Making Sauerkraut

First attempt at homemade sauerkraut! Fermented foods are an important part of the AIP (or really any healthy diet, yay probiotics), but it seems ridiculous to pay $7 a pop for tiny jars of organic cabbage that probably have 80% of their goodness pasteurized out anyway. Plus more projects!

Tools

Cabbage

Mashing

Mashed

Sauerkraut!

I bought a few tools via my new favorite I’m-a-shut-in-pastime (online shopping) to try and make the krauting super simple and idiot proof: a handmade wooden masher, some fermentation jar weights, and some “pickle pipes” that vent the sauerkraut. They did indeed make it quite easy, guess we’ll see about the idiot proof in a week or so.

Unbelievably 3/4 of a massive dense cabbage head only barely made two pints of sauerkraut after extensive sea salt mashing with my new masher. (Again, beware the salt!! Even salts just labeled as sea salt have dextrose added to keep them from clumping, which is nice, but a spiking of GMO corn isn’t always what you’re looking for with your table salt. The brand in the pictures, Alessi, is one of the only salts we could find at the grocery store that’s genuinely just salt! This diet really makes you read labels.)

Anyway I listened to a strange episode of 99% Invisible in which someone very seriously interviewed a can of off-brand cola (315-Everything is Alive), and mashed away. Then I carefully mashed the mashed cabbage into jars, topped the jars off with leaves and brine, weighted the cabbage mash and sealed the jars up with pickle pipes! Simple. I hope.

The jar with the pink lid has some homemade kefir whey in it. I’m starting to feel like a real homesteader.