Happy New Year!
We rang in the new year with, what else? sausage and sauerkraut served with mashed potatoes, followed by peppermint stick ice cream served with flourless chocolate cake. I had 3 pounds of sauerkraut left, but we invited Dusan and Irena over for dinner, so I changed the proportions, using a full recipe's worth of meat (2 pounds) and rice and a half-recipe worth of sauerkraut (3 pounds). Honestly, I think it could have used more sauerkraut, but whatever. It was good, good, good! Dusan and Irena are great friends to invite for this dish, because they actually really like sauerkraut. We still had plenty left over, and if I can make it last past tomorrow night, I'm going to freeze it just so that I can enjoy coming home to it some time later this month.
Our version of sausage and sauerkraut is one variation of a dish that is traditional throughout the region. In Serbia the variation is called sarma, and it's sausage, seasonings, and rice wrapped in fermented cabbage leaves. (Irena and Dusan approvingly said that my sausage and sauerkraut was really a lot like sarma.) Aleks and his father have fond memories of Grandma Stanic's sarma. I had several heads of CSA cabbage sitting in the bottom of my fridge waiting to be turned into sauerkraut, so I decided to try fermenting the cabbage heads whole. I just cored the cabbages, added a few heads of garlic, then poured some brine (3.5% kosher salt) over top. I also added some yogurt whey to spike the mixture with the good stuff. This method has the distinct advantage of being much quicker than shredding and pounding the cabbage. We'll see how it turns out. I'm a little worried that I messed things up by adding the brine while it was hot, instead of waiting for it to cool. I know that's traditional for pickling things, but I'm worried I "cooked" the cabbage a bit. Hopefully it didn't kill all the good bacteria in the cabbages. At least I had the forethought to wait until the brine cooled before adding my yogurt whey. I'll let you know how it turns out.
How did everyone else's sauerkraut turn out? Was it good for New Years?
-Maggie
I found that you need good german, or serbian I suppose, sausage, which I haven't found out here yet. So the sauerkraut is good, but did not follow tradition. Sounds good though.
ReplyDeleteWe definitely did sauerkraut and sausage with mashed potatoes for New Years but had to use Hatfield brand sauerkraut (which is not too bad). Unfortunately, our homemade developed the creeping pink crud and got sent to the compost heap. Better luck next year!
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