Hi I'm Wendy Van Wagner, and I'm Joe Meade, and welcome to the "In The Kitchen" cooking
school. Today were going to be making sauerkraut using a Harsch crock.
So to begin you wanna make sure you have all your ingredients in front of you,
You want to have a really large bowl to toss your shredded cabbage and salt.
You want to have some sort of pounding device, these are traditional wooden
pounders. You wanna make sure you have plenty of sea salt and then if you want
to add any flavoring to your sauerkraut you can choose caraway seeds,
you can choose juniper berries,
or you could just make it traditional with
salt and cabbage, and also you wanna have a good recipe to depend on. This sauerkraut
book has the history of sauerkraut
as well as some good recipes to choose from.
We'll be using one of
three sizes of the Harsh crocks today
now theres a five liter, a ten liter and a twenty liter.
So the first thing you wanna do is peel down
your cabbage, if there's any bruised or damaged leaves on the outside. And you really
make sure that you do get all of the bruised leaves off as well because you're not
going to be washing the sauerkraut everything inside
is clean because it's wrapped up with the leaves. You wanna cut the core out
before you start slicing it.
You always want to start with organically grown cabbage, they have much
higher sugars which allows the lacto fermentation process to get going.
So when you get ready to shred make sure you have a really sharp knife.
So when you're slicing
make sure you get it as thin as you can.
If you keep your fingers back rather than
flat when your holding it
it's much safer as you won't cut the ends of your fingers so you pull your fingers you pull your fingers
back
and allow them to form a guide for the blade and that allows you
slice the cabbage
very thin or you can use a traditional sauerkraut cutter.
Every recipe that you'll encounter for making lactofermented vegetables
calls for different amounts of salt
the most important thing is, it needs salt!
So for this twelve pounds were going to go with a standard recipe
of four tablespoons of salt.
So what Im going to do is mix this up really well.
So here's our traditional sauerkraut pounder,
you want to just take it and start pounding the cabbage.
I like to rotate the bowl as I'm pounding to get every
possible angle. If you don't have one of these pounders you can use a coke bottle
or a meat pounder. With an emphasis on cleanliness it's always great to
rinse your crock
before you pack your
vegetables in it.
Now this is the Harsch crock,
it's got this great fitting lid and then it has weights that are already
inside.
We'll just pull those out, this has all been rinsed.
So you want to start packing your cabbage into the Harsch crock and we're
going to start pressing it to get the liquid to rise to the top.
We're going to continue to press the cabbage down into the crock
until liquid starts to
come up over the top of the cabbage.
That's when we know it's time
to place in the ceramic weights.
You get the liquid up over the weights and once your there we're ready to put the lid on and seal the
crock.
Once you add the lid
you can see that there's a little space and you add water along the ring,
and that seals it.
So now your ready to put
your crock away and let the vegetables begin to ferment.
You do want to check the water level from time to time to make sure that you're
not going below the
seal.
Find a nice out of the way place where the temperature's relatively stable, sixty to
seventy degrees is recommended.
So after four weeks time your going to be ready to enjoy your delicious sauerkraut.
Oh, thank you
yyuummm!
Thanks for growing organically and eating organically too.