Chopped up the five heads of cabbage, weighed it, measured out the salt, and threw it all in the crock:
As you can see, I just cut it by hand because I like a variety in the size, and my expensive food processor I bought a decade ago died last year and I never replaced it because it’s just easier to do things by hand with a knife or a mandolin and cleaning the damned thing was more of a pain in the ass than anything else. Plus, I just like using a knife. Then we kneaded, mashed, pounded (I had fun punching it, tbh), macerated, and rotated the cabbage until the salt did its magic and pulled out the moisture:
It’s about halfway through the process of here, and when it is finished with a plate on top and weighed down, there should be a good bunch of liquid covering it:
Two quick tips- make sure you don’t use too much salt. I don’t do anything exotic, we just made it with cabbage and salt when I was a kid, so there is none of that juniper berries or caraway seed or other horseshit those soft Germans in Bavaria do. Fuck you with your sugar in sauerkraut. But too much salt can kill the fermentation process, so make sure you measure carefully.
Second, I found doing all five heads of cabbage at once to be unwieldy, so I used a 2 gallon crock to prep and the then dumped it in the 5 gallon crock to ferment, then just repeated. Also, the five gallon crock was the right size for a dinner plate to push down the kraut and keep it submerged with the stone.
We’ll see how this turns out in a few weeks.
Cheryl Rofer
That’s the way I do it, although not quite so much kneading and such at the start. By the next day, there’s plenty of liquid.
Catherine D.
I use Korean fermentation buckets They come in a variety of sizes, have an inner lid with a silicone gasket and venting button, and a snap-on outer lid with a handle.
HuCat
Juniper berry? Quick before it’s too late, toss in a few juniper berries! I had no idea anyone put them in sauerkraut, but now that I know, yumm!
laura
A friend and I made skads of pork dumplings in March, and we cut the ribs out out the cabbage and chopped the leaves and the ribs separately and got a pretty uniform dice as a result versus too tough/too stringy combo. So there’s a tip.
I canna wait for the Cole glorious Rueben Sammich post in the near to mid-future.
PJ
Why is there a big rock in your bowl?
RAVEN
@Catherine D.: As opposed to Korean Honey Buckets!
Shana
@PJ: Yeah, I’m confused about that second picture too.
James E Powell
I consider the caraway seeds to be an essential component of my New Year’s Day pork roast, sauerkraut, and dumpling dinner. If memory serves, Omnes condemned me for it, but I stick with my grandma’s Bohemian ways.
I’ve seen apple chunks, but never heard of juniper berries in sauerkraut. I will most definitely give it a try.
What are you weighing that plate down with? It looks like an alien brain.
Olivia
I am so impressed. I love homemade sauerkraut but I have never tried making it.It just seemed so fussy but you make it look easy. I do make Kimchee, however.
Do you can it when it is done fermenting?
different-church-lady
WORST BATHTUB GIN EVER!!1!
Spanky
@PJ: Stone soup.
(Or what’s used to weigh the plate down.)
John Cole
@PJ: the rock is on top of the plate to push the kraut down below the water line
geg6
My grandfather Schnell’s family was from Bavaria (his family immigrated in the 1840s, but yes, we have distant Nazi cousins) and sauerkraut wasn’t sauerkraut without caraway seeds. He made the best sauerkraut I’ve ever eaten. But I’m fine with a second best if you want to send some up my way.
Regina T.
Same way my Mom used to <3
HRA
My Mom put whole cabbages in a hug white crock to ferment on a heavy wooden platform next to the built in cabinets for the jars of canned everything in the cellar when I was a child. The canning and the cabbages were done in late August and early September before the grapes arrived to make the wine and eventually the clear liquor phase from the grape leavings. All of this caused me to do none of it and to use my freezer.
I truly admire your strength and look forward to your next projects, John!
Olivia
@James E Powell: Are they potato dumplings? That is my Bohemian mom’s way.
debbie
@James E Powell:
My mom used caraway seeds, too. No idea where in Germany her people came from, but I liked what they added to the flavor.
Jake Gibson
Good luck. My Pappy tried once. It did not turn out well.
Another Scott
Speaking of rotting, CloveGarden – Fish Sauce:
Cheers,
Scott.
Mart
@Another Scott: Being a vegetarian + mercury maybe in the fish sauce, I found mushroom based “fish” sauce ain’t too bad.
