Ferments, pickles, preserves, pickled products???

 What are we talking about when we say pickles, ferments, preserves, macerations and marinades? Are they the same thing? Does any of them include others? Let's see.

That is the question that comes up when we start with this topic. For me, everything was preserved or pickled. As I read further in groups, I learned that sometimes it was fermenting, so I thought it was all fermenting. One day I posted something and mentioned the term "fermenting", a woman told me in a bad way that it was not a ferment, but a maceration [1]. At that point, I either went crazy or stopped worrying about names and went on with my experiments (which is what they are when you start on this path). What I knew for sure was that what I was doing was preserving food, just as it had been done at home since I was a child, had been done for hundreds of thousands of years and that it is not even "a human invention; they are natural phenomena that human beings observed and then learned to cultivate" (Sandor Katz, in "The Art of Fermentation").

Later I learned that many of the things I was doing were "probiotics". I'm still mixing up and sometimes confusing the terms, so I'm going to write down - that is what clears my head.

Pickles: this is a very general term since it includes food preserved by different means of acidification:

               - mixture of brine and vinegar

                - fermentation using salt: pickles fermented in brine (what we call pickles) or salted and fermented without adding water (sauerkraut)

                - use of vinegar without fermentation (pickles) acetofermented (bacteria of the order acetobacteraceae are involved)

                - the food is preserved in a mixture of vinegar, heated oil (I do not like the term "fried" mentioned in the reference site), spices and sometimes wine. (The food is not fermented) [2]

• Preserves: general term used to refer to the conservation or preservation of food by slowing down its deterioration, loss of quality and nutritional values.
• Ferments: are products that have undergone one or more types of fermentation that modify or increase their nutritional value.

There are several types of fermentation depending on the presence or not of oxygen and the bacteria that produce it. The most common (at least for me):
            - Acetic fermentation (transforms alcohol into vinegar).

            - Alcoholic fermentation (transforms sugars into alcohol) [3]. 

            - Lactic fermentation (salt transforms microbes present in vegetables) = lactofermentation (bacteria of the order lactobacillales act).

• Macerations: occur when we submerge a solid (a fruit, for example) in a liquid to extract its compounds. The best known example is that of apples that are submerged in water with sugar to make wine (which later becomes vinegar). In other words, the fruits are macerated in water and fermented by the action of the sugar. The maceration, in this case, is a ferment (entering into a discussion of technicalities).

This is, so far, the result of what I investigated, which is not to say that there is not something that is incorrect. If you can contribute information or if you know of something that is not so, I ask you to share it. The idea is not to use those weird and high-flown terms that only those who know the theory understand, the idea is that we can all understand a little better what we are talking about.

[1] The wise lady was not clear about what fermentation actually was. Touchè!

[2] This is how I name what I preserve in oil.

[3] My fruit "maceration" is an alcoholic fermentation. Yeah!!!