Preserve Your Cabbage the Old-fashioned Way | Homemade Sauerkraut Recipe

hey friends so the cabbage is ready out in the garden i've been waiting for this moment so it is time to make sauerkraut now hold on just in case you believe that you don't like sauerkraut keep watching anyway because i used to be a sauerkraut hater too until i started making it myself it's a whole different game and i think you're gonna like this [Music] the sauerkraut is a fermented food and if you are brand new to the world of home fermentation this is a great place to start not only a sauerkraut one that is pleasing to more people's palettes but it really is not complicated and when i say not complicated i mean this is easier than dehydrating this is easier than canning and i even think it's easier than trying to blanch foods to freeze them for later so let's start out with just a few of the tools you may or may not need for your fermentation adventure so you can spend a lot of money on fermentation equipment or you can spend maybe a couple bucks and either way you will end with a pretty darn good result so let's start off with some of the fancier fermentation pieces that you may or may not want to invest in and then we'll work our way down so traditionally fermentation was done in crocks like this one sometimes these crocks were huge five gallons or more i actually remember my grandpa telling me about how his mom used to have giant crocks in their root cellar and they would store their sauerkraut in there all winter long so you can still ferment really really easily in a crock you just have to find one with a lid which is a little bit tricky if you're working with an antique crock and you'll also want something that will weigh down the food so i have these followers they're made out of like a stoneware material and they will rest on top of the food in the crock or if you don't have something like this you can get creative in your kitchen and just find something else that'll hold the food down but there's nothing wrong with using a crock for fermenting if you want to go old school if you're not quite ready to invest in a crock then we actually can keep this even simpler all you need are some mason jars to ferment pickles sauerkraut carrots really anything your heart desires now you can keep this as simple as a mason jar with a regular old mason jar lid or you can get some of the attachments that are floating around out there that make this a little bit more streamlined so i don't have examples of all of them because there are a ton of different fermentation systems but i have a couple that i want to show you really quickly so first off this is a type of air lock lid and so this is designed to fit on a mason jar it has this little gasket so we put him down there and then we would just screw our ring down like usual once the food is inside and then we'll we would fill this part with water up to about halfway and let it sit like this now the benefit to an airlock system like this one and i will put links to all of this equipment in the show notes is that it will allow the gases from the fermenting food to escape but it doesn't let any oxygen back in and that's the exact type of environment we are shooting for when we are fermenting we want it to be anaerobic so there's not oxygen in this jar okay another style of airlock type of fermentation lid would be something like this this is from trellis and company it's just a simple wide mouth lid it has a gasket inside and it has this little valve here that's going to let gases out but not air in and you just screw that on top and call it good another thing that is handy when you are fermenting vegetables or fruit is some sort of weight and you can keep this really low tech maybe you have a piece of the cabbage core you use that to kind of keep the sauerkraut smashed under the brine we'll talk about all this a little bit more in a minute but if you don't want to use something like that you can also purchase weights that are specifically designed for fermentation these are my favorite these are glass weights and they fit inside a regular mouth or a wide mouth jar and they just set on top of the food press it under the brine it's just really really simple another option would be a spring like this one you may have seen these at your local grocery store in the canning aisle these are great if you don't have quite enough food to fill the jar all the way to the top i could let's say i had half a jar worth of cabbage i could press it down with my spring and the lid would compress and it would just keep everything underneath without having to use a weight like this one so either way you get to pick which one you like best or you can just keep it super simple and use something you have around your kitchen all right so we got the equipment piece figured out let's get into the sauerkraut itself so we're going to start out with a head of cabbage this is just kind of a typical green cabbage that i grew out in my garden i went ahead and took off all the outer leaves that may have had bug bites on them or a little bit of dirt and i washed it and now we're ready to chop then i'm just going to trim the core out of the middle that's the tough part we usually don't want to eat that now i can set this aside if you don't have a weight you can use this core piece to push the sauerkraut underneath the brine so don't throw it away quite yet the next thing we need to do is shred this cabbage or slice it as evenly as possible now it's important to keep the pieces pretty even and i'm not going to tell you to get a ruler out and measure everything of course but if we have a really big piece of cabbage and a really small piece they're going to ferment at different