. You know, it's right there with dehydrating as far as one of the oldest techniques known to preserve food. There's a lot of ideas of when humans started fermenting vegetables. Nobody actually knows for sure. So that's, that's thousands and thousands of years. It was done as a basic necessity, whether they knew it made them feel better, whether they knew of the things that we call health benefits now, I don't know. But it was what they needed to do to keep fresh and vitamins through the winter. Many cultures have a tradition of fermentation. The exciting thing that's happening now with this sort of rediscovery is it's almost a renaissance because we have refrigeration, because we have such a vast availability of vegetables to us and the farmers are growing great stuff and things are available year round. We don't have to just ferment our whole cabbage crop in the fall. We can do just all kinds of things and that's where a lot of people, chefs and people starting their own fermentation businesses are having a lot of fun with the flavor. So now we're fermenting for that. We're fermenting for flavor. People are often fermenting in teeny tiny batches just to have a ferment in their refrigerator or to have. I like to have a few ferments in my refrigerator because to me, it's convenience food. You spend 20 minutes, a half hour making yourself a couple jars. And then for weeks, you have this instant live fresh salad, fermented salad that's just ready to go, throw it on a soup, throw it in a sandwich, just eat it out of the jar. And it kind of takes the pressure off of when you really don't feel like you have anything else healthy to eat. Just throw a little of that on there. And that's probably one of the reasons people started eating fermented foods with rich foods like sausage is because we have in this food that you're eating a whole bunch of digestive enzymes. So it's getting your body ready to digest these foods. You've got probiotics and I'm sure all of you have heard a lot about probiotics and our gut biome. So we're discovering that a lot of our mood, our happiness, our well-being, our just feeling strong and able and fit comes from what's going on in our gut. And these foods, if you're starting to put those into your diet, it helps keep your biome in good shape. What's really interesting is what's happening to these vegetables as they get fermented. How many people know what happens with fermentation? Sort of the basic process. That means everybody's new crowd to this one. So it's really cool. The cabbage that he's got has less vitamins than the cabbage in here. The process goes through. We've got our little bacteria on there. They're fully loaded with everything we need for the process to happen. And we'll do a demo in just a minute and show exactly how that happens. But as it's happening, the bacteria start working on the cabbage or whatever the vegetable is. And eating the sugars, the starches, the carbohydrates, they're digesting, they're pre-digesting, they're breaking down these things in the vegetables that we cannot assimilate. So they're making this food more available to our body. As they're doing that, the vitamins are going up. Vitamin C goes up. We now get vitamin B12, which most people know is not something that's usually available in any other food or any pure vegetable food. It's an animal product. But it's available in sauerkraut. Also, you get K2, which is something we need to process our D. We're going to make a lemon dill kraut. And we used to call this at the market our gateway kraut, because it's a really bright, lively flavor that people that swore up and down they would never eat sauerkraut often loved. So for those of you that haven't met your humble cabbage in a while, we're just going to talk to the basics. We just got this one at Rainbow just about a couple hours ago. It's looking pretty good. Weight really varies in cabbages. Sometimes you get them and they're like cannonballs, really thickly. Other times, depending on if they've had to fly in from someplace else, they can be really super light because they were almost ready to bolt when they picked them. And so it's really the weight of the cabbage that you're working on in this one. So this one's actually pretty light. What I'm going to do is take off the outer leaves. So anything that feels kind of tacky, not quite up to snuff, we're going to discard that. And then I'm looking for the next leaf in that looks pretty good. And we're going to actually, that one's going to be, it's going to have a special purpose later. So we're going to hold that one back, maybe two. Now we followed the farmer's motto of having lots of kids and having them work for free. Unfortunately, the first three were boys. So we had three teenage boys in the kitchen with knives at one time. Yeah, it bandaged. So luckily, it's washable. Everything's washable. So again, so we came up with a really simple rule. And you can think about it, too, if you're, we would do a couple hundred pounds of cabbage at one time with a knife. And so by two o'clock in the