Best jars for fermenting vegetables

Vegetable fermenting asks four things of a jar: that it is glass, that the mouth is wide, that you can see through it, and that it is the right size for the batch. Everything beyond that is preference, and the jars that satisfy all four start at a couple of dollars.

The picks are ordered for someone fermenting at home rather than provisioning a cellar. The first two will cover almost everything most households ever make.

Mouth size is the decision, not the jar

This is the part worth understanding before you spend anything. Fermentation lids and weights are made to fit standard mason-jar mouths — regular or wide. Buy a jar with a proprietary or non-standard mouth and you have quietly opted out of the entire accessory ecosystem.

Wide mouth, every time. You are packing shredded vegetables in with your fist and getting a weight back out of a full jar afterwards. Mismatched mouth sizes are the commonest return in this category, which is why we say it on the lids page and on the weights page too.

How we judged these

1. Glass. Inert against a salty, acidic brine for weeks. Plastic stains and holds smells; metal reacts.
2. Wide, standard mouth. So the lids and weights you buy later fit the jars you bought first.
3. Straight sides where possible. A shouldered jar makes it harder to hold vegetables below the brine, because the weight sits above the shoulder rather than on the ferment.
4. Sized to a real batch. One cabbage shreds down to roughly two to three quarts. A quart jar is a test batch; a half gallon is a cabbage.
5. A closure that vents. Fermentation makes gas. Either the lid lets it out, or you open the jar daily, or it pushes brine past the seal.

What size to buy

Start with quarts. A quart is the right size for a first batch of anything: enough to be worth eating, little enough that a failure costs you one cabbage quarter and a spoonful of salt.

Move to half gallons once you know you like the result, because a whole cabbage fits one comfortably and shredding half a cabbage is a nuisance. Beyond that you are into crock territory, which is a different purchase with different trade-offs — that comparison is crock or mason jar.

Bail-top jars: the lid that burps itself

Clamp-top jars with a rubber gasket vent by themselves: pressure lifts the gasket slightly, gas escapes and it reseats. That is an airlock without an airlock, and it is genuinely convenient.

The trade is that the mouth is not a mason fitting, so your mason-jar weights and airlock lids will not fit, and there is no bubbler to watch — you cannot tell at a glance whether anything is happening. For a second or third jar it is a pleasant thing to own. For your first, buy the fitting that everything else in the category is built around.

Jars you already own

If there are wide-mouth mason jars in your cupboard, you have everything you need to start today. Buy a vented lid and a weight for them and skip this page entirely — the whole first-batch equipment list is in what you actually need to start fermenting vegetables, and if you have no weight yet, a cabbage leaf and a small jar will hold the ferment down, as the alternatives page explains.

Kimchi is the one case where a jar is not the obvious answer, because the batch shrinks as it ferments and a press lid handles that better than a weight does — the containers are compared here.