How to make sauerkraut!!! *Traditional German Sauerkraut*

hello everyone my name is marla and welcome to my very first video so i'm actually going to be doing something that i have been asked many many times about how i do this i'm going to be making sauerkraut so sauerkraut is such a beneficial food and not only is it delicious but it's very good for you it helps with your stomach it has lots of probiotics as well as many vitamins and minerals but the hard part that a lot of people come to is the fermentation process so whenever they're doing it most of the time something happens and it molds on them well i'm actually going to bring you step by step on how i actually create my sauerkraut the only difference is i do not use mason jars i will actually create a video on how to make sauerkraut in mason jars for you for if you want to make sauerkraut at home but you do not have a crock um so what i mean by a crock is i'm going to go ahead and flip you around real fast so that you can see what i mean so these are sauerkraut crocks a sauerkraut crock is actually made primarily for making fermentated foods such as sauerkraut or kimchi or anything like that um what happens is you put everything into the croc itself and when it ferments it actually releases the gas but no oxygen can actually get inside so what you actually end up doing is with your crocs you'll actually fill this area with water and when you put your lid on you have little hinges on your lids so where oxygen can release or the carbon dioxide can release out of the fermentation but no oxygen can get re um replaced into the jar because of the water that you actually have in that line um i have two sar two crocks that we are going to be filling today one is a 5 gallon which is 10 liters and then a half gallon which is roughly 5 liters i think no 0.2 liters um we're going to be filling them with of course our cabbage so you can see here i have eight heads of cabbage this will not be enough i actually have three more heads of cabbage in my refrigerator that we are going to be adding to this process but we're going to start off with the six heads first the purple cabbage is going to go into the mini crock and the green cabbage is going to go into the big croc okay so for this part of the process of course what we're going to do is we're going to take our cabbage and all of them have been pre-washed so all i have to do is peel them back and you'll actually peel back the first top layers of the leaves but keep them because we'll actually need them for pushing down all of the chopped cabbage this way nothing floats to the top and they'll go underneath the weights you'll need salt so i actually have here kosher salt you can use any kind of salt that you prefer whether it's pickling salt or pink salt or lava salt but you do have to keep in mind that if you're going to use um any salt other than kosher and pickling your sauerkraut is going to become very very cloudy and will take on a weird color so i prefer using kosher salt it helps uh with the breakdown a lot better as well as pickling salt pickling salt does the same thing um and they are actually really nice coarse grains so if you want to use any kind of salt i would recommend either pickling or kosher and i use morton's we will need caraway seeds so this may not be enough for how much we are going to be making at least in the five uh gallon crock so that's the one we're actually going to be doing first um i'm going to be needing caraway seeds and what i like to call eye of newt so i have new is actually just mustard seed mustard seed is actually wonderful it gives a great tang to your sauerkraut and will bring out a lot of the flavor notes of your caraway seeds the other thing that i like to use as well is juniper berries so juniper berries are a wonderful earthy flavor as well as piney in the sense if you like the flavor of juniper berries i highly recommend putting them into your sauerkraut we are actually going to be adding these to the purple sauerkraut not the green sauerkraut so another thing that people have asked me before is what's the difference between green purple and pink sauerkraut a lot of people think that your pink and your purple sauerkrauts have been dyed and that's not true um green sauerkraut or white sauerkraut whichever color you think it looks like in the jar actually just comes from green cabbage and pink sauerkraut is a blend of purple cabbage and green cabbage and purple sauerkraut is of course from purple cabbage alright so what i'm doing right now is i'm peeling off those outer leaves taking off all the super loose ones we don't need them and usually the super loose ones are going to be the ones that are a little bit tougher take those and place them off to the side because you will be needing them again while you are getting ready to be cutting up your cabbage i highly recommend doing the brine that you're going to need for this so with your brine depending on how much cabbage you are making depends on how much brine you will need um since i am doing the big croc we are actually going to be needing at least eight cups of brine so brine is for sauerkraut is just water and salt and you'll need it's one tablespoon of salt per one cup of water so since i have eight cups of water i'm going to need eight cups or eight tablespoons of salt this way you can make that set off the side and it can start uh dissolving all right so with sauerkraut you don't actually have to remove the cores you are more than welcome to if you like but i actually like to leave them in there i found that it has become a wonderful treat and it's basically a sauerkraut pickle in the sense and it's delicious and amazing and it's fun to snack on so we're actually going to take our cabbage cut it in half then again cut it in fourths so that it's easy to cut and then cut out the core the core we actually want to just go ahead throw into our bowl and