an easy way to make sauerkraut

[Swamp Yankee]

Cabbage is wicked cheap in the markets right now so I thought I'd post this:

How I make sauerkraut -

Please don't look at this and think it's difficult to make sauerkraut, it's not..at all. But there are processes that get underway once you make the batch and it's a good idea to understand what is happening.

Sauerkraut is nothing more than shredded cabbage which has been mixed with salt and then left to ferment, preferably in an oxygen free environment.

The natural yeasts and bacteria that are in the air and on the cabbage are all the help that is needed to do the fermentation. The salt content inhibits the bacteria and mold that would spoil it during the first few days, but once the first stage gets going, all sorts of CO2 is produced, and that really helps to keep the color bright, and the mold absent...provided you use the right container.

The process takes a minimum of 30 days and the salted cabbage goes through three stages during that time. During each stage, the bacteria at work set the stage for the next group..and the last two stages are when all those beneficial lactobacilli set up shop and make it such a healthy food.

I made sauerkraut in crocks and apothecary jars for years before I found what I consider to be the best container for sauerkraut fermentation - bail and gasket canning jars. My favorites are the "Fido" jars made by the Italian company Bormioli Rocco, but I've also used Kilner jars and Le Parfait jars. They are all good jars and all share the same tempered glass and flip top cover with gasket. It's important, however, to use only jars that are made for home canning. There are lots of cheap jars out there like this that are just for dry storage and they may or may not be able to withstand the pressure inside the jar that is produced by fermentation. In other words, they could explode

A 1.5 liter Fido jar is just about right for making a batch of sauerkraut from a single head of cabbage that weighs 2-3 pounds. Fido jars are available in sizes up to 5L though, which is handy if you want to make bigger batches of kraut.

This a batch I made in 1.5 liter Fido jars - the picture was taken just after I filled the jars. You can see the level I fill them to..




As far as ingredients are concerned, all you need to make sauerkraut is cabbage and pure salt. The ratio of cabbage to salt that I use is two teaspoons of salt to every pound of shredded cabbage. I use Diamond Crystal Kosher salt but any PURE salt will do...sea salt...celtic salt..I like Diamond Crystal because I can get it at the supermarket, it's cheap, and it works like a charm. You don't want to use regular table salt as it often has additives to prevent clumping and those additives can cloud up the brine.

Take a head of cabbage and peel off the outside layer of leaves. Once you've removed that outer layer, cut any stump off the bottom and then pare out any cuts, bruises, dark or black spots and blemishes on the leaves. If there are lots of spots, peel another layer off.

Next, cut the head into quarters and pare out that core down at the base. Then slice the cabbage about 1/8" thick. I use a mandoline or a V slicer to do this but you can use a sharp knife easily enough. Put the sliced cabbage into a big bowl as you slice it.


Weigh out 8 ounces of shredded cabbage at a time, dump that weighed cabbage into another bowl... the biggest stainless steel bowl you have, or into a big stainless stock pot, and sprinkle one teaspoon of salt all over it. Keep doing this, 8 ounces at a time, one tsp salt on each 8 ounces, until you've salted all your cabbage. I do it this way to make sure the salt is evenly distributed through the cabbage. Weighing it ensures proper salinity in the kraut and consistent results.

Now you get to beat the snot out of it.

Start by wringing the salted cabbage between your two hands over the bowl. Be rough with it..like you're wringing out hand washed socks. After a few minutes of this, the cabbage will be shedding water. You want that water so do this right in that bowl.

Next you mash it in the bowl. I do this with the cut off handle of an old wooden oar that I had - but you can use the bottom of a heavy glass bottle if you're careful..or anything else like that. Holding the neck of the bottle, press the bottom of the bottle into the cabbage and grind/ mash it. Keep doing this until you've either been massaging or mashing the cabbage for 10 minutes.

Some people skip the mashing...but for me it's like hand kneading bread dough....it's FUN

The next step is to jar it. I like to pour a little cider vinegar, maybe 1/2 cup in the jar first. Then I flip the lid closed, lock the bail, shake it then pour the vinegar out again. This will kill any mold spores in the jar...not that it's a vital step, I just like to be sure.

