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in
the

Hannah Lewis
with an assortment
of her own fermented
veggies and sauces

Sour Grapes?
Nah, Sour Pickles!

Here’s how you can make your own at home in a flash.

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

I

PHOTOS BY JERRY ZOLYNSKY

t feels uncanny. Put cucumbers in a jar.
Cover them with clear salt water. Add
a few spices. Wait a week or so, and
you have delicious sour pickles in a tangy,
cloudy green brine. Unseen little creatures
transformed ordinary cucumbers into that
culinary delight.
This process does not resemble pickles
from the supermarket: cucumbers in a
bath of sterile distilled vinegar. New Yorker
Sandor Katz, apostle of fermentation, says
that do-it-yourself pickles are the opposite
of fast food. Corporations produce standard-
ized fast food to maximize profits, so passive
customers just have to pay and consume.
Do-it-yourself pickle-makers grow, barter or
buy fresh produce, process it to their own
individual tastes and enjoy their personal
pickled products.
Our ancestors in Eastern Europe — or
anywhere else — knew the uncanny trick
of fermentation. They needed the trick. In
Ukraine, for example, as in Michigan, local

cucumbers appear in gardens and markets
for a few weeks in high summer and then
not again until the next summer. Cucumbers
do not keep. Anyone who wants to enjoy
cucumbers the rest of the year needs to
know how to make pickles.
The same trick works for green tomatoes,
cabbage, turnips, green beans, okra and
almost any other kind of produce.
Valeriya Epshteyn of
Detroit came to Oak Park
from Ukraine as a young
child 19 years ago. “We fer-
mented vegetables at home
as far back as I can remem-
ber,” she says. “When I
was in first grade, I told
my teacher how my father
Valeriya Epshteyn
pickled tomatoes. He would
boil water, add salt, let the
brine cool off, pour that
over the green tomatoes; a week or so later,
we would have pickled tomatoes.”

When she moved to Ann Arbor for college,
Epshteyn rediscovered fermentation. The
local stores sold delicious kimchi; her friends
made kambucha. “I developed a taste for
those, but I didn’t think I could make them
myself. I was way overpaying for fermented
foods from the store.”
Later, living in Detroit, Epshteyn organized
a fermentation party, where Raya Samet of
Oak Park demonstrated how to make sauer-
kraut. I thought, ‘That’s all it took? Less than
a dollar’s worth of vegetables!’”
Epshteyn now has an extensive backyard
garden that produces nearly all the veg-
etables in her various fermentation jars. She
sees the urban vegetable garden and the craft
of fermentation as part of a larger vision.
“Every individual could become a food sov-
ereign, empowered to understand, value and
steward the system that brings them from
food seed to supper,” says Epshteyn, program
associate for Detroit Jews for Justice.
Hannah Lewis, also of Detroit and a mas-

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August 30 • 2018

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