Making Pickles with Sour Dough Bread(?)
Has anyone ever heard of making pickles using sour dough bread as a starter?
While shopping at a farm stand for pickling cucumbers, a lady that told me how her mother used to put a slice of bread on top of the jar because the yeast helps turn the pickles faster than regular lactic acid fermentation. “Fast” meaning 3 days instead of 7 weeks in optimal pickling conditions. There’s really not much on the Internet about the technique, but a handful of articles pointed to this as a popular Hungarian/Eastern European practice, specifically with sourdough rye bread. I really have not found any science to back this up. To me it sounds more like something done out of tradition. I tried the technique anyway with a white sourdough bread, a rye sourdough bread, and no bread as a control. So the result?
This is the third year in a row that I’ve attempted to make fermented pickles and once again I’ve failed. It was less worse than last year’s attempt, but for some damn reason I am not getting that natural sourness. I tasted the pickled: it took on the brine, it has the fermenty taste, but none of the batches were souring. I really didn’t detect a difference the the bread versus no bread technique as well.
This is most frustrageous people…
