Sauerkraut

- Sorry for the lack of Planet Borscht posts this fall - since I got a new modem I've been having problems uploading images to Blogger - hopefully it'll all get solved soon!

Remember when you were a little kid - your mom always let you pick your favourite food to eat on your birthday? I always picked sauerkraut. Sauerkraut with farmer sausage and potatoes. Mmmmm. Still one of my all-time favourites. It was one of the first meals I cooked for Jeff when we were first dating - I don't know how the relationship would have worked out if he hadn't liked it too... Thank goodness I never had to find out.

Since sauerkraut has always been one of my favourite foods, it's surprising that I never thought of making it before this summer, when it was one of the most plentiful veggies in our weekly CSA box. During the first few weeks of cabbage deliveries we tried to eat a lot of cabbage borscht and coleslaw, but every week we'd get another one and they'd start piling up. I went searching for cabbage recipes... what would use up a maximum amount of cabbage with a minimal amount of effort?

I found my obvious answer quite quickly - my two favourite Menno cookbooks, More with Less and Simply in Season - both had a really simple Sauerkraut recipe designed for small batches like mine. I kind of combined the two recipes - the MWL version has a bit more detail but I think it assumes that you're going to start out with really fresh cabbage that will make its own brine, and the SIS version tells you to add water.

So here's how I made my sauerkraut:

1. Chop cabbage. It would be sensible to have a food processor for this purpose, but yet again I did all the chopping by hand. My shoulder got quite sore and so my darling husband got to chop his share of cabbage as well. Darling husband.

2. Add a bit of salt to the shredded cabbage and pack it really tightly into clean jars. (I ended up taking the cabbage from these five jars and cramming it into three). Liquid should cover the cabbage once it's in the jar - if you're using super fresh cabbage, I think the salt would pull enough water out of the cabbage to not require any more water. However, my cabbages had been sitting in my fridge for a week or two already so I topped up the levels with boiling water.

3. Put really loose lids on the jars and let it sit at room temperature for a couple of weeks. During the first week the liquid will ooze out of the jar as it's fermenting. Once the water levels drop down again, your kraut is done. Then you can move it into sterilized jars and can it for longer storage.

That's it, that's all. Easy Peasy.

It worked so well and so easily that I decided to make a second batch. Although this time I was in a hurry or something and I neglected to top up the water levels when I first put the cabbage in the jars. I remembered to do it about a week later but it didn't work out so well.

These jars of kraut didn't do their oozing thing and when I took off the lids after two weeks, this is what it looked like.

Some of the really old crock-cured recipes I found when I was first doing my research said that mold was possible and could simply be removed along with the top inch or two of cabbage. (Assuming you were using a gallon size stone crock filled with massive amounts of cabbage). This was NOT the case for my small jars of kraut - the whole thing smelled yucky and therefore it was discarded.

Ah, you live, you learn. The first batch still gave me some damn fine kraut and I'll definitely be doing this again.