How to Make Probiotics = Fermented Onions

hi welcome back to better done yourself. Today on better done yourself: fermented onions! I've seen a lot of recipes on the internet for pickled onions. they'll do like pickled red onions and different varieties on that basically just you know chop up some onions add sugar, salt, and vinegar and I want to do a little variation from that. I want to do fermented onions so they'll be probiotic. they'll be good for you as well as just delicious. so basically it's pretty simple just grab a sack of onions. I'm gonna go with these I just bought these in the produce department. these are just you know your run-of-the-mill store-bought storage onions. these are sweet onions but you know not a lot to do here basically what we're gonna do is just slice these up and then brine them as usual and leave them in the brine solution for a couple of days. so what I'm interested in though is the way that we cut them. what you want to do is when you cut these up you want to think about your finished product. think about what you're going to want to end up with for the product in the jar that you're gonna be putting on tacos, putting in salads, putting on hot dogs, putting on anything you want. I mean, these are good, just right out of the jar and have them with the beer for that matter. but these are awesome with fish and chips pickled onions or fermented onions these are awesome let's um let's look at the what it takes to cut these up and break these down so we can get it packed into a jar and brined. basically what I want to do is just to cut them in half and then we're gonna do a little move where we cut off the top just kind of in a flat motion and then cut the root end off at an angle. from there just pop the skin off take that just the outer paper off next move is we're gonna French the onion so basically what I want to do is take and do kind of a cut that cut the radius of the onion over over the course of the onion so bring your fingers back you don't want to cut it into your fingers a lot of times when you're slicing things you can use your knuckle as a guide here and just sort of bring your your knuckle back as you bring the knife around so if you want to make sure you get nice even cuts keep your fingers tucked keep your your fingertips out of there just you're rubbing against your knuckle not your fingertips and just come around nice even cuts we rotate it down let's start your little radius cuts again if your knuckle in there if you'll need a little extra guide a little extra guidance and there you go so grip your onion and we just basically make a claw you know grab it like that and see what you've got you've got these these knuckles here and we can get the knife so we're just sort of rubbing the side of the knife against our knuckle and then we can use that as our a guide to get into this onion without getting into our fingertips let's get the root off let's get the top off see what I did there nice slide that down against my knuckles when you drop your knife sharp side away so just hold your knife like that take your other fingers and just wrap them around the handle of the knife that is an awesome knife grip and then you can just start into your onion so again an angle to take the root off straight chop to do the top peel up the paper clean off your board and we repeat pinch your knife get in there and then just take your take your wedges out and we're just going for eventually we'll be going for speed but right now we just want to make sure that all our onion slices are the same thickness we want just a nice even vegetable chop whenever we do something like this we want to make sure everything is the same size nice thing I found too about slicing onions you've seen me slice onions in the past and I've fallen out of it and I haven't been able to finish chopping I just sharpened this knife and this these grams leaves are sweet onions they're not you know the real sour type of onions that you know I'm really gonna make you cry but I'm finding with a really sharp knife I'm not bothered you can hear I'm not sniffling I'm not congested I'm not crying I'm actually doing pretty well with the onions today cuz my knife is so sharp all right I'm gonna go ahead and chop up the rest of these onions that we'll get back to the fermenting once you've got your jar full of onions ones that you've so carefully chopped you can go ahead and brine them and ferment them like this well you can think about maybe augmenting the flavor a little bit add a little bit of spices make these a little bit more interesting a couple things that go nice with onions brown mustard seeds black peppercorns whole I'm just gonna I'll put in you know maybe half a dozen or maybe even like some allspice berries something like that I think I did mustard seeds last time I think maybe just a half a dozen of the allspice berries and a half a dozen 10 peppercorns and shake them down in there these are gonna have a tendency to flow so what I want to do is get them down towards the bottom of the jar and they won't float up remember when we're fermenting anything that rises above that brine that we pour in is gonna be a little island that the mold can land on and make little mold islands so that's bad so we want to make sure that anything that's gonna be a problem like that peppercorn is down underneath the vegetables from here you want some kind of a weight think about this is just a little jelly jar that you can put down in there you've seen me use the pickle pebbles or even just like a plastic bag filled with water and shove down in there just something to keep the vegetables below the brine the brine of course the brine let's take a look at the brine my brian recipe always stays the same i do two quarts of warm water and then my favorite sea salt here i do three tablespoons sea salt to two quarts of water just give that a little stir this is probably going to be too much you can you could you know half this recipe maybe if you're just doing a smaller jar but so you know what you would have a quart of water - a tablespoon and a half a sea salt let's talk about these ingredients real quickly this water I live back in the middle of the woods as you can tell from some of these videos looking out the windows in the background so I've got a private well and this is water from 400 feet below the surface of the ground so I know it's nice and clean there's no chlorine there's no fluorine there's no chloramine there's none of that stuff that the city puts in the water it's just it's just a nice clean of water you can use spring water you can use RO water you can use filtered water buy yourself a Brita if you've got nasty water it you know in your house or your apartment and and filter it try to do something to get that the chlorine and all those those chemicals out of the water because they really don't they don't lend anything to the taste of the ferment and they really they're bad for the bacteria well they're bad for you but they're they're not good for the bacteria that you're trying to foster so you want nice clean water you want a nice pure salt this is a brand