How to Ferment Kale with Art and Anna

Art and Anna, we're gonna ferment some kale from our garden. What's the very first thing we do?

Pick the kale.

Okay, all right, smarty pants.

And then what? We're gonna wash it next. And so this has already been just torn off and washed, and I'm gonna chop this kale. Okay, now does it really matter how finely you chop it? And I recommend chopping it kind of just moderately finely. You don't have to worry about this step very much. Okay, and we're gonna do this together.

Don't they look alike? What's going on here?

Bree was saying we look like twins the other day.

Your sister and brother, for those that don't know. This is Art from the Art and Bree channel.

Hey guys. So We're gonna do this like in a community way because that's my favorite way to make fermented foods. And this— I love making them with the kids, and I love making them to other people, and I love teaching, teaching people. And so like we have random fermenting parties at our house as often as possible. Nice. Many of them never filmed.

So you're gonna keep chopping, she's just gonna be sprinkling salt.

I'm gonna sprinkle a little salt and massage it.

Massage it.

Get up and close with that kale. Now listen, for those that don't know, well, let's start with this. Why in the world would you ferment in the first place, or even what is fermenting? So maybe what is it and why?

So fermenting is a highly controlled decomposition of food that actually results in its preservation. You set the conditions for these particular anaerobic bacteria to proliferate, and they actually make a lot of lactic acid, which actually preserves the food.

Yeah, and so it's preservation, but what about health? Can one of you speak to the health benefits of ferment?

Yeah, let's talk about specifically with kale and other cruciferous vegetables. There's some compounds in them. I don't remember the exact name of them, but there's these plant compounds in kale, cabbage, bok choy, that when you ferment them, they get transformed and made even more bioavailable, and they're really powerful anti-carcinogens. So that's just one example of how fermentation transforms food and makes it even more nutritional for you. And then there's the benefit of eating the live bacteria and how they can affect your guts, your gut health.

Do you think we can get this much kale into this jar?

I know that I'm supposed to say no. That's right. But I know you're gonna shock us all.

You may be surprised.

With your magic trick.

This is gonna blow your mind. This needs to be your lead-in for this video because it's so good.

Fitting that much kale into this— how are we gonna do that, Mr. David Blaine?

We're just gonna stuff it in there. So what we've done so far is just chopped the cabbage, and Anna is salting the cabbage. How much salt approximately have you put in there?

Maybe a teaspoon and a half.

Now, if you're new to fermenting, this is going to sound crazy to you, but you can make most fermented vegetables and just taste the food, and if it tastes salty enough, it'll be enough salt. I know that sounds crazy. I'm just acknowledging that.

Why is that crazy?

It's crazy because most people think you have to get it perfect, okay, to be successful with fermenting, but this is actually a technique that probably arguably the most like reputable fermenting teacher in the country. His name is Sandor Katz, and he highly recommends fermenting by taste. So let's taste this.

Yeah, there we go. Nice and salty.

I think it's good. There's a pretty big range that you can use. I'm actually going to put a little more salt in it.

Are you doing it salt by taste?

We're doing salt by taste. This is simplest way to firm it.

And by your own personal taste, some people like more salt than others.

I've taught this on my YouTube channel and, and brought along people, a lot of people along in the past, but this works with most vegetables, putting salt on it.

Should it be uncomfortably salty, or should it be— this is how I would salt it if I was about to eat it.

Yeah, it should taste salty and you like the taste.

Okay. All right.

Yep, that's a good way to put it.

So all we've done is add salt to this. We're going to add some peppers for a little punch, and these are a Korean hot pepper. You could use any hot pepper, and we're gonna use about a teaspoon. It may freak some of y'all out that, that we didn't measure the kale, we didn't measure the salt, and we didn't measure the peppers, but I'm telling you that this is a legitimate way to go out and make fermented foods, this is how I actually usually make ferments.

Is that your style in life, Art?

Or is that a fermenting instruction?

You got me.

Both.

I guess I've known Art a while.

This is one approach you can take to fermenting, and it's a very legitimate one. On the other hand, we could have actually weighed this. We could have used a brine and weighed it, but yeah.