what we're doing is when we cut it into quarters that's how that's the layering that we're going to be doing for the bruising of the cabbage go ahead and cut this one whenever you're cutting your cabbage you actually want to make sure that it is fairly thinly cut it's going to be very tedious but well worth it in the end so i'm going to start with this side now if you're one of those lucky people out there and you can get your hands on a crouch shedder or shredder i highly recommend getting yourself one because this can be very tedious and very painful on the hands all right so after we get our first quarter done i'm gonna throw it into the bowl and kind of break it up a little bit throw that all in there we're gonna take a pinch of salt put that over the top pinch a small pinch of mustard seed throw that in small pinch of caraway throw that in and then we're going to bruise it so most people and i typically would do this with a mallet but unfortunately i do not have one that's big enough to reach inside the croc that's why we're doing this into a side bowl and all you're going to do is squeeze and kind of pull almost basically take your anger out on it be perfect and this actually is a great stress reliever so we'll just go ahead and leave that in and then we're going to cut our next quarter and layer that on top and then bruise it with everything again so of course cut out the core throw that on in and then cut into little shreds when you're doing this you do want to make sure that you are being very aware of where your knife is and where your fingers are because you don't want to cut your fingers again the smaller you can get it the better if you can't get it that small don't worry about it unless you are actually using a mason jar then you do want to try and get those shreds as small as you can into the bowl break it up a little bit and again a pinch of salt a little pinch of eye of newt and pinch of caraway then bruise it again the bruising is actually very key in this if you don't bruise the sauerkraut well enough it's not going to ferment quick enough so what you're doing is we're actually releasing the juices and the natural water out of the cabbage leaves so that when they ferment it actually starts to give off that sour tone and all the good bacteria now if you get some loose leaves that come off of your already split cabbage that's perfectly fine the best thing to do is actually take it and roll it up and slice it on up [Music] right on in sorry for opening you're basically just going to repeat the process until your bowl is full [Applause] now when you're doing this i do recommend wearing gloves if you're going to do it this way mostly because if you're using kosher salt it's very sharp you can actually cut your hands up so we don't want that to happen all right so that's what i have for this right now i'm actually going to take you over to the crat or the croc and we're going to go ahead and place this into the croc and then i'm going to continue on with cutting up all eight heads of cabbage well i'm gonna do yeah all eight heads of cabbage that are green for the big croc and then i will show you the aftermath of the process okay so i'm actually going to place our sauerkraut into the big croc and when you're doing so just got to be careful that you don't make a huge old mess so very gently throw it on in there and as you can see from that it doesn't seem like it's filling up very much because it's not this big croc can actually hold eight heads by itself without any issues so once we have our sauerkraut in there and this is actually going to be one of those with every um process it's going to be the same thing over and over and over again so chopping the cabbage salting caraway seeds mustard seed bruising the cabbage and then placing it into the crock so once it's in the crock you just need to make sure that you completely flatten it out in every single layer go in there flatten it and once it's flattened just so we don't have too much oxygen that gets in there we're going to take the lid and we're actually going to close the lid do not put water in there just close the lid this way no debris or anything while you're doing all of your other uh chopping will get in there so in the meantime i'm gonna go ahead and let you go and i'll meet you at the end when everything is completely packed all right guys so this is actually the full uh croc what we're gonna do is i'm gonna go ahead and give it one final pat down so you want to try and get it as packed in there as possible this is what a mallet comes in use all right so here's the above uh notice on it so with this if you're using a croc if you have a croc um the highest that you want to fill it is to the little handles that are on the sides um this way you have enough space to put the weights in i'm going to go ahead and give it one more uh press down like i said if you have a mallet this is the best time to use it um i don't have a mallet that would actually fit into this croc because of how big it is so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to use my fist and i'm going to push it down as hard as i can i actually got myself a stool so i can get a little higher up and i'm just going to try and beat it down as hard as i can pushing it everything and basically packing it all right so after it's been packed we're actually going to get some of those leaves that uh we put off to the side and you want to use the biggest leaves that you can so the biggest ones that we have are here and you're going to place them inside your crock this one has a little bit of damage on it so we're going to take that off so it doesn't contaminate the sauerkraut just kind of push that all down making sure all of the loose shredded crap pieces are covered and then from there we're going to take our weights and place them inside i'm going to try and spread them out to the sides and push down and from here