Clean with hot soapy water and rinse with very hot water before use. You will also need a weight to hold the cabbage under the brine while fermenting. You can purchase fermenting weights or simply weigh the cabbage down with a plate, held down with two or three glass jars filled with water or a large food-grade plastic bag I use a turkey brining bag filled with brine, in case it leaks into the product.
The brine should be made of 3 quarts of water with 4. Once your cabbage is shredded, salted, pounded with your clean fist or maybe a potato masher to release the liquid so that it covers the cabbage, cover with the weight to keep the cabbage under the brine.
Place a clean towel over the whole thing to keep insects out. This is one reason I wait until later in the fall to make sauerkraut. My basement gets cooler then, making a good fermentation room. If it is too warm, fermentation may progress too quickly to spoilage. If too cool, the process will take longer. Once the fermentation process begins, it will progress through three stages, as long as the temperature is desirable.
First, Leuconostoc mesenteroides initiates sauerkraut fermentation. It produces carbon dioxide, effectively replacing the oxygen in the jar. This takes days. Next, Lactobacillus plantarum and Lactobacillus cucumeris continue the ferment for about days temperature dependent. Finally, Lactobacillus brevis finish off the process, usually in less than a week. When you notice that there are no more bubbles at the side of your crock or jar, then the fermentation is complete.
Expect the whole process to take about weeks. Check often to be sure there is no mold. Skim it off as soon as you see it. If allowed to remain, the mold can contaminate the whole batch and result in a waste of a lot of good cabbage. I was part of an eclectic group of 13 students, including a newly wed home-steading couple from Maryland, a performance artist and poet from Georgia, and a General Motors wheel buyer based out of Michigan, who had gathered in the humid basement of a midcentury ranch house to learn how to preserve foods.
Some good friends of mine had introduced me to Katz by giving me his celebrated book Wild Fermentation Chelsea Green, Inspired by it, they were running out of counter space for all their pickle and sauerkraut projects. In Wild Fermentation , Katz writes with an infectious combination of erudition and evangelical vim about the pleasures of fostering and consuming edible cultures, from the familiar sauerkraut, beer to the arcane a sweet Japanese rice beverage called amazake , a bubbly Guyanese soft drink called sweet potato fly.
Katz is a year-old with piercing blue eyes and a shock of steely curls that creep down over a memorable set of silvery muttonchops. He was not raised in a pickling family: He grew up a city boy, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, enjoying deli pickles just like my father did. As a young man, he did policy work for the city, but in he made a radical change in his life.
He moved to a commune in the hills of central Tennessee and began gardening. Not quite knowing what to do with his bumper crop, he remembered that sauerkraut might be an option, and using The Joy of Cooking and some favorite macrobiotic cookbooks as guides, he set to fermenting his first batch.
The garden kept providing, he kept pickling and preserving, and before long, he was hooked. Katz began our fermentation workshop with a lesson on sauerkraut. As we sliced cabbage and tossed it in a stainless steel bowl, he explained that long before Pasteur pinpointed tiny organisms—microbes—as the source of fermentation, cultures around the world had harnessed the power of fermentation to preserve food and improve its qualities nutritive, alcoholic, or merely aesthetic.
He revealed how wild colonies of microflora—whether yeast, bacteria, molds, or a combination—grow on food, changing its nature as the microorganisms ingest sugars or alcohols and excrete carbon dioxide, acids, or alcohols. Those sugars then feed yeasts that transform the rice into the alcoholic drink sake. Take the sauerkraut we were making, for example. When chopped cabbage is combined with salt, squeezed to release its juices, and left to sit in the resulting brine, the various bacteria on the surface of the cabbage begin to grow, creating an acidic environment that transforms the flavor of the cabbage into the sweet-funky stuff we know as sauerkraut.
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