How to make Sauerkraut 101 and a secret ingredient! Homesteading Life

[Music] hi and welcome back to the garden it is a cloudy day today we've been having tons and tons of rain it's two inches one day two and a half inches the next three inches so right now i'm in between rainstorms and i'm here with some of my brassicas i got quite a few of cabbages and i have some cauliflower and broccoli mixed in here but i have a lot of my brassicas throughout the garden because this is probably one of my favorites and i like it and i try to get it as early as i can hopefully by the end of march i try to get all that in so that i will have plenty of this food that i could preserve you know for future to last until next season and the great thing about these brassicas especially my cabbage it works so well in the cooler weather so we have nice cool springs here in missouri where we are so they grow very well but if they don't grow well if you don't get them in soon enough because i know a lot of people are saying i can never grow it why can't i grow it well the trick is you need to really get in there you might need to be in the garden in your coat and your scarf on but generally if you have a long enough growing season you can get it and you have those cooler temperatures especially early on so right now as you can see come on down here let's look some of my cabbage is starting to get little bitty heads on it there's a little guy in there can you see it so they're starting to develop and i'm waiting anxiously so i can preserve this but what i wanted to do today is some of my other neighbors have already had some of this cabbage already come to harvest and i was lucky enough to be gifted some so what i wanted to do is bring you along into the outside kitchen with me right now and make a recipe with you so come on inside [Music] [Music] [Music] well now we're back in the outside kitchen as you can see i'm cutting up some red cabbage cabbage that i had our neighbors had given me a couple of them so i thought it would be a great day to come with you guys and make a special kind of sauerkraut and this is not just any sauerkraut it's going to be a sauerkraut that i'm going to mix with apples so i had a friend of mine who went out of town and you know when you want to clear out your refrigerator because you're not going to use your stuff so she gave me some apples so i got some apples and i'm going to make an apple sauerkraut doesn't it sound delicious and a lot of people are like oh i don't like sauerkraut because you know a lot of you guys might have been having the kind that you have in the store and the can that's been heated this is going to be a raw sauerkraut a wonderful fermented sauerkraut and if you've never tried homemade homemade sauerkraut it is amazing it has a wonderful flavor and especially with the apples you guys are going to be amazed at how delicious this is and it's easy really you're only going to need a couple ingredients you're going to need one like big cabbage head or two smaller ones it can be any color it can be regular yellow cabbage or it can be a red cabbage and you're gonna just need a couple apples i'm gonna do i did three apples i've already cut up one three apples and some salt that's all you're gonna need to make this recipe and it's so simple so the first thing i did with my cabbage is i rinsed it off and i peeled a few of the outer leaves off like this because i'm going to use that for later so you don't want to have the immediate blemish leaves you want one like underneath or so that's not blemished and i just rinsed them off really good my cabbages and then i'm just going to cut them shred them up and you guys can shred them however you feel comfortable shredding them up so if you like them really little pieces or if you want bigger pieces it's up to you it's very therapeutic cutting up your your cabbage but for some of you guys that don't know is doug and i we moved out here it's been now going on over 13 years at the time we moved here i didn't have a water source we were just first moving off grid and it was like you know how am i going to preserve a lot of this harvest we grew this great big garden so i'm looking into how the people did it thousands years ago and look to find out everyone fermented they were fermenting just using salt for preservation and so i thought you know let's do it you know so and i look back and i look at my grandmother i'm armenian and my grandmother used to do all this stuff you know and as a kid you don't remember or pay attention to all that you just kind of take it for granted and she was doing a lot of this stuff already and i had no clue but she had brought all these same kind of traditions and knowledge from the old country and you know you could kick yourself for not paying attention us as adults you know you are like oh my gosh you know why didn't i listen to my mom or my dad or my grandparents when they talked when they were doing these things and then you have to relearn a lot of this stuff so needless to say did a lot more studying kind of kind of looked into all this and so that's how i preserve probably 90 90 or more of my harvest is through fermentation and fermentation will last many many months i have many ferments at last year or over and it depends on what it is because when you ferment it you have like little microorganisms so here's my cabbage right there's microorganisms on different things like here's a lemon there's micro organisms on this here is a apple same thing so those little microorganisms when you ferment them you know and when you hear the word fermenting and you hear about probiotics probiotics are basically like a good bacteria it's good bacteria that you're putting inside of you because you have good and bad bacteria and those good bacteria are going to go in there and maybe get rid of some of the bad bacteria if you have too many and