Sauerkraut revisited

I made my first batch of sauerkraut in December of 2009. Since that experiment I've had many successful ferments (and started using a real fermenting crock rather than a fish bowl), but my most recent batch may just be an epic failure.

Making a tasty ferment is always a combination of factors -- temperature, bacteria, and timing all play together in a chemical, biological dance. Prior to my most recent batch, I'd only made my kraut in the Pacific NW fall; a fall with reliably high humidity. But a reliable characteristic of my current home is aridity. 

On a sunny fall day I sought out a pair of hefty cabbages at the Santa Fe farmer's market. I cradled them like babies, brought them home, and did the usual -- fine chopping, squishing with salt, and packing into my 2 gallon crock. I was impressed with the brine created from the cabbage's liquid. It covered the cabbage by a couple inches, so I didn't need to add any additional brine. 

Fast forward a few days, and I check on my kraut. All of that beautiful brine evaporated! The cabbage was exposed to air, and I needed to add more liquid. Somewhere in my head I knew that I should add a brine solution (water + salt) and not just plain water. The correct salt concentration discourages the growth of gross bacteria. But I was feeling extra experimental that fateful day, or overly confident in my healthy batch of kraut, or lazy, and I decided to use plain tap water to resubmerge the cabbage. 

Fast forward a few more days, and the kraut has an amazingly hairy growth of mold. I scoop it out with a big spoon, and the whole mat clings together like a weird kombucha scoby. I dig deeper into the crock and happily find that its innards are crunchy, delicious, and developing excellent kraut sourness and flavor. I fill a jar for the fridge, then pack the rest back together and place the crock gently in its fermenting corner, confident that it will be a fine batch.

But then the jar in the fridge grows soft. I fear for the whole batch, and open it (after 40 days at ~60-70 degrees F). It seems softer than normal. But it's tangy. And the smell is... interesting? I swear I detect notes of chocolate, but then I have a weird nose. All of this begs some questions: can soft sauerkraut be okay? and are my vague memories of someone telling me about their grandmother's sauerkraut crocks, and how they had a layer of mold, true? If the kraut is delicious, I will eat it. Go bravely into your fermenting future!

Fall Flowers

Caught a whiff of something just like spring, and found these flowers blooming in October.

it's happening!

There is a certain small evergreen bush I spend most of my time overlooking, but every year at the very earliest part of spring it snags me by the nose. Sweet and promising, unexpected perfume of its freshly opened, hidden flowers sits in clouds along city streets.

Other spring precursors:

 

Stellaria media happy and green, growing as a mini-forest on urban mulch unmolested.

An arrangement of green-headed matches, suggesting buds yet unburst.

Making Sauerkraut

I started on December 19th with one 4.7 pound green cabbage purchased from the Farmer's Market for two dollars. I chopped it up into long shreds and placed it in a large metal bowl, added sea salt and mixed it together, purposely bruising the cabbage in the process to get it to begin releasing water. I read in several places online that the accepted ratio of cabbage to salt is 5 pounds to 3 tablespoons, so I used a little less than 3 tablespoons. I then packed the cabbage and salt mixture into a glass fishbowl (the largest glass container I could find). I wasn't satisfied with the amount of brine that was created by the cabbage juice and salt mixture, so I mixed more sea salt into some distilled water and added that (using the amount of salt that I thought would be enough to keep bad germs from growing, but not so much that it would taste too salty to eat). I put a bowl on top of the cabbage to raise the brine level above the cabbage, covered the fishbowl with plastic wrap and a rubberband, and hoped the microbes would make me something tasty. Following are daily notes on its progress:

One day later: ~68 (degrees Fahrenheit). Cabbage-y smell. Bubbles that look like spit on the surface of the brine. I covered the fishbowl with a t-shirt to keep it dark (read somewhere that it should be dark).

Two days later: ~66. Bubbles this morning. Very strong sulfur smell. Tastes sweet and salty (sweet cabbage, salty salt).

Three days later: Tastes less sweet. Beginning to smell a hint of sour. Water is a little cloudy.

Four days later: ~62. Smells much more sour, still bubbling.

Five days later: ~64. Seems to be bubbling less. Tastes quite sour.

Six days later: ~66. Seems to have stopped bubbling altogether.

Eight days later: ~63. Fragrantly sour. Time to start eating it.

I'm surprised by how the sauerkraut no longer tastes salty. I know there's a lot of salt in it, but the sour flavor must be masking it. Also, the smell produced as the bubbles were released was very strong and smelled like sulfur. I read on one site that if your kraut smells bad, you shouldn't eat it. Well, that certainly smelled bad but I stuck with it and I think my finished product is fine (it tastes good and I'm not sick). I wonder how many people have started making sauerkraut but threw it out thinking something had gone wrong.

Pictured at the top is my sauerkraut in the fishbowl and below is the same fishbowl covered by a shirt, with some of the kraut that I transferred to a different jar. The jar is in a plastic tub so that when I push on the other jar that fits inside of it to push bubbles out of the cabbage, the brine doesn't spill onto the carpet. The other object is a thermometer.