So that sauerkraut idea...
Filth's post about sauerkraut got my creative juices flowing. Heck, I'd never made any fermented food from scratch. This sounded easy enough.
I already had a cabbage rolling around in the fridge. I shredded it, mixed it with salt, and crammed it into a gallon ice cream bucket, then plopped a plate on it and weighed it down with a big can of olive oil.
That was Sunday. Yesterday morning, I peeked in ready to see my magically-created brine. What I saw was wilted, crushed cabbage. That smelled a bit funny. I tilted the translucent bucket, and saw that there was some brining going on about three inches below the surface, so I crushed and plated and weighted and went to work.
Returning yesterday, I peeked, expecting to be rewarded with brine. The cabbage looked annoyed, but not briney. It was more wrinkly than cabbage usually is, and had some brown edges. Uh, did I forget the brine incantation?
By bedtime yesterday, I gave up and fed it some water, enough to cover the forlorn-looking shriveled pieces on top. Then I put the equipment back.
This morning, I gave it a suspicious look, and I swear it gave me one right back. There are a couple of bubbles around the edges. At first my heart soared...was that scum?? Had I created genuine, coveted, skimmable scum from successful fermentation, or is the cabbage plotting to mutiny by brewing botulism with which to show me a thing or two?
The funny smell is even funnier than it was the second day, and I don't mean ha-ha-ha kind of funny, I mean the hmmmm-with-a-squint kind of funny.
Can anyone tell me if this is food in the making or food turned into something lethal? I'm almost afraid to lift that plate again.
Glamorous
Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food. ~Austin O'Malley
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my talking shit about sauerkraut has spurred a few people into making it, but i am not one of them. not yet. i'm just biting the bullet and ordered this thing:
http://store.therawdiet.com/pisaandkimch.html
mostly because i didn't have a bucket/plate combo that fit enough to not let the stuff touch air. air is what grows the mold and bad stuff. traditionally, it's made in ceramic crocks, but that jar looks very affordable so i'm doing it.
all of this is to say, i don't know if what you made is poison or sauerkraut.
they used crocks with lids that fit and cleaned out the mold as a part of the process. me, i buy it at a farmer's market and don't deal with any of that.
this guy gets it started in a bowl by squeezing with the salt and extracting some of the water out, which becomes the brine. then he packs it tightly into a jar, ensuring that the brine is above the packed kraut. he goes on to say that there is no botulism or other food poisoning pathogens because the salt water environment makes it impossible for that stuff to grow. mold is a perfectly normal part of the process, you just have to skim it off.
this video was sent to me by the people i bought that jar from, along with a ton of other recipes i haven't had time to read through yet.
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The baleful glare coming out of the bucket on the counter is definitely botulism, then. My plate has a tiny rim of air space around it, but it was the tightest fitting one we had.
I'm glad cabbage and salt are in the category of 'low investment'. We can't even compost this, salt makes it hazardous to both worms and plants.
The mamas from previous generations didn't have all of this precision-made fermenting equipment, nor did they have hand sanitizer or antibacterial wipes. They just hacked up their cabbage with the same knife they'd used to gut something, then threw the cabbage into whatever container was handy and let it do its thing.
I guess that's why the life expectancy was shorter...Here Lies Prudence, victim of an ill-fitting Sauerkraut plate.