Sichuan Lacto-Fermented Pickles (Paocai, 泡菜): Starting Your First Batch
Published Aug 21, 2021, Updated Jan 27, 2025
Part 1: Making Pickles the Sichuan Way
This is part one of our guide to making pickles the Sichuan way, and it focuses on starting your first batch. Part two follows up with tips for maintaining a brine long term and troubleshooting common issues in lacto-fermentation.
Have you ever tried making pickles without vinegar? There’s a bit of a learning curve involved in letting natural lacto-fermentation sour your vegetables instead of vinegar. But there’s also huge payoff for the effort. Not only in health benefits—fermentation creates good bacteria, or probiotics, that aid in digestion and vitamin absorption—but in culinary benefits as well, since the vegetables taste like sour versions of themselves instead of like vinegar.
Now I love a good vinegar quick pickle, but naturally fermented vegetables are useful not only as condiments but also as side dishes and cooking ingredients. Many meals in Sichuan (and in our house) are accompanied by a side dish of pickled vegetables—in our case, fished from the pickle jar, chopped into small bits and drizzled with chili oil, our daily dose of sour-and-spicy, low-cal vitamins. And Sichuan dishes often use fermented vegetables as an ingredient—particularly red chilies, long (or green) beans and cabbage—in stir-fries or to top rice or noodles. So once you’ve mastered the art of brine pickling, you always have highly flavorful vegetables ready to go for both snacking and cooking.
I’ve been working on Sichuan-style naturally fermented pickles, or paocai, on and off for a many years now. Seriously, years. For the first few years, I sometimes got it right, and sometimes got it wrong, but really I just made it harder than it has to be to naturally pickle a vegetable. I have consulted many sources over the years, and they all seem to take different approaches—which just proves that pickling is both a science and an art. There are many ways to do it, not just one right way, and you’ll have to experiment and find your own best method and taste. But here I hope to shorten your learning curve with the method that never misses for me.
While fermentation in all forms has become trendy in the U.S., fermenting is not a fad in Sichuan. Many home cooks still feed their giant pickling crocks on an ongoing basis—taking vegetables out, putting new ones in—the brine growing ever more intense and intriguing over time.
A few years ago, America’s own fermentation guru, Sandor Katz (who, like us, lives in Tennessee) did a fermentation tour of southwest China and captured it all on video. The People’s Republic of Fermentation, made by filmmaker Mattia Sacco Botto and also featuring Mara King, a “probiotic pickleteer” from Colorado, is seriously awesome. The first three episodes all take place in Sichuan, and episodes one and two, in particular, focus on paocai (among other appetizing things), episode three on doubanjiang, and the remaining episodes on the fermentation of various things in Guizhou and Yunnan.
More recently, Sichuan’s Li Ziqi showed the whole process from garden to pickle jar to suancaiyu (fish with pickled veg) and Goldthread’s Clarissa Wei got a paocai lesson from a Sichuanese pickler in this wonderful video.
I had three major stumbling blocks on my own pickling journey: finding just the right container and method for submerging the vegetables under the brine; getting just the right salt concentration; and fermenting just the right amount of time for my personal taste and recipe use. So let’s break these down.
The Best Container for Making Sichuan Pickles
In the two photos above, I’m using Sichuan pickling jars, in both glass and ceramic. Designed thousands of years ago to be the ideal form for naturally fermenting vegetables, this shape has two inherent advantages:
1) The narrow opening and wide shoulders of the jar help keep the contents below the brine—which is key for mold-free natural fermentation—without the use of weights.
2) The moat around the opening holds water that makes a natural seal, allowing the carbon dioxide released during fermentation to escape while sealing out unwanted oxygen and contaminants.
The main goal in fermentation is to keep oxygen away from the vegetables. They naturally want to float up to the top of the container and poke their heads out, so you have to make an effort to keep them submerged below the brine. This is much easier to do if you fill the brine almost to the top of the jar, leaving little room for oxygen to linger. The narrow opening of the Chinese crocks further helps with this, and if you use relatively large pieces of vegetable the shoulders of the jar will hold them down under the brine. But if you have smaller pieces and they all float to the top, you may want to weigh the vegetables down somehow with something that floats. The Sichuan pickle makers in the Katz video use parts of plastic water bottles. I’ve been known to use the flexible lid of a thin plastic container (ironically, the lid from a Whole Foods pickle bar container). Big cabbage leaves also work pretty well to cover and hold down the other vegetables. If the leaf gets funky during the process, just throw it out and insert a new one.
