Kefirko Vegetables Fermenter 900ml |Ferment Fruits, Veggies, Make Kimchi, Sauerkraut & More | BPA Free Materials - Yellow

On the face of it, this fruit and vegetable fermenter kit is a great find because it contains all the components needed to ferment veggies and fruits: the jar, a plastic cover with a silicone pump that enables you to pump air out, a transparent cover with a one-way (in to out) valve, spare filters, a spring, a glass weight, an implement that is meant to be a pounder on one end and tongs on the other and an instruction/recipe booklet. I have always bought my sauerkraut and kimchi, but seeing this kit on offer with Vine in exchange for an unbiased review made me decide to try my hand at fermenting my own veggies. After a week of fermentation, I produced my own kimchi which tasted pretty good but I used a Korean recipe instead of the recipe in the booklet. The ingredient quantities I used were just a little over half the quantities cited in the Kefirko recipe book. I have a problem with the recipes - they are confusing. The kimchi recipe says the measures are for the large (1 quart jar). Apparently, there is a jar larger than the 848 ml one I have. 1 quart is about 946 mls and that measure appears to be somewhere in between the 848 ml one I have and the next size up. If selling this product in the UK, it would be ideal if measures were those used in the UK, of which a quart is not one. It would also be useful if every recipe had a clear statement at the top of the page of what size jar it was for. Ideally, the size of jar suitable to the recipe would be the jar that is in the product box, not a jar of some other size.I liked the idea of offering a complete set. This is good for a novice like me. What I did not like was the variable quality of the parts of this set. The jar itself was of good quality. The inner screw-on coloured top worked very well. I liked the day counter and the silicone part that enabled me to pump out air. That worked well. The spring was a great idea too as it did keep the veggies submerged in the juice. The transparent outer top did vent the smell. The biggest problem I had was with the glass weight. In the kit I received from Amazon, the glass weight was wrapped in a single layer of tissue and it was broken. The broken edge was sharp and because it was not securely packed, it fell out and wounded my hand when I tried to catch it and my foot, when I failed to catch it. I binned the broken weight. I looked for the UK supplier and rang them to ask if they could replace the glass weight and if not, whether I could buy one. They said they did not have spares in stock but very kindly offered to send me an entire replacement kit so I could try it. A new kit arrived with a well-wrapped, unbroken glass weight, which I have photographed. Although it was intact, a close look at the photos will show that the glass is quite blemished around the edges. I do not want to risk the glass cracking, so I have bought a set of glass weights that are heavier, thicker and totally unblemished. I used one of those weights and it worked very well, with or without the spring. The green implement was too flimsy to be of any use as a pounder, so I bought a wooden one. The tongs worked ok, but I have several pairs of tongs that I could have used.This product is currently being sold on Amazon for £29.99. If all the components of this set were of equally good quality and fit for use, I would have said this was a reasonable price. However, I had to spend £10 on the cheapest good quality veggie pounder I could find and £15 on a set of 4 good quality glass weights. This breaks down to £3.75 for 1 weight. I spent £13.75 extra to make up for the poor quality components, thus, if I had actually paid for this Kerfiko fermenter, I would have spent a total of £43.74, which is an excessive amount of money for this product. In my opinion, this product would be better if it included the jar, the two tops, a good quality heavy glass weight (so the spring would be unnecessary) and a solid, good quality tamper. Tongs are easy to find and cheap to buy, so in my opinion, their inclusion or exclusion from the kit does not make much of a difference. In sum, whilst a complete fermenting kit is a good idea in principle, if paying close to £30 for a small fermenting jar, I would expect consistently high quality in the components and greater attention to detail in the recipes provided to make them more convenient to use. A final note here is that the excellent customer orientation of the UK supplier has made a huge difference and this can make a less than perfect product attractive.

This fermenting kit comes with a very useful guidebook which has an explanation of the basic principles of fermenting plus a bunch of recipes. I've put my first ferment in a few days ago- I haven't tested it yet. I've gone for courgette and lemon. This needed no water, as once salt was added, the courgette gave off loads of liquid.I found it was easy to do, but the next day the weight had gone slightly sideways in the jar, and a few bits of courgette got past it and floated up to the top. Although I had pumped out all the air I removed these pieces to avoid mould growing on the top. Maybe I need to not cut the pieces so small. I should imagine though that this would be a common issue with sauerkraut as the cabbage is shredded.It was good to have a kit which included all the bits I needed. This gave me the confidence to get started. Like other reviewers I thought the plastic tongs/ pounder device was a bit useless and not up to the standards of the rest of the equipment. But it's OK as a starter item, and then if you find that you like fermenting you can buy a better one or just use a pestle.This is a good starter kit and would make an ideal gift for someone who wants to give it a go.

This is vastly overpriced for what is essentially a glass jar with plastic lid. OK there's slightly more to it - a lower plastic lid with a hole in the middle which contains what is supposedly a silicone pump (which doesn't work and is totally useless) which also acts as a release valve for gases and an upper lid with a small hole with tiny carbon filter to let the gases escape, plus a spring and glass weight to push down the contents. Even so, thirty quid for this? Really? There's no fancy technology here to warrant such a price tag.I've tried using this with my sourdough starter (I hope to eventually use it to make sriracha from my chilli crop, but that's a way off being ready to harvest yet) and I can confirm that it successfully lets gases escape - an improvement on a Le Parfait/Kilner type jar which I usually use. The "pump" in the inner lid, as previously mentioned, is a total waste of time. The carbon filter in the escape hole, which is intended to reduce odour in the merging gases, is said to last "a few months" - what does this mean exactly? Three months? Six? Nine? You get two spares, so if it's at the lower end of the scale you could have run out of filters in less than a year.

The first thing I like about this product is that almost all of the parts that contact the food are made of glass. That wasn’t obvious to me from the product description, so i was pleased to discover that. I also like that it has an integral airlock. However, the size is fairly small. They have a disclaimer in the booklet that accompanies the product to the effect that small batch sizes are the norm for fermented foods, but this simply is not true. German sauerkraut crocks are normally 5 litres (which is small in a sense, but enormous compared to the size of this vessel). It’s okay if you don’t mind making small batches, but I typically make batches of about 2-4 litres, so this is on the small size for me.It mostly appears to be good quality, but one exception is the “pounder”. This is the only plastic item in the kit that could potentially touch the food. But it’s not particularly robust, and I doubt it could survive usage as a vegetable pounder. In any event, it’s not necessary: you can achieve the same (in fact better) effect by massaging the ingredients with your hands. So I threw that item away.But, other than the flimsy pounder and small vessel size, it seems pretty good. The fitted pebble and the spring to keep everything under brine is a nice touch, and makes it less likely that stray ingredients can get past the pebble to float up the the surface (the most likely reason a batch goes bad).