Now add the kraut to the jar a little at a time, I use a pair of tongs and a wide mouth canning funnel. After each addition press the kraut in the jar down hard enough to drive any air bubbles out. I use my masher for this. Add and push down on each layer of cabbage in the jar until you've driven most of the bubbles out. Keep adding cabbage until the level of brine and cabbage reaches the bottom of the shoulder of the jar.

For experienced kraut makers - don't worry if your cabbage is not under the brine when you're done. If it is, that's fine...but it's likely it won't stay that way. But don't worry - these jars are so good at excluding oxygen you don't need any weights at all to keep the kraut down in the brine. Even the "dry" kraut that comes out of the brine will be OK.. Once the bacteria start making CO2, they make so much that the kraut "inflates" and rises up in the jar. But that pushes the air out so there's no oxygen in the jar that can cause mold or turn the kraut brown.


Once the jar is filled to the shoulder, just clean off any bits of cabbage around the jar rim, inside and out, wipe the rim and gasket off with a napkin soaked with a bit of vinegar, and seal the jar.

It's best to set the jar in something like a teflon coated baking pan. They will sometimes leak acidic brine during the fermentation - especially during the first, or "gaseous" stage when the bacteria are making most of the CO2 - and that stuff will ruin a nice finish on any wooden shelves...even on steel shelves.

The beauty of using these jars is that when too much CO2 is produced inside the jar, it pushes all of the oxygen out of the jar. As more is produced, the excess pushes out. But the pressure inside the jar will remain greater than outside, so air will not get back inside the jar. The seal on these jars is so good that it will often keep enough CO2 in the jar so that when you open it when it's done, it might even fizz for a while like soda pop.

Here's a pic of one of the above jars after two days..you can see the level of the cabbage is way up over the shoulder now. That is because the CO2 has literally inflated the mass of shredded cabbage.




It's also a good idea to keep the jar in the dark as light inhibits the bacteria you want. So - once it's set in a pan, put your jar in a cupboard or somewhere that the temp is around 70°F and leave it alone. Do not open it to see how it's doing - you will end up with brown or even moldy kraut. Forget about it for 30 days.

When it's done, you should see the kraut still has a nice color - not browned like canned kraut - and the color should be pretty much the same from the top of the kraut to the bottom. If you see the top layer is browner than the bottom, then some oxygen got in....did you peek?

If you see mold on the top, throw it out.

Back in the days when I used to make it in a crock, I just scooped off the mold on top. But studies have shown that if there's mold on top, there's mold all the way through it. Throwing it out when it's only a 1.5 liter jar full is a whole lot easier to do than when it's a 5 gallon crock full of kraut. That's another reason why I like to make it in jars. If something goes wrong with one jar, out of a dozen, it's no big deal.

After 30 days it's ready but it will keep indefinitely at room temps unless you open the lid. After the lid has been opened, keep it in the fridge.

A 1.5 L batch of kraut usually lasts me and my wife about a month.... YMMV

[natedg20020]

Thanks for this!


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[Jon]

Great write-up. Is the brine just what is extracted from the cabbage?

[Swamp Yankee]

Yes - the brine is what comes out of the cabbage.

[Travis]

Thanks for sharing this!

[Jon]

Ok, I got a batch down. I did add onion, carrot, and serranos. Not much, just because.

Thanks again for the nice write-up.

[Swamp Yankee]

Ok, I got a batch down. I did add onion, carrot, and serranos. Not much, just because.

Thanks again for the nice write-up.

Cool! Did you take any pics?

[Jon]

I did not. It seemed anti-climactic after your nice pictures. I just followed your directions and put them on a plate away from sunlight. They look like jars of cabbage.

[Hell Fire Grill]

Hi Swamp Yankee.

Nice to see someone else on here that has a basic understanding of acidity levels concerning food safety and bacteria in our food and environment. Its not something I see often enough on the internet forums, most people just copy & paste the USDA & FDA guidelines and accept their BS as the one and only method of eat eating and maintaining a safe and nutritious food supply. Those ideals are further grossly misrepresented people that are not knowledgeable in the areas of curing & fermenting foods, in my opinion, and have never practiced the art of preserving. They're the same people that use three sets of tongs to flip a hot dog, and if the bacteria on that hot dog don't kill them worrying about the bacteria will.

