Looking for ways to utilize your old lime juice? Look no further. I came up with the realization the other day that you can use other liquids other than water for your lacto fermentations. Why not right? Well, I had no idea if it would actually work. I’ve had a serious case of the feces touch lately. It seems everything I tried out last week turned to total shit…Except for this small victory. Hey, you’ve gotta take ’em where you can, you know?

Anyway the formula is easy. Make yourself a salty lime solution by taking your old lime juice, weighing it, then adding 2% non iodized salt. You can actually do the math in your head. Yes, even you. It’s the same formula you would use to tip 20%, you just carry the decimal point over one more.

So, take 500 grams lime juice. 1% of this would be 5 grams. Then double that. So, 10 grams of non iodized salt. Pretty easy. I don’t even dissolve it, I just throw it in. 1000 would be 20 and so on.

Wash your raspberries thoroughly. I know I’ve said in the past not to wash your fruit, but this is only in specific fermentation cases where you need to retain the yeast on the exterior of the said fruit’s skin. Certain fruits, like the ever versatile raspberry, contain all kinds of crazy nooks and crannies where something vile, like manure, or weird bacteria from unwashed hands can hide. If any small amount of bad bacteria gets into a lacto fermentation, you’ll know it. It’ll smell real, real bad. Not like the floss after a few days or weeks of neglecting your teeth but more like rotten vegetables. It’s the worst because you have to throw all your hard work in the bin.

Anyway, avoid this by being anal retentive with your jars, hands, anything coming in contact with your ingredients. With any lacto fermentation make sure all your equipment has been sanitized. I do it twice out of OCD and fear of failure and you should too. I use the flesh scalding water from our insane tap and scrub with soap and then use the chemical sanitizer from the kitchen (ugh, I know) then more hot water. It seems to do the trick.

This particular batch was 865 grams of old lime, and 17 grams of salt (8.65 x 2 = 17.30…I always round down) with one green container of razzies (365 grams) and it all fit into a 1 quart Ball jar. In two days it fermented, got all nice and bubbly, and the raspberry color leeched out. The result was an insanely SOUR concoction. Two days later Angel got nervous and asked what to do with it. So I asked him to buzz it with equal parts by weight sugar. The result, in his words, “It tastes good. Tart and Sweet.”