The Humble Carrot Stick: A Better Way to Pack School Lunches

Last week, we talked about school lunches and something that has absolutely nothing to do with vitamins, minerals, protein, or carbohydrates: the social side of eating. This week, I want to start digging into the food itself, and we're going to begin with one of the most boring, ordinary, run-of-the-mill foods found in lunch boxes across America: the carrot stick.

Before you think I'm about to tell you that fermented carrots are some magical superfood that absolutely must be in your child's lunch box every single day, I'm not. The carrot is simply our poster child. It is a perfect example of what can happen when we take an ordinary food and apply a traditional food-processing technique to it. With almost no additional work, we can create something that stores better, tastes better, introduces the benefits of fermentation, and, perhaps most importantly, has a much better chance of actually being eaten. Because remember: the most nutritious food in the world isn't doing your child any good if it comes home in the lunch box every afternoon.

In fact, I was on NBC Washington DC last week demonstrating exactly how easy it is to ferment carrots at home and talking about some of the benefits of fermentation. We have included a link to those segments here so you can watch the process for yourself. And, if you're ready to give it a try, stick with me. We're also including our complete step-by-step fermented carrot recipe at the end of this blog.

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Does This Sound Familiar?

Carrots fermenting in our home kitchen

Every morning you get up and pack your kids' lunches. If you're making the lunches yourself, maybe that means pulling out the bread, spreading some mayonnaise, adding ham and cheese and perhaps some lettuce, wrapping up the sandwich and putting it in the lunch box. Then you grab a cheese stick, a piece of fruit, something crunchy, maybe something sweet, and add those too. Finally, you peel and slice a carrot into carrot sticks and toss those in.

You do this day after day after day until eventually you realize, Wait a minute. Why am I peeling and cutting carrots every morning? I'll just do the entire week's worth on Sunday.

Brilliant.

So on Sunday night, you peel and slice enough carrots for the entire week, stand them upright in a container with some water, put them in the refrigerator, and congratulate yourself for being ahead of the game. Monday's carrots are pretty good. Tuesday? Still okay. Wednesday? Ehhh. By Thursday, things are headed downhill. And Friday? Those once-crisp, sweet carrot sticks have become sad, dried-out remnants of what they were on Sunday.

And guess what happens? They come home.

You open the lunch box Friday afternoon, and there they are: the same lifeless carrot sticks you packed that morning because your kid refused to eat them. So what do we do? On Sunday, we start the entire process over again and repeat it week after week after week.

I have a better solution.

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Add Salt and Time

Imagine that this Sunday, instead of putting those carrot sticks into a container in the refrigerator, you do something only slightly different. You peel them, cut them into sticks, pack them tightly into a clean Mason jar, cover them with a simple saltwater brine and, instead of immediately putting them into the refrigerator, leave them on the counter.

That's it.

And don't worry about taking notes here. The complete recipe and step-by-step instructions are waiting for you at the bottom of this post, and you can also watch me demonstrate the process in the NBC Washington segments linked above.

Now one of humanity's oldest and most powerful food-processing technologies takes over: fermentation.

A Washington College intern prepping carrots to ferment

Monday, they're basically fresh carrots sitting in a salty brine, and they taste good. Tuesday, they're still crunchy and delicious. Then, as fermentation becomes active, things start getting interesting. The flavor begins to change. Acidity develops. The carrots take on that wonderful fermented tang. Their flavor becomes deeper and more complex while they remain wonderfully crunchy, and the activity of lactic-acid bacteria transforms the food and creates the living fermented product we're looking for.

By Wednesday and Thursday, instead of thinking, I need to use these carrots before they get worse, you're thinking, Wow, these are getting better.

That's the part I love. Time isn't the enemy anymore.

With our original system, every passing day was working against us. The clock started ticking the moment we peeled and sliced those carrots. With fermentation, we're using time to our advantage. Rather than simply storing food and watching its quality slowly decline, we're intentionally transforming it.

And when those carrots reach the acidity, texture, and flavor your family likes best, put the jar in the refrigerator. The cold dramatically slows the fermentation and allows you to keep them at or near that stage for a long time.

Which raises an obvious question: Why make only one week's worth?

If you're already peeling and cutting carrots, make a big batch. Instead of repeating the process every Sunday night, ferment enough to last for several weeks. Once they've reached the point you like, move them into the refrigerator and pull out what you need each morning.

Think about what we've accomplished. We haven't introduced some exotic new "health food" your kid has never seen before. It's still a carrot stick. It still fits perfectly into the familiar lunch-box formula we talked about last week. But we've used an ancient technology to transform that ordinary carrot into something more flavorful, longer-lasting, and fermented—and we've actually made our lives easier in the process.

That is what traditional food processing should do.

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Make Them Your Own

Once you understand the basic process, you can start having fun. The carrots become a blank canvas. If your kids love pickles, add some pickling spices. If they love citrus, try some lemon or orange peel. Experiment with garlic, dill, ginger, herbs, peppercorns, or whatever other flavors your family enjoys. The point isn't to make my fermented carrots. The point is to figure out how to make fermented carrots that your kids actually want to eat.

And don't think you're limited to carrot sticks. Shred fermented carrots and add them to coleslaw. Chop them into salads. Put them on sandwiches. Serve them alongside meat. Once you have a jar sitting in the refrigerator, you'll start finding all sorts of places to use them.

Whatever you do, don't throw away that brine! That wonderfully sour, salty liquid is packed with flavor and can be used anywhere you need acidity and complexity—in salad dressings, sauces, marinades, and all sorts of other dishes. At the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, we even use fermented carrot brine in our signature Dirty Carrot Martini.

Maybe don't put that one in the kids' lunch boxes.

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It's Not Really About the Carrots

And that's really the point of this week's post. This isn't actually about carrots.

Fermented carrots served as a sandwich side

You don't have to completely reinvent the way your family eats. You don't have to send your kid to school with a lunch box filled with foods nobody else at the table recognizes. Sometimes, you can start with something your family already eats and simply ask, How can I make this better?

Humans have spent thousands of generations developing technologies to transform food—to preserve it, make it safer, change its nutritional properties, improve digestibility and bioavailability, and, perhaps most importantly, make it taste incredible. Fermentation is one of those technologies, and a humble carrot stick is the perfect place to start exploring it.

A little water. A little salt. A little time. Almost no extra work.

And suddenly that sad Friday carrot stick that used to come home uneaten has become something entirely different.

So, watch the NBC Washington segments to see just how simple the process is, then scroll down for our complete step-by-step recipe and make a jar yourself. Better yet, make it with your kids. Let them choose the spices and flavors. Taste the carrots together each day and let them decide when they have reached the perfect point to move into the refrigerator. Now you've done more than improve the carrot sticks in their lunch—you've given them a hands-on lesson in one of humanity's oldest food technologies.

But be careful. Once you see what fermentation can do to something as ordinary as a carrot, you may start looking around your kitchen wondering, What else can I ferment?

And that is the beginning of a very deep and incredibly delicious rabbit hole.