Accumulating ferment juice

[baerdric]

I have an idea I am trying out, but I will listen if it's been done before or if it's a bad idea.

I have a few vegetable ferments going right now, kraut, salsa, celery, and garlic. They are all at different stages, with the salsa just gone into the fridge.

So I took a tsp of salsa liquid and put it in a jar of water with a tbsp of sugar mixture I keep for water kefir. That jar has been on the counter all day and I just now decided to put in a little bit of the cabbage fermenting liquid.

My thought is that it will form a starter like a ginger bug or a fruit starter, but for vegetables. My further idea is that if I keep adding a little bit of everything I ferment, the new, wild, and hopefully different strains of bacteria will accumulate. So that after a while I have a multispecies wild ferment starter. And if I keep using a small amount of that starter in every batch of veggies, I get a wider selection in all my jars.

Objections I thought of are that:
1) I might pass on bad bacteria/mold
2) The dominant bacteria in the starter will out compete new wild strains and I might end up with just one strain anyway.
3) There just aren't that many different strains on common veggies to make it worth the effort.

Any comments or thoughts?

[Christopher Weeks]

I suspect that one (or a very few) bacteria will be optimally suited to the conditions at which you keep the jar and they will dominate the culture.

Also, people often point out that lacto-fermentation of vegetables is a progressive process. It starts out as a low-acid brine, in which certain organisms thrive. They produce lactic acid, lowering the pH, and making the environment hospitable to other organisms which then start to thrive, blooming, and outcompeting the first ones. And that might happen three or four times. So the culture that you have at the end of the process, when you would be taking these samples to add to the "veggie-bug", aren't even the organisms that will kick the fermentation off. I don't personally know how much of that is perfectly accurate and how much is just common wisdom passed from person to person without basis. But it makes sense and certainly might be correct. I occasionally start a ferment with bits and bobs from one or more others that I have in the fridge. I've never noted a particular increase in speed, but also never noted a deliterious effect.

[baerdric]

I just learned the term "Backslopping". Doing a search on this board for that term led me to a conversation and article about that - time and process dependent populations and stuff. Interesting.

Other people are quite serious about their "Ginger bugs". I might have to do some real digging into the research to see if that has any validity.

I think I will probably continue my little jar and see what happens. I might also have to start keeping better records...

[gardener]

Besides different bacteria, you also are saving and combining different flavors. That could lead to something delicious , something horrid, or anywhere else along the taste spectrum.

[baerdric]

Good point. Right now I am just talking about a tablespoon in and a tablespoon out, but as I get a better culture going maybe it will be more.

And I think I have a theory about the problem of time dependent populations. I think it's alright, because the predominant population almost certainly never becomes the only population, and so the few other bacteria will be there in the beginning. Just like on the outside of a cabbage. And each will flourish as the conditions are right for them, then subside again.