Whatever weight you do or do not use, the brine should always cover the vegetables, which means checking on it after the first day or two to top it off with more brine if needed. Even if not filling the whole jar with vegetables, always fill the jar to the bottom of the neck with brine, replacing the oxygen but leaving a little headroom for liquid expansion during fermentation.
Salt Type and Amount for Lacto-Fermented Sichuan Paocai
What is the magical salt concentration that kills off bad bacteria but allows good bacteria to create fermentation? In Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty, she notes that the typical Sichuan brine is “very salty” and calls for about 35 grams of sea salt per cup of water. I personally have had no luck jumpstarting fermentation with that high concentration of salt, ending up with only super salted vegetables instead of sour ones.
So over the years, I tried to make do with a much lower salt concentration, and was mostly successful, but not always. By the time the new edition of Dunlop’s book was published in 2019, she had reduced her recipe to 20 grams salt per cup of water, and I had increased my own recipe to 14 grams salt per cup of water. Water weighs 236 grams per cup, so 14 grams is 6% of the water weight (or 5.9% to be exact) and 20 grams is 8.5%.
Then in 2023, we at The Mala Market were finally successful in importing the same pickling salt that is used religiously in Sichuan—Zigong Well Salt, in a pellet size specifically for pickling. The packaging from these longtime paocai pros recommends using an amount of salt that is 6% to 12% of the water weight. That’s a pretty wide range, but as I said before, the practice of paocai making is different for everyone. So I encourage you to experiment and find a brine within the range of 14-20 grams salt per cup of water that suits your climate, chosen vegetables and tastebuds.
I give the measurement in grams because it is important to measure the salt based on weight, not volume, since 1 tablespoon of salt can vary widely in weight depending on the type of salt and even the brand. That has tripped me up several times! Plus, once you find a brine solution you like, you want to be able to repeat it and volume measurements just aren’t that precise.
A further word on the fascinating history of Zigong well salt and why we went to great lengths to import it. This legendary salt comes from brine deep under the ground in Zigong, Sichuan, site of the world’s very first brine wells, drilled in 252 B.C.! For literally millennia, Sichuan cooks have sworn by this salt, for its purity, nutrients and, in the modern era, its lack of added iodine and anti-caking agents, which they feel ruins the taste of salt and the food it’s used in. Especially for pickling, where iodine can kill fermentation, serious cooks insist on this Sichuan salt. And old-timers will also tell you the coarser the salt the better. According to the salt company, the extra-large grains of our pickling salt allow a sustained release that penetrates vegetables more efficiently and results in a brighter color, crispier pickle and less spoilage.
The best alternative to Sichuan well salt is probably kosher salt, which is also iodine-free. In either case, for a new brine you’ll start with the salt dissolved in water that has been purified by boiling it. To top off an established brine, however, you’ll add the salt directly to the jar in the same salt percentage you used for the original brine.
Fermentation Time for Sichuan Pickles
Like most people in Sichuan, I often take cabbage pieces out of the brine after only one or two days, producing the very lightly sour paocai that is eaten as a side dish with most meals, perhaps topped with some homemade chili oil. Read all about the pervasive presence of this quick paocai in Chengdu here. (Note that if you put cabbage in a new brine, it won’t be soured in a day, but if you put it in a pickling jar with an established brine, you’ll have a slightly sour cabbage pickle in a day or two.)
True fermentation of a new batch of pickles usually kicks in on about day three, in my experience. At this point the water turns cloudy and the vegetables go from salty to slightly sour. Every succeeding day they will continue to turn less salty and more sour. If your water remains clear and the vegetables remain salty after several days, you’ve probably used too much salt and killed the good bacteria.
Sandor Katz recommends checking in on your fermenting pickles every three days to determine which length of time suits your taste. But some fermenters let the pickle crock go for two to four weeks before eating any. The time of year also makes a difference, with vegetables fermenting noticeably faster in warmer months.
Be careful every single time you take the lid off the jar to not let water from the moat drip into the jar. I have a maneuver where I lift the lid slightly out of its water, shake it back and forth, then pull it quickly up and away from the jar before any water can drip.
Timing Guideline and Ideas for Using Your Homemade Pickles:
- Take cabbage and thinly-sliced veg out after 1-2 days to eat as a “shower pickle” with your meal, or leave it in longer to fully sour—it will still retain its crunch. These pickles are great with a dribble of homemade chili oil and perhaps a smidgeon of sugar.