afternoon, you're getting pretty tired. So we would do this rule where with the stem out, I'm just going to, now I'm right handed, flip this if you're left handed. But I'm just going to make one diagonal cut along the core there. And then I'm still going to face it out. I'm going to take a second diagonal cut. So what I'm going to do here is just a third cut down. This is the guy we don't want. And now everything else is something we can chop. So what I'm going to do, so chop is really important. So for some of you that have maybe tasted a kimchi and you stick your fork in and out comes a quarter of the cabbage or half of the cabbage, that's a chop. That's the reason that they did that. And so what you like or don't like, this is your chance to dial it in. So if you like a thinner chop, you can just, this is where I'm going to do maybe a thinner's chop for the lemon dill because it's a light sort of airy crowd. It goes on top of, imagine on top of salads and things like that. So I'm going to do really fine chop for this. We actually came up with this flavor because our second son was, I think, 16 or 15 at the time, and he loved to go hiking. And he said to us, hey, could you come up with something that is refreshing on a hike? Actually, he was also working a lot with the Forest Service and would be out for a few days at a time. And so we thought we'd try to come up with a crowd that really felt like it had that thirst quenching feeling of electrolytes. Sauerkraut, anyway, sauerkraut juice does have a lot of electrolytes. In Eastern Europe, especially, you drink the sauerkraut juice or the pickle juice the next morning after a night on the town. Brines have become so popular that some of the, they sell them in the jars down the stores and it's actually a problem because people are buying the brines even more than the sauerkrauts. And as you'll see, this process only produces so much brine. You can't really dial it up and get a lot more brine. You're not gonna ever add water. So the fact that the brines are so popular actually causes a bit of a problem for the sauerkraut. So they're waste, not whatnot. It was selling the extra and now that's the lead. So if you can see right now, you got the crunchy thing going on. It's really dull. I mean, it's a great cabbage. It's not dull that way, but it's fresh. By the time we are gonna add the salt, it's gonna change quite a bit. But I have to start chopping again. What we're doing is we want to make the environment perfect for the lactobacillus. Those are our little good guys, our little bacterial friends that are gonna change. Do that magic. And they're a little environment quietly and make this the good food that we're after. So what we do after we chop is we want to create a brine. And that's making that perfect little salty pool environment. The reason we need it under a brine is because this process needs to be an anaerobic process, which means no oxygen. And so keeping the vegetables submerged under that brine keeps the oxygen out, keeps the bacteria happy. And what they're doing, so this is the place where this food becomes shelf stable to a certain extent, is the preservation doesn't happen from the salt. We're gonna be adding salt, but it's not the salt that's preserving the vegetable. What's preserving the vegetable is making this environment. They're starting to eat the carbs, the sugars and what not, convert it into acid. When it becomes acidic, then all the other bacteria, the pathogen or the molds or the yeasts or the things that we don't want in there, they can't live in there in that anaerobic, acidic environment. So what Christopher is gonna show you is dry brining. There's ways to make a brine that is wet brining and that's like a cucumber pickle where you're taking a salt water solution. And you're putting it over the top of your vegetables. The only thing you tasted tonight were these pickles that were pickled in a salt water solution. And with that, that salt gets in there, that salt water with sort of an osmosis process, the vegetable juices. They kind of switch places and that's getting that environment perfect for the bacteria to thrive. Wow, I really smell that, or that dill, do you guys? Smells really good. I think I should stop there or do you think I should? I put the rest. Go dealy. Yeah. So there's no rules with what spices or herbs that you can use or not use, and that's kind of the exciting part too. If you have some flavors you really wanna try out, feel free to. We have not come up with a vegetable that you cannot ferment because it won't do the process. I'm gonna add the salt first so I can taste it and then add the vinegar or the juice. So I'm gonna add salt now. When I start scrunching this, Kushner probably talk about salt a little bit more and what kinds of salt we use. But I'll do the part about how much to put in. This is gonna taste like it's gonna taste when it comes out the jar. