In this chapter you’ll learn everything you need to know about making sauerkraut, and in the next, its variation, condiments. We’ll walk you through the process, showing you the steps in photographic detail, to set you on the path to becoming a fermentation (c)rock star. When you understand how the ingredients work, you can make any variations that strike your fancy.
Kraut making is wonderful for people who don’t like to measure, who use formal recipes as a jumping-off point. That said, our recipes do include measurements, but if you have a bit more cabbage than the recipe calls for, toss it in; the ferment won’t suffer.
The ingredients are cabbage and salt. As a matter of fact, one of us — we won’t name names — would jump feet-first into the cabbage and make a barrel of kraut without knowing any more than that. We want you to make a life-changing first batch, however, so read on before you tackle any of the kraut recipes.
We’ll start with the cabbage, then delve into salting, brining, and curing your budding ferment.
Our essential vegetable, the cabbage, comes in a variety of sizes. It ranges from a tiny, dense head bred for single-person households to the size of a soccer ball.
For our purposes, one cabbage assumes a 2-pound, tightly packed head. If the heads you have are loose, adjust with some extra leaves. If the heads are exceptionally large and heavy, use one and some extra leaves in a recipe that calls for two.
Then there’s the giant, homegrown cabbage that’s about to set seed and is loosening for that reason. The head becomes slightly cone-shaped and will eventually open, when the core develops into a flower shoot. At the cone-head stage, you can still make kraut. If it opens too much, though, the leaves are drier, tougher, and greener, and the flavor is different. At that point, it’s just not kraut-worthy.
Through the miracle of cold storage and refrigerated shipping, you can always find cabbages. They’re a staple. Unglamorous. Peasant food. But they’re also quite amazing in their variety: there are summer cabbages, fall cabbages, and winter cabbages. Cabbages are a hardy cool-season crop. In northern climates the season begins as the spring-planted cabbages ripen in June and July. This season can last through January or February, but by April cabbages are being shipped from southern farmlands. This is something to be aware of when you want to make a big batch of kraut and are looking for the freshest cabbage possible. Out-of-season cabbages are likely more expensive, and they may be dry from long hauling and storage times.
So what do you look for? You want firm heads with crisp, shiny leaves. (They look dull as they lose vitality.) Check for damage on the outer leaves. If a head is cracked or bruised, chances are there’s interior damage. Bypass pre-cut, plastic-wrapped cabbages; they’re already losing nutrients.
If you’re harvesting from the garden, cut a head right off the root but let some outer leaves remain. It’ll sprout baby cabbages from the sides of the root core.
After coring and shredding the cabbage, it’s time to add salt. Don’t let this cause you anxiety. While encouraging bacteria seems like a project for the science lab, it is an organic process that has a very tolerant range of what is acceptable. Just as in cooking, there is a degree of flexibility in the amount of salt that tastes right in a dish.
Though these recipes all contain a recommended amount, it is best to begin with half that amount. Taste. You want to taste the salt, but not be overwhelmed by it. Slowly build up to the recommended amount, but don’t be afraid to stop if your mixture is beginning to taste too salty. If you find it too salty, add more cabbage. If it’s tasty fresh, it will be delicious fermented.
Please, please, please taste your kraut while you are making it. It is the simplest way to ensure success. Make sure you can taste the salt, but it should not be “briny,” “salty,” or in any way unpalatable. Remember: If it is good fresh, it will be excellent fermented.
If it’s a regular or small batch, you can add the salt after all the cabbage and any accompanying veggies are shredded. If you’re doing a very large batch, sprinkle in the salt as you shred and transfer the cabbage to a bowl. This will begin to break down the cell walls and release the juices even before mixing and will help ensure that the salt is spread throughout the batch.
