sauerkraut

I got a fancy new sauerkraut-making apparatus with some Amazon gift certificates. It's supposed to make sauerkraut-making easier with its built-in weights and water-sealing lid. The water seal means there's no scum-skimming, and the weight means I don't have to find a clean stone to set on a plate to squash the cabbage down below the brine. It also means you can make sauerkraut with little or no salt, but I don't think that would taste like sauerkraut.



I had a bag of pears from Mary Verdery's tree, and some nice green tomatoes from Annie, so I decided to incorporate these into my first batch of sauerkraut. I ended up using about 2 kg cabbage (a mixture of red and green), 4 pears, 500g green tomatoes, 2 onions, 5 cloves of garlic, 5 bay leaves, a branch of tarragon, 1T coriander, 3T mustard seed, and 8g of salt per kg of fruit and veg. I squished it all together to make the brine, then sealed it up in the crock. I'm not to peek for two weeks!