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use about it. This was a pretty light cabbage, so I'm gonna use maybe not quite. I have a whole teaspoon, but I'm gonna put half of it, three quarters of it. I'm gonna mix it around and taste it. And what I'm going for is taco chip or tortilla chip, not Doritos. But like corn chip, you know something that's- Or a good kettle chip. But some kind of salty, that kind of flavor, but not super salty. Something you'd want to eat over and over again. Because that's what it's gonna basically come out as. If you get too salty, then you need to add more vegetables, because you want to fix it right now. Because once it comes out, there's no fixing it. We had stories, rarely we'd have people cry in the farmer's stand. But sometimes people would come in and they'd say, so I've got this crowd. I did it three years ago. It's still salty, but I'm waiting. How long do you think I need to wait? I look at Kirsten and she'd look at me and it's kind of like that doctor thing about who's gonna, depending on who's in the dog out. Usually, well, one of us would say, honey, it's not gonna. It's just the water's gonna evaporate and just like the ocean, it's gonna get saltier and saltier. And so there's a time we just, we had to say goodbye to. We're writing a second book on hot, fiery ferments. And so we're inventing, Kirsten's inventing, a lot of new flavors. And almost all of them work, but one was a real dog and it didn't. And we had to get rid of it. And so we actually posted that on the Internet and so many people came back and said, I'm so happy to know that you have failures too. It's really hard to let go of these things after you've made them. And you really want them to taste good and they don't. And they just won't. So just be brave, early on it's like tough love. So there are pounders and there's scrunchers, I'm a scruncher. So I really liked it. So while he's scrunching, let's talk a little bit about salt. Cuz I know that is a thing that people get confused about. So like I said, first, don't think salt is what's gonna keep your ferment from killing your family. So if you're at that point and you're making it and you taste it and you're like, that's tasty. And you think, well maybe just a little more salt because I want it to work. You don't need to do that. Like I said, it's the bacteria and the acidification. The other thing is, people ask, well, I don't really want to use salt. Can I ferment without salt? Technically, you can ferment without salt. What the salt does is, and we don't add a whole lot, but what the salt does is it makes that environment really hospitable to the bacteria that you are trying to encourage. And so it makes that fermentation process a little easier to get it started, get it off on the right foot. The other thing the salt does is it hardens the pectins. And so it helps keep your kraut or your whatever pickle that you're making a little more crunchy, a little crispy. And so instead of thinking, wow, I don't want to use so much salt, I encourage people to explore some of the unrefined, either mineralized sea salts or mineralized rock salts. And I'm actually happy to, once Christopher knows he has enough salt, I'm actually happy to pass this one around. This is what we tend to use. It's a rock salt out of Redmond Eustach. It's called real salt. I like it because it's got a higher trace mineral content. So you're adding that to your food. I also like it because the sodium chloride content is lower, which means it doesn't taste as salty. It doesn't have that bracingly briny flavor that some of these really refined salts can have. And so that's why I like to pass it around for folks that haven't ever had a chance to taste a mineralized salt because you'll see that it's actually got almost a sweet flavor. And so I'll just, you can just use the back of this and put a couple little sprinkles on your finger if you want to taste it. It's called Redmond Real Salt. Yeah, and it's from Utah and it's very similar to the Himalayan pink salts. I just think of it as a more local salt because it comes from here and not Pakistan, but either one works, Celtic sea salts are wonderful. Smoke salt. Smoke salt is a lot of fun. That's a way you can play with flavor and get a smoky crowd without doing a whole lot, just adding some smoke salt instead. So if you can see now that the cabbage besides the dills in there, it's really changed. It's more dull in color. It's not squeaky anymore. And what's happened is just that little bit of salt. I ended up using just the teaspoon. But it's already breaking down this. This is your ooh, ah, big moment here. I didn't even cheat. I didn't put the lemon in yet. So that's really just. So that's what you're aiming for is just that brine. And so Kirsten has a lot better taste than I do. So I need, if I'm going to add some acidity like the lemon, I need to taste it beforehand because once the lemon gets in there, I can't really pick out the flavor so much. So just depending on how good you are. So now we're just going to add both of them. And if you want to make a kraut with a lemon flavor, the acidity is by the time this ferments, the acidity that's created sort of overtakes the lemon. It's