Fermenting Your Produce: How to Make Delicious, Healthy Pickles at Home

Fermented food is one of the healthiest things you can eat for your gut health and your body. This easy technique creates probiotics out of regular produce, creating healthier-for-you foods, as well as avoiding food waste and preserving your produce purchases for months. Fermenting also provides a nutritional bonus: Fermented cucumber pickles are a great source of the beneficial bacteria—those vital probiotics—that can aid in your digestion and gut health.

Putting up a batch of lacto-fermented cucumber pickles is about as simple as preserving gets. The pickles are made simply by soaking cucumbers in a salty brine, along with naturally occurring lactobacilli for fermentation and added spices and botanicals for flavoring. Lactobacilli are especially beneficial in gut health, since they break down sugars, such as lactose, and help you digest them into lactic acid, so your gut can break down foods and work to reduce your body's LDL, and lower your cholesterol, which is beneficial to long term cardiovascular health.

The bacteria ferment the carbohydrates (sugars) in the cucumbers by digesting them, causing changes in their texture and flavor. As they digest, the bacteria give off carbon dioxide and lactic acid. It’s the lactic acid that preserves the pickles by acidifying the brine and preventing the growth of other harmful bacteria.

How do the bacteria get into the mix? They just do—the many different species of beneficial lactobacilli (L. acidophilus, for example) are everywhere. They’re all over you as part of your skin’s microbiome, they’re all over the skins of the cucumbers, and they’re floating in the air. They’ll find your pickling jar on their own. Of course, so will other bacteria, but that’s where the salt comes in. Most bacteria, especially the harmful ones, are killed off by the salty brine, but the lactobacilli are hardier and survive.

Confusingly, lacto-fermented pickles are sometimes called brined pickles, because they’re fermented in salty brine. Not all brined pickles are fermented, however. Quick pickles are made using a brine of vinegar and salt, but they’re not fermented; the acidic vinegar, not lactic acid, is the preservative.

The classic fermented pickle is the kosher-style dill. The kosher part comes from the generous amount of garlic added to the brine, traditionally associated with the Jewish pickle-makers of New York’s Lower East Side.

To make these pickles, start with the freshest possible cucumbers, from your garden or from the farmers’ market (never the supermarket). A pickling variety such as Kirby is ideal, but slicing varieties also work well.