Bad to the Bone Naturally Fermented Sauerkraut

I won't even go into how much sauerkraut I can consume. It's like on a scale... and that's because my normal method of making sauerkraut involves fermenting my veggies in very large Harsch-style fermentation crocks made by Gartopf.

And I have obtained these beautiful vessels and made an enormous amount of sauerkraut over the years because Fall often brings an abundance of cabbage. Whether grown at home in the garden or picked up like irresistible vegetable magnets at some beautiful farmer's market veggie stand, I can never resist the urge to preserve it all for later consumption when fresh greens are less abundant.

10L and 15L crocks make a pretty decent amount of pickled anything, whether it's dill pickles, pickled hot peppers, sauerkraut, kimchi, whatever. It's a lot.  And when they are full, they are heavy. Like, you might strain yourself if you try to lift them. That kinda heavy...

For instance, if you have 15 or more lbs of cabbage, then the larger, traditional glazed clay crocks are the way to go. They aren't cheap and can run anywhere from $85 to over $200, but it's definitely how you want to make a larger batch.

But lo and behold, I stumbled upon this little fermentation container known as the Crazy Korean Kimchi maker. Or something like that. But this company makes them in every size you will ever need.

What I love about this one is that it is fridge-size. If you've ever made kimchi before, you know that it's a fridge or cool cellar, kind of affair. Me, I've always made my kimchi in a click clack style food container that I kept in the fridge. An airtight, container, mind you. Understating it politely, kimchi can be rather aromatic. Especially to those untrained in the ways of kimchi. lol! I love that kind of intense, sucker punch of flavor, for real but not really loving a cheesecake with a hint of kimchi...

Having said that, I love anything naturally fermented. I drink fermented tea, keep sourdoughs, brew beer, kombucha, dabble in charcuterie, cheese. You get the crazy picture... That is to say, I am fascinated by this old fashioned preservation method that has become all but lost and is now considered by most to be a hobby instead of a life or death necessity of feeding the family throughout the winter.

So when I saw this contraption a few years ago on Amazon while looking for a new glass kimchi jar, I had to have it. It seemed ingenious.

Easier to refrigerate and the best part of it is that it has it's own flexible airlock layer that naturally vents the fermentation gases. No weights and no mess or fuss with your fermented vegetables not staying beneath the fermenting brining liquid. That sometimes leads to mold or off flavors and this handy little all in one box does it all and does it very well.

Not one to settle for single-taskers in the kitchen, I wanted to test drive it with a few smaller batch ferments I needed to do recently. For one, I used it to speed up a chili pepper ferment for a microbrew of hot sauce. It was outstanding and the ferment was so perfect after 2 weeks, I could complete the hot sauce I was making with the fermented peppers.

On to bigger and better culinary experiments.

Here's the way I used it for making my first batch of bad-to-the-bone sauerkraut. And yes, at my house, that's now a thing....

Bad to the Bone Sauerkraut Ingredients:
cabbage, sliced thinly with a knife or mandolin slicer
pink Himalayan salt

Brining ratio, if necessary:
2 c water
2 tbsp distilled white vinegar
1 tbsp pink Himalayan salt

1. Slice the cabbage thinly and layer on the bottom of whatever vessel you are using for your ferment. It could be a ceramic or glass jar.
2. Sprinkle salt over the layer of cabbage. Don't have to go crazy here. A light touch will do. Pound with a cabbage muddler/pounder, if you have one and if you make kraut a lot, you will want one. I couldn't find mine, funny enough, so I used the meat pounder.
3. Pound the cabbage layer a bit and then add another layer of salted cabbage. Continue to pound each layer until the cabbage begins to release it's natural water. You will be surprised.
4. At this point, you should have enough natural juices to submerge the now tightly pressed cabbage but if not, add a simple brine using the above ratio until you can fully submerge the cabbage. This container I'm using has a silicone layer with a built in airvac loc and seal. It performs the same function as traditional fermentation weights or plates. If using a more traditional fermenting crock or jar, the cabbage needs to be submerged in its liquid using fermentation stones, weights, a plate, etc.
5. Seal the vessel. Mine above has a locking lid. My other crocks have large stone fitted lids and are sealed with water in a water channel that creates an airtight seal. You can also just use a cheesecloth, muslin or tea towel secured with a rubber band. You want to keep out bugs and insects as well as unwanted bacteria or other airborne contaminants.

