Stop Pickling with Vinegar! This is Way Easier~Fermented Turshia

What if I told you you could pickle all these beautiful vegetables without using any vinegar, just water and salt? Today I'm making what many cultures call tortilla. This is a pickled vegetable medley that's so lip-smackingly good, you're going to want to eat it all the time. You're going to have it with your sandwiches, put it in your salads. It is so, so addictive. If you love pickles, you're going to love this. Rather than making a vinegar brine for our tortilla, we're going to be fermenting ours, so it's going to get its sour flavor through lacto-fermentation. You'll be happy to know that making pickles this way is actually way easier than using vinegar, and they're way healthier for you. You're not going to have to sterilize any equipment, you're not going to do any canning. I'm really excited to show you this, let's start. So you can use almost any type of vegetable you want for tortilla, but there are some exceptions. The usual favorites are cauliflower is kind of a must, peppers, carrots. Right here I have some beautiful pickling cucumbers I got today at the farmer's market. Nice, fresh, crunchy celery is a great choice. I'd say a couple of vegetables that wouldn't work very well for this would be something like broccoli, or even zucchini has that kind of spongy texture. It wouldn't hold up in this recipe. So of course you want to wash your vegetables really well, and then you have to cut them into pickle-sized pieces. So for the cauliflower, I'm just going to cut it into bite-sized florets. I'm going to put those into a bowl. For the pepper, I'm just going to kind of cut around like this. I like to get every little last bit. I'm going to cut these sort of triangle shapes. I'll do the same with the yellow one. And those go for the celery. I'm going to do kind of an angle cut, so something like this to get pieces that look like that. Oh, the celery is really fresh. Throw those into there. For the carrots, I'm going to use this crinkle cutter. I don't know, I just like the look of it more. I think I might cut some of those in half because they are pretty big. And for the cucumbers, a lot of people will just leave them whole, but I am going to cut those also with the crinkle cutter. I'll show you how thick those are. They're about like that, so pretty thick. Gotta love summer and all that gorgeous produce. So here we have our beautiful vegetables looking all fresh and crisp. We're just about ready to pack these into the jars, but first we need to make the brine. Right here I have some filtered water. You want to use any type of water that's chlorine free to make your brine. I'm only going to put about half a cup in here in this little pot. It doesn't even have to be an exact amount. The reason why I want to heat up some of this water is because my pickling salt is very coarse and I want it to fully dissolve in the brine so that it distributes properly. So I'm going to just start with this small amount. Now the formula that works best to ferment almost any vegetable is 4 cups of water to 2 tablespoons of salt. I'm going to stir it around until it's completely dissolved. It doesn't have to come to a complete boil or anything. The reason why I'm just heating up a small amount of the water is because now I can just add this into this amount of water and it will all be cooled pretty quickly. It's a good time saver rather than heating up the whole amount of water and having to wait for it to cool. So this is completely dissolved now. Now I'm just going to very carefully add it back in. Oh boy. I probably could have used a funnel for that but oh well. Now you do want to make sure that this is cooled completely. Mine is still a little bit warm so I'm going to wait for a little while to let it cool. The way you want to build your tortilla in the jars is to start with some fresh dill. Put as little or as much as you like. Another thing you'll want to add is a few cloves of fresh garlic. I always like to cut that little stem off and I think I'll split these down the middle lengthwise because that will expose more flavor. So I'm going to drop those in there. Now if I had some black peppercorns I would put some of those in there but I don't right now. One great ingredient to add to fermented pickles is bay leaves. These are a natural source of tannins which really help keep the pickles crisp. You can also use some loose green tea leaves if that's what you have. I believe grape leaves work very well for this. And I also have here a few yellow mustard seeds. I'm going to drop a few of those in there. So now we're going to take our lovely veggies and now you can just start packing them in pretty tightly if you can. You want to put them in in a way that it takes up a lot of space inside the jar. So I also like to try and keep all the veggies showing all over the place. So once your jar is half full now you want to repeat that dill, garlic, mustard seed layer. A little more bay leaves. Now we're going to finish it with more vegetables until it reaches almost the top. You'll want to leave about an inch and a half of space from the top because you are going to have to press this down when the brine goes in. And now it's time to add that brine. So just pour it in very carefully. You do want to make sure it's cooled completely. So now we have to find a way to keep these completely submerged under the brine. I have these fermentation weights that I use. They're glass weights that are designed to not react at all in these types of ferments. But if you don't want to invest in these you can also use a cabbage leaf. I did that in the sauerkraut video. You just take a big cabbage leaf and use that to press everything under the liquid. You can use some of the leaves from the cauliflower or even the stalk. This has to be in an anaerobic environment meaning no oxygen. That will inhibit any bad bacteria growth. Now you can just cover it with these regular lids. You might lose a little bit of brine that's okay. Another thing you can do is just put a plate or a bowl over top of it like