- Remove harder vegetables like daikon, carrots, celery, celtuce or cauliflower in 5-7 days or more, depending on temperature and when it’s soured to your liking, and eat as a side dish or noodle topping.
- Remove long beans when soured to use in a long bean and pork mince stir-fry or as a topping for Chengdu’s zajiang noodles.
- Ferment dried erjingtiao chilies to make Sichuan pickled peppers (paolajiao).
- Pack Chinese mustard greens into the jar with a dry brine and eat the soured suancai in a week or more in a stir-fry, noodle or soup.
- Cucumbers are mostly water and are notoriously hard to pickle properly. Start with less watery vegetables as you are learning to ferment, and ferment cucumbers on their own, using a recipe specifically for them.
It’s easiest to ferment only one or two types of vegetables at a time. Ferment like with like, or with complementary, for best results. Ferment strong flavored vegetables such as mustard greens by themselves, or everything will taste like mustard (which I learned the hard way).
You can leave the pickles in the brine or remove them when they taste right and store with some of their brine in a jar in the refrigerator, which greatly slows fermentation. Many Sichuanese keep their brine for years, adding more salt water and flavorings over time (Cooking Bomb’s is 15 years old!). But some people also start from scratch each time. It really depends on how well the ferment went and how good the brine tastes to you.
Making Multiple Batches of Paocai in One Brine
This is the brine from the cabbage and red radish ferment in the photos above. After a few days, I added some chunks of celtuce. We ate these pickles throughout the week as they got progressively more sour, and within seven days we had eaten most of them, so I removed the rest to the fridge. My brine still looked, smelled and tasted enticing—a sweetly sour smell without so much as a whiff of rotty funk! So I added some Chinese cauliflower and some Sichuan peppercorns directly to the brine and eagerly awaited our next pickle harvest.
As I said, pickling, like all cooking, is both a science and an art. Let this paocai recipe be the beginning of your own experimentation and creation.
See part two of our guide to pickling the Sichuan way for further instruction on long-term brines and for troubleshooting common lacto-fermentation problems.
Sichuan Lacto-Fermented Pickles (Paocai, 泡菜): Starting Your First Batch
Ingredients
Prepare 4 cups of brine for a 1.5-liter glass paocai jar
Prepare 8 cups of brine for a 2.5-liter glass paocai jar
Prepare 12-13 cups of brine for a 4-liter ceramic paocai jar
Per each cup water:
- 14 to 16 grams Zigong well salt, kosher salt or other iodide-free salt
- 4 grams (1 teaspoon) Chinese rock sugar or white sugar
- 4 grams (½ tablespoon) Chinese baijiu, gin or vodka
- non-watery vegetables such as cabbage, radish, daikon, carrot, celery, celtuce, cauliflower, lotus root, long beans, ginger, fresh or dried chilies, etc. Enough to fill jar mostly full of vegetables for your first batch
- Sichuan peppercorns (optional)
Instructions
- Bring tap water to a boil and remove from heat. Add salt and sugar and stir to dissolve. Let brine cool to room temperature and add liquor. You can refrigerate to speed up the process
- Wash and dry vegetables and cut them into large pieces—large enough to be caught under the jar's "shoulders" and held beneath the brine, but small enough to be retrieved through the narrow neck of the jar. Add vegetables to clean, dry pickle jar, along with Sichuan peppercorns.
- Add brine to the jar, filling up to the bottom of the neck and being careful to place larger vegetables on top and tuck them under the jar's shoulders. You want to displace as much oxygen as possible, but also leave room for liquid expansion during fermentation. Replace lid and add tap water to the moat. Keep any leftover brine for topping up.
- When the brine begins to bubble, turn cloudy and take on the color of the vegetables in it—usually within 3-4 days—then you know that fermentation has started. With the ceramic jar, you’ll start to hear little “burps” as the gases escape. Test pickles periodically to assess sourness, using clean chopsticks or spoon, and make sure they are always covered with brine. Vegetables will lose their bright colors as they ferment, but not their crunch. Cabbage and softer vegetables may be ready to eat in 3-4 days, while harder vegetables may take 5-7 days or longer, depending on size of the vegetables, room temperature and desired sourness.
- Add water to the moat every few days as it evaporates to keep moat mostly full. If you keep the brine for weeks, periodically clean the jar’s lid with soap and water and sop up the water in the moat with a paper towel before replacing it with fresh water.