a very light, light lemony flavor. If you want to really know that you've got that lemon flavor, or if you're using something like an orange, just a little bit of that zest in there will help increase that lemon flavor. Okay, this guy's ready to stuff. We don't usually have this, but tonight we have an additional device that's really cool. You can find these in canning supplies. We also can, so it's great for putting sauces in, but it's also nice to not be so messy. So what you need for fermentation to work is a place to make this environment anaerobic. Really, there are beautiful, beautiful crocs out there. There's potters all over the country are making these amazing handmade crocs, but you just need a vessel. So we like to show you how you, I'm gonna show you a few ways to ferment tonight that are just so simple that you probably have these things around. So one of the places that you can get into trouble for those of you that had maybe problems the first time around, is like Kirsten just said, it needs to be anaerobic. With canning and everything else, you just fill her to the top, right? But in this case with fermenting, what you're gonna wanna do is just put a little bit in, and then I'm gonna tamp it down. I'm just gonna build it in layers as it comes up. But once you get into this, there's a lot of woodworkers now that are building all these things on the internet so you can hint Christmas is coming and I need a tamper. And I'm just gonna keep doing this just to fill it up. And I'll tamp every little bit. What are we making here? You are making lactic acid. Towards the end, there's some acetic acid starts to come in but so little that it's really lactic acid that's happening here. So while Christopher is getting all that prepped and we just talked briefly about lactic acid, people often ask, especially folks that are looking for, I really want this superfood, I want my probiotics, when is the best time in the process to eat my sauerkraut? So the first thing to know is it's not just one strain of lactic acid, the lactic acid bacteria family has hundreds of strains and recently there was a study done that showed one big, nice spoon of kraut has as many bacteria, species, or not species, but not strange, just as many numbers. Population of bacteria as a whole bottle of the really expensive probiotic stuff that you buy. So eating sauerkraut regularly isn't necessarily the same as eating the pills but it's a really good way to get the probiotics. The one thing they're not sure about is what strains are in that population and what species besides the ones that they really know. So there's a succession as the fermentation starts and you get these different members of the bacteria that start the process and then some that move in as it's getting more acidic and wow. So I'm gonna show you a couple different ways. We'll start with the jar. We like to put that cabbage leaf that Christopher saved on the top. It just is another place of protection. So if something is gonna move in and want to spoil your ferment, it would come in from the top. And so your magic potion is having that nice thick layer of brine on top of your ferment. But as the process happens, the carbon dioxide starts creating. I mean this thing doesn't look like it's going anywhere but as soon as the carbon dioxide starts pushing the oxygen out and doing all of that, you can have your brine all over your kitchen counter. So we did a book tour this summer up through the island, San Juan Islands and every bookstore, every little island has a bookstore which is awesome. And so we made a new kraut on every island. So our jet I got filled up with these krauts as we're moving along, right? And it's warm, it's the summertime, so even the San Juan's are 90 degrees now. And so at 90 degrees, these go really quickly. And as we were in Seattle or Portland or somewhere, we were hitting those bumps. And from the back trunk, you just, you could hear it, you know, like here it comes, you could count, it's kind of like little kids in a car, one, two, three, and they hit, you know. And at one of the islands we stopped and Kirsten got some of these out just to burp them. And they just went off. So if you see your lid domed for the canning folks that just freak out, you know, if you see a domed lid, that's really bad. These guys can take it, you're just, if you see it like that, you're gonna give it some space when you burp it. I'm gonna do this first. Sure. So I don't wanna confuse you, but I wanna show you there's different ways to manage this whole anaerobic thing. This one is nice and full and this is what we were doing when Christopher was talking about traveling in the car. We just, we didn't want it to leak and so we just tightened it up. And then what happens is as that action happens, you just, you sort of undo it a little bit and it makes, sometimes though, like the one he was talking about in the parking lot because it was so hot, the fermentation went so much faster. We'll talk about that again in just a minute. When those bubbles came out and when we