The palette — herbs & spices of pickling

The body of the jar

Vegetables are what the ferment lives in — the food that feeds the culture. Pick what the season and the food bank have for you.

Red onion — deep colour, gentle sweetness; the jar's shy anchor.

Fresh ginger — a warm, peppery root that weathers a long ferment whole.

Capers — buds of bright, briny patience; remarkable company.

Fresh turmeric — golden knuckles that dye the brine before they dissolve.

Cucumber or cauliflower — the honest crunch that keeps a ferment a pickle.

Red cabbage — purple generosity; turns the whole jar a soft rose.

Celery — clean green, salt-adjacent, quietly structuring.

Garlic — the friend that somehow stays sharp for months.

Centella asiatica — the herb of skin and tendons; a traditional leaf, not a novelty.

Dulse (seaweed) — a taste of the shore that brings minerals along.

Watermelon rind — summer saved from the compost; mild and sweet.

Tart cherries — a fruit interruption; the only red that remembers the tree.

Leaves & barks

The green kitchen. Leaves are the easy magic — tannins hold crunch, aromatics perfume the jar.

Oak leaves — tannin, nature's crisp-preserver, grown from a tree.

Grape leaves — the winemaker's trick, tannin plus deep fruit memory.

Rosemary — resinous mountain air that ignores the months.

Thyme — small, dependable, always right.

Nettle leaf — the plant that stings outside the jar and calms inside it.

Olive leaves — silver-green and bitter-sweet; a cup of the Mediterranean.

Citrus peel — oil, and everything oil carries; the whole fruit remembered.

Slippery elm / marshmallow root — mucilage twins; they calm and smooth wherever they float.

Lion's mane — a mushroom of nerve and memory, at home in brine.

Horseradish — the barbed-wire root; unforgettable and proud of it.

Seeds & spices

The loud, generous end of the palette. Small amounts go a long way.

Nigella sativa (black seed) — the ancient seed, warm and faintly smoky; tidal in herb kitchens.

Black peppercorns — the conductor; makes everything around it speak up.

Cinnamon bark — sweet wood; the jar's warm weather front.

Fennel or nigella mixture — a wind off the sea through a Baltic kitchen.

Wheat germ — a quiet, chewy handful; the culture doesn't mind.

Chicory root — deep coffee-roast patience for the very long haul.

Chamomile — apple-scented sleep, even in a pickle jar.

Frankincense (food-grade) — the cathedral note; a resin that was sacred before it was culinary.

Astragalus / ashwagandha roots — the adaptogen pair, earthy and long-simmered in tradition.

Schisandra / hawthorn berries — wild, tart beads that hold the colour of their season.

Barberry / knotweed (resveratrol family) — deeply red woods and berries; the ferment takes them seriously.

Reishi & cordyceps — forest medicine, chosen for texture and history, not novelty.

The brine — the water part

Salt is the law of the jar. Everything else is elective conversation.

Non-iodized salt — 35 g per litre; the one non-negotiable. Iodine kills the culture.

Glycine — tasteless helper; the amino acid that shows up everywhere and does no harm.

Blackstrap molasses — a spoon of minerals and a little sugar for the bacteria.

Black seed oil + lecithin + glycerol — the homely emulsion: oil meets water politely, so everything dissolves.

The deeper stories behind these notes — the full fat & nutrition knowledge graph, compound biochemistry, and the fermentation systems — are one wiki, waiting for their renderer. This catalog is the face of that project; the notes stay kitchen-framed, never prescribed.

The documents

The 120-day narrative exploration pH / EC calibration chart Follow the ferment

The full research graph lives in the repository as the Fat & Nutrition Protocol (70 files, Obsidian-style wikilinks). Its Master Index is the doorway; a graph renderer is a later loop. This page is the curated kitchen view of that body of work.