The fermentation started innocently enough in college with just the odd batch of mead. Then, sometime in 2006/7, one of my coworkers heard that I make mead, and mentioned that she'd just made some T'ej (Ethiopian honey wine) from a recipe that called for no yeast (or rather, wild yeast that occurs naturally in the air of your kitchen). Intrigued, I asked to see the recipe, and she loaned me her copy of Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz.
I'd been taught that, to make mead successfully, everything that came in contact with the must (mead before it's fermented) had to be carefully sanitized and controlled or else the mead would be spoiled--or worse, make you violently ill. The T'ej recipe, however, said that it was perfectly possible to get a good fermentation by just leaving your must covered with just a cloth to keep out bugs and dust for a few days before putting an airlock on it. My coworker who'd made the T'ej insisted that it came out great, and that she'd suffered no ill effects from drinking it, apart from a slight hangover.
I flipped through the rest of the book, finding recipes for all sorts of interesting stuff like kombucha, yogurt, and kimchi. I'd tried making pickles before, using a recipe in The Joy of Cooking that involved putting cucumbers in spiced vinegar, but I found the results extremely sour and unappetizing. After the recipe, there was a cryptic warning that while it's possible to make pickles in brine instead of vinegar, but it's far too complex and requires too much specialized equipment to be attempted in a domestic kitchen. Yet here was this book, telling me that brined pickles are easy and don't require anything that isn't already in most kitchens or easily acquired from a thrift shop.
I tracked down a copy of Wild Fermentation for myself on Worldcat and eventually, Amazon. I strongly recommend that you do the same. In the intervening years, wild fermentation has become a regular occurrence in my life. There are still plenty of recipes in the book that I haven't tried, but I make homemade ginger beer and other sodas, keep a little jar of sourdough starter in my kitchen, and put down the odd batch of pickles or sauerkraut or kimchi...
...which finally brings me to the subject of pottery.
At its simplest, making pickles is not a particularly equipment-intensive process. Technically, all you need is a wide-mouthed jar or crock and something heavy to keep the pickles from floating above the surface of the brine. As with any hobby though, there is some equipment that makes the job easier or more fun.
A year or so ago, I learned about the existence of traditional German fermentation crocks. These crocks have a kind of circular trough that goes around the mouth of the crock, and the lid sits down inside this trough. You then fill the trough with water, creating a hermetic seal while still allowing gases to escape, basically like a gigantic version of air locks used in brewing.
My parents bought me one of these crocks for Christmas and it's been great fun, but the smallest size you can buy is 5 litres. While that's a pretty good size if you're making a few cabbages' worth of sauerkraut or kimchi, it's not necessarily so great if you want to make, say, a small batch of Lebanese pickled turnips.
I'm not a particularly good potter, but at the moment I happen to have access to a wheel and kiln, so in an attempt to level up my skills beyond mugs and small bowls, I decided to try to make a smaller scale version of my gigantic store-bought pickling crock.
The way that my commercial crock is made, the rim is folded over to the inside, making a shelf for the lid to rest on. To be perfectly honest, making a folded-over rim is probably a bit beyond my current skill level, so instead, I made the body of my pickling crock in two pieces: one for the base, one for the trough. The base is just the largest roughly cylindrical shape that I could throw. I gave mine a little bit of a gentle curve outward. For the trough at the top, I centered my ball of clay and then opened it out into a kind of doughnut or ring large enough to sit on top of the base that I'd just thrown. I made a groove in the middle of that ring and raised the walls on either side to make the trough. The shallow trough on my mass-produced crock means that I have to replenish the water fairly often as it evaporates, so I made sure to make the trough on my homemade crock comparatively deep.
Once the trough dried to leather-hard, I trimmed the bottom into a smooth curve and joined it to the top of the base. The lid is thrown just the same as a bowl, making sure that the opening fits down inside the trough. There are two small notches cut out from the rim to allow air bubbles to escape. I think the shape of the finished piece looks a bit funny and will probably make the base more of a plain cylinder next time, but it should do the job just fine.
The finished crock holds a bit less than a quart. As I get better at throwing larger pieces, I hope to make a few more of these in 2- and 3-quart sizes.
Now, all of this work on pickling crocks gave me a mighty craving for some kimchi, which is not the easiest thing to come by in rural Scotland. As much as I love Wild Fermentation, its recipe for kimchi doesn't bear much resemblance to the stuff I was used to getting from Korean restaurants, markets, food trucks, or friends. Determined to improve my results, I contacted a Korean friend who pointed me to maangchi.com, which is now one of my favorite sources of cooking videos (coming in slightly behind Cooking with Dog and slightly ahead of the Vegan Black Metal Chef).
In Maangchi's wonderful video on tongbaechu (napa cabbage) kimchi, she talks a little bit about onggi, the clay pots traditionally used for fermenting kimchi and gochujang. I became completely enamored with these pots, and decided to see if I could make one myself. Here is the result:
I knew that I needed to leave part of the lid unglazed so that it wouldn't stick to the kiln shelf. As long as I was going to have a stark contrast between the off-white clay and the black glaze, I wanted to make some kind of interesting design with it. I wasn't really feeling inspired by most typical Asian imagery (I have a lot of emotional baggage relating to Chinese culture owing to my mother's 15+ year genealogical obsession), but I had recently spent a lot of time watching Marco Polo on Netflix and had Mongols on the brain. I drew some Mongolian cloud motifs in pencil around the lid and shoulder of the pot and then painted them in wax resist to keep the glaze from sticking. On the whole, I'm quite chuffed with the results.
Now, to make some pickles!
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