general — MikrobenKabinett

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MikrobenKabinett is what I call my fermentation cabinet — a bubbling, living archive.

Here I keep a growing collection of starter cultures that I’ve collected, nurtured, traded, or purchased over the years, along with several ongoing jarred fermentation experiments.

This page is a digital duplicate of the cabinet at home. It serves both as a record of each “member” in the Kabinett, and as a practical manual: If you’ve ever received a culture from me in real life, you’ll likely find its basic ratios and reference recipes here — to help you start your own fermentation journey!

Welcome to explore！
Xijing Xu
info@xijingxu.com
https://xijingxu.com
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Genral

About water

While starting and maintaining your fermented food, water matters!

In some areas, tap water contains chlorine for disinfection purposes — but this can also kill the microbes we need for fermentation. In that case, you can either boil the water in a pot with a wide opening to let the chlorine evaporate (an electric kettle may not do the job), or you may need to buy bottled water.

Water also differs in terms of mineral content. While hard water contains more minerals — which can serve as fuel for microbes — it sometimes tastes worse than soft water. But we’ll come back to this topic in the kombucha chapter.

About ingredients

Use wild food or organic products!

I find it much easier to work with organic produce, as it’s free from pesticides. This is especially important when doing any kind of lacto fermentation with vegetables or fruits — you don’t need to scrub the skins too hard when cleaning them, and that’s where the most vibrant microbes usually live.

If organic products aren’t available, try to find fresh produce from your local market, or forage for wild food.

Once you have a starter...

Give your starter a name!

It might be a myth that your starter will die if you don’t do so…
but I still find it cute to give a name to the little creature you’re taking care of!