Once the salt is added you’ll massage it in with your fingers. Be sure you have washed your hands well in warm soapy water (remember, don’t use antibacterial soap, as it can interfere with the fermentation process). Don’t be afraid to use your fingers. The process of massaging cabbage is similar to kneading bread dough. Pick some up in your hands and squeeze it. Think deep-tissue Swedish massage, not a gentle back rub. Repeat this process, working through the entire batch. Almost instantly, the cabbage will start glistening, looking wet and limp. There will be a puddle of liquid pooling at the bottom of the bowl. For a large batch, massaging is more of a workout.
When we make 10-gallon crocks of kraut, we thoroughly work in the salt and let the batch sit, covered, so that exposure to air doesn’t dry it out. After about an hour we toss and massage it again for a few minutes just to get everything mixed. At this point there is brine building at the bottom. We then let it sit again, often through the rest of the day. Periodically we mix it a bit. At the end of the day it has produced a lot of brine and is ready to be pressed into the crock — the salt does the work.
You have salted, mixed, and massaged your shredded kraut, but when you squeeze, it is like milking the proverbial turnip. No liquid. Sometimes this happens when veggies are simply drier than usual, which can happen with long refrigeration periods. Sometimes it’s because the veggies were not sliced thin enough. Here are some solutions.
First, taste it one more time. If you think it can take more salt, sprinkle in just a bit. If adding more salt was the answer, it’s time to pack. If you still don’t have enough brine, there are a few more tricks.
With or without added salt, maybe just a little time apart will help the relationship. Cover your bowl and set it aside for about an hour. When you return, the salt should have continued to break down the cell walls of the cabbage, and you should have more brine.
Now massage your kraut again. It should be wetter, but if you are thinking, “So that didn’t work, now what?” you could try packing the kraut and pressing it into a crock or jar. You might find a thin brine layer at the top; thin is enough, as long as the cabbage is submerged. If there is still not enough, put it all back in the bowl. Now you have some choices.
Do not add salt water to sauerkraut! Other kraut makers might tell you otherwise, but in our experience this can cause a discoloration and possibly a mushy kraut. (As you will read later, this rule does not apply to kimchi or pickles.) The simplest option is to add other veggies that are known to give off a lot of liquid. Believe it or not, turnips are one of them. (Maybe you can milk a turnip!) Grate your turnips, or use very thinly sliced onions, grated carrots, or beets. In this book we are defining grated, or sometimes shredded, as processed with a medium grater blade, unless otherwise specified.
The next option is to find another kind of liquid that will enhance the quality of your kraut. A few tablespoons of lemon juice, bottled or fresh, can save the day. The lemon flavor will be subtle, as it gets lost in the acidity that you are creating with the fermentation. If you want to taste the lemon, add the zest also. You can also use fresh-squeezed orange, lime, or grapefruit juice. If you have leftover fermented brine from previous batches of krauts, or pickle juice, you may use that as well, keeping in mind the potential effect on flavor.
If you really want simple unadulterated cabbage sauerkraut, then there are two more possibilities for creating more brine. One is to bring out the pounder and beat more liquid out. With too vigorous an effort you risk softer kraut, but this is a time-honored practice. Another method many people use is to take a bit less than a quarter of the volume of your batch and blend it. Return this kraut “smoothie” to your batch and proceed. This is not our favorite solution; we find the crisp, crunchy texture suffers.
You might be wondering about whey. A lot of sauerkraut recipes call for whey to inoculate the vegetables. This will help add to the brine volume.
However, good-quality raw whey can be difficult to find and we generally don’t recommend it anyway. It is an unnecessary extra step. Remember, vegetables already have the necessary bacteria for fermentation. To use an inoculant such as whey might in the beginning speed up the process by which the lactobacilli overwhelm the undesirable bacteria, but it is by no means necessary. The process will continue through the same progression of the different members of the lactic-acid bacteria family without adding whey. We also avoid using whey because our priority is flavor, and sometimes whey can leave a slightly “cheesy” or “sour milk” flavor.
