Technique
Salt and Brine Calculations Without Guesswork
Brine percentage, dry salting and the arithmetic that makes vegetable ferments reproducible batch after batch.
6 min read ·
One formula, two methods
Dry salting suits shredded vegetables with high water content — cabbage, radish, turnip. Weigh the prepared vegetables, multiply by 0.02, and you have the grams of salt for a 2% ferment. Massage until the vegetables release enough liquid to submerge themselves.
Brining suits whole or chunked vegetables that cannot release their own liquid. Weigh vegetables plus water together, then apply the same multiplier. A jar with 500 g cucumbers and 500 g water needs 20 g salt for 2%.
Choosing your salinity
2% is the default because it inhibits most spoilage organisms while letting fermentation finish in 7–14 days at room temperature. Kimchi is often brined at 5–8% and then rinsed, leaving a finished salinity near 2%.
Cucumbers and olives need 3.5% or higher because they are prone to softening and, in the case of olives, need salt to leach bitter oleuropein. Expect proportionally longer ferments.
Which salt to use
Sodium chloride is what matters. Pure sea salt, kosher salt, pickling salt and rock salt all work. Iodine is antimicrobial at the concentrations found in some iodised table salt and can slow or stall a ferment; anti-caking agents cloud the brine.
Salt density varies enormously by crystal size, so measure by weight, never by volume. A tablespoon of fine salt can weigh nearly twice a tablespoon of flaked salt.