opened it, it caused it to just, it was volcano crowd. So when you see that happening, because that can happen on a kitchen counter too, what you'll do is just do it over a bowl or a clean bowl or plate and as you're opening it, sort of press gently and bring that brine to where you see it go fall back in. So that's one way to manage the brine or that a similar idea where you don't have to burp it is to use this kind of jar with this rubber lid or rubber gasket. And what happens is you've got that in there nice and tight like the jar lid, except the difference is that when the pressure builds up, there's just enough give that it will let the extra carbon dioxide out and not bring any in. And so you can ferment quite a bit in these without having to burp it. Now when you do open it, they can take a lot of pressure before they start throwing stuff out. So you're still gonna get that wild effervescence and that's an okay thing. The other method that we like to use is a really simple method that this jar is kind of a little too full for. You'd want it maybe a little less full. And you're creating a seal with this bag and what's cool is that water is going in there and it's filling around the bottom of the bag, the top of the crowd and the brine is sort of going along the bag and you're creating a seal that way. The CO2 is gonna escape through the little wrinkles in the bag and not let oxygen in and it's weighting it down and weight is another strategy for keeping the crowd under that brine. So you can kind of see what's going on there. So you would just sit this on your counter. So it's ready to go in whatever format you put it in. And I actually discovered this summer you can take and ferment in a bag if you don't even have a jar. I was at the Mother Earth news fair this fall and I was doing a fermentation class with kids and somehow wires got crossed and I wasn't given any of the jars and the kids were all supposed to go home with their own jar of sauerkraut. And so, but we did have a bunch of bags. And so we ended up, the kids ended up putting their cabbage and their salt in, fermenting in their closed bag. We squeezed out all the oxygen and I mean I'm not a big plastic fan but it's a pretty cool way to make a little batch of sauerkraut. So now this is gonna go on your counter, right? It's gonna ferment best in that 55 to 75 degree range. Lower than that and the fermentation process doesn't really get going quickly enough for the good bacteria to overwhelm the bad bacteria and get that acidity going warmer than that and it might get going a little too quickly and you lose that flavor because what's happening, remember we talked about that succession of bacteria. Each of those types of bacteria are kind of layering on a different flavor and so if you're at that sweet spot of fermentation temperature somewhere in that 55 to 75 range, you're gonna get more flavors and as more bacteria have their time to really go through the process which is kind of interesting. If it's too hot then like 100 degrees it's just plain too hot for the bacteria to really do a good job. So you're gonna put that on your counter. So room temperature obviously is fine, it's perfect. You'll read, put it in a dark closet or under a bed or something. I say don't do that especially when you're learning how to do this process because you'll forget about it and all that brinal herb over and you'll come back and there'll be oxygen and brine and mold and that's no fun. So keep it on your counter, talk to it every morning when you start making your coffee or whatnot and that's why people don't like to throw away their ferments, I mean they know their life food and they make friends while they're curing together and so keep an eye on it and also back to the full flavor idea, taste it. You know, taste it, like I said four or five days in. See what you think, pack it all back in there, let it go a little longer, see what you think then. It's not like canning where you can't touch it once you've done it. As long as you use clean utensils and get everybody tucked back in the anaerobic environment you're definitely welcome to scooch a little out and see what you think. So that's how long it takes is anywhere from, you know, we start thinking of it as done when it's starting to turn acidic. 4.6% pH level is the point where it's safe, other things won't live. I've noticed when I'm doing experiments and testing it with little pH strips that it'll sort of hover in that neutral stage for a little while and as soon as it hits 4.6 it's actually past 4.6. It doesn't really go down slowly. It's sort of it hits that critical mass and it's below four often. So you don't really have to worry about is it acidic enough? Your mouth will tell you. It's nice and sour, it's pickly, it's ready to go. All right, now I think we can start questions. Where do these bacteria come from? Where do they come from? Do you have an answer? Oh, you were saying. They're everywhere, they come from the soil. That's why it's really nice to use organic vegetables where you know they're all