Vegetable by vegetable, and what is published for each one

This section opens one page per vegetable, but only where a named document actually publishes something. Every entry that follows rests on a printed recipe from the national guide, from Oregon State's PNW 355, from Penn State, from Clemson, or from Colorado State. Where nothing is published, the page says so and stops there.

How to read a vegetable sheet

Each sheet always reports the same fields when a source publishes them: the salt, the acid, the fermentation or processing temperature, the duration, the headspace, and the boiling water bath schedule, with its altitude bands. If a field is empty, it is empty because no accepted source prints a number for it. An empty field is not an invitation to estimate. The rule of this manual is that no number appears here unless a named publication printed it first.

Fermented and fresh-pack are two different techniques

The sources themselves draw the line. In a fermented, or brined, product, "acid is produced as lactic acid bacteria grow" over several weeks of curing at room temperature (PNW355). A fresh-pack, or quick-process, product "is not fermented; some are brined several hours or overnight, then drained and covered with vinegar and seasonings" (the national guide). The acid arrives ready-made, as 5 percent vinegar, in one or two days (PNW355). A vegetable can have a published fresh-pack recipe and no published fermented version at all, and that is the most common case in this section.

Why salt means different things in the two families

In the fermented recipes, salt is a working ingredient: half a cup of pickling salt per gallon of container for fermented dill pickles, and 2 to 2.5 percent salt by weight for sauerkraut as Colorado State prints it. In the fresh-pack recipes, salt is almost never a preservative. It is either residual, at 1 1/2 to 5 teaspoons per batch, or it is used in a preliminary brining and then rinsed or drained away. Safety in those recipes rests entirely on unmodified 5 percent vinegar and on the heat process.

One exception, and its limits

Clemson's Home and Garden Information Center publishes a cabbage kimchi dated September 4, 2025. It is a refrigerated lactic fermentation with no published heat treatment, fermented at 68 to 72 degrees F for 1 to 5 days and stored up to 6 months in the refrigerator. It stands in tension with Penn State's narrower position, and the two sources do not agree; this manual prints both without deciding between them.

What is published, vegetable by vegetable

This page does not give quantities, times, or temperatures for any vegetable; those live on each vegetable's own page. It also does not report anything for radish, turnip, ginger, or garlic beyond the fact that nothing was found, and a "not found" here means not found in the sources actually consulted, not proven nonexistent. Penn State's root vegetable sheet was not searched for brining and remains unverified.

Sources of the figures on this page

• National Center for Home Food Preservation, University of Georgia, General Information on Pickling, adapted from the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning, revised 2015, reviewed February 2018. The four classes of pickled product, the 5 percent vinegar requirement, and the prohibition on altering proportions.
• Oregon State University Extension Service, Pickling Vegetables, PNW 355, by Jeanne Brandt, revised July 2019, reviewed 2024. Equipment, water, salt and vinegar, the fermentation procedures and seventeen tested recipes.