- As you use the pickles and the brine recedes, replenish the crock with more salt water, liquor, seasonings and vegetables. Add water and salt in the same ratio as your original brine, using either filtered water or boiled-and-cooled water. Even if no additional liquid is needed, add more salt whenever you add a new batch of vegetables. No need to dissolve salt first. Continue making new batches of pickles in the brine for as long as it tastes fresh and pleasing and not rotty. Sichuan picklers can keep a brine going for years!
- To serve as a side dish, cut an assortment of pickled vegetables in bite-size pieces and serve as is or drizzle with chili oil/crisp.
Tried this recipe?
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I’ve been exposed to this process since I was a wee lad. My mom’s lineage is eastern Russian and this is how all our vegetables were pickled: cabbage, cucumbers, cauliflower, onions etc. I find that this process really allows the flavor of the vegetable to shine through, on the down side the shelf life is considerably less than those put up using vinegar. A trick my grandma would do is after you take your water and salt mixture off the stove let it cool then put it in the fridge until ice cold. Then fill your jars with the liquid.
Interesting. I’ve heard that the Eastern European pickle crocks are similar to the Chinese crocks and also use a water moat as a seal. Are the Russian ones like that too? What does the cold water bring to the process? Crisper pickles?
Lol. I really couldn’t tell you. Making sure that the brine was ice cold was always “just the way we did it.” However it may indeed make the vegetables crisper. Sort of like shocking them perhaps. As to the containers grandma always just used the “Ball” fruit jars. Cucumbers made this way are incredible; garlic, dill, whole cukes and ice cold brine. Let sit for three to four days and fantastic!
On a decidedly unrelated note I see that your sold out of dried mushrooms. Any ETA on this item? Also do you carry the Chinese wine? Oh, and I made that carmalized chicken dish the other night. What a bizarre flavor! One of those “I hate it/I love it/I hate it/I love it” type dishes, which of course are my favorites 🙂
I’m having trouble sourcing small packages of mushrooms, and the large ones are quite expensive. Will keep looking! I so wish I could carry Shaoxing wine, but the cooking Shaoxing with added salt is not really worth carrying, and the real stuff requires a liquor license. Maybe someday I can carry it or find a partner who does… Thanks for asking!
I’m surprised by your reaction to the caramelized chicken dish. To me it tastes very similar to every other country’s chicken soup, just kind of homey and definitely not bizarre. I know you’re a fan of mushrooms, so perhaps you don’t like celery? I tend to get carried away with it because I love it…
I kind of figured that i.e. liquor laws.
I used brown sugar in the recipe as opposed to white which I’m thinking gives it a more intensive sugar flavor. Regardless, I just love that recipe! And as to celery…when this planet gets too crowded this should be the first species to go 🙂
????
Maybe I just lucked out in regards to this sugar/chicken dish but now I know what “umami” is.
Tom, do you use golden sherry? It’s a very good sub for Shaoxing wine.
Hi Taylor! Small town living means having to use a generic cooking sherry but it’s not all that bad. Keep me posted on the mushroom situation 🙂
I made my first two batches of half-sour pickles this summer. Both batches came out good. I knew ahead of time that the cloudiness wasn’t an issue. The first batch I did in two smaller jars. One got yeast. It was caught dill, so I tossed the dill that it was one also. The second batch I made in one large jar. On the second or third day when I checked, the brine had fizzed up and spilled out, leaving one cucumber exposed. There was some mold. I tossed that cucumber and all the surface water/mold and topped it off with more brine. No more mold after that and the pickles were good.
I was getting ready to quick-pickle some serrano peppers but I think I will try this instead. Thanks for the recipe!
Hi Robert,
Sounds like your experiences have been similar to mine. Though I haven’t tackled cucumbers yet. I understand their high water content makes them harder to do and maintain crunchiness, and that they require more salt. Must try though! How long did the half-sour cucumbers take?
If you pickle cucumbers, make sure to cut off the flower bud as it contains enzymes that soften the cuke.
The recipe I used said to taste after four days. First batch, I tasted and decided to leave them for a fifth day, then moved them to the refrigerator (from the basement). The second batch, I left for six days, partly because of the mold. I wanted to see if it would reappear. I was very glad it didn’t, because it was a four-pound batch and I really didn’t want to throw it away. After it was too late, I read this web page about using grape leaves to make the cucumber pickles crunchier: http://www.wildfermentation.com/making-sour-pickles-2/ My pickles weren’t un-crunchy, but could be crunchier. But it’s hard to know if it was the lack of grape leaves, or that the cucumbers were too large, or the brine could have been saltier… Lots of variables. Which is part of the fun. Ancient methods of preservation have quirks.
