October 30th, 2011
Sauerkraut. Just you try to spell it.
I’ve always liked sauerkraut. I know my name is Ingrid, but I am not Germanic in the slightest. My love of sauerkraut is a developed taste. While I did volunteer work in Toronto, Canada, I had some somewhat late, wild nights in the exciting city. As I was poor, I did a lot of walking (stumbling?) home from nightclubs at ungodly hours. Yes, I was doing the work of God, but even so, I kept some ungodly hours. Anyway, street vendors catered to the likes of me—you could always find a bratwurst vendor at 2am who was waiting to take your $2 and give you SERIOUSLY THE MOST PERFECT THING IN A BUN EVER— with tons of sauerkraut on it. It was cold out, but bratwurst with sauerkraut on it tasted so perfect late at night. Now I am in bed by about 10pm every night, but I still crave sauerkraut.
At first the goal was to find good sauerkraut. Bubbies was a no. Nalleys was a no. Then I attended a Werth family gathering and had something so amazingly crunchy, so delightfully citrusy and light. It was perfect. The relative responsible for this culinary sensation told me how he MADE it. I remember him describing a “stone” (huh?), the necessity to “weight” the kraut, the “crock” it sat in, how the crock kept you from needing to “skim” bad stuff. I sort of half listened, or listened in a way that seems thorough at the time, but is woefully inadequate when I find myself trying to replicate someone else’s experiment.
I could write here about the health benefits of sauerkraut, but truthfully, others have done that and it is not the most interesting part of the whole undertaking for me. I like the product, not the rationale behind it. If you are interested though….
I planted cabbage in the garden and watched it carefully until it was ready for harvest. I got myself a food grade container. I cut up the cabbage and salted it liberally (too liberally as it turned out). I filled a jar with water to provide weight to push the cabbage under the brine, covered the entire thing and waited a couple weeks.
It was….okay. It was….really salty actually. And the white scum on top, while harmless, was sort of freaky to get around.
Fast forward a couple weeks. The short comings of my procedure were pretty clear to me. My jar had a narrow top which meant that the plate and jar that I used to push the cabbage down were actually too small to effectively do the job. I did not dig scraping the white scum off the cabbage each day. It just freaked me out.
So I got serious. I got on-line.
I don’t really shop much. I don’t buy clothes (at least not new ones) and I don’t have any expensive hobbies besides my chickens. I don’t get haircuts or seek out fancy makeup or buy jewelry,(except from Brad’s cousin’s wife) so I feel justified in springing for cool toys every now and then. My cool toy happens to be a sauerkraut crock.
It came all the way from Poland, so you know it is good! It is a perfect cylinder, brown ceramic with a lid and this really cool air seal thing so that you know that bad germies are not getting in your goods. Best of all, it has lovely weights that fit in there perfectly. No fuss.
It is week three of my newest batch of sauerkraut. The crock sits in our kitchen next to our refrigerator sort of out of the way. Every now and then I hear a gentle “blub, blub” of air escaping from the fermentation pot. All is well in my crock. Awesome.
The crock can ferment away for anytime from 2 weeks to 3 months. I can’t wait to try our kraut! Maybe in the dead of winter it will provide just that little bit of needed boost that only cabbage can give us.
















If you are now singing, “But! – it’s poetry in motion






