Preserve Your Bounty: A Seasonal Fermentation and Pickling Workshop with Sam Paone

What does abundance look like when we meet it with care?

Early summer is when farmers markets and CSA boxes start to overflow. This workshop is about learning how to respond to that abundance — not with overwhelm, but with preservation, creativity, and care.

Using fresh, seasonal produce sourced from local farms, we’ll work through three hands-on projects together:

• Seasonal Sauerkraut — a flexible kraut using cabbage and whatever vegetables are at peak, with an emphasis on ratios, texture, and seasoning intuition
• Vinegar-Pickled Mixed Vegetables — a quick-pickle technique using a light, balanced brine
• Fermented Tomato Salsa — an introduction to fermenting something students already love

A shared table:

The lunch at the end of class isn’t an afterthought — it’s the whole point. Every dish is built around fermented and preserved ingredients so students can see exactly how what they just made fits into a real meal.

We’ll start with a macro quinoa bowl: tri-color quinoa and black beans as the base, layered with Moroccan kraut, seasonal roasted vegetables, sweet potato, and fresh fruit, finished with Collective Cultures Caesar dressing and microgreens. It’s hearty, bright, and a pretty persuasive argument for keeping a jar of kraut in your fridge at all times.

Alongside that, we’ll serve bread with avocado, krauts fresh from the workshop, Golden State Pickle Works pickles, and microgreens — simple but deeply satisfying when everything on the table has a story behind it.

To drink, Sam will bring a seasonal shrub — a drinking vinegar made with fruit, sugar, and vinegar — which gives us a chance to talk about how fermentation and preservation show up in beverages, not just food.

You will take home:

• Three jars of preserved vegetables to finish at home
• Step-by-step fermentation and pickling guide
• Recipes made together in class
• Two additional ideas for using ferments in everyday meals
• The confidence to look at abundance as opportunity, not pressure

No experience is necessary, and all materials and produce will be provided. Lunch will be enjoyed together at the end of class.

Instructor Bio

Sam Paone is a Sonoma-based cook, preservationist, and the founder of Golden State Pickle Works and Collective Cultures. She’s best known for her deeply seasonal approach to fermentation, pickling, and pantry-building—work that sits at the intersection of tradition, practicality, and everyday cooking.

Sam is the creator and host of Jarring Everything, a food series that explores approachable ways to think about ingredients differently. Filmed in her Sonoma production kitchen and rooted in local agriculture, the show focuses on techniques like fermentation, dehydration, vinegar-making, and preserving—not as trends, but as useful, hopeful skills anyone can learn.

Her work is driven by curiosity, care, and community. Sam collaborates closely with farmers, cooks with what’s abundant, and believes that learning how to preserve food is a way to feel more grounded in an often uncertain world. Whether she’s teaching a workshop, making hoshigaki from local persimmons, or talking through salt percentages on a gram scale, her goal is always the same: to make preservation feel accessible, human, and deeply nourishing.

Categories: Beginner, Cooking Class, Fermentation, No Experience Necessary