Upon second thought, maybe I put in too little vegetable at beginning? I put in only raw green cabbage and I already took out and ate almost all the cabbage. Should I add more vegetable to the bone broth? Should I take it out of the fridge to continue to ferment?
Amounts of vegetable, fermentation times, and that sort of thing are up to your individual taste. Here are a few facts that I've read about:
- "They" say that good strains of probiotics take a few weeks to grow, so a quick ferment won't give you the best in the way of probiotics. Nevertheless, shorter fermentation times do make tasty dishes.
- "They" say that good strains of probiotics grow best between 65 - 72 degrees F. That's why I rarely ferment in the summer, where my inside temperature gets into the 80s or more daily. That's also why I don't like to rely on fermentation in a refrigerator, where the temperature is too low. You can buy a kimchi refrigerator for mucho dinero, make one with thermostats and an old fridge, set up your own system in a cooler, rig up a swamp cooler to keep your ferments cool. I live in a very small apartment, so I don't do any of this, just wait for cooler weather.
- Oxygen is the enemy. Personally, I use fermentation air-locks, which I buy at a local beer-brewing supply store for about $2 each. I drill a hole in a canning jar lid, put a drilled cork in the hole, and put the air-lock in the cork. The fermenting ingredients release carbon dioxide, which escapes through the air-lock, resulting in oxygen being displaced by CO
2 in the air space above the ingredients. The air-lock only lets the CO
2 escape, but doesn't let air in. You can also buy water-trough fermentation crocks that lock out air and let CO
2 escape.
- I have read that some people use a microscope (not paleo - LOL) to identify bacteria and molds in their ferment. Not something I do, but it is an interesting possibility.