To start this all off…I’m not sure you can actually “double ferment” an ingredient or if that’s even a thing. On one side it seems that if an item is fermented, it stays fermented. On the other side, why can’t you just keep adding ingredients that subsequently continue to ferment? Anyway, each year we add salt, plums, and honey together. It’s a magic combo. Some fruits like strawberries and cherries are less salt friendly. Weird right? You’d think all your berry friends would like salt. No no no. But plums were made for salt. Last year we just threw this all into a jar and added a sprinkle and then left it in the closet for a couple three days to quite fantastic results. This year it was a little more scientific.

Plums sliced into eighths and placed into a jar. Bottled water to fill. 1.5% salt (measured to the water). This sat four days at around 70° and created some really magic pickles. Oh man. I ate a lot of them…About three plums worth. Anyway, this got filtered and then I added 1:1 raw honey to the plums, then go! Big puree time with a hand blender/weed whacker thingy. The leftover liquid I drank a good amount of. It’s basically a kvass and good for the troubled bowels. I remembered to take a pic this time.

This is what it looked like on day four. It could have easily gone another two. Man oh man, when I bit into one of these puppies I was so goddam excited. The two funny truths about doing lacto fermentations is you never know if it’s going to be any good flavorwise and you never know if it’ll come out at all. One, some ingredients, like pickles, cabbage, etc. were born to be drowned in salt. Others were not. Also, like life and sex, sometimes it depends on how many nooks and crannies are involved. A stray microbe could get in there and ruin the whole damn thing. Case in point: Cauliflower. Two, this is why you have to be super OCD about cleaning EVERYTHING before putting your fruit or veggies in. I hand scrub the jar with soap, then flush it with the sanitizer and triple rinse with the dish pit hot water which is hot enough to flay flesh from bone. Even then I’m nervous.

One you’ve got your salty purp slices, strain off and add equal parts honey. Check it out:

You can leave it like this but as you can see, there’s a good amount of plum at the top there and you want that shit submerged. That’s the other golden rule of fermentation: Always submerge. Since I don’t like putting extra shit in the jar I just hand blended the old girl.

Voila. Goddam it’s almost as beautiful as a Coors Banquet short neck bottle on ice. It’ll sit another couple of days, from Saturday to when I arrive to work on Tuesday afternoon and get nice and weird. Then it’s R&D time. I always try to think of the opposite of what would work but it’s hard not to gravitate directly to gin, sloe gin, and something bitter in here.