Sauerkraut

[watervole]

 Tasted the first batch of sauerkraut today. I'd left it for nine days to ferment.

 

Delicious! Much better than I expected.  Tangy and tasty and not as salty as I'd thought it would be.

 

I think we'll put the rest of this batch into jars and then get another cabbage on the go.

 

This is only a three litre fermenting pot, so one large cabbage is all that will go into it.  I might have got a 5L pot, but most of the online stores had sold out of all sizes, so I grabbed what I could get before that ran out too.

Comments

[ex_peasant441]

Are you adding the watery bit from live yoghurt (sorry, I've forgotten the proper word)? That allows you to reduce the quantity of salt. What is your basic recipe? I started out with the one in Michael Mosley's book, but have been slowly adapting it with each batch because I find all the seeds he adds smothers the other flavours.

[watervole]

The whey thing may be a bit of a myth. totally different species of bacteria.

I got interested and did some reading - have a look - https://www.makesauerkraut.com/starter-cultures-not-used/

[igenlode]

Interesting -- I'm glad my instinct to make use of leftover pickle juice to make salad dressing has precedent (even if I'm only trying not to waste the vinegar!)

[watervole]

We use it to remove limescale in the toilet.
We really like pickled onions!

[igenlode]

I really wouldn't want to use pickle juice for descaling the electric kettle, but I can see that it would probably be fine on the toilet...

I'm almost tempted to try another batch of sauerkraut myself, but I'm not sure it would actually ferment -- the ambient temperature is too cold. (Web sources worry about how to cope when your house is warmer than 75 Fahrenheit, but it's more like 55F in here at the moment, which is what they recommend as 'cellar temperature' for longterm storage! This page suggests that you will eventually get results: https://deeprootsathome.com/high-quality-sauerkraut-fermentation/ )

Presumably one would traditionally have had the steady warmth of the pech' or of a cast-iron range available.

[watervole]

I suspect most people had no option but to do a colder ferment (probably starting earlier in the year). The range is very much a product of cheap coal.

Though people would have tried to keep one room warm if at all possible.

[igenlode]

The woodburning Russian pech' goes back into the Middle Ages, I think... but it's huge. (Literally takes up half the floor space of the peasant hut, such that people used to sleep on top of it.)

But I imagine you made your sauerkraut, like all your other preserves, at the time of the harvest for future use -- I don't know how well cabbage survives Central European winters if left in the ground, but I imagine they would have had to pick them.

[watervole]

I couldn't find pech' in Wikipedia or Google.
I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it reminds me of something that they used to use in Tibet. It was more or less a sleeping platform with slow burning yak dung under it.|

Cabbage is reasonably resistant to cold weather, but hungry deer might be more of a problem.

[igenlode]

I couldn't find pech' in Wikipedia or Google.

Google search doesn't do very well on transliterated words, understandably enough: the Russian is печь (I don't know if that will post).
Wikipedia has it just as Russian stove

It was basically a mound of stone and clay (and later brick) that radiated constant heat into the surrounding wooden building.

(Presumably Russians possessed the ability to bake much earlier than the mediaeval English peasantry, who could only boil their food or send it to the baker's...)

The ground temperature in Germany and Eastern Europe rarely rises above freezing in the winter months (which is how the great rivers manage to ice over despite their powerful flow). Temperatures further east in the Moscow region range from -10C to -20C over the winter, which is why Russian vagrants (and, traditionally, random drunks) freeze to death in the streets :-(

I don't know how much icing-up cabbage cells can tolerate... however, Russians are pretty keen on sauerkraut.

Here's a sauerkraut and beetroot salad recipe I found, if you're still looking for things to do with yours...

[ex_peasant441]

Fascinating, thank you. Also annoying to know since I will have to consider changing half my recipes. Grr - the curse of being a perfectionist!

[watervole]

Glad to be of help!

I'm always sceptical when I find things that veer too far from traditional recipes.

Eg. Germany, Czech Republic, etc. have plenty of dairy produce, so if whey is useful in sauerkraut, it would have been tried and adopted long ago.

[igenlode]

Traditionally people weren't at all worried about cutting down on the 'unhealthy' preservatives used to ensure the food didn't go off -- so no-one attempted to perpetrate jam with 40% sugar or less, or mincemeat without suet, and I assume they wouldn't have been interested in low-salt sauerkraut!

[watervole]

Exactly. Having anything to eat at all in the winter was a far higher priority.

[ex_peasant441]

Good point.

[igenlode]

You'd normally expect to rinse it before using it, as you would when salting aubergines to draw out the juices. But it shouldn't be all that salty anyway.

[watervole]

Thanks for that!

I hadn't realised.