Strawberry Flavor-bombs
In my spare time, I run weirdceviche, a culinary project and pop-up where I’m trying to push ceviche to its limits with fermentation and other cooking techniques. Unfortunately, perhaps because I’m trying so many new techniques, most of my recipe tests for weirdceviche fail.
So when I stumbled upon a simple ingredient recipe that exactly embodied the goals of weirdceviche, I was pumped. When I realized this ingredient works just as well in salads and traditional ceviche, I knew I had to share.
This is a recipe for fermented and then dehydrated strawberries. They taste like healthy fruit loops. The fermentation subdues some of the strawberry’s sweetness while introducing a beautiful acidity. The dehydration concentrates the sweet and acidic flavors while adding a deep undertone, creating flavors that feel entirely foreign.
And the kicker? Both the fermentation and the dehydration preserve the strawberries, so you can keep these around for weeks in the fridge. Whenever I’m making a cold preparation that could benefit from sweetness or acidity (which for me is usually salad or ceviche), I throw some of my fermented and dehydrated strawberries in the mix.
ABOUT THE RECIPE
This recipe requires knowledge of fermentation. But before you click away, hear me out! I’m going to teach you the basics of fermentation so you can not only make this recipe but also create pickles, kimchi, or even soy-less sauce. Fermentation an incredibly useful yet easy skill to have.
Step 1: Fermenting STRAWBERRIES
Fermentation (specifically lacto-fermentation) is a natural process where good bacteria (called lactobacillus) break down the sugars in foods to form lactic acid. Lactic acid is sour in a good way. Think sauerkraut.
Since the lactobacillus bacteria can survive in salt and most other bacteria cannot, it’s really easy to lacto-ferment fruits and vegetables. In fact, it’s so easy that you literally just have to add salt. That’s right, if you weren’t aware, pickles are just salty cucumbers that have fermented their way to their own funky vibe.
Now, to make sure you are fermenting safely, it’s a little more complex than salting at random. Here are the rules (and we’ll go through the specific steps later on):
You need to add the right amount of salt. You need around 2% of the weight of the fruit or vegetable in salt. It’s helpful to have a digital scale so you can measure in grams.
You need to ensure that the salted fruit or vegetable isn’t exposed to air. For a fruit like strawberry, the easiest way to do this is to use a vacuum sealer.
You need to ferment at around room temperature. Somewhere between 60f to 80f is ideal.
I’ll walk through the steps to ferment the strawberries for this recipe. First, here is the equipment I use.
1. Vacuum sealer
You don’t need anything fancy. I’ve had this one for five 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.
2. Scale
You need a scale that measures to the gram, because we’re going to add exactly 2% of the strawberries’ weight in salt.
Here are the steps for fermenting the strawberries. The only ingredients are strawberries (I prefer smaller ones) and salt. The recipe below will scale for any quantity.
Lightly clean the strawberries using a damp paper towel.
Chop the strawberries in half and remove the stems.
Weigh the strawberries with the scale in grams. Pull out your calculator and calculate what 2% of that weight is by multiplying by 0.02. For example, 2% of 600g is 12g.
Weigh out salt equaling the 2% number you just calculated. In the example, I’d weigh out 12g of salt.
In a bowl, mix the strawberries and the salt.
Transfer the strawberry and salt mixture to a vacuum sealer bag. Be sure not to leave any salt behind!
Vacuum seal the strawberries. You’ll want to make sure that the sides of the bag are totally dry before sealing, because this type of vacuum sealer doesn’t work well with liquids. If the vacuum starts to seep liquid, be quick to press the ‘seal’ button yourself rather than letting it turn on automatically (which might be too late for the seal to form).
Wait! Store the bag at room temperature in a dark place. Over the next few days, the salt will seep juices and air from the strawberries. You’ll start to see the strawberries have more room in the bag until the bag totally puffs up. If you added a ton of strawberries in the same bag, it might look like the bag is about to pop. If you’re worried about this, you can cut open the bag and reseal.
And that’s it! At around day 7, the strawberries will be fermented enough for this recipe. But note! The specific amount of time varies on the temperature and other factors.
For the rest of the recipe, we’re only going to use the fermented strawberries. But feel free to save that strawberry liquid for another purpose (e.g. vinaigrette).
Step 2: DEHYDRATING FERMENTED STRAWBERRIES
The next step is to dehydrate the the fermented strawberries. The dehydration concentrates the flavors, preserves the strawberries for storage, and adds its own flavors through the maillard reaction.
Assuming your oven does not go as low as 130f, you’ll need a dehydrator to complete this recipe.
There are many workable dehydrators out there for very cheap. But once you really get into dehydrating, you’ll probably do what I did and toss one of those to buy an Excalibur. These guys are the real deal, and the square form factor ends up being very helpful.
The steps here are simple: transfer the fermented strawberries to the dehydrator, then set the dehydrator to 130f. Keep them in the dehydrator until they are completely dry, which could take 8-12 hours.
Step 3: Add to whatever!
The strawberry flavor-bombs are now good to go. They’ll store for many weeks in the fridge. I like to add them to ceviche or salad, especially with marjoram or oregano and fresh strawberries, too. My ceviche recipe includes these strawberries, marjoram, fava beans, koji oil vinaigrette, and shrimp.
Mixing it up
This recipe is really meant to be a template for so many variations.
Here, I applied the same technique to cape gooseberries.
If you enjoyed it, you could explore the technique further by:
Trying different fruits. Cape gooseberries (AKA golden berries) are my favorite.
Adding another round of dehydration. This might sound crazy, but you can take the dehydrated strawberries, rehydrate them in something (e.g. coconut milk), then dehydrate them again. The possibilities are endless.
Dehydrating a bit less. If you don’t need to store these longer-term, you can try only partially dehydrating (e.g. for 6 hours). This puts them in this limbo that is very satisfying.
