To celebrate the new year my friends and I made 6 gallons of sauerkraut. That’s right! For the low low price of dumpstered vegetables, cabbage ($1 a pound), 3 hours of time and a lot of effort you too could have a seasons worth of kraut. We made five different variations of kraut with different amounts of various beets, various cabbages, ginger, garlic, carrots, apples and even turmeric. We should have a selection from fuschia to electric yellow.
What? How do you make fermented veggies? Check out Sandor Katz’s book on Wild Fermentation. We cut veggies, salted them, pounded them to release their water, then packed them in to food grade plastic containers. After the sliced veggies were submerged in their own salty brine we weighted them down with containers of water (plastic bags of plastic pails).
The kraut will be stored in my friend’s basement since I’m currently subletting and my housemates didn’t seem like the “kraut in the basement” type of people. Lucky for us this beautiful pink smelly batch will be ready just in time for the most sickening modern holiday of all: Valentines Day.
