Naturally Pickled Green Beans with Radishes, Red Onions and Thyme

My favorite part of growing my own food and visiting my local farmers market this year has been coming up with new recipes for preserving the harvest naturally.  Here is a great recipe to preserve the ever growing bounty of green beans.

A couple weeks ago at my farmers market I found some beautiful radishes.  Since green beans are at the height of the season, I decided to ferment them together with red onions and thyme I have growing in a container in my front yard.  To add a little pizazz, I decided to throw in a Thai chili pepper that I had frozen last year.  I allowed this to ferment for about 1 and a half weeks. It was definitely done as when I unscrewed the lid, it was fizzing like crazy!  A clear sign of fermentation.

Oh my wow, am I ever pleased with this recipe. The radishes and red onions compliment the green beans nicely adding a bit of a bite and a stronger tasting pickle.  The thyme infused the ferment beautifully and tastes great along side the vegetables.  I’ll definitely have to make a few more of these jars before the winter is upon us.

For nutritional benefits and an explanation of what lacto-fermentation is, click here.

Naturally Pickled Green Beans with Radishes, Red Onions and Thyme
These measurements are not exact.  Feel free to add more or less of any ingredient.


Ingredients:

• A good handful of freshly picked green beans, cut in thirds
• 1/2 red onion, sliced
• 1 garlic clove, sliced
• 4-5 radishes, sliced
• 3 sprigs of fresh Thyme
• 1 Thai chili pepper (optional)
• 1 tbls sea salt
• 4 tbls whey (If you do not have whey, feel free to add 1 tbls extra sea salt)
• filtered water (must be filtered as chlorine will disrupt the fermentation process)

Method:

1. Blanch the green beans for 3 minutes.
2. Once blanched, in a large bowl mix together the green beans, onion, clove and radishes.
3. In a quart sized mason jar add 1/3 of the vegetables and a sprig of thyme.
4. Add another 1/3 of the vegetables followed by the second sprig of thyme.
5. Finish with the last 1/3 of vegetables and the last sprig of thyme.
6. Top with the Thai chili pepper.
7. Add the filtered water, sea salt and whey.  Make sure you add enough water to cover the vegetables and that it’s 1″ from the top of the jar.
8. Cover and shake it up.
9. Uncover and make sure all vegetables are underneath the liquid.  Cover and tighten the lid.
10. Allow to ferment in a dark cool place for 3 days up to two weeks (or more).  For this recipe, it took about 1 1/2 weeks to ferment.
11. After fermentation, place in a fridge where it will continue to ferment at a much slower pace and develop in flavors!

Buen Provecho!

This post is a part of Two for Tuesdays.