In a way, it's fitting that the first project I started for this blog was not a success. It provides a window with a view onto cooking's experimental nature. Just how long did it take for some of these early cooks -- members of Germanic tribes, flocking into Europe in the fourth century AD from the Asian steppes,* who existed without ready access to a food-blog saturated Internet, let alone a concept of chemistry -- come upon a chemically-intensive process that preserves this nourishing, abundant vegetable? They did what I did, albeit much, much, much more intensively. Some of those early Germans might not have survived their first few experiments with fermentation.
My grandmothers gave me some ideas, albeit after the experiment died. "You have to use bricks to weigh it down!" "We had it [sic] wooden barrels, and we put it in the ground." I don't have the space to dig, nor do I want to buy barrels, but I can probably procure some bricks.
I followed the restaurant's recipe for sauerkraut, which I had made once before. After thoroughly cleaning the cabbage and slicing it into thin strips, I weighed it. From there, I could determine the amount of salt I would need to add, which is equal to five percent of the cabbage's weight.
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| This is some salty cabbage. |
I combined the cabbage and salt well, with clean hands. The salt will draw out much of the moisture from the cabbage, providing your natural brine. I packed this entire mixture, salty water and all, into a clean container, covering it with a layer of plastic wrap. This was weighted down with a plastic bag filled with water, which would put pressure on the cabbage evenly and entirely. Next time, I will probably use bricks to this end.
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| My makeshift sauerkraut weight. |
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| Cabbage: cut, salted, packed tight, ready to ferment! Only most of these things actually happened. |
After wrapping the entire container with Saran wrap, I left it to ferment for five weeks in a cool, dark garage.
The "sauerkraut," however, was not at all sour. The product of this first experiment was merely a batch of salty cabbage. The cabbage probably needed more time to ferment, during what has been a particularly cold California winter. This recipe was ready in three weeks at the restaurant -- but that was in August, when the dry storage's cooling unit was on the fritz. The heat had allowed the restaurant's batch to, so to speak, mature sooner.
Being paranoid that I had introduced harmful bacteria after disturbing the mixture, I relegated it to the compost. My next experiment with sauerkraut will take a two pronged approach: another stab at the restaurant's recipe, and one more following Sandor Katz's guidelines. Hopefully, these attempts will produce some proper sauerkraut that will find itself into proper recipes.
*See A History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat (2009) for more geekworthy food history