this is where we're going to need our brine so like i said our brine is water and salt if you want your brine to be anything other than that so if you want to make a sauerkraut or something that is a little bit more out of the box when it comes to fermentation you can actually do any anything so if you want to add chilies into it if you wanted to add garlic you can basically anything it's up to your imagination um just kind of fixing the leaves in there to make sure our little crop pieces wouldn't fly up but if you're gonna do anything other than just salt and water make sure you try it first before you put it into your fermentation so from here we're going to go ahead and pour it right on in giving it a little bit of time to settle into the bottom because we do have it really super packed in there so we want to make sure that we're going to have enough water so when you're making sauerkraut you do want to make sure that your brine covers everything at least to the top of the weights if not higher so from what it looks like it looks like our weights and everything is under the water so we'll go ahead and give it another push down you want everything to be submerged in the water and into the brine so that it doesn't mold if you have anything sitting out outside of the brine that will actually uh end up molding and will contaminate the entire project and you don't want to do that but as you can see we do have a couple little floaties every once in a while which is okay um in a week we are going to go ahead and check this to see how everything is doing so in the meantime we're going to go ahead and wipe the reservoir because i did get some debris in there you want to wipe it clean so that there is a good seal between the lid the water and the bottom of the crock all right there's that i'm going to take your lid place it in and if you have if you have a hard water system you do want to use uh or water or purified water in your lid just fill that up all right so we have our water into our lid gonna have a nice seal on it um from here you'll move your crock or whatever you're using into an area where um it's gonna stay fairly room temperature warm but not too cold and not too hot if it gets too hot it will be fine uh but you'll just have to check your crop your crop more often if it is cool you don't have to check it as often so my house fairly stays around 60 degrees on a normal everyday basis so my crowd will actually be ready and completely ready in about three weeks from this point um if it was during the summer time it'd be more like two weeks so in one week we'll actually check to make or to see where our crowd is sitting in its fermentation process and to make sure that nothing has started to spoil and nothing is molding um when you ferment there will be a bubbling action in the sense so it's almost like a scum that is perfectly fine you want that you what you don't want is mold mold is actually going to look white and fuzzy and it's actually going to almost be like hair like whereas scum is going to be bubbly and kind of well scummy so the scum you want because that's actually the good bacteria is building and causing the fermenting whereas mold you do not and if you do get mold it can ruin the entire croc or the entire crout in the sense even just a little bit so you do want to keep an eye on it if you are using a sauerkraut crock make sure there is water in the brim at all times um depending on the area you live i live at high altitude so my water actually gets sucked up under the backside of the lid during certain times of the day and will release it during the low times of the day so do keep an eye on that if you do happen to fill it it's okay it will not overflow the water will actually get just sucked up and into the um into your pot which is perfectly fine that's why i said you want to use a purified water or or water or bottled water if you have hard water so my hard water we have a well so we have a lot of sulfur in our water which we do not want in our crock so i use our water so this is done and since this is done i'm actually going to show you how to make sauerkraut since i have a little bit of uh cabbage extra in a mason jar so let me go ahead and move this real fast and i will be back alright guys so we're now turning to mason jars um so if you are actually somebody who does not have a sauerkraut crock which is perfectly fine you do not need one you will actually use a mason jar you would need a wide mouth wide mouths are the best because you can get everything in there and i would highly recommend pickling stones so pickle stone will actually be the perfect weight and it fits only in a wide mouth jar if you do not have pickling stones that is perfectly fine you don't need a pickling stone i just recommend them what you would do is you would get a ziploc bag and either put water into the ziplock bag so that you can force it in or if you have marbles marbles work as well so we're gonna go ahead and your cabbage is in the same process that you would for the croc salt um salt mustard seed and caraway seed if you want you can add juniper which i actually am going to add to this package or this crowd thing so you take your mason jar and go ahead and stuff it and in between making basically layers so of course you're going to push it down again kind of stuff it in there as hard as you can the less amount of area for oxygen to be the better we're going to use just a couple i actually have [Music] one two three i probably say about seven juniper berries you don't want too many especially in a small container like this because if juniper can be very very overpowering all right then you're gonna go ahead and re-stuff some more all right and as you can see we're kind of full so we want to make sure that we push this down as much as possible pushing down will also help kind of force the cabbage to stay down when you put the brine in got that