Ultimate Fermentation Gift Guide
The best thing about fermentation Christmas or birthday gifts? They create fermented foods that are easy to share! It’s the gift that gives back.
So here it is — the ultimate gift guide for the fermenter in your life. Thank me later.
Categorized by price and complete with recommended uses for each gift, this fermentation gift guide is sure to be an endless source of inspiration for whomever is lucky enough to receive a gift from you.
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1. Fermentation books
These fermentation books don’t just teach you how to ferment safely, they also give you the know-how to be creative and create your own unique ferments.
The Art of Fermentation
Sandor Kat’s The Art of Fermentation is considered the fermentation bible. From sauerkraut to pickles, wine to cider, bread to kvass, this book diligently documents the entire world of fermentation. Beginners should start here — but even seasoned fermenters would love to have this classic on their shelves.
The Noma Guide to Fermentation
Noma in Copenhagen is often regarded as the best restaurant in the world. When Noma released their Noma Guide To Fermentation, it felt like a vault of secrets had been opened. With the book, Noma revealed that the magic behind their incredible dishes lies not in their use of rare ingredients or high tech gadgets but in their use of an age-old food preservation technique: fermentation. This was revelatory, because fermentation is actually pretty approachable.
With fermentation recipes for lacto-ferments, vinegars, misos, soy sauce, kombuchas, and even black fruits, this book teaches both the basics and the only-noma-would-think-of-this extraordinary.
See my Noma Fermentation Buyers Guide if you want to equip your gift recipient with all they need to create any recipe in this book.
Wildcrafted Fermentation
If your gift recipient already knows the basics, Wildcrafted Fermentation: Exploring, Transforming, and Preserving the Wild Flavors of Your Local Terroir might be the way to break them from routine. Pascal Baudar is a legend in the fermentation community for his ability to transform wild ingredients with fermentation. The book details how foraged foods where you live can produce other-worldly ferments like native pickles, berry wines, plant-based cheeses, and more. For more specialization, you can also check out his books on The Wildcrafting Brewer or Wildcrafted Vinegars.
Koji Alchemy
Koji Alchemy goes even deeper than the Noma Guide To Fermentation on the topic of using koji (a mold!) to produce soy sauce, sake, miso, mirin, fish sauce, and more. The book really differentiates itself with its focus on koji-based charcuterie. Since it’s not as good at describing the basics, I recommend it only for those who are either already fermenting with koji or are also receiving the Noma Guide To Fermentation as a gift.
2. Mason jar lacto-fermentation kit
Lacto-fermentation is the process that turns cucumbers into pickles, hot sauce into delicious preserved hot sauce, and cabbage into sauerkraut. Most folks use wide-mouth mason jars to ferment these (though in the $$ section of this gift guide, I describe why I prefer to use vacuum sealer instead of mason jars for certain applications).
When fermentation in a mason jar is doing its thing, air escapes. We want air to exit the mason jar so that it doesn’t explode from built-up pressure. But we also don’t want to let air in (because that can let the wrong bacteria take hold). This lid has a one-way valve to allow for this.
You also need a glass weight like this to ensure that the fermenting foods are submerged under liquid rather than exposed to air. This prevents spoilage.
You will also need a scale that measures to the gram, because most lacto-fermentation recipes require adding exactly 2% of the fruit or vegetable’s weight in salt. This one works very well for such a low price.
3. Vinegar fermentation kit
Unlike lacto-fermentation, vinegars need oxygen to ferment. To get started with vinegar fermentation, I recommend wide-mouth mason jars as well, but I close them with a kitchen towel and an elastic band.
If you want to dramatically speed up your vinegar production, you can speed it up by pumping in even more oxygen. I use one of these to oxygenate my vinegars.
If you’re planning on making vinegar from fruits or vegetables (which is descriped in detail in the Noma Guide to Fermentation), you’ll also need a juicer. I personally don’t have one of these, but my sister has this one and I’ve borrowed it. I highly recommend making celery root vinegar with this.
To take any vinegar to the next level, you can age it in an oak barrel. Beet balsamic, anyone? You can use this to age soy sauces, too.
4. Food safety on a budget
Lacto-ferments and vinegars are preserved due to their high acidity. To make sure a given ferment has reached the appropriate acidity to prevent bacteria growth (4.6 pH), these pH strips are a simple solution.
