I’ve adapted this recipe from my friend Alex Lewin’s book Real Food Fermentation, Preserving Whole Fresh Food with Live Cultures in your Home Kitchen. I love how he writes, There are lots of pictures, and he gives lots of tips and troubleshooting for many ferments. Here’s a link to check his book out on Amazon. If you want a bit of live coaching, you are very welcome to grab a cabbage and join me from your kitchen on 10/7 or 11/4/21 for a zoom workshop. If neither of those dates work, you can also purchase a link to my video stream and make sauerkraut any time it suits you.
Ingredients:
A head of cabbage, green or red (red cabbage will give you pink or ruby kraut. You can also mix them up or layer them)
sea salt (2 teaspoons per pound of cabbage. The correct amount of salt is important.)
that’s it.
Instructions:
Remove the outer leaves and the core of your cabbage. Weigh it now before it gets messy.
Chop your cabbage roughly or finely (finely chopped creates more surface area, so the ferment will move along faster) according to your taste, and put it in a big bowl. You might have to do this in two batches if you have a lot of cabbage.
Add the appropriate amount of salt to the chopped cabbage and massage it firmly with both hands until juice starts to be expressed. You might have to pound it a bit. I use the mortar from my mortar and pestle. (Be careful of your bowl if you decide to pound. I learned the hard way that a metal bowl might be a better choice.) A fresher cabbage will be juicier.
Pack the cabbage into clean glass jars leaving a couple of inches at the top, because the cabbage will expand and liquid will rise. Use something to press it down hard to expel bubbles and have the juice rise above the level of the cabbage. I use wide-mouth mason jars and pack it down with my mortar. Any sealable jar will do. The trick is to get the cabbage underwater to protect it from oxygen.
If you don’t have enough liquid expressed to cover the cabbage, add a bit of brine (1 tbsp salt dissolved in 1 C of water), or a splash of yogurt whey, or previous batch sauerkraut/other veggie ferment juice.
Store in a cool dark place preferably between 50F-75F (10-25C). I put mine in a cupboard. Apparently, the optimum temperature is 70F/21C. And store them on a tray or plate because some liquid might leak out.
Check everyday for the first few days to make sure the cabbage stays underwater. After a week, taste it - use a clean fork so as not to introduce new organisms or salivary enzymes into the ferment. It should be bubbly and start to taste like mild sauerkraut. It’ll get even better from there. Put it in the fridge to slow the ferment to a crawl when it reaches your desired level of krautiness.
