Lacto-fermenting involves encouraging healthy bacteria and fungus to grow within a contained environment. Vegetables ferment extremely well because they already contain good starts of those bacteria and fungi.
The problem with mushrooms is that they ARE a fungus. Their presence in a ferment will radically affect the balance of bacteria and other fungus in the ferment. Not in a good way!
The problem with eggs and sausage is that they encourage the growth of other items that are not conducive to the growth of healthy microbes. Both are traditionally pickled with finished pickle brines, or with apple cider vinegar blends.
You can, of course, purchase pickled mushrooms, pickled eggs, and pickled sausage. The mushrooms are likely filled with chlorine because they’ve been watered with chlorinated water (and the mushroom fruits concentrate contaminants). The eggs are of unknown age, from chickens fed who knows what, and preserved with chemicals that were never meant to be consumed by humans. The sausage… well, if you don’t already know what goes into commercial sausage, then maybe you don’t really WANT to know. And that doesn’t even touch on the quality of what the animal ate, or the chemicals used to cure the sausage!
When you want to KNOW the real quality of the ingredients, you just HAVE to make your own! Fresh, quality ingredients. Or specialty ingredients.
Pickled chanterelles or morels. Or your own homegrown Criminis or Oyster mushrooms, or maybe the Russulas you gathered yourself. Pickled bantam eggs, or Quail eggs, with specialty seasoning combinations (I’d love to have some Quail eggs to drop into my Pickled Salsa… OOooooooh!). Or Polish sausage made from homegrown pork, elk, or wild hog, or even a combination of duck and rabbit.
Certainly you can use Raw Apple Cider Vinegar and mix a cold seasoned brine for use with any of these (stir well to incorporate the salt or sugar), in order to create a live culture pickling brine (heat must be avoided, it will kill the ACV). But you have so many more options by following this simple method instead.
To ferment these specialty items, get a good vegetable ferment going that has the flavors that you want in your finished pickle. Once the ferment is well established (approximately two weeks, minimum), you can add the mushrooms, peeled boiled eggs, or sausage, either to the vegetable mix, or after removing the veggies – just add it to the brine.
Let the food ferment for another week or two, to develop a good pickle. They may be refrigerated during the pickling process (especially important for eggs and sausage).
If you are going for a SWEET pickle flavor, add your sugar immediately prior to adding your mushrooms, eggs, or sausage. Make sure you stir it in well, so that it is completely dissolved. This keeps the ferment sweet and sour, instead of creating a sour alcoholic brine (sugars added earlier will convert to alcohol and go sour).
My mother pickled eggs in the brine from her home canned pickled beets. This was a heat treated brine, so the bacteria was dead, though adding the eggs stirred up a bunch of new healthy stuff as the eggs cured. The eggs turned a lovely shade of purply red, and the beet brine was a lovely complement to the eggs. I do not use beets in my fresh ferments though, because they are high in natural sugars, which go alcoholic, and that is not somewhere I’ll go with food I feed my family.
One of these days I will ferment some beets and push it through to the vinegar stage (past the alcohol stage) and then sweeten it a little and toss in some eggs, to see if I can get the delicious result with more probiotics but without the alcohol that would result from a young ferment with beets.
Get all the goodies from the lacto-fermented brine, with the superior flavor of home cured foods, infused all the way through your freshly purchased ingredients, or through your own homegrown or gathered mushrooms, clean-fed chicken eggs, and homemade sausage (from home grown pork even!).
Dead food just can’t taste like that!