What's your style, Anna? Are you a measurer? I'm more of a measurer.

Yep.

So is this driving you a little nuts?

No, it actually— it doesn't bother me with this style. So this is kind of a dry salted, and there's also another big category called brine. So that's where you like mix up like a salt water. With the brine, I really like to measure it. I like to use a scale and get really precise. But for this kind of ferment where you're not adding a bunch of liquid, this works well because you can get a good feel for the taste.

Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and pack this jar next. And that's just really straightforward. We're just gonna cram it down in here. I'm actually not sure if it's gonna fit.

Oh, we're calling him on his magic trick here. I was like, oh look, he's breaking out the wooden spoon.

Your wooden spoon, yep.

So you are gonna jam it in there?

Oh yeah, there's two ways to do this. The technique we're using here, Anna mentioned, is called dry salting, and this is the basic technique for making sauerkraut or any other vegetable that will create its own brine, essentially.

Your unmeasured style is totally acceptable in this case.

Definitely.

You've created this course. Yeah. Why? Why a course on this and not a course on bow hunting?

Because I think this is really valuable and it's something I'm very passionate about. And between us, we share a lot of experience and knowledge. So it's something I love sharing. Yeah, I don't know why. It's like, it's magic. That's the thing. What happens in here is like magic.

You're, you're a magician, actually. You, you like magic tricks. I can tell.

Yeah, I do.

It's all coming up. What about you, Anna?

I think they taste really good. That's at this point, that's one of the big draws. I got into it for health reasons, started fermenting to improve my gut health, and I got hooked on the flavor. It just— you just get flavors that you don't really get in any other way.

What liquid is coming out there?

That's actually the brine that the salt's creating. It's pulling the liquid out of the plant and it's making a brine which is going to cover it. Now the easy way to do this—

I think you can do it, Art.

Yeah, I can get it, man. The easy way is actually to let this sit for 30 minutes. Oh, and it'll soften a lot. But you can just expedite it by just packing your jar or pounding that, massaging that. Vegetable in a bowl heavily. It's definitely all going in.

Yeah, right? Wow.

And you don't add any water or anything?

No. There's multiple techniques to fermenting. You can, you can use a brine technique where you add salt water and you can pour that over nearly any vegetable. But with a technique like this, the veg and the salt create the brine.

And all you need is the salt for it, for the, for the vegetable to start breaking down.

That's right.

Okay, how much time? Um, this ready?

So you could eat this from like 5 to 6 days out to months out. It's going to get stronger and stronger. It's going to get more and more acidic, especially over the first weeks.

So now we're going to take a weight. And what is that weight, for those that don't know?

This is like a fermenting, a fermenting-specific glass weight. It's called a Pickle Pebble. I think that's the brand, perhaps. Um, we're gonna put it on top of here, and the reason for this is to hold down the kale and make it so that the liquid covers it fully.

Yeah, because you don't want any oxygen getting in there.

Exactly.

You want this to go anaerobic.

Exactly. Yep.

Okay.

And take a look here. We got the vegetable line and the liquid line. That's great, plenty of coverage.

Okay.

And it's, it's gonna get even better as time goes on. The salt will do its work and pull more of the liquid out, and there'll be plenty of brine.

Okay, that's it. One more step.

Last step is to cover this and label. Oh, I want to show this. This is actually my favorite fermenting weight, just a little jar. So you don't have to buy specific weights. In fact, I've almost never used a product that's sold specifically for fermenting. I just use jars. I'm going to cover this with a piece of paper, and I'm going to put parchment paper. Yeah, just a parchment paper.

Does it have to be paper? Could have been a cloth.

You can use almost anything.

Okay.

Um, I like I like the parchment paper a lot. I like fabric a lot. And I'm going to put a ring on it, and I'm going to just put it on just enough to hold it. Um, I don't want it tight because as the bacteria really proliferate and grow in here, they're going to create quite a bit of CO2, and it's going to need to escape.

And I used the rubber band in the carrot video.

Rubber band is a great way. Yeah, if you put a tight sealed lid on it, there is a small risk it'll explode. It's not likely, but it It can explode.

Yeah.

Um, and all we're trying to do is just keep stuff out of here.