James E Powell
@Olivia:
Absolutely. It’s beyond comfort food. It’s food I sometimes dream about.
@debbie:
It’s nice to know I’m not alone. My grandmother’s family came from some village in what was then the Habsburg Empire and is now the Czech Republic. Neither she nor any of her rather large family called themselves Czech. It was always Bohemian.
PJ
@John Cole: ah. I thought maybe it was some petrified kraut from years past
HinTN
I don’t do any of that (other than mix reasonably well) and the salt does its magic. Otherwise exactly the same. Skim the crap off the top about once a week and in six you’ve got the real deal.
Well done, sir.
J R in WV
I had the best sauerkraut I’ve even had at the 5th of July picnic dinner party next door. It was really tart, just a pint canned in a jar, nothing but cabbage and salt, fermented. I think this is one of those things that either comes out all OK, or NOT to an extreme. If you get a few of the wrong species of yeasts or even esp. non-yeasts in the crock, you could get spoiled rotten cabbage.
My Germanic grandpa loved sauerkraut, and my grandma, southern belle tho she was, learned to deal with it very well. Short ribs brazed in kraut, ummm.
MelissaM
Oh, man, that will be good!
Firebert
A bit of family lore: my uncle had begun a batch of sauerkraut one weekend, and on the following Monday, checked to find it nice and bubbly, smelling exactly right. Pleased with himself, he left for work, only to discover it missing when he got home. He asked his wife if she did anything with it. She replied, “Oh, it looked like it was spoiled, so I threw it out.”
mrmoshpotato
I’ve never had a food post make me want to listen to some death metal before, but here we are.
Obituary – Slowly We Rot
mrmoshpotato
@J R in WV:
That sounds good. I’ll just assume potatoes are involved too. :)
Olivia
@James E Powell: I am pretty sure my great grandparents came from that same area.
My kids and grandkids can’t get enough of dumplings and sauerkraut. When I was a kid and even now, my kids remember it as poor people food. It’s cheap and filling and you can feed a lot of people with it. My grandkids can’t get enough of it. Years ago I learned that I can make the dumplings a lot less labor intensive by making a huge batch at one time and then I freeze them so that we can have them more often. Does your family ever fry up cabbage and bake it with the dumplings?
Another Scott
@Mart: Andrew has a couple of vegetarian fish sauces there. The first one may be similar to the one you use.
Cheers,
Scott.
(“Who knows Andrew from another hangout on the inter-tubes.”)
Steppy
I p@Olivia: You can water bath can it but I think it messes with the texture too much. Another helpful tip: Leave your cabbage out for a while before processing. Smashing refrigerator cold cabbage is hard on the fingers.
central texas
Looks good and brings back memories. My grandmother (Nutter’s Fort, second holler left of Clarksburg) used to fill several 5 gal stoneware crocks. She had one of the cabbage slicers, (giant mandoline) and her sauerkraut was of the “thready” rather than the “chipped” kind. She used juniper but not caraway. I still love the stuff.
rikyrah
Looking good, Cole????
SWMBO
@Olivia: My Mom fries cabbage with kielbasa or brats. It is right tasty.
MoxieM
@James E Powell: What! not Rotkohl and Ganse and Kartoffel? I am shocked, shocked. You Bohemians… seriously. (In point of fact, Christmas Eve at my house growing up was RussischerSalat, aka fancy herring salad, and pickles and black bread. Evidently it had been an appetizer in my (German) grandmother’s house growing up, before the big meal, and that’s what she went with. She wasn’t one for cooking much. So it became tradition.) But wow I can sure shock some Germans with that!
HinTN
@Steppy:
I absolutely can it with a water bath and the texture is fine. I use the recipe from The Joy of Cooking. It’s an excellent reference when ancestral lore has been lost or never existed.
Narya
If you use wide mouth Mason jars, you can fit a jam-size jar in there; I fill the jam jar with pie weights and water. Another advantage is then you don’t have to repack anything; I just refrigerate it when it’s done fermenting. Also, I weigh the cabbage to determine the amount of salt and that helps keep it from getting too salty.
Dr Ronnie James DO
Fish sauce and Worcestershire sauce have very similar recipes. I love SE Asian food, but don’t like the taste or scent of straight fish sauce. I will have a nip of Worcestershire straight from the bottle at times (yum).