I was first exposed to cultured vegetables when I was a Tibetan Buddhist monk, living in a monastic community in Maryland about fourteen years ago. One of the monks in our house had digestive issues, and was fermenting vegetables to help with his symptoms. I didn’t hear anything more about cultured veggies until I began investigating the raw vegan lifestyle only three years ago.
When I was at the co-op the other day with a friend, I spotted an interesting variety of cabbage, it was light green with red veins. I thought it would make a very nice sauerkraut, so I also grabbed some purple kale, bok choy, a head of anise, and a head of celery to include.
I had seen a video with Sandor Katz all about Fermenting Vegetables at home, and wanted to try his “no water added” method. The juice from the vegetables provides the liquid for the brine, and there’s no need to add pro-biotic to the mix.
Here’s what I did with the batch pictured in this post. I chopped up the vegetables I got at the co-op and massaged them, just like Sandor does in the video. I added two tablespoons of Celtic sea salt for each 1/2 gallon Mason jar. There were enough veggies in this batch to fill two 1/2 gallon jars.
When I was visiting my good friend, Julia Child Award-winning cookbook author, Rebecca Wood (Twitter) (Facebook Fan Page), I noticed many Mason jars on her kitchen counter, each with a tapered water glass inserted to keep the fermenting vegetables in the jar from contacting the air.
I thought this was genius, not having to crack the lids on the jars to let the CO2 escape. With her system, the vegetables stay down and the gas seeps out around the edges of the glass. I’m trying this system on this batch to see how well it works.
If you don’t want to risk having sauerkraut juice slopping onto your counter, you can always pick up a Perfect Pickler or two. I haven’t used one yet, but Angela and Matt Monarch rave about them.