So speaking of explosions, you told me before we started filming that you wanted to talk about safety. So yeah, we're not talking about explosions. What are we talking about?

We're talking about people being afraid that they're gonna make their family sick.

Okay.

Or hurt their family by making fermented foods. And we heard this so much from people, and it was actually something that we identify with, and I actually wouldn't— the first time I fermented food, I didn't let my kids eat it. Like, I tested it on myself.

So you were nervous yourself?

I was nervous. So people think it's like moldy.

It's a little freaky because we use refrigerators generally a lot.

Okay, this is not going in the fridge.

This is gonna set out, you know, here with— on the counter with the carrots.

Okay. Yeah.

Um, it's gonna set at room temperature, and it's prepared vegetables. And if it wasn't submerged under the water, it would rot. It would go bad. It would end up slimy mess, you get flies. And that's kind of— we've been programmed to think, you know, preservation, cold, cold storage. But, um, so it's just different. And we found that when we show people what to look for, for when a ferment's going well, and what to look for, for issues that might come up and how to address them—

we've done this, we've put it over here. I imagine people are afraid that this is going to go bad. Perhaps it's going to make them sick. That's what maybe you were afraid of when you didn't feed your child. So what's the big takeaway that we can know that we're not going to do that?

Essentially, if you closely babysit your ferments, you can catch any issues as they come up. And the thing is with fermented foods, you're going to see it or you're going to smell it if it's going bad. What people are— a lot of people have this botulism fear from the old, all the canning warnings. And it's almost impossible to grow botulism in fermented foods. Okay, that's like scientifically proven, like by the USDA, by many studies, because it acidifies.

Okay.

Um, and botulism doesn't— people don't get botulism from fermented foods, period. Vegetables, let me say that. There, there are cases with some meat products.

Yeah, so for the most part, you could maybe trust your eyes and nose.

You can trust your eyes and nose with your ferments. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, we can talk a little bit about the babysitting process though for people who are maybe doing this as a first ferment. So, um, if you put this together, you want to check it the very next day. And the main thing you're checking for at that point is you can maybe lift up your lid and look and just check again to see if the brine is covering the vegetable. In this case, it's not. It probably will be tomorrow, but we'll just pretend. You can come in—

how do you know it's not? Um, oh, oh, the liquid is not on top.

There's there's air touching the vegetable over here. You can see it through the glass. So because of that, I'll open it up, press this down, and now it's covering it. So there we go, problem solved. Lid back on, continue to happily ferment. Um, you want to check it definitely on day 1, then you can start skipping days like day 3, day 5, and, uh, space mount even more from there.

Okay.

The big thing is making sure that your vegetable, no matter what it is, stays under the brine, because if it gets out, you will have issues. You will have mold on it. But if everything stays under the brine, it'll be fine. This, by the way, is actually an experiment because I was just so interested in fermenting in the past month that I ran out into the garden and said, what can I ferment? And I just grabbed a bunch of kale and fermented it.

Nice.

So we just kind of made that up.

It turned out nicely.

I think so.

We've had students who've gone through our course already do the same thing. They're like, wow, I did like these— they did some of the recipes from the course, they watched a bunch of the videos, and they're now posting and messaging us, I just did something I've never done before, and just thank you, you know.

That's perfect. I want— hang on to that thought. I want you to speak a little bit more about what students are saying. But you guys have created a course for this, and from talking with you, I feel, I feel like the, the number one pain point for folks is they have an idea that they want to ferment for whatever reason, for preservation, for health. They're maybe a little nervous they won't get it right. They're a little nervous of maybe getting sick or something. Can you speak to that? Do you think that's true for folks' pain point?

Are people also worried about their the cost of like getting equipment and the complexity of it. But the fact is like it's actually very affordable. And even just like this setup right here, and if you think about using this jar as a weight, you're not using any specialized equipment. You probably already have it. So if you have this right here and you have kale in your garden, you should go make some.

Okay, now, so now they've, they've done all this hard work to figure this out, uh, line it out for you guys. They've created a course You spoke to students already talking about it. This has already been put out in a beta, so this has already been proven. It's there, and it's there until what, Sunday?

Sunday at midnight.