Don’t be concerned if the vast contents of your bowl look like they will never fit into your crock or jar. Start by placing a small amount in the bottom of your crock, about an inch or so. Compress this with your fist, or a flat-bottomed kitchen utensil, like a straight-sided (French-style) rolling pin, the plunger from a juicer, or a potato masher (see Tampers). When this is compacted, add a bit more and press again. Make sure that you are forcing the air bubbles out as you go. As you move up through the vessel, you will notice that the liquid is increasing. Meanwhile, the volume in your bowl is decreasing, and you might be wondering if you made enough. Keep pressing.
Your crock will be full when you have around 4 inches of space between the brine and the top rim; this is called headspace. In a 5- or 10-gallon crock, you should aim for around 6 inches of expansion room. In a jar, the vegetables should reach just below the shoulder. You need 2 to 3 inches from the top of the jar rim to the top of the brine — enough room so that even with a follower and a weight, all your hard-fought-for brine doesn’t bubble out onto the counter.
No room left in the crock and still half a bowl of limp vegetables? Find an appropriate-sized jar and follow the same instructions. Or if you like the taste, it might just be the vegetable salad side dish you needed for dinner, or a pre-chopped vegetable for soup.
This is the time for the primary follower, which in this case can be a large outer cabbage leaf (or a small sheet of plastic wrap); it will keep the shredded bits from floating above the brine. Tuck the leaf under the shoulder of the jar or crock to secure it.
Place your secondary follower and a weight in your crock or jar. Wedge it into place, with the brine covering it. Keep that oxygen out. You should be thinking, “Submerge! Conquers evil every time.”
If you have a crock with a lid or a jar with an airlock, you will put this in place. The airlock is designed to let the CO2 escape. Otherwise cover the top of the jar or crock loosely with a clean tea towel or muslin to keep out fruit flies or anything else that could fall into the brine. If you’re using a regular jar lid, don’t clamp it down; you want the CO2 to be able to escape.
Even if you left a lot of headspace, put your crock or jar on a plate or cookie sheet to catch escaping brine. Never underestimate the power of exhaling bacteria. In fact, carefully watch for the level of kraut rising above the brine. Check every day during the active phase at the beginning. You will need to apply pressure to force the air out and allow the brine to return to the top of the kraut. A small jar will need to be watched more carefully to keep the brine over the cabbage.
Now there is nothing left to do but to place your nascent kraut in a corner of your kitchen and wait. Keep it out of bright or direct light, though we find it’s better to expose your ferment to a little bit of light in your daily space than to keep it in an out-of-the-way closet where it will be forgotten, especially the small batches.
Most recommendations are to ferment between 55 and 75°F. Our preferred fermenting temperature is around 65°F because the ferment moves more slowly, stays crunchy, and develops good flavor before eventually becoming very sour. That said, we have found that if the ferment starts in the sweet zone for a few days, it can be moved to below 55°F (in a cellar or garage) and will keep fermenting at a slower rate, which can have advantages in developing the flavor. If you get below 45°F for sustained periods, it will hold slow and steady as if it were in a refrigerator.
Practically speaking, what does this mean in your home? No one knows the climate of your home better than you. If your kitchen counter is too warm in the height of summer, then look for a closet or basement that is cooler. One of our students puts his crock on a tile floor where the thermal mass of the floor is enough to keep the temperature constant. In winter, a crock on the top of a water heater could help keep fermentation active in a cold climate.
A trick we learned in cheese making is to control the climate with a portable ice chest. We would put ripening feta in the cooler and leave it open outside on the porch during cold evenings. In the morning we would close it and put it in a cool spot inside. In the heat of the summer we would add an ice pack. This was enough to maintain a relatively stable temperature. Conversely, a cooler can be used to keep your ferment a bit warmer in a cold situation.
Your crock or jar is in a corner. Things are happening. You wake up to a pool of brine on your counter; the bubbling is active. This sign of fermentation is comforting and easy to read. But for the novice fermentista, questions begin to arise. Perhaps the bubbling has stopped, or nothing is happening, or the bubbling never started as far as you can tell. Possibly something questionable is forming on top (for this we have provided a scum gallery).
