Fermenting Vegetables: Salt, Brine & Safety

Ferment guide 🥒 · Cellar crew · Nov 2026

On this page: the 2% rule · brine vs dry-salt · the working weeks · what's on the surface · fixes

The rule with its base named

Every safe vegetable ferment hangs on one number: salt. The standard jar method sets salt as a percentage of the water's weight — a 2% brine on 500 g water is 10 grams, no arguments. The kraut method sets it as a percentage of the vegetable's weight — 900 g cabbage wants 18 g salt, massaged until the brine pulls itself out. Both are honest instructions; the dishonest one is the bare "2%". Name the base every time — the app prints the base beside every number it shows, which is exactly what the brine table card does on paper.

Ingredient	What it does	Note
Vegetables	The ferment's food and structure	Crisp + fresh over tired + floppy; trim bruised bits
Salt	Selects for Lactobacillus, against spoilage	Any pure salt works; avoid anti-caking additives
Water	The brine	Chlorinated tap kills cultures — filtered or boiled-and-cooled
A 1 L jar + weight	The fermenting vessel	Anything food-safe that keeps everything submerged

Two methods, one math

Brine method (whole peppers, carrots, cucumbers): dissolve 2% salt of the water's weight; pour over packed vegetables; submerge under the liquid with a weight.
Dry-salt method (shredded kraut): weigh everything; add 2% of the vegetable's weight in salt; massage until the drawn brine covers it; press and weight down.

The three stages, briefly: days 1–2, enterobacteria bloom and the jar clouds (normal); days 2–10, Lactobacillus acidifies toward pH 3.5 (the main event — this is when bubbles climb); day 10 onward, slower acid-tolerant strains stabilize it for longer storage.

The working weeks

Weigh. Water + vegetables both — the math needs real numbers, and the log sheet wants them written down.
Salt by the named base. Taste the brine on day one: it should taste like the sea, not like soup.
Submerge everything. Weight, cabbage leaf, or a zip bag of brine — air is the enemy of the surface.
Store at cellar temperature; warm rooms race, cold rooms dawdle. Count bubbles per minute on the log; expect a peak around days 3–5.
Taste from day 4. When the bite is right, refrigerate: cold stalls the acid and holds the crunch.

What's on the surface

You see	It is	Action
White film, flattish, like lace	Kahm yeast (harmless squatter)	Skim it off, re-submerge, keep going
Fuzzy patches, colored, raised	Mold (real)	Compost; next time keep it under the brine line
Cloudy brine, white sediment	Normal work	Nothing — it's doing its job
Slimy brine that won't clear	Too warm or under-salted	Below 1.5% is the danger floor — correct and monitor

Fixes at the shelf

Weighed and it still went wrong? Salt percentage misread (base confusion) is the classic — taste + a hydrometer-less pH strip (the pH Zone game trains exactly this read) closes the loop. Soft pickles: warm ferment — keep the jar at cellar temperature. Hollow kraut heads: cabbage cut too early after salt — massage longer before packing. The full math — and a cellar that remembers every date — lives in the app.