I like the way you swab your jars with vinegar to insure the mold spores are dead. On some of my ferments I'll use salt water mixed at 1 tsp./cup of water to do the same thing your doing with the vinegar. That solution is strong enough to stop mold redeveloping after its scraped out and also prevents a war between the lactobacter and acetobactors. Which in my opinion negates the need for vinegar, which could alter the flavor, altogether, but thats a personal control issue for me not a safety issue. The salt water, or brine, can be put in the jar a few drops at a time and slowly swirled around on the top of the food to roughly cover the top of the concoction, just a few drops will do it. A weaker brine may work too but I haven't experimented with a lower dosage yet. I use a SS fork to drip the brine on top especially around the edge, where food meets glass. If any stray food particles are on the jar above the food level I'll wipe them out with a brine moistened paper towel and leave the inside good and clean, just like you do.

I'm very interested in reading the studies concerning the mold contaminating the entire crock, please post a link or source of information so I can learn more about it. Personally I'm more skeptical of a federally published study than I would a private or university published one but either will do.

Thanks for posting.

[austin87]

Awesome, love those jars. I will be doing this soon.

[Swamp Yankee]

@ Hell Fire Grill - Thanks for your in-depth reply! To be sure, I use very little vinegar, maybe a tsp shaken around inside the closed jar, then completely drained out. I then follow up with a quick wipe of the rim and the gasket with a vinegar wetted paper towel before closing the lids for the ferment.

I also just recently started making yogurt in these jars, and I sterilize them (top, bottom, and gasket) first in a boiling water bath. I might start doing that with kraut as well....though I think it might be overkill.

With regards to your question about sources behind my comments on mold - I'm not sure, but I think it must have been in one of the articles that Lea Harris has done and which are available online - She set up kraut ferments using a whole selection of different methods and examined sauerkraut brine samples from each method under the microscope at various stages during the ferment. She reported finding mold present, albeit in small quantities, in samples taken from the bottom of several kraut samples that had shown slight mold growth on top. 

While I'm aware that people have been safely ingesting varying amounts of mold in their ferments for thousands of years  - it can be avoided.  I've been making kraut using the jars I mention for years now and only once have I experienced mold - a small spot in the inside of the lid - none on the kraut. I threw it out anyway. Like I mentioned, it was a 1.5 liter jar...not a big deal to dump it. I'd hate like hell to have to do that with a entire crock full of kraut.   

Another thing to take into consideration: these jars work so well because the seals keep a higher pressure inside the jar than outside. As a result, the cabbage comes right up out of the brine (unless you weight it- which I don't). If the pressure equalizes due to a failure of the seal - the kraut deflates a bit, but never enough to get in back under the brine - so if there's mold growing, it's not on the surface of the brine as you might see in a crock, it's on the cabbage itself.

Luckily - it's never happened to me - and I've never had a seal fail on me yet. I think the spot of mold I saw on the underside of the lid had grown in a pocket of air that the CO2 had failed to drive out due to the concave surface of the underside of the lid itself.

Having made kraut in crocks under weight and brine, and in these jars - I'll never use crocks again. It's just too damn easy to make it in the Fido jars and the product, in my opinion, is superior. Much more crispy, better color, and with a nice clear brine.

[Jon]

@Swamp Yankee This is worth a bump. And a thank you. As I posted earlier that I followed your directions and made three jars of sauerkraut. And I've made more since those jars were finished. All in standard Ball jars.

Here is how those first three jars came out. Jar one I opened at four weeks. It was unbelievably acidic, but once I rinsed the kraut it was pretty good. Jar two I opened at seven weeks and it was very good - I ate the entire jar in about five days. Jar three I actually forgot about until week ten - went through the ohshit moment - then opened it. It was amazing. The flavor was incredible. None of the three jars had any mold.

In the jars that I made I added carrot, onion, and serrano. I haven't bothered with adding extras to the recipe since. The basic recipe works great.

If this place ever gets a recipe section (I'm not lobbying for one, but if...) this recipe should be in it. Thanks.