Chloe Beans

Meet Chloe Beans, my first collaborative ferment!

My wife said naming a jar of fermented beans after our daughter was "the most romantic thing shes ever heard of", which means at some point I've really lowered the bar on what she considers romantic.  Go me! 

When my wife went out for the evening to her "Book Club", which from what I gather focuses more on wine than books, I did what I assume every father with a sleeping 9 month old and a rambunctious 2 year old would do:  ferment green beans! In my case it made a lot of sense. Our garden and CSA had combined to fill our fridge with about 2 lbs of green beans over the past week, and Chloe was filled with boundless energy that needed to be put to use before she just start running around wildly through the house without pants (she hates wearing pants). So I decided to solve our two problems and focus her energy on something constructive by having her help me ferment those green beans (still without pants on. She really hates wearing pants).

I fermented green beans once before, so I knew it was easy.  And as it turns out, its easy enough for an almost 2 year old to do. All you have to do is throw green beans into a crock (or jar) along with salty water and whatever extra things you want and wait a week or two for them to finish.  For this version, Chloe and I went with the following ingredients:

• 1 gallon of water
• 6 oz salt (mixed into the water until dissolved)
• 2 lbs of green beans
• garlic cloves, crushed (we used around 10 from what I can tell in the pictures)
• handful of dill
• mustard seeds (about a tbsp)
• black peppercorns (far more than I was expecting. Maybe 3 tbsp)
• handful of garlic scapes (because we had them and figured why not)

Sorting garlic

Step one was sorting out all our ingredients, which involved going to the garden to get some of our ingredients. So we walked into the yard to pick all of the dill that we had, and decided to grab a few more beans while we were there because they were ready and we had room for them.

The most determined salt scooper in the business.

After that, Chloe measured out the salt. I wanted 6oz, so I put a little bowl on our scale, gave her a spoon and the salt, and let her keep going until we hit our target (or close enough). She actually did really well and probably spilled less salt than I would have.

Gathering all the dill.

Then I mixed the salt into the water while I had Chloe sort out the rest of the ingredients and throw them into the crock. First she did the dill, then the crushed garlic, and next up were the mustard seeds and black peppercorns which we had yet to measure.

After doing such a good job with the salt I thought this shouldn't be much different, so I started by pouring some mustard seeds into a bowl while she watched, and then gave her the peppercorn container to do next.  After giving me a confident "Me got it!" response she started pouring......and then never stopped. She dumped the entire container into the bowl, which overflowed onto the counter and all over the floor.  Then she stared at the bowl with a little smirk while I got the broom.

After cleaning up, I removed some of the peppercorns from the bowl until it seemed like a reasonable amount left. Then Chloe dumped them all into the crock, and it was time to move onto the green beans.

Standing in front of a pile of green beans is like winning the lottery for a little kid. She kept saying "whoa" and laughing while picking them up by the handful and dropping them back on the cutting board. Seriously you would think we didn't get her out of the house much. But after a minute of that she settled down and it was back to business.

I chopped the stem ends off the beans and gave them to Chloe who threw them into the crock. It went on like this for a while (it was a lot of green beans and she was adamant that she put them in one at a time) until eventually we got through them all and were ready to pour in the salt water.  Except Chloe didn't want to be done.

After telling her we didn't have any more beans and then having to answer her subsequent "why?" question 10 times in a row, I went into the fridge and pulled out some garlic scapes just to make her happy

Shes actually asking me "why are you taking pictures of me?" in this picture, which I answered with "because daddy has a blog for his pretend ferment business that he posts on the internet for the 5 people who are interested or just bored to read." She answered "Oh.", like somehow that made perfect sense.

So our dilly beans now have garlic scapes in them because I gave in to a 2 year old.  I chopped those up, Chloe tossed them in the crock, and we were all happy.  Then I poured in the salt water, weighed down the vegetables under a plate, covered it with a pillow case, and let it sit for about 2 weeks.

Garlic scapes look hilarious to small children.

The finish product came out great!  Really, its hard to screw up fermented beans.  Seriously, if you read this far you realize that a 2 year old made these and somehow they are still awesome. They are crunchy and briny and have a bit of dill and garlic flavor to them. The garlic scapes did great as well, and I'm glad I gave in and added them.

The finished beans.  You can't really make that look pretty.

The only part where Chloe fell down on the job was when it came to packing them away in jars after they were finished.  Instead of helping, she preferred to sit on the ground eating them while daddy did the work. But the smiles more than made up for that, so let her enjoy her break.