Sauerkraut

Only a very quick one this evening, it is a school night after all.

I read about how easy and cheap it was to make sauerkraut and had to give it a try.

Ingredients

About 2kg of cabbage

About 3 tablespoons of kosher salt

Spices of your choice

I thought it might be fun to go for a mixture of white and red cabbage to hopefully turn out a pretty pink sauerkraut. As I'm a first timer I haven't been too adventurous with my spices. I opted for 25 juniper berries, some smoked black peppercorns, about a teaspoon and a half of caraway seeds, about a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and a bit of garlic. Had I had mustard seeds to hand I would have added them and reduced the pepper.

I lightly toasted the peppercorns, chopped up the garlic very fine and combined all the spices.

I shredded and mixed all the cabbage and sterilised the vessel I'm using to ferment in. I'm actually using a food grade plastic small brewing bucket.

Now the fun part...

Pack a layer of cabbage into the bottom of the bucket and ram it in tight with your fist. Now sprinkle some salt over the top and add a bit of the spice mix. Put in another layer of cabbage and ram it in again. Keep layering until you've used up all your salt and spice and cabbage.

The plan is the salt will draw the water out of the cabbage (through osmosis) to make it's own pickling brine, then the bacteria on the cabbage will ferment it.

I placed a sterilised plate on top and a jar of water to weigh it down. I want to keep all the cabbage under the surface of the brine. I stretched some cling film over the top just to stop any creepy crawlies finding their way in.

Now to just leave it in a quiet corner and let it do it's thing! The water should have been drawn out of the cabbage after about 24 hours so I'll check back then.

After 24 hours the Level of the brine still hasn't quite made it over the top of the level of the cabbage.

So I've topped it up with a rather strong brine solution and we'll see how that gets on.

To be returned to in about a month to see if my super healthy sauerkraut will be added to my list of epic successes or my list of heroic failures...