Sauerkraut!

Saturday, April 22 2017

Everybody who knows me knows that, especially since I retired, I despise weekend traffic.  Too many people going too many places, too fast, and too rude!  Since I don't want to be seen on the 11:00 PM news, being hauled away by the police for a "road rage" incident,  I just stay home.  This may seem to have little to do with food and cooking, but it explains (at least in part) why I am able to put together this blog about making sauerkraut.

Because of my antipathy for driving around on weekends, my Honey and I do all of our shopping on weekdays, between about 9:00 AM and 3:30 PM, which serves to explain how and why we were out shopping early this past Monday. We can usually do this, except for a couple of hours around lunch time each day.  If anything, the lunch crowd is even worse than the rush hour crowd, because, instead of packing a lunch, or eating at a convenient cafeteria, all of those insane drivers go out for lunch - at the same time!

Anyway, I needed something from an electronics store about ten or so miles away from my abode, and as we entered their parking lot, we noticed that a new Asian food market had opened next door. My Honey is a sucker for a new food store, particularly if it is of overseas extraction, so naturally, we had to check it out.  Surprisingly, this store had nearly nothing but food, on offer; which wasn't a bad thing, just unusual. Honey found several items she might pick up later, but the main thing the store accomplished was to remind us of another, older Asian market, less than a couple of miles away.

We wrapped up our business at the electronics store, and headed to the more familiar Asian market, which had a larger and more diverse housewares department.  While Honey was perusing various items, I wandered around on my own, and ended up in a section where several odd-looking items were stacked, nearly to the ceiling.  On first glance, they appeared to be strange-looking plastic storage containers, but on further investigation, it turned out that what I had found was the store's stock of kimchi fermentation vessels.

Kimchi is, basically, Korean sauerkraut. As far as I am concerned, the jury is still out on whether one should count oneself fortunate, if one has ever become familiar with kimchi! Most popular recipes start with Napa cabbage, and add a variety of other ingredients before fermenting, often including a fish sauce, and at least one recipe includes tiny shrimp.  The, ah.... aroma of the fermenting vegetables (and seafood!) is described by kimchi lovers as intense. Others might use less complimentary terms.

open fermenter, showing inner lid assemby

To make a long story short, I carefully examined the design and materials of the plastic vessels, and was impressed with the engineering.  The price almost scared me away - I object in principle to paying multiple tens of dollars for a few cents worth of plastic! - but how do you assign a value to a good design?  Anyway, I had been wanting to try my hand at making sauerkraut (European version) for some time, so I ended up purchasing one of the smaller vessels, for the project.

Now sauerkraut recipes abound everywhere, and one might even make a successful batch without even having read one!  The basic ingredients and processing are simple: cabbage, salt, maybe a little water, and fermentation.


My research indicates that the most important things to remember are:

• Maintain cleanliness:  Fermentation is a biological process.  In other words, there are living organisms at work in pickling your kraut!  You only want certain, specific ones working there, because having the wrong ones in there can make you sick when you eat the kraut (not to mention that they may ruin the flavor!).
  
  
• Shred the cabbage, as closely as possible, into pieces a uniform size: Sauerkraut is a pickled product.  The whole reason for husbanding the fermentation process, is so that the lactic acid produced by the guest bacteria can pickle your cabbage.  Having all the pieces of be the same size means that pickling will finish for all of the cabbage at the same time.  Conversely, having a lot of different sizes means that every differently-sized piece needs to pickle for a different length of time.  This can result in a mix, where some pieces are nearly raw while others have become soggy.  I use our food processor with a slicing plate installed, and it seemed to work pretty well, producing about 4 pounds of fairly uniformly-sized shreds in less than 5 minutes, including setup time.
  
  
• Keep the proportions of salt and cabbage within a narrow range:  Recommendations concerning salt are all over the map.  Some people recommend avoiding iodized salt - not just for sauerkraut, but for preparing nearly any kind of preserved food - mostly for aesthetic reasons. It seems that those people feel that using iodized salt imparts undesirable color to the food, or causes it to soften too much.
  
  There could be, however, some significant thyroid health concerns for people who don't use any iodized salt.  Read about it on a credible medical website (e.g., The American Thyroid Association), not a new-age, follow-the-latest-food-fad site! It may be that you get enough iodine from other dietary sources, but you must be the judge of that.  Choose what you want to use: kosher salt, sea salt, iodized table salt, or canning salt, but choose wisely.
  
