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Pickles and ferments
All Containers›Shop by use case›Pickles and ferments›The brine›Whole spices, not groundShop all pickles and ferments →
The brine

Whole spices, not ground

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5
Use whole spices, and tie them in a bag if you want to remove them. Ground spice cloud the brine and darken the product, and both of those are listed problems rather than matters of taste.

What ground spice does

It does not dissolve and it does not settle out either. It stays in suspension, which reads as a cloudy brine, and it continues to release color for as long as the jar sits, which means a product that looked acceptable on the day darkens on a shelf. Both of those appear in the published problem tables.

Why a bag rather than loose

Whole spices loose in the jar look attractive and are a reasonable choice. The bag matters when you want the flavor without the appearance, or when you are making enough that spice floating in a jar becomes a consistency problem between units. For a fermented product the bag also makes it possible to remove spice at the end of the ferment rather than at packing.

Strength and time

Whole spices extract more slowly than ground, which is usually the point, and it means the flavor of a fermented product continues to develop in the jar. Worth knowing when setting a date on a label, because the product a customer opens in March is not the product you tasted in September.

Where it becomes a cost

Whole spice is more expensive per unit of flavor than ground and that gap widens at volume. It is one of the few places in this craft where the correct choice is also the more expensive one, which is worth accounting for rather than discovering in a margin calculation.

Buy whole spice in bulk and grind nothing. Stored whole it keeps its strength far longer than ground does, so the unit cost comes down and the product gets more consistent at the same time.

References

United States Department of Agriculture. Complete Guide to Home Canning, Guide 6: Preparing and Canning Fermented Foods and Pickled Vegetables. Revised 2015, National Center for Home Food Preservation. nchfp.uga.edu
National Center for Home Food Preservation. Named-problem tables for fermented pickles and for pickled foods. nchfp.uga.edu
Written from federal regulation and published extension guidance, not from a laboratory. An acidified food is a federal category with a filed process behind it, and your state enforces it. Anything here is a starting point for a conversation with your state department of agriculture and a process authority, not a determination that you comply.