In a perfect world you will begin to see action in your kraut the day after you’ve packed it. If you’re fermenting in a jar, you will see the little bubbles moving up through the cabbage similar to champagne. If you’re lucky enough to own a crock with a water seal, you will begin to hear an occasional bloop as the CO2 escapes. Sometimes, even though the kraut is actively fermenting, these signs are less obvious, or they don’t last very long. This is all within the range of normal. Krauts can be anything from explosively active to seemingly dead, and both are fine in the end.
Your job during active fermentation is a bit of a balancing act: you’re responsible for keeping those veggies submerged, so you’ll need to check your crock regularly, but at the same time you must try not to disturb it too much, as this can invite in unwelcome microbes and oxygen.
How long you’ll have to wait depends. A very small batch of kraut will be ready much sooner than a larger batch in a crock. If you’re making a small batch, watch it carefully, keep it pressed down under the brine, and taste it soon. It is these small batches that often get novice fermentistas into trouble. Since it is widely believed that kraut needs to sit for a week or three, the unsuspecting fermentista can easily let a batch spoil because small batches are difficult to keep weighted under the brine. In warm weather a small batch might be ready in as little as three days. Large crock sizes can take three weeks to a month or more.
Warmer incubation space and vegetables with a higher sugar content are often more active and require that you watch them a little more carefully to make sure everything stays submerged. Generally these are “ready” sooner. Remember, this is a live food exhibiting its terroir, or sense of place, climate, and season. This means that even when you follow the exact same procedure, your ferments will be different each time. This is the beauty and excitement of the art.
There are two things to consider: acidity level and taste. Acidity level is a clearly defined goal — anything below a 4.6 pH level (see A Ticking Crock). Taste is a matter of personal preference. There are as many opinions about active fermentation length as there are kraut makers. Some people will not even consider eating anything short of a six-week cure time, either because they like it sour, or perhaps more often because they have heard that the longer it ferments, the more probiotics there are in the crock. On the other hand, one person wrote in an online forum that she never left something on the counter for more than four days (keep in mind, this short a curing length may compromise the acidity level on some batches). The real answer to the question of how long to ferment your vegetable is most irritatingly vague: It depends.
How long do you ferment your pickles? ̓Til they’re perfect. Depending on the type of pickle, this can be anywhere from 24 hours to a year or more.
—Alex Hozven, owner, Cultured Pickle Shop, Berkeley, California
A small crock in a deep-summer kitchen will probably be acidic enough in as soon as three days. The larger the crock, or the cooler the room temperature, the longer it will take to reach a 4.6 pH or lower. Early on in the fermentation process, vegetables will taste acidic, as though lemon has been squeezed into them. You will also know your ferment is not quite there because it will taste dull, like a wilted salad. Although 4.6 pH is your goal, we have found most finished krauts are even more acidic — below 4 pH. And once you have reached that acidity level, “done” is again subjective. Let your senses make the decision for you.
After a few days, you can do your first taste-test on smaller batches. On multi-gallon batches this will be in one to two weeks. Carefully lift your weights and follower with clean hands. With a clean nonreactive utensil (stainless steel is fine), remove some of your veggies and taste them. Replace it all carefully, keeping everything submerged. Your weight will probably have some sediment on it; rinse it off with hot water before replacing.
Your kraut should already taste a bit sour. But it may still be a bit “green.” In other words, it will be like a half-sour pickle, without the full-bodied rounded flavor of the acidity and spices that a pickle develops, somewhere between the cucumber and the pickle it is becoming. Young sauerkraut is the same way. If you prefer this “half” flavor, you can put the ferment in the refrigerator to arrest the process. The spices will still deepen as it sits in the refrigerator. We think the best answer to the question “When is my kraut done?” is “When it tastes great.”
When fermenting in the kitchen, make sure your jar or crock isn’t too close to a refrigerator’s motor or fans; they could heat up your ferment without you knowing it.
If it’s not ready, rinse the followers and weight, put everything back in place, and continue monitering the brine level and watching for scum and mold.
