Charis Cuisine

Homemade Garlic Dill Sauerkraut
One yummy way to ferment your food and keep friendly microbiome in your gut!

Step-by-step instructions happily shared with you by David Oshel
 

Ingredients and items you will need:

Sea salt

1 cabbage – green, purple, whatever you fancy

fresh dill

Garlic

Optional: Carrots, caraway seeds, or any other veggies and spices you want to throw in there.  Kraut can be creative!

A large pot or bowl to mix it in

Some kind of weight – a jar full of water that fits inside the mouth of your canning jar , or a scrubbed and boiled rock

A few elastic bands

Step 1: Remove the very outer leaves of your cabbage and throw them away. Then rinse your cabbage under some cool water, shake it out, and then take off 3 or 4 more of the large outer leaves and put them aside for later.

Step 2: Start chopping your cabbage. Because the lactobacillus bacteria needed for fermenting are found inside of the leaves, you want to chop it as finely as possible in order to get the most surface area. You can chop it in a food processor or by hand.

Put your chopped cabbage in a large bowl or pot. It seems like an absolutely ridiculous amount, but trust me – the volume goes way, way down. 

Step 3: Chop up anything else you want to put in the kraut. I chopped up one bunch of fresh dill and cloves of garlic.

Step 4: Add your sea salt to the mix. Salt does two things – draws the juice out of the cabbage, and also inhibits unfriendly microbes from growing in your ferment. The rule is 3 tablespoons per 5 pounds of cabbage. So… maybe weigh your cabbage at the store before you buy it (or at home if you have a scale).  Add 6/10 TBS. salt per pound of cabbage. 

Step 5: This is the fun part! Wash your hands really well, and get down and dirty! Stick your hands in your huge pot of cabbage and squish and mash! The aim for this squishing and mashing is to work the salt throughout and get the cabbage to release it’s magical juices. Keep doing it for 15 minutes at least, until there’s a decent amount of brine.

Step 6: Wash your hands and kraut vessels really well and then begin stuffing your cabbage into them, stopping a couple inches before the top of the jar. You really want to make sure you pack the cabbage as tight as possible as to get all air pockets out of it. Hopefully the brine has now risen above the cabbage… if not, that is okay, because the salt will continue to draw out more juice.

Step 7: Take the large cabbage leaves that you had put aside and fold them up and place them into the top of the jar, as sort of a blankety cover for the shredded kraut. You may need to break it apart to get it in there, just as long as it sort of covers everything.

Step 8: If you are using a jar with water as your weight, take off any labels that might be on it and wash it really well with soap. If you are using rocks, it probably has some weird stuff from outside on it, so wash and boil it for ten minutes to sanitize it. Place your weights into the jars over the large cabbage leaf covers and press and squish everything down until the brine rises well above the cabbage. If it hasn’t yet, it will, so don’t worry. I use a perfectly fitted plate under the rock to hold the contents firmly down.

The purpose of the weight is to make sure that the cabbage stays packed and is not exposed to the air. You see, the awesome lacto-fermentation process that is happening to transform your salty cabbage into probiotic magic takes place in an anaerobic environment – one without oxygen. Bad microbes and bacteria that will spoil your food can only grow in an aerobic environment – in other words, in the presence of oxygen.

So if your cabbage is weighted down and safely submerged under the brine, it’s safe and can’t go bad. This is why you also want to make sure you packed your cabbage in there really good to get rid of any air pockets in which bad microbes could grow.

Step 9: Cover the whole thing with something that can let air flow, but protects it from bugs and the like. I use a towel.

Step 10: After 3 or 4 days in warm weather, start tasting the kraut. In cold winter months it can take a week or two. It should taste kind of alive and tangy – something more than just salty cabbage. The taste will continue to improve and get stronger as time goes on, but you can tell how you like it and when you think it’s done. Don’t forget that every time you take kraut out of the jar to pack your kraut back down to get any air bubbles out.

When you have it tasting good, you can move it into the fridge to slow the fermentation way down. I moved mine in after 1 week, but fermentation is fairly dependent on the room temperature. It’s nice and pleasantly warm here, so it fermented fast. If your house is a bit colder, it might take longer. Probably a week to a week and a half. When you move it to the fridge, the brine will probably go way down, but you can top it up with a little salty water. It will keep in the fridge for at least a few months!

Ready for the refrigerator!

Step 11: ENJOY!!! YUM! It’s ideal to have a big spoonful with each meal if you can. Susan and I have really been enjoying mixing it with all our meals…. makes each one new and interesting!

Oh yes, one last note: Don’t ever heat your sauerkraut up. You have to eat it raw or you’ll kill all the bacteria and you won’t get the benefits!