then that way you want an equal balance of good and bad bacteria because unfortunately in this day and age a lot of us have more bad bacteria and then sickness and disease can happen you can have you know other issues arise because of that so just by adding a little bit of a fermented food every day could definitely help because when you ferment something it's going to produce lactic acid like lactic acid bacteria that's why a lot of times you hear this is called lacto fermentation and lacto doesn't mean dairy a lot of people get confused with that but lacto it's lactic acid bacteria and that is like the good bacteria the good probiotic bacteria and then that bacteria is what is going to make your ferment safe and healthy and then it's going to produce a beautiful ferment that you guys can enjoy and it gives it that sour kind of flavor because you know when you have a pickle like a fermented pickle or you're tasting some fermented foods it has that slightly kind of acidic or kind of tangy flavor and also when you ferment something it's going to taste it kind of gives it a it just it kind of enhances the flavor so that's what i love about it and it can really make a meal rock so if you're adding a little sauerkraut to a sandwich or on your soup or or in your salads it just really tastes good and i really enjoy this apple one because it's so easy to do and then another thing that's really cool about fermentation it makes it more available to your body when you do consume it so it makes it more bio-available you're able to like i digest and assimilate it better because a lot of this is already broken down a lot because the fibers are being eaten up and digested a little bit better like you hear about yogurt yogurt the lactose is broken down a little bit more a lot of the sugars and starches like if you make kombucha people are like oh i can't do that much sugar well majority of all that sugar in that has been eaten up too so that's what kind of helps it and then your body is is able to assimilate it better and another cool thing about it is you all often hear that you have your second brain is in your gut and it kind of affects you know you have your your feel good chemicals the serotonin and all that good stuff and uh you know if you have a happy gut it can make you happier too so i know for me personally if i don't have my fermented food every day i'm not in as good of a mood believe it or not so true and it also helps you stay regular and i mean it's just it's great but you want to be careful when you are eating it you don't want to eat the whole jar because it tastes good a lot of people like oh this is so good but you're putting a lot of those good bacteria in there and they're you know getting rid of a lot of those bad guys too and you might get a little gas and bloating if you eat too much so generally when you first start a tablespoon or two is fine and then you might work up to having you know something with every meal so you know that saying you know you don't want to do too much of a good thing my cabbage is all chopped up now just the second ingredient that i'm going to use are my apples i've already chopped up one apple and i did put some lemon juice on it so that they would brown so i already didn't do that but all i'm going to do is chop up my apple and the neat thing about fermenting some people might want to shred this you could shred it if you wanted to if you want it you know a little thinner or put it in a kind of a food processor and kind of pulse it a little bit and do it that way you know it's your choice that's what i like about you know cooking in general it's like you kind of do what you like what your family likes how people like it and just kind of do it to your taste so i'm just going to chop up these apples and i'm going to put about three of them in here i generally like to make this apple kraut when we have apple season but i got some apples so i'm going to make it because it is one of my favorites because it that that taste between you know that cabbagey kind of taste kind of soury with a little bit of the sweetness it always goes great together got one more apple left i know a lot of people you know might be taking probiotics so you're going to the store and you're paying high dollar for these probiotics when you guys can make them and unfortunately a lot of times with these probiotics that you buy you might only get a few different strains and then you're taking the same strains all the time for months and months and months and months when you need a diverse variety of them in your gut so that's why it's good to ferment some things and try different types so like i like to ferment everything you can do mustard you can do ketchup you can do salsa you can do you know fermented dilly beans you can make beets you can do anything and then that way you're getting all those little diverse microorganisms and you're getting a wide array of them inside of your digestive tract what i wanted to tell you is dr mercola if some of you guys are familiar with him he did a study he sent in two tablespoons of his homemade sauerkraut so he sent it in and they tested it and they found out that his two tablespoons just two tablespoons of homemade sauerkraut had more probiotics in it than a whole hundred 100 pills of like pills that you get of probiotics isn't that crazy so just by doing it from scratch and homemade what a difference that was and also depends how long you fermented and because the longer you're gonna ferment you're gonna get a little bit more so what i'm going to do here i got everything chopped up really good i'm going to mix it all up the main ingredient here that's going to do all the magic is your salt and i always tell you guys not any salt will work my favorite salt to use is the redmond real salt right here from the united states in utah you know it's locally mined in source it's been