First ferment - Carrot, Turmeric, and Ginger

So this is my first fermenting experiment since the fermenting workshop I did a few weeks ago.  Our local health food store, the Stone Store, in Guelph has recently been stocking turmeric root, so I thought it might be time to try this out.  Especially considering there are studies suggesting that the good nutrients found in turmeric, the curcurmin, may not be very bioavailable to us in terms of how we digest it.  Fermented turmeric supposedly makes it much more available to us, so I thought I would try to out, and see how it feels!

The idea of fermenting, for those uninitiated is to create an environment that encourages healthy bacteria to form by creating an alkaline acidic environment...  I hope I'm doing it justice with this.  I'm still pretty new to it, and new to even speaking about things in a scientific manner!  You can ferment practically anything.  The healthy bacteria continues to eat away at the sugars of the things that you're fermenting, and allows us to actually take in more of the nutrients from those vegetables.  In my own terms, it's like powering-up your veggies! 

In the batch above, I sliced up turmeric, ginger and carrots, put them in the jars, and then added some star anise, cloves, and cardamom (in one of them, as a test), and then poured into water, and then pink himalayan salt to maintain an environment for healthy bacteria to form.  After this, I put smaller jars (which are hard to see) in the big jars to push the foods down in order to keep them below the service of the water, otherwise you risk them molding on top.  So far so good!  I will now leave these out for 2 - 3 weeks, opening the containers every now and then to release the gases that build up.   

Hope this works!