
I love spicy foods. Love. Love. Love.
Those hot carrots I grew up devouring from taquerias and Mexican joints have become kind of a staple in my fridge after finding a great recipe and started making them myself (the other recipes I’ve tried were a bit too sweet for my tastes). They definitely add some ZING alongside a sandwich or tacos. Sometimes, I’ll just eat ’em a la carte. Potato chips ain’t got nuthin’ on some fiery carrots.
Here’s the thing: I always assumed that the vinegary pickled carrots I made at home were a product of fermentation. Wrong! Pickling and fermenting foods are not the same thing. (See? We’re all still learning as we go along.) There’s no vinegar in fermented ones — they’re just soaked in a brine for a handful of days and microbes give them their tanginess through lactic acid fermentation.
I thought I’d do a side-by-side comparison by making my standard pickled spicy carrots and trying a new fermented spicy carrots recipe that I’d found and see how they differed in taste.