protected it's an ancient seabed it has the best taste it really enhances the flavor of my ferments and i buy it in bulk all the time i think the salt will really make or breaker from it you do not want a refined salt because it may have iodine in it and it could ruin your ferment so definitely you don't want that you want a real salt that has not been um bleached or contaminated or anything like that so redmond real salt you can go to off and you can get it buy it in bulk and get a discount so what we're going to do here i need my tablespoon we are going to put some salt in here now for sauerkraut because it's hard sometimes you have a head that might be really big really little and i know you can do your fermenting by weight but i think over the past few years i've kind of changed my tune on how i ferment when i do my sauerkraut i'm going to put some on here and i'm going to taste it so i'm gonna start off with one heaping tablespoon of my unrefined salt and i'm gonna start massaging it and start to break down some of the fibers of my cabbage and once it breaks down just a little bit i'm going to give it a taste and add a little bit more because salt is what's going to preserve this okay and then when you ferment you got to remember too little salt is going to cause mold okay too much salt could halt the ferment and stop it so you don't want to have too much or too little for like a quart sized jar you can go anywhere between one tablespoon and three tablespoons and that generally works for most everything except for we don't want to get into too much but pickles are a little different because they're more juicy they have more liquid so they'll absorb more and you can go a little bit more for like a pickle and that's another thing when you guys are fermenting a lot of times you'll have vegetables and you let them sit around a long time and when you let them sit down and sit around a long time they lose some of their moisture so they're not they won't produce as much liquid when you ferment them like if you had really old cabbage it may not produce quite as much and i can really tell that these are a little fresher and it's good therapy it smells good okay so i have it all mixed up with my heaping tablespoon of salt so now what i'm gonna do is taste it so what i taste it i want it to taste salty but i don't want to taste it where it tastes really bad salty if that you guys get that so it wants to be a little salty but not bad bad salty so i'm going to put a little bit more in here because right now it just tastes teeny teeny teeny bit salty i'm going to put a little bit more so i had one heaping and then i'm going to probably put half of a tablespoon in there so this might have ended up to be about almost two tablespoons or so so i'm just gonna keep breaking it down it's amazing when you started how full it was and then by the end it's gonna really squish down so here is the recipe simple and basic just apples salt and cabbage i'm gonna put a wrench in it because one of my favorite things to add to sauerkraut i think it just makes it rock is caraway seeds right here caraway seeds so i'm going to sprinkle some of them in here too so if you guys like the taste of caraway seeds then you'll love this so just put that in there or you don't have to do it at all because it'll be good both ways i'm going to massage this you know a couple more minutes and then i'm going to put a towel over it and i'm going to run around and do a few things around here and then i'm going to come back and by then it'll produce some juice and then i'll show you what we're going to do next all right we're back it's i guess it's probably been about 30 40 minutes or so and uh let's see how much juice it's gotten oh yeah it's got some nice juice in there and as it ferments over the next day or so day or two it's going to produce more liquid so what you're going to do is get your jar now if you want to go ahead you can use quart size jars you can use a gallon jar you can use half gallon jars you can do it however you want i just use my little funnel and i'm going to pack it in there just like this now the one thing that is really cool about making it with the red cabbage you are going to end up having a beautiful colored ferment so i'll show you what happens like this is a yellow cabbage i fermented with a little bit of red cabbage and look how it turned pink just from the red cabbage so whatever you use red cabbage with if you ferment it it will change it to this really pretty color now what i think is really nifty is i have one of these acacia wood packers and they're wonderful because this wider end is for a wide mouth jar and then the smaller one is for a regular mouth jar and i like to get some of my fermenting things from mason tops and all you're going to do is it's going to allow you to mush it down because i want to get all that luscious cabbage in that jar so now i can put more in a little bit more [Music] now the rule is when you ferment you definitely want to keep some head space at the top i usually like to say about an inch and a half head space and i always use my finger so each one of your lines and your fingers an inch so i go about an inch and a half from the top so i definitely want to go to about there so i'll put a little bit more in there [Music] see all the juice in there already so now what i'm going to do is use the juice and i'm going to pour it over my ferment [Music] and this is one of my favorite tools what i ferment is a chopstick so all you're going to do is i stick it in there because the liquid kind of gets trapped because you're pressing it and packing it so tightly so you want to make sure that all that liquid goes in between all the vegetables in there and the apple so did you see how it all just got sucked up in there now sometimes you get some little air pockets in there okay look at that the juice is coming up ooh that