When it comes to sauerkraut, like most any other fermented vegetables, it really is a matter of taste. How long you let the fermentation go, depends on how sour you like your ferment. If you are more on the milder side of that fence, then check your kraut after a week and then again after another week. I think I let mine ferment for about 4-6 weeks but because I'm a curious cat, I will check the ferment starting about week 2. I like a super sour kraut so 6 weeks is still a-ok in my book. 

Remember that in times past, our grandparents used to ferment for the entire winter months, keeping their kraut and pickles in really large crocks or barrels even, just pulling out only what would be eaten within a few days, as needed. You need the larger crocks for that, in my opinion, which I have, but I usually just put it all up in jars just in case something goes awry. Like... I forget to keep the water channel full to create the watertight seal and insets get in. That is just suck-o-rama. Super suck-o-rama.

Again, one of the reasons I'm a little smitten with the Crazy Korean Kimchi maker is that it is a smaller, more manageable batch and it solves all of the drama because it keeps everything out while letting the ferment bubble and burp safely away. That's true regardless of whether you are doing a room temperature ferment, a basement ferment or a fridge ferment, like kimchi where you need to stop the fermentation process at some point. 

Me, I just blow stuff up and this can help with that little problem of over-fermenting because it's small enough to store in the 'ol refrigerator. But even that, can sometimes go awry, as you may have heard... so experiment with wild fermentation abandon at your own risk. ;)

One more handy little gadget to mention before I leave you to your fermentation devices. And that, was a pun intended, because this little device has been my newest BFF in addition to the crazy Korean mentioned above. Pickle Pipes. Yup. Mine came in a pack of 4 and they have since become one of the most used pickling gadgets in the house.

The silicone lids fit with wide mouth canning jar rings and creates an airlock with zero hassle. That little nipple thingy has a hole in it like a child's bottle might but is small enough to only let gases out while preventing access to insects, etc. What I have found is that not only are they very useful for fermenting foods. But if you use them to store fresh peppers, it will literally extend the shelf life of your fresh peppers for WEEKS. That's right. I said weeks, my friends. I was harvesting peppers out of my garden over the course of several weeks in order to start a small batch of hot sauce, but at first, I didn't have enough peppers to start. 

I added my fresh peppers to my jar, no liquid of any kind, of course. Just the washed, fresh peppers. Sealed the jar with a pickle pipe and ring, just as is shown above and I was able to collect peppers over the course of several weeks, adding them to my jar until it was full. Then I started another jar and did that until I had 3 half gallon jars full. 

I couldn't believe my eyes, honestly. I swear to Julia, the peppers I had picked nearly 5 weeks prior were indistinguishable in quality from the ones i had freshly picked that same day. You could not see a bit of deterioration, no soft spots or rotten peppers. Perfect.  The peppers were refrigerated the whole time in my pickle pipe jars. Between the refrigeration and the pickle pipe, the combination allowed me to preserve my fresh pepper harvest over 6 weeks!!! Freaking incredible. So well worth it just for this sole purpose if you grow and eat fresh peppers on a regular basis.

Pickle Peppers in a Kimchi Jar!

My hubby's million dollar secret... Revealed.  Need I say more?  Oh, ok. Let me explain...

This is an experiment pickling smaller batches of peppers using my nifty Kimchi pickling jar.  For those of you who have never made Kimchi before, I will write a post or maybe several, about this topic, but for now, let's discuss how to make your own Tabasco hot sauce.

For years, my hubby and I have grown the hottest peppers on the planet, long before it was posh or cool or hip to eat hot foods. I'm a Southern girl, raised on Tabasco.

My first garden here in Minnesota had 45 varieties of peppers growing in it and nothing else...  My husband came to love the really really hot stuff after we started growing peppers on his apartment balcony when we were first dating. The rest is hot sauce history.

I have posted the "recipe" for making pickled peppers the old fashioned way, using a Gartopf fermentation crock.  However, I wanted to show you this way of doing it, too. The Kimchi jar was perfect!  Not only did it allow us to make a smaller batch of hot sauce but we could also see the fermentation in action, which is kinda cool.

As is the case with the Gartopf crock, this jar has a "cup" on top of the mouth of the jar and a wide rim on the well which holds water to create a seal. The seal keeps critters and dust out while still allowing the jar to burp and gurgle to release the gases as the peppers begin to ferment.

