Pawaru-Grahmata

№ 5VI. nodaļa

Kāpostus raudzēt

Sauerkraut with caraway and juniper

  • Makes about 2 l (fills a 3 l crock)
  • 1 hour, plus 1–3 weeks' fermenting
  • Melnraksts · vēl nav izmēģināts

1796Kahpostus raudseht.

Modernizētslpp. 243 · PDF 257

The book gives no quantities, only the time: 8 days or longer somewhere warm. The amounts below are ours.

Method

9 soļi
  1. Scald the crock with boiling water and let it cool. If using the starter, smear it thinly over the inside.
  2. Pull off the outer leaves and keep 3–4 good ones. Quarter the heads, cut out the cores and shred the cabbage finely with a knife or mandoline.
  3. Weigh the shredded cabbage and use 20 g salt for each kg. Mix it with the salt, caraway and juniper in a large bowl, leave for 10 minutes, then knead and squeeze it with your hands for about 5 minutes, until it is wet and limp.
  4. Pack it into the crock a few handfuls at a time, pressing each layer down hard with your fist or a wooden tamper, until juice rises above the cabbage. Pour in any juice left in the bowl.
  5. Cover the surface with the whole leaves, then the plate or disc, then the weight. Leave at least 3 cm of space at the top.
  6. Cover with a cloth and leave at 18–22 °C. Check every day that the brine covers the cabbage. If it doesn't after 24 hours, top up with brine made from 20 g salt per litre of water.
  7. Taste from day 8. When it is as sour as you like (usually 1–3 weeks), pack it into clean jars, pressed down under its brine, and keep it at 0–10 °C, in a cellar or the fridge. It keeps for months.
  8. Safety: a thin white film on the surface (kahm yeast) is harmless; skim it off. If you see fuzzy, coloured mould, or the cabbage turns pink or slimy or smells rotten, throw the batch away. Keep everything under the brine: air is what spoils it.
  9. The cores: the book chops the cores and trimmed outer leaves finely and ferments them the same way in separate, larger vessels. They make a coarser kraut for soups.

Notes

What the book says vs. what we added

the method is the book's: the heads trimmed, halved and cored, shredded with a knife or a cabbage plane, packed with salt, caraway and juniper berries into oak barrels rubbed beforehand with leaven, tamped as hard as possible with a wooden pestle, covered with large leaves, a wooden lid and heavy stones, left somewhere warm for 8 days or longer to ferment, then kept in the cellar. The salt ratio, temperatures, daily check and safety advice are ours.

Frost

the book warns that sauerkraut must not freeze: then "all the sourness disappears and it starts to rot". Keep it cool but frost-free.

Fresh heads

the book also keeps whole heads fresh in very dry sand in the cellar. Today, wrapped in the fridge, they keep for several weeks.

Leaven

rubbing the barrel with leaven gave the ferment a head start. It isn't needed: cabbage carries its own lactic acid bacteria.

Juniper and caraway

paegļu ogas are juniper berries; both are still classic sauerkraut seasonings in Latvia.

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