I’ve always loved cooking with different types of chard leaves! Why not try fermenting their stalks?!?!
There were big piles of red chard at my local market the other day and the stalks themselves were particularly large and crispy looking. I’ve always loved cooking with different varieties of chard over the years and am always trying to find practical uses for their stalks. You can use them in a stock, blanch them and make a relish or dip of some sort. You can also ferment them!
Going into this, I’ve never actually fermented chard stalks but had a good feeling about it! The stalk themselves are fibrous, crispy and full of moisture. They remind me a lot of celery stalks and also have a decent flavor to them. While I’d never fermented either chard or celery before, I imagined that both of these would hold up pretty well in a ferment and that you’d end up with a pretty nice texture (side note to try fermenting celery next 😬). Texturally, I was also really curious about the stringiness of the stalks and to what degree their texture would soften during the ferment.
For spices, I stuck to a mixture of cardamom pods, black peppercorns, dried ramp powder and Aleppo pepper. I kept it at a 2% salt ratio and gave it an initial 4 days to ferment. At this point, the chard stalks were still pretty tough and stringy so I decided to let it go another 10 days.
The result was much closer to what I was hoping for. A softer but chewy texture that still has a bite to it and is not unpleasantly stringy or fibrous. The center had an almost jelly likeness to it, similar to full sour fermented cucumbers.
In the end I liked these a lot! I think they’d go great on a charcuterie board and can also be sliced down to top sandwiches, rice and salad bowls, etc! So now we know, the chard stalk is a pretty valuable part of the plant in it’s own right.
Thank you for reading! Below is a video showing the whole process followed by a full recipe and additional breakdown
Cheers,
Joey
Youtube Video:
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