on there. They come fully loaded. Some people like to add cultures but it's really not necessary. The other interesting thing is some people will try to sell you cultures because they wanna tell you, oh well we have El planterum which is very good for your gut. Well the thing with those purchased cultures is that they did studies in Korea that we read where inoculated ended up in the same place anyway in their own way. So yeah. What happens if you leave the lid off when you're doing it? You know, it's fine as long as everybody's under the brine. You can leave the lid off. That's why I try to give people a couple of different strategies because everybody's comfortable with a different method. Some people will not ferment without an airlock which is allowing that sort of like this, allowing it to escape, not allowing anything in. But you can ferment without a lid. We sometimes will put another jar, a smaller jar into the jar to weight it, just put a towel over that. What can happen is stuff can grow like if it's a longer ferment, maybe some yeast will grow on top or some molds or different things. As long as you scoop that stuff out and everything under the brine is anaerobic, it's fine and the cool, cool, cool thing about sauerkraut or fermented vegetables is you can't kill yourself. You really can't. Nobody yet has died from sauerkraut in any kind of recorded history. It's not a good suicide plan. It's not a good suicide plan. And do you know why? Because you have five senses and when it's bad, you know it's bad. There's no secret lurking botulism, tasteless odorless thing going on. It's nasty. It's either slimy. It's the wrong color. It smells like rotting potatoes. It is not a, there's nothing that says put me into your mouth and that's what's kept us alive. We were gonna self publish this after we got rejected a few times. So we had some great pictures and then when Story picked us up, they said, oh, we'll send a crew up. And so all the pictures were done by a San Francisco photographer and her crew and they're beautiful. The only thing that survived of our work is the scum gallery. So these are all shocky photographs published in the back. Not to, don't look at these before you go to sleep. But if you're making some and you wanna check the book out at the library because you've got something going on, look in the back of here because we'll show you what a calm yeast looks like and what to do about it versus mold versus any things. It just saves you because you find something we wanted you to know what things were and what's okay and how to handle them. So very back scum section. Just to be sure on the timeframe again, you say it takes about four days for this to be prepared properly. So if you were to eat it before that, would you get sick because there would be bacteria in there? You know, when we were researching for the first book, there was this very brief period that they said everything's fair game like right at the beginning. But I think, again, nobody's ever gotten sick that I know of, you know, but as soon as you see that color starting to change and I, this has other things in it, but see the difference between that yellow and that vibrant green. As soon as you see that and smell that pickly flavor, even it's not gonna, you're not gonna get sick from it. How about on the other end, how long can you keep it if it's a hundred days? Is it gonna be spoiled or? No. Do you put them in the refrigeration? We do. So this, this crowd here, this crowd here, I was really pleased with myself. This one I made last August. And it's been refrigerated the whole time. It's been tucked in a jar with brine on top and in the refrigerator, not opened and there was nothing on top. It's perfectly good. I tell people to watch their crowds, some crowds in the refrigerator. They will kind of turn a little sooner, but you can tell because see how these colors are vibrant. You kind of lose that vibrancy when they're starting to go. And often it's not even that they've gone bad, like spoiled, like I'm gonna get sick. Often they're just done. They're lifeless. The bacteria has worked its way through. It's not alive anymore and they just don't have that spark. Ageing doesn't necessarily make it better. Not necessarily. Well, here's the thing. So old school, right? Those big barrels, they were made, they were kept somewhere as cool as they possibly could. We have refrigerators and so we can keep things like this without any change because as soon as you say, wow, I really like that crowd now. Five weeks, four weeks, two weeks, you put it in the refrigerator and it slows the bacterial action down so much that there's really no change for a very long time in the flavor. Old school, they didn't often have that cold of a temperature unless it was wintertime and it was buried in the ground. And so you hear a lot of stories of people going down into their cellar or their grandma's cellar and having to peel back sort of a mat, like a mold mat or something that was protecting it what was underneath. But then as the winter progressed, it