| I was so proud of my big, beautiful, purple cabbage that I was sad to cut it up. It's amazing how one can buy a cabbage from the grocery store and never think twice about it, but all of a sudden, this one cabbage that I grew over the past four months became nearly too valuable to me to eat. (Out of the remaining cabbages I planted, only one other reached the same size as this one. A third cabbage was smaller and the dog ate all of it... along with two kale plants and a collard plant. There are a few more in the garden but they aren't very big and never will be. Note to self: Cabbages like nitrogen.)
According to the instructions, I chopped up my cabbage and placed it into a food-grade bucket. I used all of the foliage of the plant as well as the head of cabbage itself. After adding each inch or so of cabbage to the bucket, I added 2 tbsp of non-iodized salt, which is probably more than I needed. The bacteria that makes cabbage into sauerkraut needs an anaerobic salty environment. If you don't use enough salt, your cabbage can rot or go moldy. If you use too much salt, you end up with salty sauerkraut, which you can rinse off and fix. Then I tried to bruise the cabbage using a potato masher. As I did this, the cabbage didn't fill very much of the bucket, and I thought that perhaps I wasn't using enough cabbage.
Cabbage, chopped, bruised, and salted in my bucket
After doing this, I placed a dinner plate on top of the cabbage and a one-gallon jug filled with water on top of that to weigh it down. Then I covered the entire thing with a dish towel and left it on the kitchen floor. I told my boyfriend that it should be squishy by the next day and submerged in water by the day after that. If it wasn't fully submerged in water by then, he should add water to it so that it was submerged. Then I went out of town for two weeks.
When I came back, my cabbage had become sauerkraut. Really, really salty sauerkraut. The salt seemed to be IN the cabbage itself, so merely rinsing it wouldn't work. I added some water to the bucket and left it for another few days to let some of the salt come out of the cabbage. Then I did a test: Would our dog, Bernie, eat my sauerkraut? Fermented foods weird me out a bit, and I'm always a little hesitant the first time I make them. It makes me feel better if the pets are willing to eat them.
Our dog, Bernie, eating sauerkraut
Bernie LOVED the sauerkraut. That was good news. And it smelled like sauerkraut. It tasted like sauerkraut. So I moved all of my kraut from the bucket into several mason jars. It was easiest to first hold the jars sideways in the bucket so they filled about half full of liquid and then pack them as full as possible with the sauerkraut itself. As I did this, usually the liquid overflowed out the top of the jars, but in the end, the kraut was all submerged in liquid. I filled up four pint jars and one quart jar - three quarts total. It's going to take me a long time to eat all of that kraut. Good thing I didn't make more.
The bucket still had some leftover liquid in it, and I poured that down the sink. I figured it was too salty to use as greywater on ornamental plants and fruit trees. As you can see in the picture below, the liquid is all purple, same color as the cabbage. I suppose next time around I could save it to let the kids do science experiments with it, since red cabbage juice turns red when mixed with acids and blue when mixed with bases (or purple when neutral in pH).
Leftover liquid
Now I'm going to enjoy my sauerkraut with another delicious fermented food - beer! |