  Whatever salt you decide to use, you should use between 1¾ and 2 teaspoons per pound of shredded cabbage. I tend to favor the high end of this range.  Using too little salt opens up the possibility of invasion by inimical organisms, like Clostridium botulinum, before the ferment can produce enough lactic acid to prevent it; and too much would inhibit the development of the friendly lacto bacteria.
  
  
• Maintain control of the fermentation environment:  This starts the instant you begin loading your fermentation vessel. The lactic acid guest bacteria need an anaerobic environment - this means that once they begin working, you can't allow air to get to the fermenting cabbage! Failure to maintain anaerobic conditions will slow down the development of guest culture, and potentially allow unwanted organisms to gain a foothold. The best way to insure anaerobic conditions is to build them in as you load.  Loading the cabbage and salt is a fairly simple process:
  
  
• First, lay in a layer of shredded cabbage and crush the cabbage using whatever clean tool you may have that will do the job.  Most people use their (clean) fist! For the current vessel, I tend to add about ½ lb of cabbage at a time.
  
  
• Next, sprinkle the crushed cabbage with salt, in proportion to the amount of cabbage you just added to the vessel.  For each ½ lb layer of crushed cabbage, I sprinkle a scant teaspoon of salt on it before adding the next layer.
  
  
• Repeat until the vessel is at capacity (or until you run out of cabbage, whichever comes first!).
  
  

When you are done loading the vessel, you must take measures to insure that the fermenting cabbage remains submerged in brine at all times. If you are using a "starter" culture, this is the time to add it to the cabbage.

If you are using a vessel similar to mine, simply install the inner lid assembly, and press it down until the cabbage underneath is submerged in the brine. If there isn't enough brine from the salt and the cabbage "weep water", make up supplemental brine by adding 1 rounded teaspoon of salt to 1 cup of water, and top off the vessel as needed to insure that the cabbage remains submerged.  Bleed off any trapped air or fermentation gasses that appear under the lid. Fermentation should begin pretty quickly, and will be evidenced by the appearance of gas bubbles under the lid.

Check the vessel every day to bleed off fermentation gasses, and to ensure that the cabbage remains submerged, and that no growth of mold has taken hold. If your kraut turns pink, throw it out!

inner lid assembly

The inner lid assembly of my vessel is translucent and slightly dome-shaped, and has both an access port and a bleeder port at the top of the dome. The access port is handy for adding brine (if needed) and for withdrawing product for in-process testing. The bleeder port is useful for removing air and fermentation gasses, because - due to the shape of the lid - gasses tend to migrate toward the port anyway.

How long you need to let the product ferment at nominal room temperature is apparently highly variable. One recipé calls for for 2-3 days of fermentation at room temperature, followed by moving the vessel into a refrigerator.  For me, this turned out to be a mistake.  Fermentation completely stopped! Further research indicates that one might expect fermentation to stop at temperatures below 60° F.  I found this tidbit on the National Center for Home Food Preservation website, hosted by the University of Georgia. That website has a ton of useful information, and I highly recommend that anyone wanting to make their own preserved foods read it frequently!

Anyway, fermentation is done when no more gas is being generated.  When this happens, it means that all of the sugars in the cabbage (yes, there are sugars in cabbage!) have been metabolized into lactic acid and carbon dioxide.  It was pretty obvious in my case: once I got the kraut going, it was producing at least a liter or so of gas every day - that I knew about - and then one day it abruptly stopped!  According to the NCHFP site, fermentation can take as long as 4 weeks, under ideal temperature conditions (between 70° and 75° F); and finished, unused kraut can be kept in a refrigerated, tightly-covered container for several months.

almost gone!

My 4 lb charge of shredded cabbage produced a bit more than 4 pints of pretty decent sauerkraut.  We elected to use somewhat less than half of it fresh, first on hotdogs (good!), and then as part of two skillet meals , one involving pork loin, and the other, kielbasa (both also good!); and we also gave some away, getting rave reviews.  The remainder sits in a fido jar in the fridge, awaiting my convenience.  As you can see, there isn't much left!

our canned product

The kraut that we didn't use fresh, we canned (boiling water bath method) in half-pint Mason jars. My Honey and I taste-tested, comparing the fresh kraut, our canned kraut, and a conveniently-available commercial German-style kraut.  Both versions of our home-made kraut were crisper, albeit saltier and more acid, than the commercial kraut.  I could barely detect any difference between the fresh and the canned home-made, but my Honey said that she preferred the canned, as she felt that it had a milder flavor.

By the way, common sense dictates that if you eat fermented kraut in any significant quantity at a meal, you need to rinse and drain it to remove the excess salt!

-Mariner