A reference with recipes in it

The world's fermented pickles, and the numbers that make them work

Not a recipe blog. A table of 209 named pickles from 56 places, each with the salt concentration, the fermentation temperature, the duration and the terminal pH that a named source published for it, and the sentence that source used. Where nobody has published a number, the field is blank and says so.

23 of them are also written out as recipes you can follow, step by step, in the words the FAO and the USDA used. This site did not write those steps and does not improve on them.

Named pickles209
Stated to ferment174
With a published parameter23
Substrates39
Regions56
Organisms76

The one distinction

A vinegar pickle is preserved by acid somebody added to it. A fermented pickle is preserved by acid the food made for itself, out of its own sugars, using bacteria that were already on the vegetable when it came out of the ground. They look alike in a jar and they are not the same food.

Fresh-pack or quick-process pickles are not fermented; some are brined several hours or overnight, then drained and covered with vinegar and seasonings.

USDA, via the National Center for Home Food Preservation

This site is about the second kind. It covers cucumber, and it covers cabbage, radish, mustard leaf, bamboo shoot, mango, lime, durian, olive, enset and about seventy other things people have found a way to keep by letting them sour.

What actually preserves it

Not the salt. Salt buys time and shapes which organisms get to grow; the acid is what keeps the food. The FAO bulletin puts it plainly, and it is worth reading twice because almost every popular account of pickling has it the other way round:

The spoilage organisms can tolerate salt concentrations up to between 5 and 7%, therefore it is the acidic environment created by the lactobacilli that keep the spoilage bacteria at bay, rather than the addition of salt.

FAO Agricultural Services Bulletin 134, 5.6.2

Which is why terminal pH is the column on this site that carries colour, and why the safety page is about how fast the pH falls rather than about how much salt went in.

Recipes

23 of the 209 pickles in the table have a recorded method as well as recorded numbers, and those 124 steps are quoted rather than rewritten. Two are USDA home recipes with household quantities; the rest are the FAO's record of how a food is made somewhere in the world, which is a different kind of document and is marked as one.

Recipe	Method	Where	Steps	From
Sauerkraut, USDA home method	Dry-salted	United States	10	USDA/NCHFP Sauerkraut
Fermented dill pickles, USDA home method	Brined	United States	9	USDA/NCHFP Dill Pickles
Green mango pickle	Brined	India, Pakistan and Bangladesh	6	FAO Bulletin 134 6.2.1
Lime pickle, brined	Brined	India, Pakistan and North Africa	8	FAO Bulletin 134 6.2.2
Dry-salted lime pickle	Dry-salted	India, Pakistan and North Africa	8	FAO Bulletin 134 6.1.1
Gundruk	Non-salted	Nepal	4	FAO Bulletin 134 6.3.1
Dry-salted cucumber pickle	Dry-salted	Africa, Asia and Latin America	7	FAO Bulletin 134 6.1.2
Kocho	Pit-buried	Ethiopia	7	FAO Bulletin 134 6.3.2

All 23 recipes

The pickles with published numbers

23 of 209. Everything else in the table has a name, a place and a vegetable, and no published parameter. That ratio is the honest state of the record, not a gap in this site.

Pickle	Substrate	Salt	Temperature	Time	Terminal pH	Source
Sauerkraut (USDA home method)	Cabbage	3 tablespoons of canning or pickling salt per 5 pounds of cabbage	70 to 75 °F	about 3 to 4 weeks	-	USDA / NCHFP
Fermented dill pickles (USDA home method)	Cucumber	-	70 to 75 °F	about 3 to 4 weeks	-	USDA / NCHFP
Gundruk	Leafy vegetables, Cabbage, Radish, Mustard leaf, Cauliflower	None added	about 18 °C	five to seven days	4.0	FAO Bulletin 134
Sauerkraut	Cabbage	2.0 to 2.5 % w/w	21 °C	-	-	FAO Bulletin 134
Sinki	Radish	-	30 °C	twelve days	3.3	FAO Bulletin 134
Black olives	Olive	2 to 5 % salt in water	-	two to six weeks	-	FAO Bulletin 134
Brined cucumber pickles	Cucumber	15 to 20 % salt in water	29 to 32 °C	10 to 30 days	-	FAO Bulletin 134
Brined vegetables (general method)	not stated	15 to 20 % salt in water	-	-	-	FAO Bulletin 134
Green olives (Spanish-style)	Olive	1 to 10 % salt in water	24 °C	two to three months	-	FAO Bulletin 134
Dry-salted cucumber pickle	Cucumber	1 kg per 20 kg small or 15 kg large cucumbers	-	one to four weeks	-	FAO Bulletin 134
Dry-salted lime pickle	Lime	1 kg per 4 kg of limes	-	one to four weeks	-	FAO Bulletin 134
Dry-salted vegetables (general method)	not stated	3 kg per 100 kg of vegetables	-	one to four weeks	-	FAO Bulletin 134

The whole table, all 209 of them

Ways in

Recipes, step by step23 methods, every sentence quoted from its sourceStart with the two USDA ones By what you are fermenting39 substrates, from cabbage to false bananaMustard leaf / Bamboo shoot / Cucumber / Cabbage By where it is made56 countries and culinary regionsEast Asia / South East Asia / India / Japan By how the brine gets thereDry-salted, brined, non-salted, pit-buried, rice-branCalculatorsSix of them, each showing its arithmeticThe organisms76 named, with the names they were given before 2020 and the ones they have nowWhat the salt didSodium per 100 g, from USDA FoodData CentralpH 4.6, and where it comes from21 CFR 114, uneditedSafetyWhat goes wrong, and the one thing that does not forgive a mistake

Where the numbers come from

Four sources supply parameters and nothing else may: the FAO Agricultural Services Bulletin 134 (1998), the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning by way of the National Center for Home Food Preservation, 21 CFR 114 and 108 from the eCFR, and USDA FoodData Central. Names, regions and substrates additionally come from two open-access review papers and from Wikipedia and Wikidata, neither of which is permitted to supply a number anywhere on this site. The full list, with retrieval dates and the exclusions, is on methodology.