Sometime in the spring, when I bought a few toys for the kitchen, I came across a fermentation kit made by Ball Corporation. It uses a typical wide mouthed quart jar and this cool spring with a zigzag base that looks like a potato masher. It also has a plastic lid with a vent to release gasses as the food inside ferments.
I cant really remember if my grandma made sauerkraut when I was little or if I just have incorporated that into my memory from all the stories I’ve read. She did have huge pickle crocks and I know she made pickles, so it shouldn’t be a hard stretch to think she also made kraut. I know she had a kraut cutter somewhere along the line…a wooden tray with a sharp blade set in it for slicing cabbage into this strips.
Somewhere over the last couple of months, I misplaced the directions for the kit…as usual…so I looked it up on the internet. It suggested using napa cabbage, but I had regular. I searched for a recipe using the typical heads of cabbage and found one by Ree Drummond of Pioneer Woman fame.
I removed the outer leaves then cored and washed the cabbage. I saved one good leaf then using a very sharp knife, I cut the cabbage into very thin slices. I weighed the cabbage and used the appropriate amount of pickling salt and tossed it together to evenly distribute. Then, I covered the bowl with a clean flour sack dishtowel and let it sit for a while.
About an hour or so later, I commenced to massaging the cabbage for about 5-10 minutes. This took a lot of hand strength…rubbing, squeezing, mashing…till the cabbage had been greatly reduced in size and there was a fair amount of brine in the bottom of the bowl. I washed the fermenting jar, spring, and lid in as hot soapy water as my hands could stand and rinsed it well.
I packed the now limp cabbage into the jar, mashing it down with my fist as I packed. Once all the cabbage was in the jar, I cut a circle out of the reserved leaf and laid it down on top and pressed it down. This helps hold all the cabbage under the brine. Then, I strained the remaining brine from the bowl and put enough in the jar to bring it up to about a half inch headspace. I pressed the spring down onto the leaf covering and screwed down the lid. I set the jar in a pie plate to catch any drips that may bubble out through the vent in the lid.
This jar will sit at room temperature and ferment anywhere from 1-4 weeks, depending on how sour I want the kraut. This doesn’t make enough sauerkraut to can, obviously. But we don’t eat it often enough to warrant making a huge batch. I used two small head of cabbage for this one jar. I just thought it would be fun to try something different for my Covid Kitchen Chronicles. With all the bread I bake, my kitchen is teeming with wild yeasts so it ought to make some really good kraut.
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The only verses I could fined about fermentation:
“No one pours new wine into old wineskins. The new wine would swell and burst the old skins. Then the wine would be lost, and the skins would be ruined. New wine must be put only into new wineskins.”
Luke 5:37-38 CEV