The 10 Best Fermenting Kits

At some point in the life of anyone who regularly eats and stores food, they’ve unintentionally taken part in the process of fermentation. Maybe you’ve left a half-eaten yogurt in the back of the fridge for one too many months. Perhaps it was a smoothie you made and left on the counter, in the sun, for a week. Whatever the food source or length of time, any incidence in which some kind of microorganism goes to town on your food is a case for fermentation. Don’t mistake this for simple mold, however. The two often coexist for a time, but fermenting microorganisms do their best work in oxygen-deprived environments.

In one epic example, my dozen housemates and I threw a massive thanksgiving feast at the large house we shared in college. We fed about 35 people and partied on into the night. The next morning, much of the leftover food lie dormant on the table, probably not quite safe to eat, but not a full-fledged science experiment either. I left to catch an early flight home for the holidays, and a few of my friends told me they’d take care of the table (I’d cooked most of the food, so it wasn’t on me to clean up).

By “take care of,” apparently my friends meant that they would embark on one of the most impressive fermentation experiments I have ever seen. They quite simply left everything on the table in place, and wrapped the entirety of it in shrink wrap. The job was impressive; the barrier was practically airtight. A week later, we returned to find a table free of any interference from insects or other vermin (which, presumably, was their intent). Beneath the sealed wrapping, however, had grown species so advanced they were likely on the cusp of developing their own written language by the time we carried the entire table out to the dumpster and slid its contents — flatware and all — into the trash.

The above are examples of fermentation by human error. The fermentation kits on our list, by contrast, take advantage of much more specific forms of the interaction between certain foods and certain microorganisms. In these instances, you can create foods that you typically don’t think of as having gone bad, but that technically have succumbed to the attack of tiny creatures. Fortunately for our purposes, these creatures have a tendency to improve the foods we place in their path.

All of your favorite alcoholic beverages, for example, are brought to you by fermentation. If you like the taste of anything that’s been pickled, from cucumbers and dilly beans to eggs and pig’s feet, you can thank fermentation. A list of intentionally fermented foods could go on for quite a while, but one thing that most of them have in common is how inexpensive their base ingredients are. For the most part, when you buy a fermented product, you’re paying for the time that the process takes.

As such, when you purchase a fermenting kit of your own, you give yourself the opportunity to save a tremendous amount of money on a lot of your favorite foods. Kosher dill pickles are probably one of the most recognizable fermented foods on the market, so we’ll use those as an example. A jar containing about eight full pickles will easily cost you more than twice what the cucumbers and brine ingredients would run you combined. That can save you a ton of money. You can also reuse brine from previous batches when you make more pickles, so the more you ferment, the more you save.

The other special thing about fermenting your own products is that you can create your own unique flavors. Specialty items like these often suffer massively inflated costs, when adding a few pieces of ginger to your brine will only cost you a few extra pennies.