Fermenting Your First Crock: A Free Beginner’s Guide

The first jar I ever made sat on the counter for three days before I opened it.

It smelled like cabbage. It bubbled a little. There was a rock in it, because a clean smooth rock was what I had.

I was sure I had ruined it.

I had not. That jar turned into sauerkraut, and it was better than anything I had ever bought in a bag.

Most people do not quit fermenting because it is hard. They quit because nobody told them what normal looks like.

So I wrote the book I wanted that week.

Fermenting Your First Crock is a 51 page guide to putting up vegetables with salt, water, and a jar you already own. It is free.

What is inside

Before You Begin

• What Fermenting Actually Is
• What You Actually Need
• Salt: The One Thing You Cannot Guess At

Your First Ferments

• Simple Sauerkraut
• Carrot Sticks with Garlic and Ginger
• The Odds-and-Ends Jar

Keeping It Going

• When Something Looks Wrong
• Storing What You Made
• Moving Up to a Real Crock

The back of the book

• Frequently Asked Questions
• Quick Reference: Salt at a Glance
• Final Thoughts
• Sources and Further Reading

It teaches one thing, and it teaches it all the way through

This book will not teach you kombucha, or sourdough, or yogurt, or kimchi. Those are good things and they deserve their own books.

It teaches vegetables in a jar on your counter, and how to know they turned out right. That is the whole scope.

If you have never fermented anything, start here. If you have tried once and thrown the jar out, start here too.

What you need

• Cabbage, or carrots, or whatever is left in the crisper
• Salt
• Clean water
• A wide mouth quart jar
• Something to hold the vegetables under the brine

That really is the list. No airlocks, no crock, no special lids, no starter culture.

And no kitchen scale. Every measurement in this book is in teaspoons, tablespoons, cups and quarts, because that is what is already in your drawer.

The part nobody tells you

A white film on top of your ferment is almost always kahm yeast. It is flat, it is harmless, and you skim it off.

Mold is different. It is fuzzy, it is raised, and it has color. That jar goes to the chickens.

There is a chapter with photographs of both, side by side, because reading a description at eleven at night while you stare into a jar is not the same as seeing it.

What I would do differently

I used a clean smooth rock as a weight for my first year, and I would do it again. Women were fermenting cabbage on the prairie long before anyone sold glass weights. A rock works.

What I would change is how long I waited to start. I read about fermenting for two years before I made a single jar.

The whole thing costs less than a bag of sauerkraut from the store, and the worst case is you feed a quart of cabbage to the chickens.

Fermenting is not canning

This trips up almost everyone. Canning uses heat to kill everything in the jar. Fermenting uses salt to keep the right bacteria alive and crowd the wrong ones out.

Different job, different rules, different results. There is an illustrated card in the book that lays the two side by side, and a chapter on what you can and cannot safely can afterward.

How to get your copy

The book is free for anyone on the Tuesday Letter, which is the note I send out once a week from the homestead. Put your name in below and it comes straight to your inbox.

No spam, no daily emails. One letter, on Tuesdays.

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If you are just starting out and everything feels like too much at once, read Start With Rest, Not Chickens first. And if you are looking at your kitchen wondering where to begin, these simple kitchen swaps are a gentler place to start than a crock.