The kiddo and I walked over to the post office today, the stroller weighed down with packages of goodies to send to the raffle prize winners.
(That stroller is a pack mule. I’m going to be rather sad when the kid decides he’s too old to ride. Or maybe we’ll just graduate to one of these. I’m pretty sure my current steed can be adapted for the long tail, so it would be affordable–considering we’d be using the bike like a car, which is how we currently use the stroller.)
Wow. Long parenthetical there. Sorry. You know how I love my parentheticals. (Good news. I don’t use them in my fiction. Though they are a pretty good indication of the way my brain moves. Which is…scary, I guess.)
Okay, so we dropped all those packages off at the post office, and strollered on over to Goodwill to reward ourselves for all that philanthropical schlepping. I had a $10 credit in my pocket from accrued points on my Goodwill card, and the memory of a sweet little crock I’d seen the last time we were there and passed on by because it was $12 and I didn’t really need it. I was thinking I could use it to make sauerkraut. We love the stuff, but it’s kind of pricey if you consider the fact that it’s just cabbage, salt, water, and fermentation time. Heather (who never blogs anymore, which is a shame, because it means you’ve missed out on pics of her outrageous garlic harvest) made a batch at home a while ago and was raving about it, and so I thought, well…why not? And then Billy got all excited about the idea of adding in some juniper berries, and that settled it. We would be making sauerkraut. Yeah, I could probably use something we already had in the house to make it, but that crock was so sweet and would make nice, little batches of sauerkraut. (Or so I thought.) The crock was still there today, and I bought it and carted it home. The kiddo fell asleep on the walk home (something else I’ll miss when he gives up the stroller), and I sat down to do some sauerkraut research. You know–the research I should have done BEFORE blowing my $10 credit + 2 bucks. (Sensing a pattern?)
The crock is too small. The batches I could make in there would be too small to be worth the effort. Also, the shape isn’t ideal. I could make do by using a bag of salt water as the weight and seal, but still, that’s just not what this crock is for. (Unless I’m wrong? If this crock can be used to make sauerkraut, please do chime in and let me know!) I was kind of bummed. But then I thought about what we use sauerkraut for most of the time: our beloved tempeh reubens! Which means rye bread.
I accidentally killed my sourdough starter last summer, and have been meaning to get a new one going ever since. This little crock is the perfect container for a starter. And the container I had been using to hold the starter, which was really WAY too big for that purpose? I can totally use that to make sauerkraut.
So give me a few weeks to let everything ferment (except the tempeh, whose fermentation I will leave in the capable hands of the pros, for fear of poisoning my family), and we will have tempeh reubens around here with homemade rye bread, homemade sauerkraut, and homegrown tomatoes.
Ahhhh….
My mom used to make sauerkraut and the crocks she used were huge. Like four times that size, bigger than the one you are using for your sourdough starter, and we didn’t even eat that much sauerkraut. I have a friend who has made it in the past using five gallon buckets. To be perfectly honest neither my Mom or my friend were entirely successful in their attempts. We fed most of what mom made to the dog and my friend had issues with his batches going bad, if that was because he was using buckets or he forgot to take care of them during the fermenting process I’m not sure. Personally, I like the sauerkraut you can get during the Verboort sausage/sauerkraut festival in the fall. The same friends stand in line forever once a year and buy a ton and freeze what they don’t eat right away.
I highly, highly, highly recommend portabello reubens. Holy goodness.
Do you need starter for sauerkraut? When we made it last time around with the farmer, I thought we just did the cabbage and salt (.10% of the weight of the cabbage in salt) and the mashing. The mashing formed the juices, and then we covered it and let it sit to ferment itself. (It is entirely possible I missed something.)
Good luck and have fun! YUM!
I will eat almost anything, but the thought of sauerkraut (right up there with raw fish — therefore sushi — and raw oysters) makes me retch. 😛
However, the sourdough? I’m all about it. Well, except for the whole wheat issue, that is. Darn. I miss my sourdough so much.
