I never had limes when I needed them (UNTIL NOW!)

i love limes i love squeezing them over my tacos i love squeezing them into my pho and i absolutely like enjoying one or two adult beverages in the hot summery days with a lime squeezed over it but i can never keep the limes fresh and around limes don't grow well in the far north of idaho well my lime tree looks pretty healthy but there's no limes on it i think i need a lot more light [Music] hey i'm carolyn from homesteading family and if you are interested in increasing your health your security and your freedom then make sure you click the subscribe button and turn on your notifications so that you see all of our other videos one day i was reading little women to my children and i got to the part where the girls are really excited about the pickled limes that they're eating at school and that got me thinking could i ferment whole lime so i can keep them on hand for whenever i need them wait a second what's the difference between pickling and fermenting anyways well in a modern context pickling usually refers to using a vinegar brine vinegar in order to stop the aging process and preserve the food fermenting usually means a salt brine where we're encouraging the lactobacillus bacteria to grow and create lactic acid which then preserves the food in a historical context both of these things were done under the term of pickling now both vinegar pickling and lacto-fermenting have been around for thousands of years but often in our historical record they use the same word for it which is pickling so what were they talking about in little women i don't really know but i figured that vinegar would really change the flavor of my lime pickles so i decided to go ahead and go with lacto fermenting for a long term long lasting pickle that is shelf stable without canning it this is a lime that i fermented six months ago now it's changed color it looks a little more like a lemon and it's swelled up a little bit but look at how absolutely perfectly preserved it is this is a whole fermented lime let's take a bite and see what it tastes like you can see that the fermenting has gone all the way through it's gone all the way through the rind and into the meat and it's changed the appearance of it but would this be good over your fish tacos wow that has an amazing salty limey flavor it'd be perfect on a nice cold summer beer this is absolutely amazing let's go make some lacto-fermenting is incredibly simple to do it's really easy you just need to gather a few supplies so let's look at what we need you're going to need a fermenting vessel now here i have an old-fashioned fermenting design vessel design and i really really like this for something that i'm getting in and out of regularly and not consuming all at once you could certainly just use a good old-fashioned jar you'd have to make sure it was wide mouth so that you can get the limes back out and you can use whatever you have on hand but you do want to be able to make sure that your limes stay submerged at all times a really nice aspect of a jar like this a fermenting vessel like this is that it has a built-in water lock or air lock when you fill this part up with water and the lid is on it can exude gases but it won't take anything in that is an effective and ancient airlock system it makes it really really easy to use now because we're going to ferment this and leave this sitting on our shelf for maybe months at a time we have to make sure to take one additional step than we would if we were fermenting something that we were going to consume pretty quickly and store in the refrigerator and that is we need to make sure to sterilize our vessel this is the difference between something that will last for six months on your shelf and something that will only last for a few weeks on the shelf to sterilize it you can just submerge this in to a pot of water turn it on slowly bring it up to boiling and let it boil for 12 minutes you can also use a sterilizing solution if you have some on hand but personally i really like just using the boiling water once you have it sterilized you're good to go you're also going to need a good quality salt make sure that your salt is not a table salt or is not an iodized salt the reason for that is that the chemicals in those salts namely the iodine or the anti-clumping agents and the bleach that they put in a table salt will stop the bacteria from forming in your ferment now remember we're trying to make the good lactobacillus bacteria grow and that's what's going to preserve the limes so we don't want anything that's going to hinder its growth make sure you have a really good quality salt without any of those chemicals in it this is a red mineral salt you could use a himalayan salt or celtic salt or anything like that that would be just fine a good quality sea salt kosher salt or even a canning salt would all be absolutely fine for this you're also going to need a little bit of water the water needs to not be treated by the city which means it can't have the fluoride and the chlorine and all the different things in it that it might have if it's city water if you're living on city wallet water make sure you either filter your water or you just go ahead and grab some distilled water the ratio for salt to water is two tablespoons of salt for one quart of water that's pretty salty but remember these are gonna sit on your shelf or in your kitchen on the counter for months at a time so we wanna make sure to give it a good protection dose of salt today i have a half gallon of water here which is two quarts and i'm gonna go ahead and put in four tablespoons or a quarter cup of this good quality salt [Music] i'm just going to let that sit for a moment and start to dissolve while i get my limes now when you're fermenting again we want to encourage that bacterial growth so we don't want anything on the limes that would be disencouraging those that bacteria to grow that would be anything like pesticides fungicides herbicides that might stop things from growing and we want that bacteria to grow so try to get organic limes if you can either way make sure you give your limes a really good scrub to get off any residue that could possibly be in it then we're just going to start packing our limes right on into our vessel you guys it is seriously this easy if you wanted to if you wanted to make spiced limes you could add some whole spices in here if you wanted them to maybe have a little bit of spiciness to them you could add something like peppercorns you could add a red chili pepper to this just stick it right on in there and we're going to pack as many in here as we can remember these are going to swell a little bit with that salt water and so you want to make sure that the opening is big enough to get them out once they swell a little bit otherwise you're going to have a challenge we're going to cut put these right on up into the neck now let's help our salt finish dissolving we're just going to give it a little bit of a shake this is room temperature water if you wanted to you could heat the water up a little bit the salt would dissolve faster but you would have to let it cool back down to room temperature before you used it i just opt for shaking just a little bit more now we're just going to pour this right over the limes [Music] making sure they are completely covered and if you need to push it back down in there get it locked into place [Music] in order to activate the air lock we're going to want to add some of our brine right to the rim of the vessel and just put it in there and then we will put the lid right on that'll bubble a little and there you have it it is all ready to just go ahead and sit on your shelf or on your kitchen counter for at least two weeks before you start using it as it starts to firm it you're going to get all sorts of interesting things happening in here you can expect to see bubbling maybe a little bit of cloudiness and all of that is absolutely okay what you do want to watch though is to make sure that there's always water in this airlock and always water covering your lime on the inside it's okay to just add some plain water to either place whenever you see that it needs a little bit more obviously the limes are gonna change quite a bit too because they're gonna go from that beautiful bright green and nice and hard looking firm looking to this yellowish kind of softer looking swelled up lime now they're still gonna taste great but expect to see those changes as the fermentation continues now anytime after the two weeks you can start getting into your limes and pull one out use them whenever you need them just make sure the remaining limes always stay underneath the liquid level and make sure whatever you use to get the lime out is impeccably clean you don't want to introduce any other bacteria or yeast at that point now you can always have a lime on hand fermenting is so amazing you guys if you want to check out any other videos on super easy but super amazing ferments check out this one right here

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 480,141

Keywords: Homesteading, Homesteading Family, preserved limes recipe, preserved limes turn brown, vietnamese preserved limes, fermentation process, fermentation explained, fermentation crock, preservation, pickled limes, fermented limes

Id: ifJAHLR0DX4

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022