that. Finally you can also use a paper towel with an elastic band. Now some people like to make tortilla in one giant jar and then after it's fermented transfer it to these smaller jars. But I think this way just saves a step so that's why I did this. So now you want to put your tortilla in a warm dark place to ferment and that's going to take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks depending on how sour you like your pickles. So right now I'm just going to transfer these onto a plate. I'm going to go put these in a warm dark place and I'll show you what they look like tomorrow. So it's actually been 48 hours since we made this. I did check it yesterday but there was no change to it at all. Here's what it looked like. The brine still looked very clear and the vegetables were pretty much the same. It is important to keep in mind that my house is 25 degrees celsius right now so that has a huge impact on your fermentation time. One thing I also want to mention when you're putting the lids on when you're making it don't screw them on too tight because a lot of gas builds up during lacto-fermentation and you don't want your jars to explode which can happen. So let me show you what mine looks like after 48 hours. So you can see here that there's a bit of a cloudiness to the brine. Don't be alarmed by that it's perfectly normal. Let me show you what it actually looks like. So you can see here that things are still submerged under that cauliflower leaf and it has a wonderful briny smell to it. You really get that dill and the garlic. If you look really closely on the rim of the jar you can see little bubbles forming. You might notice if you give it a little tap some bubbles might kind of rise to the surface. Let's check one of the ones with the weight. You can definitely see here too that the water that's inside the weight is cloudy and like I said that's excellent. Oh it smells so nice. So if you see that everything is looking healthy which this definitely is go ahead and taste it. I like it definitely longer than this but if you're happy with how sour it is you can put it in the fridge right now. But it's not uncommon for a lot of tortillas to sit out for one to two weeks to get really sour. It really depends on your taste. I'm definitely going to put this back in a warm dark place and I'm going to let it ferment a little longer and I'll check back with you in about maybe another day or two. Hello again. Well it's been one week since I made this now. I would recommend starting to taste your tortilla after five days. That's around the average period when your brine will start to taste sour so maybe it'll be sour enough for you at five days. Let's open them up and take a look inside. I'm going to start with the ones with the regular lids. So I'm going to take out the weight here. This is looking really good. Oh it smells so nice. It smells exactly like you would imagine like pickles. The dill is nice and strong. So you can see that the brine looks murky again. There isn't that much change from the last time we looked at it. Now we don't have to put the weights back in because this is finished fermenting. Take a look at this one too. Oh yeah everything looks really nice and healthy. Now you can see here that there's an actual white scum forming on there. That's also perfectly normal. That's called calm yeast and it's just a natural part of lacto-fermentation. You can get rid of it by just skimming it off but it's actually a sign that things are going really well. I'm going to go ahead and give it a taste. I think I'll start with a nice cucumber. So there's how it looks. I can tell that it's nice and crunchy. So here we go. Oh that's beautiful. That's plenty sour for me. I think fermenting tortilla in these smaller jars helps it ferment a little faster. It's more common to make this in a large jar and then later on transfer it to smaller jars for storage. But I find that I like doing it this way because it just skips that step. But this tastes so so good. I love that everything worked out so beautifully. You do want it to have that little bit of cloudiness in the brine. I think now I'm going to try a carrot. So there's our carrot. I love that crinkle cut. I can tell it's going to be crunchy. I just love how easy this was to make. There was no sterilizing any equipment. No fancy you know canning for long-term storage. Oh that is so so beautiful. All right I have to try a cauliflower now. So here we are. So there's what the cauliflower looks like. I can tell there's going to be another good crunch to this one. All right. I need a pepper now. Still that beautiful bright red color. Oh I also forgot the celery. Boy celery. There we go. Okay. I love tortilla. What can I say? Once you're happy with the level of sourness you can start refrigerating it now. And in the fridge it's going to keep fermenting but at a much slower rate. And your tortilla is going to last for several months probably in there. This is going to be gone in no time. I just know it. Now because the weights were taking up room in the jars now there's a lot of space left over because we don't need them in there anymore. So I am going to consolidate here and fill the jars up a little bit more. Now they say this brine makes a really great electrolyte so I don't know. I do know that you can also start another batch of pickles with this brine and it's still full of all that good yeast so it'll work really well for you. It makes a really nice marinade for chicken. I know that. There we go. So now I'm going to go put these in the fridge where they're going to last for probably several months. These veggies are now fully preserved and they're always going to be there when you want a nice probiotic side dish for your meal. Don't make pickles with vinegar anymore. That's so much work and it's not nearly as healthy for you as these are. So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this one and that you learned something new. I hope you'll give this fermented pickle project a try soon. And once you know how to do this you might never make pickles with vinegar again.