Oh, right. That’s another reason I haven’t tried cucumbers. I seldom have access to fresh grape leaves. That’s Sandor Katz’s site you link to. When I saw him speak about fermentation, he was encouraging everyone to start with a sour kraut type pickle, since cucumber pickles are harder to get right. Seems most people start with cucumbers, however.
Quirks, indeed!
Of course! I hadn’t even looked at the name on the website. I watched the first episode of his China travels yesterday.
Regarding the saltwater concentrate, I pickle olives, which are tradionly pickled for much longer, at least 3 weeks. To pickle the vegetable to stop it going off the concentration needs to be at a certain level other wise it does not pickle and goes off. The rule I use which I read somewhere was to place a raw egg still in the shell in the water and keep adding salt until the egg flouts.. In plane water only the egg will sink to the bottom. Until the concentration reaches a certain level you are flavouring the vegetables not pickling them.
I think that leaving veg in brine at below the right concentration is flavouring rather than pickling. Also the same outcome for soaking for only a few days rather than extended time.. If the veg is truly pickled no need to refrigerate it won’t go off.
I also had the same problem with white scum appearing on the surface. If it got too bad I drained and replaced. A low concentration also effects the growth of that scum. More salt less or no scum. With olives I found to get rid of the over salty tast I rinsed and soaked in plan water for a day or two, sometimes changing the water. You have the salty flavour your looking for.
If the job is done in summer the risk of contamination with low salt level is greater.
I think from reading your notes it’s a mater of pickling to preserve for a long time or just for a few days to enjoy the flavour as is out of the jar or cooking.
Great idea intend to experiment and will advise.
Hi David,
Thanks for your thoughts on this. I haven’t heard that about the egg trick. That’s interesting, but I would still argue that you don’t need that much salt to ferment. (Sandor Katz says you don’t actually need ANY salt to ferment. Though that’s a scary thought to me.) I agree that 1-day pickles are more flavored than pickled. However, my 3-day green beans are definitely pickled, because they don’t taste salty, they taste sour. Like a pickle! I haven’t tried to pickle olives myself, but love the idea.
I think the origins of pickling is about long term preservation before refrigeration. Similar to smoking kills the bacteria which preserves the food. I doubt the amount of salt used is elielevent for a few days as the water alone keeps the oxygen away from the food. Then it goes in the fridge no risk.
That’s true. For a long winter storage, you’d probably need a lot of salt. And if you’re constantly eating and replenishing the crock, not as much.
The salt is not there to help the lactobacillus grow, it’s there to stop everything else from growing. In theory, there’s nothing preventing other things from growing in a lack of salt but it would be difficult to verify.
One thing though is that lactic acid also inhibits other bacteria from growing so presumably you could use less salt in a reused brine and that could be a way to both stay safe and also get your desired salt level.
Good theory, Hang…Have to admit that I have never reused the brine.
I think my pickles are likely to stay in the short to mid-length fermentation timeframe, since I don’t need to put up vegetables for the winter.
Here in Japan, we make day pickles too — called Asazuke. Salt, red pepper, other Japanese spices are added to cucumbers, radish etc. They are allowed to “work” only for half a day or just a few minutes, 60 minutes and eaten that night with dinner. I didn’t know China had something similar.
Most Japanese pickles, in fact all I think except for western style pickles, are made without vinagar. Instead they are fermented with a lacto-fermentation method. The most popular is Nukazuke, where you make a rice bran mash or paste with salt, red pepper, kelp, a little water etc and put veggies in this. They are pickled in a day — 24 hours. Most housewives still doing this themselves will make fresh pickles to be served that day, every day. Of course, there are long term lacto-fermentated pickles too where the pickled vegetables are supposed to last the winter months. Takuan would be an example of that.
Interesting! So are these in a brine, or more like a paste? Do they do any in brine? I like that Japan has different names for different types/lengths of fermentation. China calls them all, one day or longer, pao cai.
The “nuka zuke” are in a fermented paste, but long term pickles, longer like for the winter, would be salted to a certain amount — not too too much. Juices from the vegetables make the slight amount of liquid. Enough salt is used to keep the vegetables from rotting but hopefully not too much salt. The asazuke, very short term pickles, are mostly salted, spiced, with only the liquid that drains from the veg because of the salt. They are eaten that day so not too much salt is used.