went from this sort of vibrant, crunchy to successively more sour until it was done. And so a lot of that we can save with the refrigeration. You had a question. If I used a jar with the rubber gasket, do I need, I don't have to burp it. It would stay for weeks without lifting them in. Do I need to be so concerned about keeping the veggies below the brine? I, you know, some people say you don't because you're not opening it and that oxygen has left the environment. There gets to be a certain point where I feel there's a flavor difference if you have these big air pockets that you can see. I've noticed a bitterness. So for me, I go in there and I press everybody down anyway if I see some of them. So I think of ferments as introverts and extroverts. There are some, and it's really just a sugar content, starch content that are just wild. You don't know what you did differently, but they are just erping and burping and Christopher. I can just feel it. You taught little kids how to do this at the libraries up in Oregon this summer. So we did, it was cabbages in chemistry because there's a chance to introduce pH and acidity. They're little guys, and usually when we say they've been drugged here, right? And as soon as they know this is about sauerkraut, you can just start to feel the passive resistance. And there's usually somebody who will, well, whole time, but once they get to making it and you're explaining it, especially when we talk about these guys that are living on there and they're eating sugar and they're farting, and that's all they're doing. They're just sitting around doing that and you just see these big smiles on their face. They're imagining themselves. They're all in. They're all in, they're imagining themselves as a microbe thinking, wow, this is all they do. This is so cool. And then now burping is like, oh, so the kids are just waiting for the farts to build up and they haven't yet. You say, you gotta take it home. It'll be in the morning, there'll be farts in the morning, but you gotta watch it. You can't have them yet. And they get so excited, but we'll have one or two mothers who will come up and go, now I understand. I didn't understand without the farting thing, but now I get it. So all ages, farmers market, the thing that would kill us was, the parents would come in and where Kirsten talked about they'd have that, oh my gosh, meanwhile their kids have come in and started sampling. They're just going down the line because it's pretty and it's, they don't know any different. And the parents would say, whoa, stop. You're not gonna like that as they're mowing down our samples. So there's a lot of things now about getting your kids interested earlier. There's a lot of different kind of things you can do to sneak it in their diet. We've got Schmiers, which Schmiers were introduced by a family friend a long time ago about these bagels and Schmiers thing. It's a great way to introduce it. You just squeeze up some of these things that you make and put that in some kind of spread. You're getting it into their guts and you're building what's going to become an addiction. And then pretty soon they're eating it out of the jar. Can you only ferment vegetables? No, you can ferment all kinds of things. Cheese is also lactic acid fermentation. Kombucha is another really popular one right now and that's a bacterial mat. It's a whole different thing. Kiefer, there's all alcohol is fermented. But yeah, but with the lactic acid fermentation, it's a really great way to kind of enter the fermentation scene because you can't screw up and if you do screw up, you know you screwed up. You wanna talk about fruits? And fruits, fruits can be fermented. If they're too juicy and too sweet, they actually become alcohol. So when you're fermenting them with vegetables, you wanna use a small amount or you wanna use dried fruits. It's really wonderful to use dried fruits to sweeten something up. So if you want a sweet flavor, add some raisins, cranberries. I didn't bring any today because the cranberries are just coming on but what I make this time of year is a cranberry ferment for Thanksgiving and think about it, you've got this raw enzyme rich probiotic that you're having with your meals so that you're getting your digestive enzymes in there instead of the stuff that bloops out of the can. So the recipe's in the book if you wanna buy it or if you check it out but also if you go to our website, it's fermentista.kitchen and if you scroll to the bottom, you'll see sort of a secondary navigation bar that says presentations in that. You'll see something that is M-E-N-F which is Mother Earth Newsfare and I gave out that recipe in a class that I did there so you can get that cranberry recipe online but basically all you're doing is you're chopping the fresh cranberries, you're adding salt and orange juice just like we did here, you're adding dried cranberries and that's your sweetener and you get a pretty incredible ferment that way too so that's a lot of fun. Well thank you, we're gonna sign books if you'd like me to. Thank you.