Past cooking meals in all their wonderful variety, the easiest forms of home food production are making extracts (put stuff and alcohol in jar, wait) and fermentation.
As gut health becomes more and more part of our health awareness, fermentation may also be important for your long term human capital. But the kind of pickling that produces loads of beneficial bacteria almost certainly has to be done at home.
Sauerkraut is the easiest thing to ferment. It tastes good and its pretty. It’s also pretty forgiving of variations in technique, and easy to modify to taste.
Here’s what we do.
Get one green cabbage and one red cabbage. Cut out the core, set the outside damaged leaves to the side, dice the rest. Smaller is a bit better. Using a food processor is a shortcut but the mouthfeel isn’t as good. Your end product will taste grainy. Sharp knives that you run along the steel a couple of times during the process will make it go a lot faster.
Get a large pot and put some of your green/red cabbage mix in. Add salt. We usually do half. Then add salt. This batch we did two tablespoons because it was the winter and we wanted to speed up ferment. More salt = faster ferment, but also a saltier taste. In the summer we might do 1 to 1.5 tablespoons. Mix the salt well.
Then knead the mixture. Do this for about 5-10 minutes until the cabbage is starting to feel floppy and you can see a little bit of liquid sloshing around. At that point, transfer to a glass or ceramic jar. Pack it in tight.
We usually use an old glass gallon jar from when you things in bulk.
Repeat with what’s left of your cabbage.
When a jar is getting almost full even packed down, put some of your old leaves on top as a cover and then put a weight on top of the old leaves. You can use a glass weight that you buy, a smaller jar filled with water, or just rocks that you cleaned off. We’ve done all three. The point of this is to keep the cabbage packed tight. In a day or two more water is going to come out of the cabbage. You should get a red juice that covers the cabbage and the leaf. If not, add more water until the cabbage and the leaf are covered. (If you pack your jar brimful, the juice will spill over and stain stuff. Ask us how we know.)
Let it sit. Its best if you put some kind of cover on the jar, but it shouldn’t be too tight. Air moving out is good. During the summer, you may have to top off the water from time to time.
Its ready when it turns a uniform pink, though you can let it sit longer if you prefer more ferment flavor. Though be aware that it will continue to ferment in your fridge.
Remove the weights and the old leaves. Feed the old leaves to your poultry. Remove anything that looks molded. Put the rest in your fridge. It won’t need any special storage if you eat some off the top every few days. Otherwise you will need to add water to keep it covered, elsewise you will get mold and have to throw away the top layer.
The resulting sauerkraut is pretty and tasty. It dresses up a salad like you wouldn’t believe.
(Including sun dried tomatoes from our garden and fresh tomatoes from our neighbor’s greenhouse)