Get the salt exactly right for kimchi, sauerkraut, and pickles. Weigh your vegetables (and any brine water), pick a salt percentage, and I'll tell you how much salt to use — by weight, which is the only way that's reliable.
Always weigh salt rather than measuring by spoon — salt crystals vary wildly in size, and fermentation safety depends on getting the percentage right. Use salt without iodine or anti-caking agents.
I make several kinds of kimchi and I love sharing what works. Want my go-to ratios and timing notes?
If you've ever asked yourself how much salt goes into a batch of kimchi or sauerkraut, you've already run into the same problem I did when I started fermenting at home. A teaspoon of fine table salt and a teaspoon of coarse sea salt do not weigh the same thing. The crystals are different sizes, so the same spoon holds wildly different amounts of actual salt. That's why every reliable fermentation recipe talks about salt as a percentage of weight, not as spoonfuls. Once I switched to a kitchen scale and started thinking in percentages, my ferments got consistent and I stopped throwing batches away.
This little calculator does that math for me, and I built it so it can do it for you too. You tell it the weight of your vegetables (and water, if you're making a brine), pick your salt percentage, and it tells you exactly how many grams of salt to add.
For most vegetable ferments, somewhere between 2% and 2.5% salt by weight is the sweet spot. That range is high enough to hold back the bacteria and molds you don't want, while still letting the friendly lactic-acid bacteria do their work and sour the vegetables. Go much lower than 2% and things can turn mushy or off; go much higher and the ferment slows way down and gets aggressively salty.
As a general food-safety note (not medical advice, just how home fermentation works): that salt level is part of what keeps a ferment safe as it acidifies. Keep your vegetables submerged under the brine, keep things clean, and trust your senses. A good ferment smells sour and fresh. If something ever smells genuinely rotten or grows fuzzy mold, throw it out rather than risk it.
There are two ways people calculate fermentation salt, and it helps to know which one a recipe means.
The calculator handles both. Just pick whether you're salting the vegetables directly or mixing a brine.
When I'm making kimchi, I aim for roughly 2% to 2.5% of the cabbage's weight once it's prepped. Traditional methods salt the cabbage heavily first to draw out water, then rinse a lot of that salt off before mixing in the seasoning paste, so the final salt level lands in that comfortable range. If you're skipping the rinse and salting straight in, start closer to 2% so it doesn't end up too salty.
Reach for plain salt with nothing added. Avoid iodized salt and salt with anti-caking agents for fermenting. Iodine can inhibit the good bacteria you're trying to encourage, and the anti-caking additives can leave your brine cloudy or off-tasting. I keep a bag of plain sea salt or kosher salt just for ferments. Pickling salt and fine sea salt both work well too. The one thing I avoid is anything labeled "table salt" with iodide and additives in the ingredient list.
If you want something to actually make with all this, I keep my recipes over on my recipes page, including the kinds of kimchi I rotate through my kitchen. And if you found this handy, you might like my other free tools for the kitchen too.
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