How do you ferment vegetables to make sauerkraut, pickles, and other cultured foods? Sauerkraut actually contains more vitamin C than the cabbage from which it's made. To find an excellent recipe, look at the Wild Fermentation: Making Sauerkraut is Easy! website or the primary source, which is the book by Sandor Ellix Katz, the creator of this site and the author of Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods (Chelsea Green, 2003) has earned the nickname "Sandorkraut" for his love of sauerkraut. For the recipe, see the website, Wild Fermentation: Making Sauerkraut is Easy! That site contains Sandorkaut's easy sauerkraut recipe, one of more than 90 ferments included in his book.
Korean-style fermented cabbage (kimchee)
If you want a hot Korean kimchee recipe that ferments cabbage with added chili powder, see the sites, Korean Kimchi Recipe and Korean recipes: Kimchi and Kaktugi - Maangchi.com. There are both Asian and European recipes for fermented cabbage. The Korean Kimchi variety of fermented cabbage is hot and spicy because the fermentation process includes chili powder.
With Chinese or Korean fermented cabbage your mixing shredded Chinese-style (Napa) cabbage with white radishes, green onions, hot red pepper powder, salt, sugar, garlic ginger, salted shrimp, and optional, fresh oysters. For recipes for this spicy fermented cabbage see, Spicy Korean Kimchi Recipe - Food.com - 130619 or watch the uTube video, Making kimchi - YouTube. Also see the site, The Ultimate Kimchi Recipe - TreeLight.
European-style fermented cabbage (sauerkraut)
What you have to do in order to ferment the sauerkraut is to spent from one week to a month or more, probably closer to six weeks fermenting the cabbage. You don't want to ferment in plastic that leaches out or metal. So use a ceramic crock. You'll need a one-gallon container that lets vegetables ferment well without what's in the chemicals of the container leaching out into the juice. What you'll also need is a plate that fits inside the crock or bucket. Then you need an additional one-gallon jug with purified water.
You can cover it with a cloth such as a boiled pillowcase or towel. It's going to take a fermentation process of one to four weeks, sometimes more to ferment one gallon of 5 pounds of cabbage with about 3 tablespoons of sea salt. Don't use commercial table salt. Instead, get good quality sea salt because of all the trace minerals in it that hasn't been processed with aluminum or overheated.
Basically all you do is shred the cabbage the way you like it, in long strips or chopped. Try red cabbage to get those antioxidants that are in deeply colored vegetables. Or mix green and red cabbage. But you should know that deep purple or so-called red cabbage has more colorful antioxidants than white or light green cabbage.
You'll be sprinkling the cabbage with salt. The purpose of the salt is to pull the moisture out of the cabbage in order to create brine. Then the cabbage ferments or 'cultures' in the brine, turning sour but never rotting. Instead of the cabbage becoming limp and soggy in plain water, the salt keeps the shredded cabbage crunchy. Without the salt bacteria would just eat up the cabbage to the point where it would become so soft and droopy, you wouldn't want to eat it.
You can use about 3 tablespoons of salt for five pounds of cabbage. If you're only making a jar of sauerkraut large enough to fit in your refrigerator when it's fermented, you might want to use one tablespoon of salt for 2 lbs of cabbage or half that amount of salt for a pound of cabbage.
What's interesting about fermented vegetables is that you can add other vegetables to make a fermented cole slaw of cabbage, onions, garlic, sea vegetables, green vegetables, garlic, beets, turnips, and various root vegetables. Or you can ferment apples, herbs, seeds, and berries. You can add all of these mixtures to one sauerkraut crock or just stick with cabbage. For a Mediterranean spin on sauerkraut, add dill and celery seeds to the sauerkraut.
Making Sauerkraut with Salt
Cover kraut with a plate or some other lid that fits snugly inside the crock. Place a clean weight (a glass jug filled with water) on the cover. This weight is to force water out of the cabbage and then keep the cabbage submerged under the brine. Cover the whole thing with a cloth to keep dust and flies out. When you make sauerkraut with salt, you'll have to keep pressing down on the cabbage because you want the brine to rise above the covering leaf. This takes about a day. What's happening is that the salt is drawing out the water.