Sunday at midnight you close. So what are some other things students are saying? So, I mean, we're a little biased. We're a little biased because we're selling this course, but what, what are the students already saying besides what you already said, which was beautiful?

So one of the things that a student told us was that just how systematic the course is, and then walking her through information and this very detailed instructions on how to make each recipe, and then explaining the science of fermenting really actually freed her from that fear. And so she said she'd made fermented foods in the past and never eaten them, and then she took our course and now she's actually eating her own fermented the first time because she's confident.

Yeah, that's encouraging.

We had another student say that the course was so enjoyable and engaging that her teenage son actually jumped in and did all the fermenting projects with her.

What? She was like, that's a family. Well, this is your first course to put out, isn't it?

Yeah.

And yours too, Anna. So how does that feel? How does that feel to put a course out in the world and you're already changing people's lives? Like a mom and a son are getting together and working together create something healthy?

It was a little scary ahead of time, and then that just completely transitioned into very fun and fulfilling because it actually worked. Like, we had these goals in mind, and our goal was to get people through their fear, through hurdles, and fermenting like immediately, and, and we've been successful.

So what were you scared about?

Uh, just like, so it was a huge time investment, and, and okay, a lot of it was her. Like, she went full time on it. And that was, it was a risk. I wasn't really afraid.

Maybe it wouldn't have worked out.

Yeah, we took a risk. I mean, I think Anna put about 2 months full-time into it.

And the last few weeks.

I hope this is gonna work. Plus, it's like, we are fairly experienced and we've framed out this course with the goals in mind, but are the steps in the way we, when we took 50 sticky notes and laid them out for every piece of information, every video, and laid them out, is that gonna work for for a new fermenter. So that was part of the fear.

So how did you overcome the fear, guys?

Jumping in.

Just doing it.

Jumping in together too.

Just embracing the fear.

Yeah.

You had each other. It is better if you're going to be scared to be with a friend. And so I see a lot of parallels here. So they were scared to do this course, but they just jumped in. And some of you guys may be scared to do ferments, but maybe you just need to jump in. Maybe you're, maybe you're scared to get their course, but you just need to jump in because— and then see what it's about. And I think when you get to the other side of what you were so afraid of, it doesn't become so scary.

Yeah, that's true.

I know that from the Great American Farm Tour. Yeah.

And maybe if you do get into the course, you call a friend to have them come over.

That's right.

And watch the videos together and do some of the projects together.

Exactly. And then fear is more Fear turns into fun. Yeah, this is not in your course, but I get to offer it as a bonus as an affiliate of theirs. If you buy through my link down in the description, you'll get how we built these carrots, made these carrots. We just did it, we filmed a little video. You'll get that free. I guess you'll send me people's emails after the close on Sunday.

I'm going to send you people's emails so they can get that bonus.

Yeah, so you guys got to get in before Sunday And then Art will get me those who bought through my course, and I'll send you the special video of those carrots.

We have a carrot stick video in the course already, but Anna said, hey, the Rhodes fermented carrots are so good that we should make a video on that.

And these are more like carrot chips.

And you guys have eaten them like this for years.

Yeah, we can attest to that. Yeah, they're good.

We actually offer a complete guarantee, so if people like actually enroll in the course and then they say, ah, this isn't what I wanted, or I didn't learn what I want, like they can completely get their money back. Yeah, yeah.

So really there's no reason to be— let's take that off the table. They should not be afraid to buy the course because if they don't like it, they can get their money back.

Yeah, and we easily—

yeah. Okay, has anybody done that?

Um, I think we have like a 1 or 2% refund rate. Oh my God, we're refunding people like immediately.

You're having—

it'll be easy, we won't, we won't bug you.

You have a 99% 1% chance you're gonna love the course. And if you're that 1%— I had a guy call because I do the same thing, and I had a guy, he canceled. I even put this in an email marketing. He canceled on me. Cancelled. I gave him all his money back. Why? Well, he forgot to talk to his wife. He's just like, I guess it wasn't in the budget, so I'm not even— so it wasn't even a problem with the course, it was just social dynamics at home.

Yeah.

So talk to your spouse or whoever, please, and get on this course.