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1. Vacuum sealer lacto-fermentation kit
Vacuum sealing is my preferred for lacto-fermentation (think pickles, strawberry flavor-bombs). Unlike lacto-ferments with jars, vacuum sealed ferments take up less space, require less equipment, don’t smell, and are less failure-prone. To lacto-ferment with a vacuum sealer, all you need is the fruit or vegetable of your choice, salt, and a scale. I’ve had this one for a few years and it has really held up well.
The vacuum sealer will come with a few vacuum bags, but don’t get suckered into buying spare bags directly from FoodSaver. I use these ones instead because they’re much less expensive and work just as well.
You will also need a scale that measures to the gram, because most lacto-fermentation recipes require adding exactly 2% of the fruit or vegetable’s weight in salt. This one works very well for such a low price.
2. Decorative miso fermentation kit
Since miso ends up sitting around your house at room temperature for many months, I prefer miso equipment that looks good in any room. I opted to get higher quality stoneware for my miso crock and keep it in my living room. It’s actually a fun conversation starter.
I have both a 1 gallon and a 3 gallon crock from Ohio Stoneware. The 3 gallon one is massive… I honestly feel like I have an endless supply of miso! And don’t forget the lid.
You’ll also need weights to compact the miso over time. If you don’t have it, be sure to buy some plastic wrap to put on top of the miso (under the weights), too.
3. Ceramic kimchi or sauerkraut kit
Crocks for kimchi and sauerkraut differ from miso ones because they have a water-based seal to prevent oxygen from interfering with fermentation.
If your gift recipient is eyeing kimchi in particular, a necessary but rare ingredient in grocery stores is gochugaru (a type of chili powder), so you might as well include that too.
4. Food safety kit
Lacto-ferments and vinegars are preserved due to their high acidity. While pH strips can help to measure the acid in a given liquid, they are difficult to read when evaluating pH that is anywhere close to the target 4.6 pH level. pH meters, however, measure to the fraction of a decimal point — cutting out any source of doubt.
5. Fermentation chamber
Fermentation chambers, which are basically just temperature and humidity controlled boxes, are used to grow koji — the fermented ingredient in miso, soy sauce, sake, mirin, and garum. A fermentation chamber is necessary for enjoying the best recipes in the Noma Guide To Fermentation.
Most people make their fermentation chambers out of common tools such as a styrofoam cooler, a thermostat, and a heating pad. I made a separate article on how to buy for and build a fermentation chamber, so take a look there if interested in this gift.
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Now for the baller gifts. How to win any fermenter’s heart!
1. Excalibur dehydrator
You can’t ferment with a dehydrator, but you can transform fermented ingredients with one. I use my Excalibur dehydrator to:
Semi-dehydrate fermented fruits, which helps to balance their sweetness after fermentation
Dehydrate the solids after making hot sauces or garums to create a one-of-a-kind spice
Create fermented fruit leathers, the grown-up version of fruit roll-ups!
The Excalibur is the preferred dehydrator of the restaurant industry for its ability to last forever and its square trays (perfect for leathers).
2. Chamber sealer
I bought my chamber sealer in a total “spoil myself” moment, and it has totally transformed how I ferment. Chamber sealers are lightyears better than traditional vacuum sealers because (1) they can vacuum-seal liquids and (2) the bags they use are much less expensive than traditional ones. Vacuum sealing liquids will allow your gift recipient to open and then reseal ferments (to taste them or let out gases) or otherwise ferment things that would be near impossible to do any other way (like berry juices).
I have the large capacity AvidArmor chamber sealer (pictured below) so I can ferment in larger batches, but the smaller capacity one is much less expensive.
It’s not fermentation, but chamber sealers can also compress fruits (breaking their cell walls through boiling them at room temperature!) so you can transform watermelon to look like tuna or pickle/infuse fruits in minutes rather than hours.
3. Anova Precision Oven
A koji-growers dream. The Anova Precision Oven is a countertop oven that works with steam to create highly precise and humidity-controlled cooking environment. Since growing koji requires both steaming rice with high accuracy then inoculating the rice in a temperature and humidity-controlled space, the Anova Precision Oven is the one-stop-shop for growing koji with perfectly replicable results.
The Anova Precision Oven can also be used to sous vide without bags and water, cook bread with perfect oven spring, and basically act as an at-home Combi Oven (the restaurant oven that is the envy of all ambitious home-cooks), so it really is an epic gift to give.
At time of writing, the Anova website is $200 cheaper than Amazon, so be sure to check there too.
