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| Our Fall Cabbage Harvest |
The weather in southeastern Pennsylvania is finally turning to freezing nights and moderate days, so it's time to harvest the fall cabbage crop. We have been cutting cabbages one at a time for cole slaw, but the freeze-thaw cycle is bound to ruin them if we don't get them all in now. That's a lot of cabbage for two people so it's time to try making some sauerkraut.
The coming of winter also leads to the search for firewood and the other day I cut down a large dead hickory tree down by the bank of the creek. I rigged a snatch block (type of pulley) from a tree at the top of the hillside and with a long line used the 4x4 pickup truck to haul the hickory logs up the hill to the yard. This afternoon, I used the chainsaw to hog out a blank to be carved into a hickory sauerkraut tamper.
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| Hickory Cabbage Tamper Blank |
Ace Hardware provided a handy 2 gallon plastic sauerkraut "crock" but I still needed something for the pressure lid that fit the inside of the crock. I cut a round of hickory about 2" thick and with first the ax and then chisel carved it down to a round lid that fits inside the plastic crock for applying pressure to the sauerkraut as it works.
I started by washing everything in distilled white vinegar per Uncle Tim's suggestion. Three green and one red cabbage heads yielded about 6 lbs of sliced cabbage. I layered this into the crock sprinkling it with about 3 1/2 tablespoons of salt as it was layered. Each layer was tamped down with the hickory tamper blank. (This will be more elegant after the blank is carved into a properly shaped tamper with a handle but in the mean time that big ole chunk o' wood did a great job of tamping 'em cabbage down.) At the end, I covered the cabbage with the round hickory pressure lid and weighted it down with the tamper blank. Within an hour enough water had been extracted from the cabbage to form a brine which covered the lid and the sauerkraut was starting to work, forming bubbles when pressed down. This all seems too simple to be true but after experimenting with pickles this year I am beginning to really appreciate lacto-bacteria. With a little luck, we should have fresh homemade sauerkraut for Thanksgiving dinner this year. Well see...
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| Ace Hardware Sourced the 2 Gal. Plastic "Crock" |
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| Hickory Pressure Lid for the Crock |
Drain some yogurt and add about 1/2 cup of the whey to the brine. It will spike it with the right kind of bacteria, allowing it to reach a "critical mass" faster. This helps prevent yeast from out-growing the bacteria and contaminating your sauerkraut, and it speeds up the fermentation process so that your sauerkraut might actually be done by Thanksgiving. I'm going to go add homemade sauerkraut to the list of what I'm bringing to our potluck Thanksgiving dinner this year. Mine was okay this year - hope yours turns out better.
ReplyDeleteAlso, your tamper and weight are beautiful. Much nicer than the metal meat pounder (I know, I shouldn't be using metal) and water-filled ziploc bags that I use.
ReplyDeleteOne source that I read commented that cabbage from the garden are already inoculated with the right kind of bacteria, which makes sense to me. I did not make any effort to wash the cabbage, just cut off the outer leaves and "debugged" a few spots, then sliced away. The source said that the salt should drive enough water out of the cabbage to create a brine which covers the "plate" used for a lid and that an active culture should produce bubbles of CO2. When I checked it after about 1 hour, my crock had enough brine to cover the lid and was bubbling when pressed down, so it appears to have kick started right away. It is out there working madly away now, less than 24 hours later, so I am very hopeful that I got an effective inoculation.
ReplyDeleteIt will be interesting to see the effect of using a wooden lid for the process since it is porous. At first take in our modern, sparkling, stainless steel and plastic world the idea of porous wood soaking in a food brine sounds unsanitary. But fermenting has been home to wooden implements and barrels for millennia and you see a lot of old wooden sauerkraut making tools. My plan for care of these implements is to wash (maybe water only, perhaps with mild soap, not with detergent; this means a bar of Ivory, no Palmolive liquid) and rinse with vinegar. I expect the porous wooden tools will tend to carry over cultures from one batch to the next. The source I read actually recommended pouring a little brine from the old batch to the new if making batch-on-batch.
Like a good sour dough starter which starts off capturing a wild yeast on the wind, I am hoping I captured a good sauerkraut culture from the wild by working direct from the garden. As I said, we'll see...
Having said all of that, the use of yogurt whey as a kick-starter is a good idea and I will keep it in mind.
Yes, definitely to the natural bacteria on the sauerkraut. Maybe they treated or washed the ones we got from the CSA (which is all organic) in some way. I found that my first batch was great - I definitely had to fight back against some contamination, but the final taste was great. I then had a batch I didn't spike with yogurt whey and it smelled like bread or beer. So I figured that was a yeast culture. I finally put my glass crock through the dishwasher, then did a batch with the yogurt whey. I didn't have to fight any contamination, but, as I think I mentioned before, the flavor was also more...boring. So, maybe some of the more interesting flavors come from the other stuff that grow.
ReplyDeleteMan thats awesome. I'm excited to see the process. We just sorta slice and cover, our pressure system is significantly less picturesque than yours. I'm jealous. I am hoping to get into a studio over winter break and make a ceramic crock. Figure it won't be too hard with a slab roller and a template of some kind. If you start noticing an awkward smell in the house, similar to cat urine, its probably the sauerkraut doing its thing.
ReplyDeleteSee you monday
Andy