in there and as you can see there's already some kind of moisture in there that's actually good that means that your cabbage is starting to uh basically bruise and it's releasing its own juices and that's what you want you want all that juice from the cabbage outside of the brine so go ahead and push that down as hard as you can then clear it away you'll take your pickling stone or ziploc bag whatever you have and place it right on top pushing down again and then from there i'm going to take my glove off so i can do this much better saltwater brine again for every one cup of water you need a tablespoon of salt and you're going to pour this right over the top giving it time to get down into the base there's lots of air bubbles coming out so that's actually a good sign that means all the uh oxygen is being released out of the bottom tap it on the base if you need to get a little extra moisture out and of course we're going to make sure that our stone is completely covered if you need to go ahead and push down to help release any extra oxygen that there might be in there and of course it goes without saying whenever you're doing this you do want to make sure you have clean hands of course mine have been in gloves but i had washed them before so it looks like all of our air is out all of our brine has settled and what you'll do is you'll just take the lid of the mason jar not the screw part just the lid and leave it loose over the top it just basically you want it to be where oxygen can release out of it but nothing can get really sucked into it this one will actually go ahead and check within a week as well but since it is in a mason jar it's going to be so much easier to actually uh pay attention to it i'm gonna go ahead and close this real fast so i can turn it on its side for you but you can actually you'll watch and you'll see like right now there's even like some bubbles in there which is okay that's actually a great good sign um and it should continue to bubble so in a week i'm going to just go ahead and place this in my pantry on a plate this way if anything overflows it's perfectly fine if you need to you can either keep the brine that you made if you made too much or you can make new brine if you need it if you see that the water level is starting to lower refill it add more water to it you need to make sure that the brine is always always uh on top of your sauerkraut all right so from here i'm actually going to show you another technique using the croc with our purple cabbage all right everybody and last but not least i'm gonna go ahead and do uh sauerkraut using the my little croc so because this one is smaller i can actually reach inside what i actually use is a wooden spoon so typically you would need to actually use a wooden mallet um but i don't have one of those so i use a wooden spoon instead this one is really easy you just take your sauerkraut or not even your sauerkraut your purple cabbage you don't actually have to do the salt and everything into it after you cut it because you're going to do it all right into the crock so you just take your cabbage and you're going to place it into the crock in layers so put it in and with each layer you're actually going to sprinkle some salt into it some caraway mustard seed or i have newt as it's funnily called and since this one i'm actually going to use juniper so with each layer you actually only want to do maybe one to two juniper berries or it can get really really uh piney and then you just take it and beat it down a mallet does work best because it does have more surface area but the wooden spoon does work as well because you are breaking that all up and then just continue on in all of your layers salt mustard seed caraway and two junipers and beat it down and as you're beating down you want to go ahead and try and push it down as well so you can fit more in with the little croc you can fit just about a head of cabbage depending on how heavy the cabbage is so if it's a really tight cabbage you can do just one head if it's a loose cabbage you can almost get a head and a half so mustard caraway and salt and two juniper then crush it down again now this one we don't need the extra leaves we just need to make sure that everything is packed as far as we can because the weights actually will fit the entire thing completely so after you pack it all down take your weights place them in and push down and add your brine and again your brine needs to cover completely if it doesn't go ahead and get some more mix it all up and if your salt doesn't completely dissolve into your water that's perfectly fine just make sure the salt gets into your crock alright that's done take your lid make sure everything is wiped out of the reservoir so we have a nice good seal place your lid fill with water and you're done all right everybody thank you so much for tuning in and uh and i hope you enjoyed my sauerkraut process if you have any questions you can leave them in the comments below um again i'm really happy to be able to share my process with anybody who's wanting it if you have any questions of course comments again if there's anything you would like me to try and ferment go ahead and let me know if you would like me to try different types of sauerkraut let me know i primarily do your basic traditional german or bavarian sauerkraut so everything is just traditionally done but i am always open to new ideas one of my favorite is actually a combination between sauerkraut and crap in uh carrots it's actually wonderful i have been keeping an eye out on different ways i can do this but if you have any recommendations go ahead and leave them in the comments thank you again for tuning in

Channel: Kitchen Magic with Marla

Views: 1,762

Rating: 4.8333335 out of 5

Keywords: sauerkraut, german, homemade, traditional

Id: NrabZf-trgQ

Length: 36min 5sec (2165 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020