rates so we're going to do our very best to keep everything as uniform as humanly possible without driving yourself crazy now you could potentially use a food processor with a slicing blade not the shredding blade but it's really easy with a food processor to end up pulverizing the cabbage and ending up with like cabbage puree and we do not want that we want some nice even slices so i prefer just use the knife it doesn't take too long and just make sure the end results what i want all right so now we have a giant bowl of cabbage and i failed to mention earlier you're going to want a big bowl for this because a head of cabbage tends to expand considerably so we're going to get this all in here and now we're going to add our salt that's really the main ingredient of sauerkraut cabbage water and salt super easy so i have a fine sea salt here this is from redmond's real salt you can use any salt you like but make sure it does not have iodine in it so i love red onions it's 100 real salt no extra stuff because iodine can affect the way the good bacteria works in a ferment and your results won't be great so i have regular old good sea salt i'm going to add one tablespoon per head of cabbage i'm going to sprinkle all that over there give it a little bit of a mix to get the salt incorporated alrighty and now we're going to let this sit for about 15 minutes and what the salt will start to do is pull the moisture from the cabbage and that's where the magic happens so let's set this aside and while this is working we're gonna make our brine okay so to make a two percent brine this is how i do it i'm going to take four cups of non-chlorinated water and we have well water so i don't have to worry about extra stuff in mine but if you live in the city and you have chlorine in your water a simple way you can get rid of the chlorine is just leave this out without a lid overnight chlorine tends to evaporate really quickly and then you don't have to worry about it okay so i have my four cups of non-chlorinated water and i'm going to add a tablespoon of the same fine sea salt and give it a nice stir now odds are i will not need all of this for a single jar of sauerkraut but the good news is this is just salt water so it will basically last forever in your refrigerator so just put a label on it and you can keep it in the fridge if you're going to be fermenting lots of things during a certain season like i am okay it's been about 15 minutes you can see cabbage is getting a little droopy not quite as perky as it was which is good that's what we want so now we are going to knead the cabbage which is kind of like meeting bread you can be a little bit more aggressive so this just takes some time so put on some music or your favorite podcast intent go check out mine and just get to work now it does help to think of someone who makes you really mad while you do this a little more effort into it but you just gotta work it between your fingers give it some squeezes and what we're trying to do is break down the cabbage and get it to release the juices and eventually as we keep going here between i don't know five to eight minutes we want to end up with a little pool of salty brine in the bottom and we get to that point we're getting really close so you can use um some sort of tool or mallet or i mean you could try different things to help you crush it if maybe you aren't able to use your fingers or maybe have arthritis or something like that for me my hands are the easiest and then i can kind of feel if i have some big chunks that aren't going to be super uniform i can kind of break those up make sure everything is of similar size but it doesn't have to be perfect alrighty so i've been kneading the cabbage for a while you can see that it's not quite as fluffy as it was we were back down to normal size and it started to release some of the juices which you can see down here in the bottom of the bowl so at this point we can add more salt if we need to and the reason that salt is so important in this process is because it is a big part of the puzzle that keeps your ferments from getting moldy or rotten as they set out on the counter now as long as you're using a recipe that you trust then your ratios of salt to vegetables will probably be good but there's a little trick i like to use to make sure i'm on the right track so after i've worked with my cabbage a little bit i like to take a piece of cabbage that's down here in the bottom of the bowl in the brine and taste it as long as our brine and our ferment is a little bit salty like the ocean we should be on the right track now if you go ahead and taste this and it's just not salty you can add a little bit more salt work it again and then taste one more time all right now it is time to transfer the cabbage into the jar one medium sized head of cabbage usually will fit into a quart sized mason jar you might have a little bit left over but for the most part this is about the size of jar you need for this amount of cabbage because we are going to pack this in as tight as we possibly can so you can do that with a regular old wooden spoon maybe you have some sort of mallet that would fit in there there is also this handy dandy tool called a kraut stomper i got this from layman's hardware last year kind of in love with it now the only downfall to this guy is it doesn't fit into a wide mouth mason jar so this is really only helpful if you are using a larger crock like i showed you earlier but regardless it's kind of cool for today i'm just going to use a wooden spoon to help me pack everything in so i'll just start off by adding a layer at a time to this jar now it might be tempting to fill it halfway up or fill it three quarters of the way