The pickling liquid will also go from crystal clear to a milky, cloudy pickling liquid and this is your sign that fermentation has happened and may need to be slowed down. To slow it down, put this little jar in the fridge. This slows down the fermentation process and I find that the refrigeration step also allows the real tang to develop.

Of course you can eat these little devils just like they are. And we do. But another way we enjoy this bounty is by juicing the whole batch and making hot sauce.  This is the trick to making a good hot sauce. You can blend, puree, mash the peppers but juicing them gives you the consistency of real hot sauce and also helps to keep the sauce homogenized. In other words, the sauce won't separate as easily if you put them through the juicer.

As a precaution, we use clean and sterilized herbal supplement bottles (which are quite small and very appropriate) fitted with medicine drippers. This allows hot sauce lovers to drizzle the sauce drop by drop on their food instead of pouring it out of a bottle which can end in trauma if you pour too much. This method, which my hubby thought of, is the most perfect way of doing it I've ever seen.  :)  

Gartopf Fermented Pickles

This is my 10L Gartopf fermenting crock. I've been using these now for several years after doing research and learning that these are the traditional vessels used for making sauerkraut and pickles in Germany and Austria.  I'm sure any old ceramic crock will do and I am antiquing around town in order to locate some of the awesome local crocks from Red Wing, but until then, these are my go-tos. They are sturdy, steady and quite heavy so keep that in mind if you do decide to start pickling this way. 

The nice thing about these crocks is that their lids are specially designed to let the gases escape and of course, since they are covered, bacteria can't get in.  The deep well on the outside is filled with water once the lid is in place and a little hole or gasket that sits above the water line releases any excess gas while the fermentation is in full swing. 

Fatalii, Red Congos, Purira, Punjab, White Habanero
Jalapeno Chili Peppers

If I had to guess, I would say this was around 7 or 8 lbs of homegrown very fresh peppers, picked from our pepper plants that same day.  From here you add the fresh peppers to the crock above and I admit this one is a little full so they will have to be pressed down somewhat so that the stone weights, which the vessels come with, will fit in and keep the peppers submerged in the pickling brine. This is extremely important if you do not want your peppers to rot. That can happen when the peppers are allowed to float on top of the brine and then, you run the risk of spoiling the whole batch.

We put the stones in top, then pour the pickling liquid in so that it covers the stones completely. Put the lid on top and wait about six weeks for the fermentation to stop. The vessel will start "burping" almost immediately so if you smell something funny, don't blame your neighbor, they didn't do it, honest. :)

The standard pickling brine I use for cucumber pickles and pickled peppers is the following:

• 2 cups warm water, not hot
• 2 tbsp white vinegar (I love fancy, but not here, this needs to be standard white vinegar)
• 1 tbsp kosher salt

Repeat this exact measurement as many times as you need to completely cover the stones and peppers. My 10L needs about 6 repeats and 5L about 5. Don't ask me why, doesn't make sense to me why you don't need twice as much for the 10L but I have repeated this enough times to know that you need one more batch more than the 5L, usually.

Shocked? So was I.  But this is the perfect ratio for creating a natural pickling brine that isn't overloaded with vinegar or salt. It will work, trust me. The pickle flavor or the acid you are looking for will be there, I assure you, but it will develop naturally and allow you to store these pickles without hot packing BUT you will need to refrigerate them temporarily to stop the fermentation process. I learned this the hard way when a bottle of recent hot sauce nearly exploded at the kitchen table because we forgot to put it back in the refrigerator just after bottling it.  We put our hot sauce in medicinal dripper bottles because the dropper is the perfect way to distribute really, really hot sauce in moderation. Well, the rubber dropper on top turned into a big round bulbous balloon that was funny at first.

In an attempt to alleviate the pressure, hubby wanted to put it in the fridge. Due to recent events in which other things blew up my fridge, I was a little wary of this idea and insisted he put it outside where temperatures were already quite nippy.  Well, as you might expect during the day, the temps climbed and we forgot to take it back in. It alerted us by exploding with such a force that it literally shot hot sauce to the soffits of our roof, much to my dismay. Alas, putting it in the fridge may have been more prudent but don't tell him that.... :)

After these are done, we take them out of the brine then run it all through a juicer and the hot sauce will surprise you. Of course, you can also pack them into jars to brighten the day when the mood strikes if pickled peppers is more your thing. Just be careful and do your homework so you know exactly how to process fermented food as I'm still a novice (no? really??) myself. Experiment but arm yourself with a bit of google research so I don't lead you astray. But, above all, have fun!