The nukauzke are really interesting. Any kind of summer vegetable except for really wet ones like tomatoes are candidates for pickling. There are 2 fermentation bacillus in the mash. One likes oxygen a lot and the other dislikes oxygen. So the person doing the pickling has to turn the mash and mix the mash up every day or it goes bad. That’s why a lot of younger women don’t want to make this pickle as they feel their hands begin to smell like nuka. Store bought nukazuke never tastes as good as homemade.
Japanese pickling sounds like a whole other world. Thanks for shedding some light on it.
I LOVE real nukazuke takuan (daikon) pickles – unlike the ones sold in Japanese groceries in the US (made with corn syrup, color and MSG) they are salty, slightly metallic, umami filled and dry/crunchy. Delicious once you develop a taste for them. However my attempt to nuka bed pickle in Michigan was a failure – I think that I neglected to turn the bed once during the summer and things soured. The bran, salt, water paste got funky in a bad way and the requirement to attend to it daily was just enough hassle that I didn’t try again (maybe I should).
Taylor! What a fascinating thread this has turned into!!!!!
I know! My readers are so smart. 🙂
Lol. I is smart too. 🙂
Hi,
I forgot to re-seal my pickle jar with water. Does this mean they are inedible? 🙁
Hi Sarah,
I think it probably depends on how established your brine is, how much salt you used, how long it wasn’t sealed, etc. But if they still smell and look good, then they’re fine.
I just made up a batch (in a quart mason jar with a bung and airlock fitted into its lid, so I don’t have to worry about dust or fruit flies getting into the brine) and set it in the basement to cure for 3 days or so. Fresh farmers market white cabbage, green beans, red radishes, fresh chilis and the aromatics in your recipe. Thank you for the nudge to do this, as I used to make sauerkraut (we don’t eat much of it but do like it in Julia Child’s choucroute garnie recipe in cooler weather) and since I made a quart only of the Sichuan pickles (husband won’t be very interested) the extra farmers market cabbage went into the kraut pot (using Katz’s 5 lbs/3Tbs ratio). That will be done in 3+ weeks.
FYI, 3 cups of brine and about 12 oz of hard vegetables works for quart sized mason jars well too. I have a little brine left over, but had enough room in the jar for the veggies, one big cabbage leaf on top, and brine to cover near the top of the jar but not up to the jar. I’ve not brine fermented before and I love kitchen science experiments!!
Hi Marla,
I’m happy to have inspired you to try this one! Did three days make a good, sour pickle for you? Did you like the taste?
After 3 days I did get the sour funky taste of lacto-fermentation, and I’ve transferred the whole jar to the fridge. I’m interested to see how the flavor and texture plays with cooked food, so I’ll be making the green bean and meat “larb-ish” recipe you posted too. Thank you for nudging me to get back into fermenting!
And thank you for letting me know! This weekend at the restaurant Mala Project (no relation!) in NYC, I had a fried rice with Chinese bacon and tiny bits of pickled green bean. Yet another use for them!
Taylor – lacto pickles are definitely more complex than vinegar ones. I struggled for a while myself with lots of failed “experiments”. I highly recommend taking a look at Kirsten Shockey’s books Fermented Vegetables and Fiery Ferments. She and her husband Christopher do a great job explaining – and the recipes are pretty spot on. So far everything I’ve had has been spot on – and some of the pepper ferments are amazing. She even has some Tibetan inspired recipes, although no Ma La recipes. http://ferment.works/
Thanks for this recommendation, Thom. I actually do have their Fermented Vegetables book, but didn’t know about the Fiery Ferments. I definitely need that one!
These look delicious, and I love the pictures you included in your article! I love the one with all the different jars of vegetables. I absolutely want to try making some of these at home! Thank you so much for sharing!
Thanks for writing, Billy! I see from your email address (Bubbies.com) that you probably know a thing or two about natural fermentation and pickles, so I’m flattered that mine are of interest. I hope you like the Sichuan style!
Terrific article and informative comments.
This is a great community!
Thank you, Dennis. Welcome to the community!
Any experience with determining if fermentation effects the potency-lifespan of the peppercorns’ numbing effect?
Interesting question. Most of the flavor of the Sichuan peppercorns escapes to the brine. If you bite into one, it’s still numbing but not as much.