full and then start packing but it's just gonna make your job a lot harder so we're gonna go in baby steps so i put an inch or two of cabbage in and i'm gonna use my spoon and just crush it as much as possible kind of furthering the process that we started earlier when we were kneading it we're just going to continue to coax the juices out of the cabbage and get it as tight as we possibly can because we don't want air in this jar the first few layers kind of hit or miss but as we add more cabbage this gets easier as you go the cabbage will continue to release some juice if you're using an older head of cabbage maybe that's been in the store for a while it'll be a little bit less juicy whereas a fresh head of cabbage like this one that i picked from the garden about an hour ago it should have more juices flowing okay so i've been pounding and packing for a while and you can see we've made progress here we have everything packed as tightly as possible and the brine from the cabbage is starting to appear on the top which is exactly what we want so i'm going to leave about an inch of space here at the top of the jar i don't want to add any more cabbage in here you can see that i have some cabbage left over in the bowl that was a large head usually a medium head will fit in here no problem but i can eat this plain it tastes really good or put it in a stir fry or a salad so you don't have to throw this away all right so i'm going to add a little extra brine into my jar before i put the lid on so i can either add the brine that we made earlier or i can just tip my bowl and grab some of the brine out of the bottom now the important piece of this next step is to make sure we keep the food underneath the brine because if the cabbage is exposed to oxygen that's when it gets black and slimy and gross so like i explained earlier we can use a piece of our cabbage core just kind of press that in and keep everything underneath the liquid or we could use one of our handy dandy glass weights this is my favorite so i'm just going to stick this in and press it down a little bit and it's kind of invisible now but you can see that at the top i have a layer of liquid and then all of the cabbage is safely underneath if you happen to have a rogue bit of cabbage or whatever food that you're fermenting you'll say it pops up and it gets a little bit black it's okay as long as it doesn't look like it's contaminated the rest of the ferment usually can just skim that guy off and throw it away all right now it's time to put our lid on we can use the regular old classic mason jar lid if we wanted to you could use one of those plastic screw-on lids or if you have an airlock it's probably your best bet so i'm going to use what i have which is one of these trellis and company airlocks i'm just going to screw that on and now we just have to wait all right so now we have our lid on and we just now get to wait so i like to leave my sauerkraut fermenting for 7 to 14 days some folks like really sour sauerkraut so they'll leave it up to a month or more but i'm a little bit more of a mild sauerkraut type of girl so what i like to do is i will stick this over on my countertop somewhere that i won't forget it exists but i also want to keep it out of the way and out of direct sunlight so honestly this over here by my egg bowl is kind of my fermentation station okay so i am going to set a saucer underneath my jar just in case it leaks so as the fermentation process continues we're going to have some gases release sometimes we'll get some expansion and the liquid will seep out just a little bit it doesn't happen all the time but just in case i like to put a plate just so we don't get the goo on the countertop so if you are using a regular lid on your jar it's going to be important that you check it every couple of days and burp it so basically that's just removing the lid letting the gases out and then putting the lid back on that'll just help with some of the leaking that may occur however you shouldn't have to do that if you are using some sort of air lock system but it's not a bad idea to keep an eye on it just in case so after this has had a chance to sit on your counter for 7 to 14 days or however long you decide you can start to check it and taste it to see if the level of tang is something that you like so you get to totally have control over this ferment or any ferment you create in your kitchen you get to decide how sour it is how not sour it is if you wanted you could add other herbs or spices to this recipe or you can just keep it super simple and let it do its thing all right so now all you have left to do is just to move it over to cold storage once the flavor is where you want it to be now the old timers would have kept their sauerkraut down in their root cellar because it kept it cold enough that it wouldn't continue to ferment but it also didn't freeze if you don't have a root cellar don't worry i don't either you can easily transfer this jar right into your refrigerator when you're ready to eat your sauerkraut you can simply just dip some out of the jar you can eat a plain you can put it into salads you can mix it up with potatoes and sausage however you like your sauerkraut you'll find that i think your homemade version is even better

Channel: Jill Winger - The Homestead Mentor

Views: 99,156

Rating: 4.9822483 out of 5

Keywords: homemade sauerkraut, how to make sauerkraut, sauerkraut recipe, how to preserve cabbage, homegrown cabbage, homesteading, modern homesteading, prairie homestead, making sauerkraut, food preservation, the prairie homestead, how to, make sauerkraut, making sauerkraut in mason jars

Id: 3D0zujCthu4

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020