About
A reference with recipes in it, not a recipe site
The domain says recipe. What the subject actually needs is a table: the salt, the temperature, the time and the pH, for every named fermented pickle anyone has published one for.
Last reviewed 6 September 2026
What this is
A table of 209 named fermented pickles from 56 places, built from 39 substrates. For each one it holds whatever a named source has published about how it is made: the salt concentration and whether it is applied dry or as brine, the temperature the fermentation runs at, how long it takes, the pH it finishes at, and the organisms responsible. Beside every value is the sentence it came from and a link to the document containing it.
The word "pickle" is used here in its broad sense - anything preserved in brine or salt - and the site is about the lactic kind rather than the vinegar kind. Kimchi, sauerkraut, tsukemono, torshi, achar, curtido, pao cai, gundruk, atchara, sinki, dua muoi and about a hundred and seventy others.
Why it is not a recipe blog
Two reasons, and the first is the honest one. Recipe publishing has been the worst-hit category in web search through the last two years: sites in it have lost between a third and four fifths of their traffic, and answer engines now resolve "how much salt for sauerkraut" without anybody clicking anything. Another thousand-word essay about a grandmother and a crock, ending in the same three numbers everyone else prints, has no reason to exist and no way to be found.
The second reason is better. The thing that is genuinely hard to find, in any language, is the parameter set. What salt percentage does a Thai pak-gard-dong use, and for how long, and at what temperature? Which organism starts a sauerkraut and which one finishes it? What pH does gundruk reach, and by which day? Those answers exist, in an FAO bulletin from 1998, in two open-access review papers, in the USDA preservation guides and in the Code of Federal Regulations. They are not collected anywhere. This is the collection.
So the recipes are here, but they hang off the data rather than the other way round. A page exists because a row exists.
What counts as a pickle here
A named preparation, made from a plant, preserved by salt or brine, that a source describes as fermenting. 174 entries meet that. Another 35 are in the pickle categories with no source saying they ferment; they keep their pages and their pages say so, in a marked band, because the difference between a pickle preserved by acid somebody added and one preserved by acid the food made for itself is the entire subject here and quietly dropping the ambiguous cases would make the table look more certain than the record is.
What is deliberately out
Fermented fish and cured meat. Both are large subjects with their own control parameters, and the model this site uses - salt on the weight of a vegetable, terminal pH from a lactic fermentation - does not transfer to them. Water activity and nitrite do the work in a cured meat, and neither appears here.
Soy sauce, miso, doenjang, gochujang, tempeh and natto. Fermented, and not pickles. A vegetable ferment site that annexed the soy shelf would be a directory of two subjects and an authority on neither.
Cassava staples. Gari, fufu and chikwangue are lactic fermentations of a root, and nobody calls them pickles. Seven of them were dropped from a review table this site otherwise reads in full, and the count is published rather than quietly absorbed.
Vinegar quick-pickling. Covered only as the thing this site is not about. The USDA's own sentence, that fresh-pack or quick-process pickles are not fermented, is quoted on the front page.
Why so much of the table is blank
23 of 209 entries carry a published parameter. The rest carry a name, a place, a vegetable and a row of dashes. That is not laziness and it is not a placeholder: it is what the published record looks like. The FAO bulletin says so itself in its final chapter, that most of this knowledge has not been documented and is in danger of being lost as families move away from traditional preservation.
Filling those blanks with plausible numbers would be easy and would make the site look far more complete. It would also mean that somebody ferments on a number this site invented, which is the single worst thing a page like this can do. A missing salt percentage is fine. A confidently wrong one is not.
Who it is for
Somebody who already ferments and wants to know how a tradition other than their own handles the same problem. Somebody trying to work out why a batch went soft, or slimy, or never soured. Somebody who read a recipe saying "5% brine" and noticed that the phrase can mean three different things. And, straightforwardly, somebody who wants to know what gundruk is.
How it pays for itself
Amazon affiliate links, on two pages: the equipment page and the larder. There are none anywhere else, and specifically none on any page carrying a salt percentage, a temperature or a pH. That is a rule rather than an oversight, and disclosures sets out why.