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.