Sauerkraut

As you can see, I have had a break from blogging.  Too much happening and not enough time to relax!  Anyways, as you can see from the title of this blog post, we made sauerkraut!  From scratch, thank you!  I am really luck my partner loves to experiment with food too.  He does it from more of a health perspective (every now and then he sways the other way- he is eating Paleo chips tonight- oven fries cooked in butter) and does alot of research behind what he is interested in.  Sauerkraut that is fermented is suppose to be good for your digestive system, I have terrible problems with my digestive system, so this was a perfect pairing! I dont know where he got this recipe but it was really good!

This should make one medium sized jar

Ingredients:

1/2 a cabbage sliced really thin

1 litre of natural yoghurt (to turn into whey)

1/2 a teaspoon of salt.

Method:

Slice the cabbage thinly.  Add the thinly sliced cabbage to a bowl and get something really heavy to pound the cabbage.  You need to pound the cabbage till it is broken down till there is just as much juice to cabbage. 

 Add to the jar.  

Get a clean piece of material (I used a clean cotton tea towel) and place the yoghurt in the centre of the material.  Tie and hang it up so that it is in a ball, leave a bowl underneath to let the whey drip into.  This should take a a few hours.  We cheated and placed the material with the yoghurt in it in a metal steamer with a sauce pan underneath to collect the whey.  

Once the whey is collected, add 4 tablespoons of whey to the pounded cabbage.  Add the salt and stir.

  Close the jar with the lid and keep in a warm place (roughly 27 degrees celcius). We cheated and used a EasyYo Yoghurt maker to fast track the process.  If you are on top of this by changing the hot water when needed using the easyyo Yoghurt maker , you can have your Sauerkraut ready in 3 days.

Images by me.  I look rancid in this shot!