I have been making sauerkraut for many years. My grandmother (my mother’s mother) was German, and used to make it many years ago. Unfortunately, she never taught me how to do it, so I had to learn how to do it on my own. Fortunately, I found a really excellent book, Making Sauerkraut and Pickled Vegetables at Home, by Klaus Kaufmann and Annelies Schoneck. This book not only explains how to do it, providing many different recipes but also explains the science behind the fermentation process. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in making sauerkraut.
The basic steps are as follows:
1. Shred the cabbage.
2. Add salt to the shredded cabbage and mash it. This bruises the cabbage, and the salt brings the juice out of the shredded cabbage.
3. Add caraway seeds (for traditional German sauerkraut) or other spices and herbs to flavor the sauerkraut.
4. Put the shredded cabbage mix into a container that can be set up to prevent oxygen from entering the mix, but will allow carbon dioxide gas to escape.
5. Cover the shredded cabbage so that the pieces of cabbage can’t float to the top of the brine. This is done usually with a large leaf to cover the cabbage and a weight or other mechanism to prevent the leaf covering the cabbage to float to the top of the brine.
6. Install an air locking device on top of the container to allow gas to escape the mash as it ferments but will not allow oxygen to enter the container.
7. Let the sealed container set at room temperature (70’s) for a couple days to start the first phase of the fermentation.
8. Move the sealed container to a cooler environment (60’s) for the second phase to allow the bacteria that form the lactic acid ferment the cabbage properly.Continue reading“Making Your Own Sauerkraut – Part 1, by E.P.”