was perfect sometimes you may not get a lot of juice that you're produced on that so you could if you don't hardly have any sometimes i've added a little filtered water to my sauerkraut you can do that um or just wait like in the next day or two it's going to produce some more liquid and sometimes you don't get enough you might need to add a little bit you can maybe get a little water and just put you know like a teaspoon of salt in there mix it up and then pour it over it and then make a little brine and you can just do that but right now this was turned out good that's what you get for getting fresh vegetables so now i'm gonna use the top i that i have the big piece of cabbage and i'm gonna pack it in there really good because that's gonna protect my cabbage push it under that brine really good and protect it so it doesn't get any air to it whatsoever so right now all my apple kraut the cabbage the caraway seeds and and the cabbage and the apples are all underneath the brine and this big cabbage cabbage leaf is pushing it down i have an inch and a half head space i'm going to wipe off my top and then i need a fermenting top so this is by mason tops you can go to off-grid with duganstacy.com and go to the shop tab just like with the real salt and you can get a discount there too so this top there's a little hole in the top that's going to let the gases that start to build up during the fermentation process you know that good lactic acid it's going to go out but it won't let the bad stuff in so you're going to put that on top and i like to use these because it's hands-free fermenting now if you don't have a mason tops like i use all you're going to need is just a flap put it on top like that and then i would put it on a plate you're going to set it somewhere in your house at room temperature away from direct sunlight and you're going to let it ferment anywhere you know from 7 to 14 days so after seven days or so you might want to go in there give it a taste and then see how it tastes and then if you want it a little bit more tangy go a few more days i generally like to go you know closer to 14 but it depends also if it's very hot and humid out it's going to ferment quicker so room temperature you know generally between 62 70 to 75 degrees will be a pretty good ferment the hotter it gets it's going to ferment a lot quicker so just be aware of that that's why you want to go less on the number of days so seven or 14 days or so and then when you're finished you'll take off your lid take off the cabbage leaf and then if you have the fermenting top you'll replace it with a regular lid just like this and then you're going to put this in cold storage so you can either put in a refrigerator or down in a root cellar and it will last you many months and it's wonderful you can add it with you know your meals if you're having some chicken or if you want to put it on your salad or just eat it by itself it's just a wonderful way to add a little bit of a fermented food to your diet it tastes wonderful and it's simple to do so i bet you guys are wondering i know a lot of you were like what is she going to do with the rest of that and what are you going to do with the cores of your cabbage don't throw them away because they're wonderful so i'm going to do is chop them up really really nice because tonight when we have our salad every day doug and i i try to make a great big salad with lots of different things in it leafy greens and all this wonderful cruciferous vegetables because they're so good at detoxification so i'm going to use what's left over the apples with that and probably put some sunflower seeds in there and at strawberry season we've been getting lots of strawberries also so maybe i'll put some strawberries and kind of make a like a fruity kind of salad because i got the apples in there too so i'm going to go ahead and just put all this together and then i'll get some greens from the garden and i'll mix this on up put some nuts some strawberries and i think it'll be good well if i get a little pep in my step by the end of this video maybe i'll show you what the salad looks like we'll see stay tuned for that one i have super super super good news for everyone finally i'm so thankful for a lot of you guys that have been so patient that did pre-order my fermenting book that i wrote it is finished it's at the printer now yay i'm so happy it is finished it has over a hundred recipes actually i have 101 recipes when i talk about honey ferments i talk about vegetable ferments i talk about fruit ferments i talk about ferments that my grandmother did i talk about sourdough i talk about drinks i do condiments it's got everything in it so if you guys are interested in my fermenting book you can go to off grid with doug and stacey.com too and go to the shop tab and you can find it there but it is it the printer's finally yay so thanks again for you guys being patient waiting for such a long time but what i want you guys to do is leave me a comment below if you guys are going to start this will be your first ferment that you ever have done i want you to try it let me know if you are or if you're going to try this at all i can't wait to hear from you and you know have a beautiful wonderful day and i'll see you soon bye [Music] you

Channel: OFF GRID with DOUG & STACY

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Keywords: Off Grid with Doug and Stacy, Doug and Stacy, Doug, Stacy, Off Grid, off the grid, off the grid living, off the grid homes, off grid living, off grid cabin, off grid with Doug and Stacy, off grid solar power system, off grid house, off grid homestead, off grid solar, homestead, homesteading, homesteading for beginners, homesteading off the grid, cooking from scrtch, self sufficient, growing food, how to grow food

Id: at8xumffvgc

Length: 25min 39sec (1539 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2022