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| Cut cabbage! |
I am very fond of eating sauerkraut - the real uncooked version, that is. One can buy sauerkraut on-line now, but it is mainly cooked. Also it is very expensive. Like so many foods, modern life has turned sauerkraut from a daily staple into an expensive luxury. Like decent bread - artisan loaves anyone? - or sour milk, or pickled herring.
In the olden days, in places like Wisconsin, people used to make sauerkraut by the barrel in the Autumn, and lived on it, together with potatoes, with the occasional bit of salt pork thrown in, all Winter. Sauerkraut is very high in vitamins, especially vitamin C:
"According to researchers at Cornell University, levels of antioxidants and vitamin C in sauerkraut range from 57 to 695 mg—with raw, fermented red cabbage having the highest levels of vitamin C, hitting almost 700 mg per cup. Captain James Cook, was given 7,860 pounds of sauerkraut to take with him on his journey. After over two years at sea, Captain Cook reported that no one died of scurvy."
So there you are! Sauerkraut is a pre-digested form of cabbage, like kefir or cheese is a predigested form of milk, and sourdough bread is a predigested form of Wonderbread (just kidding).
Interestingly enough, many foods that are predigested in this way have more nutrients than they had before they were digested. Ludicrous, I used to think - there are only so many nutrients in any given amount of food, so how can keeping it in a crock with a group of bacterial digesters make a difference?
Well, amazingly enough, the tiny organisms that do the digesting create vitamins and such like in the process (rather like our skin can create vitamin D - I suspect it is actually the bacteria that live on our skin that create the vitamin D, but I don't know). Also, the pre-digestion process makes the vitamins and minerals that are in the food more accessible to the human digestion.
Anyway, I am passionately devoted to sauerkraut, and make it twice a year or so, depending on how much I eat and what else I have going on.
When I first started, twenty years ago, I used old recipe books and followed their instructions, to wit, just cut the cabbage, toss it into a likely crock, stamp down on it, add salt, weight the cabbage down with a heavy stone, and wait for six weeks.
Well, that never worked for me. My theory is that the old recipes depend on either the cabbage managing to attract nice sauerkraut bacteria while roosting in the crock, or, that the bacteria live on the cabbages themselves and can set to work as soon as they cut cabbage is settled in the crock. But nowadays cabbages, even organic ones, have been so cleaned and sterilised that the bacteria that naturally live on them have probably all been exterminated. And as for attracting beneficial bacteria in my little lean-to conservatory, forget it!
So whatever the reason, I never managed to create sauerkraut in the Little House, until I did some proper research (on the internet) and introduced two improvements: (a) I got my sister to send me a proper sauerkrautpot from Germany; and (b) I added some live yogurt to the cabbage, to start off the fermentation process.
I never looked back - nice sauerkraut every time!
Recently I introduced another change. I already eat a lot of yogurt, so reasoned that populating my sauerkraut with the same yogurt culture was not doing much to expand my range of beneficial gut bacteria. So I bought some starter culture on-line, which has the added benefit of speeding up the process to one or two weeks. Of course this is an additional cost, but with my consumption this isn't too bad. Also I am trying to improve my health here!
I shall explain with the help of the photos below what is involved:
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| Massive cabbage cutter - I always buy things that are too big for me! This thing is almost as big as I am. |
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| All types of cabbage can be used - this is Duchy Originals, because now that I boycott Tesco I shop at Waitrose. |
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| The aforementioned starter culture |
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| Salt, juniper berries, and caraway seeds |
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| The juniper berries got crushed in my mortar & pestle. I rather like this one, I imported it from the Caribbean. It is made from Lignum Vitae, once of the hardest woods there is - they used to make bowling balls from it. I don't like stones mortars; apparently the ancient Egyptians used grinding stones for their wheat grinding, and the little stone fragments that came off the stones ended up in their food and acted like sandpaper and ground down their teeth, and lots of them died of toothaches. I like my teeth! |
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| Largest bowl in the House - it is HUGE!!! |
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| Place shredder on bowl, and shred. You can use a knife, of course, that way you don't have to store the ludicrously large shredder somewhere in between your shredding sessions |
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| The result of my labours - half a huge bowl full of shredded cabbage. |
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| I added the shreddies into my sauerkraut pot, stomped it down, added the salt and caraway seeds and salt and the starter culture, all suitably mixed with water, added a few large outer cabbage leaves (unshredded) on top, and weigh the lot down with two semi-circular stones. |
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| The full sauerkrautpot is placed near the bottom of my kitchen, where it is coolest. I plan to keep the sauerkraut in the pot after it is done, and just lift out whatever I need when I need it, so it has to be kept cold. Sadly I don't have a cellar. Mind you, could I cope with the spiders? |
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| Lastly, I fill water into the ridge of the sauerkrautpot. This creates a one way seal, so the fermentation bubbles can get out, but tiny creatures of all types can't get in. That's why sauerkraut made in such pots doesn't spoil! If you want to make sauerkraut I would recommend you invest in such a pot. It weights a ton, but lasts a life time. Actually, I have two. I like to make my own pickled cucumber, too! |
