Fermenting green rosehips

Hello Plant Power community, I decided to stop by here this time though I don't post much here as I'm not such a dedicated cook and the stuff here is simply amazing so I feel like just watching your wonderful recipes from the corner 😅

In case you don't know me, I'll introduce myself as a plant-based offgrider which can be quite a challenge, specially in this cold part of the world (southern Chile) where the crop growing season is very limited. This means I have to often be creative to find sources of food without resorting to buying everything on the market, which is quite far to be going there on a regular basis anyway.

This year has been horrible for fruit in this part of the world. Excessive rain and little sunshine left us without most of the berries. However, we still have rosehip. Rose hip doesn't give a shit about anything, that's why it's hip. It grows anywhere and fruits no matter the conditions, it's a very underrated plant these days, though our ancestors knew it's benefits and spread it out through the world.

The bad part, is that the best moment to enjoy rosehip is more towards the winter, when the pulp is soft and you can squeeze it out without getting the seeds in the way. It's actually great to have some fruit and vitamin in the winter but I also need some now!

While passing by a bush I looked at the green fruits and thought: "these kind of look like green olives". I imagined them sitting in salty water for a while and then being a nice snack to enjoy. I've never heard of anyone doing this but it's always a good day to do some experiments for me!

This is such an abundant fruit that the more ways I can learn to consume it, the better fed I will be throughout the year. Most people limit to making jam out of it and while I find jam to be a nice treat, I also prefer to avoid consuming cooked fruit and rather ferment it or find other means to preserve.

I only harvested a few as I plan to go trying them out in different ways and times. First thing was to snip off the flower bud and the remaining piece of stem (must have a botanical name but I don't know it lol).

See? They're a bit like green olives.

For this amount it was feasible to open them and get the seeds out. You probably already know but eating rosehip seeds is irritant and will give you a sore throat. At this stage they were pretty tough so it was a bit of an effort to split them in half. I'm considering cooking them a bit to soften them up on the next batch.

I wonder what could be done with the seeds... I think the oil is made from them but I'd need a press. Another option could be some kind of musical instrument or one of those seed pillows. For now, they go to the compost. I'm not running short of these any time soon!

This is the day 1 harvest already in salty water. How much salt you ask? More than you would cook with, I don't really measure. Let's hear the words of an expert:

My preferred method for fermenting things is to add more of the fruit or vegetable evey couple of days to the jar, and change the water a bit adding more salt or sugar depending the kind of ferment. Despite this breaking the anaerobic process it works pretty well. Once I feel there's a bit of fermentation going on, I might leave it for a longer time closed and then check out it's evolution. Never had a problem.

Day 2 I added some more whole fruits without removing seeds because it got late and had no more energy for that. I tried one from the previous day and despite being free of seeds, it was irritating for my throat. I'm thinking I'm going to cook them a bit tomorrow and put them back to continue the fermentation to see what happens.

More in a future update, good night!