that I recommend to everyone this is just Celina naturally there's a link down below if you want to grab a bag off of Amazon but this is just a nice Celtic gray salt it's got lots of minerals you can see now that I've dissolved that all the stuff that's in the water that's awesome lots of you know not some nice minerals nots of things going on that'll really you know make your bacteria you happy and your sperm n so essentially you know use grey salt use pink salt and Himalayan salt is nice is mined out of the you know the Himalayan mountains but just don't use iodized salt again kind of like the chlorine that iodine that those those metals those chemicals in your our food products are gonna kill the bacteria that we're using to try to make a healthy ferment so I've got a little bit didn't dissolve them not gonna sweat it but let's get enough of this brine in there to cover up the onions and you can see they're starting to float up I'm just gonna stick this little jar down in there and hopefully we're gonna get everything down below the surface of the water looks like there's a couple things floatin up this isn't gonna work all right Plan B ziplock bag some more of our brine good thing we made lots right and look what I can do I can take maybe not that much I can take this plastic bag and kind of fit it down in there and shove everything below the surface of the brine which is now way up here and so as this ferments what's gonna happen it's gonna make bubbles it's gonna make carbon dioxide those bacteria and yeasts that are naturally on the onions are gonna ferment the carbohydrates and the fructose and all the sugars that are in the onions make lactic acid and carbon dioxide so you can see blue carbon dioxide bubbles rising and they'll get out they'll slip along the edges of the bag here but no oxygen can get in all the things that are bad that could potentially go wrong with this ferment come from the air and that's really what we're trying to prevent is anything that is an aerobic bacteria is gonna cause problem with this give you off tastes gonna give off flavors and by doing this you're gonna keep the oxygen out and the carbon dioxide can get out of the jar so you're not gonna have any problems with this thing exploding like a bomb because of the carbon dioxide buildup in it so this is ready this is done we've got our flavors in there we've got our brine in there we've got our onions in there I'm gonna put this in the cabinet for about a week maybe even two weeks onions can really kind of like sauerkraut can go a long time some of your maybe your dill pickles or some of the other things we fermented on this channel really you want to taste that for a couple of days these onions have a lot of sulfur compounds in them that really just need a good long ferment so I'm probably gonna let this go about two weeks before I even taste them and then after that we'll have a look at them see you then all right so it's been a couple of weeks now since we cut up our onions for fermenting and well this is cool let me zoom in on this for you when I give this jar a little shake you can see that bubbles rising up that's a good sign the fermentation is still occurring or has occurred anyway and as these bubbles come up we know that the lactic acid bacteria are giving off carbon dioxide and lactic acid which is gonna pickle our our vegetables and as this fermentation continues it creates more and more acid which is going to preserve and make better and taste our onions so here let's get this bag out of here I'm looking for mold I'm looking for any little blue green red orange bits there's nothing really on this sack that is gonna get me to excited I'm gonna give it a quick smell and that that's strong onion that makes me cry that everyone laughs at is gone that onion smell it completely completely absent I can smell the spices that I put in there which is nice and mmm beautiful crunch that the onion taste is almost gone the salt has really diminished and it's good something stainless steel remember my my mantra always stainless steel in the in the kitchen in the fermenting kitchen but this is great I'm gonna push this back down a little bit back down into the lactic acid and brine a little stir well I'm trying to get down into the jar and see where we are further below and these are awesome I'm really happy with these I think I'm having that onion sandwich for lunch they almost taste like the little cocktails that you put you know in a martini well my guess would it be a gimlet but these are delicious this I'm really happy with the way these onions fermented and came out and so at this point just a plastic lid really I don't like using those metal lids that you know that their rings and the canning tops I don't like that metal this is fairly strong acid I mean it's not you know gonna eat your or anything but it's it's better just use plastic and glass to store your lactic acid ferments but this is delicious these will be great on hamburgers I'm gonna toss some these on a salad maybe just a spread out on a piece of buttered bread these are delicious these will go into the fridge for as long as it takes me to eat them probably the rest of the day but no honestly they'll last a month at this point these are well preserved if you want you can leave them out you don't have to put them in the refrigerator these are you know pickled and preserved they're fermented so there's really nothing more that can go wrong with them other than maybe leaving them open if you do leave them in the pantry give them a stir once in a while just to kind of you know keep what is exposed to air you know not always the same bit of onions but you know just or maybe just take him out and give him a shake the the white stuff on the bottom of the jar that you see that you know you'll see like a sediment don't worry about it's it's scientifically it's fluctuated yeast cells what that is is just dead yeast that you know in the course of the ferments and yeasts were involved they gave it their all and did what they could to the ferment and progress the flavor and the and the you know the preservation technique and died and left their corpses at the bottom of the jar there really are pretty tasteless easier just to leave on the bottom of the jar and the dishwasher will take care of them when it's done but this can go in the fridge and enjoy enjoy your next ferment here with the fermented onions thanks for watching you guys and enjoy the other fermenting videos be sure to subscribe talk to you soon

Channel: Better Done Yourself

Views: 222,418

Keywords: HOW TO MAKE PROBIOTIC FERMENTED ONIONS, probiotic onions, ferment onions, how to ferment onions, fermented onions, homemade fermented onions, lacto fermented onions, fermenting onions, better done yourself onions, fermented onion, fermented onions recipe, fermented onions and garlic, onion fermentation, simple fermentation recipe, better done yourself, how to ferment vegetables, where to get probiotics, what's the best probiotic, fermenting, probiotics, fermentation, onions

Id: qksQLkQBktM

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2017