sauerkraut saturday

i never thought i liked sauerkraut. i have a kind of tenuous relationship with foods that are essentially rotting. blue cheese - huh uh, kombucha - definitely not.
but after tasting some homemade sauerkraut at a friends' house a couple years ago i had to change my outlook on the pickled cabbage. plus it's more like kimchi than anything else, and i love kimchi.


i'm kind of alternately fascinated and disgusted by the idea of keeping a batch of decomposing i mean fermenting vegetables in my house for later consumption. but i've been collecting cabbages each week from our farm share and i've run out of other ideas of what to do with cabbage, so i decided to spend my saturday morning prepping my first attempt at sauerkraut.
plus they say fermented stuff is real good for you.
i found this great tutorial on how to make sauerkraut - unfortunately i didn't watch the video until after i'd made my batch, so i should have done a few things differently - i'll just give you the video now to spare you my mistakes.


the process is pretty simple: you chop up the cabbage, and whatever other things you want to put in there. i added garlic and wakame (seaweed) and a few anise seeds, just to see what that was like. you layer your chopped cabbage with sprinkles of sea salt, and then pack it down into your container a little bit at a time.




then you cover it with a plate and stick a jug full of water on top to weight it down. it's supposed to look something like this:


i didn't exactly have all the requisite tools at my disposal (they say you're not supposed to use anything aluminum in the process, fyi). so i had to be a little creative with what to pack the kraut into. i ended up using my salad spinner bowl, since it was the only thing i had that size that wasn't aluminum. You're supposed to fit a plate "snugly" inside the bowl - and i also didn't have the right diameter plate, so i ended up cutting one of our many flexible plastic cutting boards into a circle and pairing it with the steamer basket from our rice cooker to hold the water jug weights. we'll see how that goes.


upon watching the video, i think i should have sliced my cabbage a lot thinner, but i do like my sauerkraut crunchy, so ... this is all an experiment.
hit me up if you've got good sauerkrauting tips.
in the meantime, we'll be waiting around here for the kraut to do its thing. updates forthcoming in one to three weeks.


here's what my little sauerkraut bundle looks like in its towel tent.