Every 24 look to see whether the brine is rising above the plate level, since you put a plate on top of the cabbage. If it's not rising, just add more salty water, about one teaspoon of salt to one cup of water. Then stir.
You're now leaving the crock to ferment with the salty water and cabbage, spices, herbs, and whatever other vegetables you've put in there. Then every day you check the sauerkraut. As fermentation happens, the water level goes down as does the actual volume of the vegetables. When and if mold is seen on top, skim it off. It happens when air meets mold spores. There usually will be some spores left.
Basically, what's happening is that the fermentation under salty water is without oxygen (anaerobic). That's why there's brine. You're going to keep rinsing off any plate covering the vegetables and any weight you put to hold and press the cabbage down. After a few days, you'll taste the tang. So winter is the best time to make pickled cabbage. In summer or in a hot room, the fermentation process speeds up. But at the same time, the cabbage gets too soft and tastes lousy. So do this in the winter, if possible.
When you taste the tang and like the flavor, put a jarful at a time in the refrigerator. Sauerkraut juice is a great digestive tonic if you're not too sensitive to a little salt. Otherwise, when you eat the fully-fermented sauerkraut, rinse off the salt first. But don't rinse it off until it's about to go into your mouth.
Pack the cabbage tight. It's important to keep a level surface. Keep it covered and weighted down while fermenting. If the brine evaporates, make sure you have the vegetables submerged below the brine. Add salty water if necessary. You don't have to heat vegetables to make sauerkraut. Some people have recipes that call for heating and processing the cabbage, but organic, raw, unheated cabbage is healthier if prepared right. You want the culture alive for your digestion.
Also, you can use the sauerkraut already made and properly fermented as a 'starter' and keep adding new, fresh, salted cabbage. You pour the leftover sauerkraut and juice over the new salted cabbage. This way, you have a 'starter' culture of enzymes acting in a similar way that yeast acts on dough, or yogurt culture works on milk, but with different bacteria. For some people who can't have salt added to foods, you also can make no-salt added sauerkraut. Here's how to start.
Making No-Salt-Added Sauerkraut
Salt-free sauerkraut is made with lemon juice and dill and chopped cabbage. The the recipe for salt-free cabbage is at the Easy Salt-Free Sauerkraut site. When you make no-salt-added sauerkraut, you can also add other vegetables such as cucumbers, cauliflower, beets, or carrots as well as various spices, and herbs such as dill for deeper flavor or seeds such as caraway seed, thyme, kelp, or dulse.
You want to cabbage plus the spices to marinate in its own cabbage juice. Sprinkle herbs and spices over the cabbage, using a half teaspoon for each head. Dulse is a seaweed used as a spice that gives the cabbage a salty taste without added much sodium of the table-salt variety. Don't use too much dulse.
Without salt, you need to be careful of spoilage. When making no-salt-added fermented vegetables, you put several of the whole outer cabbage leaves on top and cover them with the plate or lid, which should be weighted down with a heavy pan, washed rock, or other heavy lids. Than you just cover the crock with a pillowcase or other clean cloth and let it ferment in a cool place that's below 65 degrees F.
Don't let the temperature in that place rise above 70 degrees. Keep it at no more than 65 degrees F, but not yet refrigerated. You'll do that later. That's why it's best to make this in cool weather where the high temperature of the day doesn't reach 65 degrees. But you want to keep it at around 60 to 65 degrees all the time for several days. Look at the fermented vegetables after a few days to see if a froth forms on top of the juice. Skim off the juice, and keep washing the lid and any heavy weight on the lid. Do this every few days for one to three weeks. Try a sample of the sauerkraut every few days.
After the sauerkraut becomes tangy or sour enough for your taste in any time between one and three weeks, you then boil and sterilize glass jars and put the sauerkraut in the sterile glass jars. Cover, and place in your refrigerator. It's important to keep this type of sauerkraut in the refrigerator because without the salt, the sauerkraut spoils quickly. But once in your refrigerator it could last for two weeks. Check out the websites with recipes on how to make either salt-added sauerkraut or no-added-salt recipes for sauerkraut.
Websites with How to Make Sauerkraut Recipes
Salt-Added Sauerkraut
Wild Fermentation :: Making Sauerkraut is Easy!
Wild Fermentation: Vegetable Fermentation Further Simplified
No-Salt-Added Sauerkraut
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