I feel like they’re related in technique but have fundamentally different results. Pickling can enhance and sharpen flavours but fermentation, at least the salt anerobic kind, tends to mellow flavours. I found it helped to start with some pretty simple stuff. Just a single ingredient and salt (and water). It’s Alive, the old Bon Apetit (booo!) show, has some really helpful starting recipies. Noma’s guide to fermentation really emboldened my fermentation choices.

I got one of those fermentation kits of Amazon that has a couple of jar lids with a one-way valve, some glass fermentation weights, and a large syringe to pull air from the jar. I was much less worried about turning something poison with the added help from those tools.

My process is usually when something is going to go bad I put it in a jar I know the weight of, add a spice or something that may taste good then add water. Then weight it and calculate 2.5% salt of the item+spice+water. You can go lower than 2.5% but that’s a pretty safe number. Then I’ll look at it and taste it a couple weeks in, decide if it needs more time and keep going. Some things have a tipping point where all of a sudden they taste really different. Other things have a more linear progression.

Experiment and have fun!

I love the pop texture of with them skin on. And it is gives a nice bitter light note to the sweet fruit.

Pickle everything! I’ve come up with some pretty interesting pickles, and also ferments. Worst outcome is food that was going to go bad is bad. Best outcome is delicious surprise!

Only speculating but I think this is a symptom of late stage capitalism. Companies are staking enormous risk on leveraged finances to achieve impossible stock prices. And if they miss, they’re done. They collapse and get rolled into giant multinationals to funnel even more money to the top.