I have a really lame to most people story about sauerkraut, but there is such rare occasion to tell such story that I must at any opportunity. So here goes… feel free to skip or delete if you wish.
At my high school, freshman biology included a lab lesson that, for whatever reason, included making sauerkraut and tracking the pH over time. Everyone had a head of cabbage, some vinegar and a clean pickle jar.
My locker had no top/ceiling to it because it was apparently the way that they could access wiring in the walls if necessary (our lockers were built-ins). This meant that I had extra storage in that I could put stuff on top of the adjoining lockers. I put the sauerkraut jar there on the last day of that particular lab, since we were all sent home with our jars to enjoy with our families, presumably. (You can probably see where this is going.) It stayed there… until the last day of my senior year of high school when I retrieved it and returned it to my biology teacher. He was stunned. I’m told it’s still in the science wing teacher’s room. 🙂
And that concludes my silly sauerkraut story.
My mom made sauerkraut once. The crock was about knee high, the diameter was big enough to use a dinner plate (one of those large earthenware ones) as a weight on top of it, with a linen dishtowel under it to keep things out of the kraut, and she weighted down the plate with something–a brick? a quart mason jar full of something? I don’t remember at this point. I do remember her shredding the cabbage and it took forever–so I would reccomend either a mandolin or food processor for that. The only thing she put in with the cabbage was salt. And that was the best kraut I ever had. It was even better if you ate it “uncooked.” (I know she canned it, so it had been cooked somehow at that point.) It squeeked in my teeth and was awesome. To this day, I really don’t care much for cooked kraut.
Just de-lurking to say that I really enjoy reading about your Portland adventure I’ve also been making a lot of homemade versions of things we used to buy in the store in recent weeks. Your sauerkraut and sourdough sound fabulous!
The brown crock is probably a bean pot.
Is your old cobalt blue crock in good shape or with cracks? It may have been used for this same purpose over a century ago.
Love:)
“Mom” beat me to it – I was also going to say that the brown crock is a bean pot. It would be good for molasses and brown sugar baked beans to go with a hearty brown bread (baked in a coffee can of course and then toasted with a sharp cheddar or Swiss melted on top). I have a blue and white Polish pottery (fraternal) twin to your bean pot. I guess I should dig out my MILs (she’s a New Englandah) bean recipe and put it to use one of these days. (Currently it sits at the top of the wall unit looking pretty.)
Two years ago we tried making sauerkraut in a crock pot and something happened around week 3-4 and it turned ugly (there was mold involved). Last year we canned cabbage directly in jars with a few other things (dill, garlic, salt) and after a few months it was pretty tasty. I’d like the try the other method again someday.
My mom used to make sauerkraut when I was a kid. She used (clean, new, purchased direct from the supply house by my dad) 5000 ml beakers. (My dad is a geologist, so he got all the science-supply catalogs). She used a bag full of water as the sealer and even then the sauerkraut sometimes didn’t turn out (one year one of the bags broke…my six year old self may or may not have been involved in that…)
All she used was cabbage and salt, but it was my understanding that a bigger batch was more likely to turn out. I’d love to try making it someday, but I fear my house is too warm (she used the basement) and besides, I live alone, so I’m not sure I could use up 10 pounds of kraut…
The crock is pretty! Also, I love those $10 credits! We just used another one recently. Actually one of the things I got was a pair of Danskos I’d been keeping an eye out forever so (even though we bought several things that day) I like to think I got the Danskos for $1 or $2, in my size after waiting for-ever. -I’m catching up on my blog reading, sorry about all the late comments tonight.
Please research juniper berries and the effects it could have on your efforts to bear children. It seems to me that it was recommended to bring on labor in pregnancy. Also, was it used as a contraceptivein times past? I seem to recall that women used to drink gin (made from juniper) as a way to cause a spontaneous abortion. Please be careful.