Time to make some sauerkraut | Food Production and Preservation | Forums

we eat a lot of sauerkraut, a lot, due to our pennsylvania dutch and polish heritage, pork and sauerkraut is a pretty staple meal, especially on New Years, well since we have a lot of pork, we need a lot of sauerkraut

RIP pig pig and sue sue

I realized the other day we were getting low, and with easter coming up, we are going to need it, so it's time to get another batch going

So I grabbed 10 heads of cabbage, my food grade bucket and some canning salt

you want to pick off any discolored leaves on the cabbage

I quarter them and cut out the cores

I set up my scale

and chop up and weight out 5 pounds of cabbage, which will use about 2 heads and give you roughly a gallon of cabbage

you want your salt to be roughly 2.5 to 3 percent by volume, which is around 3 tablespoons per 5 pounds

so I take off roughly about a pound and a half of cabbage

dump it in the bucket and sprinkle with a tablespoon of salt

and keep layering it and sprinkling

I give the bucket a good shake to evenly spread the salt, and at this point you have a gallon of cabbage to make into kraut, but like I said, we eat a lot, so I have a lot more to cut

so I use a large lexan to dump into and massage the salt in by hand

and dump it into the bucket, giving me 5 gallons of cabbage

take a non reactive plate and set into the cabbage

and set something on to it to weight it down

the salt will slowly draw out the water from the cabbage and it will compress

that was after about 4 hours, I checked it this morning and my brine has covered the cabbage, time to wait for nature to takes its course

to be continued