Sunday, April 5, 2009

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.

7 comments:

Whateverman said...

Hi Kasha - I stumbled across you blog randomly, and like the sauerkraut lesson. I'm an ex-food scientist who still loves to cook, but I've never tried sauerkraut. You've inspired me to give it a go.

Cheers!

I Heart Kale said...

Hey Kasha--I love making sauerkraut with sliced turnips, daikon or ginger thrown in, or with oregnao and jalapenos to make that cabbage slaw they serve with pupusas at Salvadoran restaurants. Once you start, the variations are endless. (Although I am totally that dirty hippie with a fermenting 5-gallon jar of kombucha on my counter at all times, so it's a slippery slope for me).

Lydia said...

K: I found myself with a batch of kraut this past weekend too. How wonderful a thing to help get us (at least us in the northern climes) through the end of winter before the peas and greens come in. But YIKES! A red squirrel found its way into my house, tipped my cactus off the window sill, and somehow managed to poop on the towel covering my crock. I don't have an aversion to fermented foods, but I have a serious aversion to feces. Blah. Here goes the next round... Lydia

Sele said...

yes, but how will it smell? :)

aryn said...

i am a serious curtido fan (salvadoran kraut). i used to make a batch almost weekly. then all of the sudden my batches started turning nasty. same recipe, same tools, but bad taste. i used to eat curtido every day, but now i am deprived. any ideas of what went wrong and how i can remedy the nastiness in order to get this good stuff back on my table?

Whateverman said...

Maybe the tools weren't cleaned thoroughly? Sauerkraut and the like are made via fermentation; if you've got contamination from a wild yeast strain, that would very likely add odd flavors/smells.

Try sanitizing everything with a mild solution of bleach and water (rinse everything thoroughly after). If you use wooden utensils or a bucket, be aware that contamination can actually live in the wood itself. Switch to all plastic if you can.

Cheers

Tim and Melissa said...

mmm, kimchi! we should make spicy kimchi together, baby!