The Great Sauerkraut Experiment (Part 3)

It has been 5 weeks now since I started my first batch of sauerkraut. I tried another taste today and decided it had fermented perfectly! It was tangy but not too sour and the cabbage, while soft, still had a faint crunch at the thicker parts. Now it's time to can it.

This part of the process is fairly simple. In one large pot, I brought about 6-8 quarts of water to a rolling boil and processed quart sized mason jars and lids for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, in a second large pot, I heated the sauerkraut to a simmer. To make this easier, I cooked to sauerkraut in two batches. I packed the jars and topped them off with brine before sealing them. I ended up with seven and a half quarts of sauerkraut.

Which brings us to Batch #2. You would think that seven plus quarts of sauerkraut would be enough to last for a while. I mean, I would certainly think so. My wife Kat, on the other hand, thinks differently. Kat is a cabbage convert, you see. When we met, she hated all things cabbage. I've slowly been bringing her around. One of her new enthusiasms is sauerkraut, which she has become an even bigger proponent of after the success of Batch #1. So we're going to do another bucket of kraut, this one even bigger than the last. In this batch I'm using:

2 large heads green cabbage, sliced thin

1 head purple cabbage, sliced thin

4 yellow onions, sliced thin

4 large cayenne peppers, seeded and sliced thin

5 jalapeno peppers, seeded and sliced thin

5 carrots, shredded

2 T caraway seeds

1 T yellow mustard seeds

1 T brown mustard seeds

1 T celery seeds 

sea salt

The purple cabbage will lend a ruby color to the sauerkraut. I also added a great deal more peppers than Batch #1 as spiciness was the one thing Kat and I felt was missing from that batch. The first batch made about a half of a bucket with two gigantic heads of cabbage. The cabbage I'm using for Batch #2 are almost as large, and I decided that three heads would do a better job of filling the bucket.

Once again, I put all the ingredients in the bucket, layer by layer, with liberal sea salt sprinkled on top of each layer. It is important to remember to press down each layer as hard as you can, compacting the kraut as tightly as possible into the bucket. If the salt doesn't extract enough liquid from the vegetables to completely cover the top of the cabbage after a few hours, add salted brine. I have never had to do this, at least not yet. I put a plate on top of the cabbage and sealed plastic containers of water on top of the plate to hold it down so that it continually presses on the sauerkraut, keeping it all under the brine.

And so we begin another five week wait. I may wait longer and let it get really strong, if I can keep Kat out of it that long! I'll let you know how it turns out. As always, feel free to post your comments, questions and stories below.

Cheers!

You Can't Beat a Beet!

As I mentioned in the last post, our bimonthly produce haul landed me a couple of pounds of golden beets. I've never pickled a beet before so I turned to Alton Brown and took a few tips from him, notably the idea of roasting the beets before canning them.

I had 2 bunches of beets, about 8 medium sized bulbs. I prepared 4 pint sized jars but it turned out I only needed 3. I started by heating the oven to 400 degrees. I lined a 9"x13" dish with foil and added the following:

about 8 medium beets 

a large onion, roughly chopped

2 sprigs of rosemary

about 2 T olive oil

I placed a piece of foil over the top and baked them for about an hour, until the beets began to soften slightly. I took them out and allowed the beets to cool until they could be handled. I then sliced them about 1/4" thick. While the beets were cooling, I mixed together in a small saucepan:

1 c red wine vinegar

1 c water

1/2 c sugar

2 t kosher salt

I brought this mixture to a boil, dissolving the salt and sugar. Meanwhile, I took each of the sterilized jars and filled them, layering the beets with:

1 med red onion, thinly sliced

I also threw a small sprig of rosemary into each jar. Once each of the jars was tightly filled (I had to press down on the beets a little to pack them in), I added enough of the vinegar mixture to cover the beets. I tightly sealed each of the jars and immersed each back into the boiling water and processed them for 10 minutes.

The pickling did not stop with beets. I spent the rest of the weekend pickling everything from our latest produce order that I could get my hands on! We had a couple of heads of cauliflower, bunches of rainbow carrots, purple bell peppers, banana peppers, onions, garlic and green beans. With these I added pickling spices in different combinations - coriander seeds, brown and yellow mustard seeds, dill weed, cinnamon, cloves, and star anise. I ended up with about 8 quarts of pickled veggies!

Next on my hit list are tomatoes. It's been such a bad year in the northwest for tomatoes, however, that I'm not sure if we'll be doing too many of those. I'd also like to try pickling eggs, which I may do first if I can't get my mitts on the tomatoes! We shall see...!

The Great Sauerkraut Experiment (Part 2)

It's been one week since I started the sauerkraut. Immediately after the last post I realized that the pot lid I was using to weight down the cabbage would not in fact work because it was ringed with metal. I replaced it with a smaller version of the original plate and used a plastic mayonnaise jar filled with water and sealed tight as a weight to hold the plate down.

This has been working wonderfully! I checked in on the kraut a couple of times during the week, making sure it was still covered in liquid. Today, I gave it a taste. It is seasoned perfectly and is beginning to pickle, though the brine is still very mild. As the weeks go by, it's going to develop a very nice flavor. I can't wait!

All natural brine - no liquid has been added to this cabbage.

I pressed the sauerkraut back down as tightly as I could, making sure that all of the cabbage was covered. Placing the plate and weight back on caused the brine level to rise even more, well covering the sauerkraut. I will check it again in a week or so. The whole process should take anywhere from 5-10 weeks, after which I will pack the sauerkraut in jars for storage.

The Gentle Art of Ratio Cooking

Often as I have watched other more experienced cooks ply their trade, I have marveled at their freedom from using recipes, how they just seem to know how much of what to mix together to make a delicious moist cake or a creamy custard. Of course, experience has much to do with this skill but just as important is the understanding of cooking ratios - what they are and how to use them. This is where Michael Ruhlman's book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking comes to save the day!

This might just be the most important book about cooking that I have ever read. Sure, there are some fun and interesting recipe ideas within its pages but the point of the book is to get you away from thinking in recipes and to get you to see why the recipes work the way they do. If you know, for example, that a basic cookie dough is 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat, and 3 parts flour, you can use this 1:2:3 ratio to make just about any cookie your imagination can come up with! When you understand that muffins are 2 parts flour, 2 parts liquid, 1 part egg, and 1 part butter, you will have hundreds of recipes at your fingertips and will have the freedom to improvise with whatever flavor combinations you might have on hand at the moment. That, I believe, is what this book is really all about - culinary freedom. As Alton Brown put it, "...having a ratio in hand is like having a secret decoder ring that frees you from the tyranny of recipes." So many cooks are slaves to the recipe to the extent that when they are forced to forgo a pre-written recipe, they are lost and their cooking suffers. Knowing what works and why it works is a big part of elevating your cooking from being just food to being art.

One of the best things about reading this book was that fact that I constantly found myself stopping and pondering the possibilities of the ratios Ruhlman discusses. I had never thought of using a Pâte à Choux (cream puff dough) as a base for dumplings in chicken stew but I can't wait to try! His explanation of the difference between a roux and a beurre manié has made me rethink the way I was making gravy, a basic sauce that I thought I had completely mastered.

The approach discussed in this wonderful book is so basic and yet is the foundation for literally everything else that happens in the kitchen. These are, as the title of the book claims, simple codes. With practice and technique, you will be whipping up handmade seafood sausages, fresh wild mushroom raviolis, and homemade butterscotch without ever cracking open a single cookbook. And that my friends is what the true Art of Cooking is really all about!

The Great Sauerkraut Experiment (Part 1)

Sauerkraut. One of the easiest dishes to make and yet, like so many easy dishes, one I have never attempted. Today, I'm changing all that. My darling wife, in an effort to encourage the creation of said sauerkraut, purchased 2 very large heads of cabbage, each over a foot across. I designated Saturday to be Sauerkraut Day.

The first thing I needed to do was to procure a food grade plastic bucket. My plan was to go purchase one at the store but Kat, ever frugal, managed to find a couple for free by calling around bakeries and donut places. I got 2 five gallon buckets from Voodoo Doughnut, giving my sauerkraut a world-famous edge right from the get-go! I went out this morning, brought the buckets home and washed them real good. (After all, the last thing I want is frosting flavored sauerkraut - though it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Voodoo came up with a sauerkraut flavored doughnut! But I digress...)

Once I had my buckets nice and clean, I began preparing my vegetables. My original intention was to do two separate buckets, flavoring each differently. I found, however, that this was not going to work and opted to put it all in one bucket. The problem I had was that once I got the veggies in the bucket, the plates I had planned on using to hold the cabbage down wouldn't fit! The only thing in my kitchen I could find was an old pot lid but there was only one. I will leave the flavor experimenting for later.

I gathered my vegetables together and cleaned them well. I sliced and diced a little at a time, putting a layer in the bucket then covering it with a tablespoon or two of sea salt. I continued to pack in layer after layer, pressing each down as hard as I could and covering each with a sprinkle of salt. Here's what I put in:

2 huge heads of cabbage, quartered, cored and sliced thin
3 good sized carrots, shredded
3 large white onions, quartered and sliced
2 heads of garlic, cloves removed, peeled and chopped
2 jalapeno peppers, seeded and chopped fine
approx. 3-4 T caraway seeds
approx. 1 T celery seeds

I mixed all these ingredients together real well and pressed them down as hard as I could. I took the pot lid that fit inside the bucket (now half full) and covered the cabbage, making sure that the lid covered all of the cabbage. I let it sit for an hour or so and then checked in on it. The salt had already done a great job of extracting the water and juices from the vegetables and when I pressed down, the liquid covered the top of the lid. This is a very good sign as this is the liquid that the sauerkraut will ferment in. If for some reason the salt had not pulled enough liquid out of the veggies by the time they had sat for a day, I would have added enough salt water to cover the cabbage. With this current batch, however, this step will be unnecessary. With everything in order, I sealed up the bucket and let it sit.

Tomorrow I will check on the cabbage and, if all is well, I will move the bucket to the basement. Placing it in a cooler location will mean that it will take longer to ferment but I'm in no hurry. It should take at least a couple of months to completely ferment, though it could sit longer. If I were to ferment it in a warmer location, it could be done in as little as 4-5 weeks. I will check on it every couple of days or so and will be writing more as the process goes along.