Adventures in fermenting

For my birthday I begged for a fermenting pot and my husband being the most wonderful guy that he is bought me one from my amazon wish list.  It's the 7.5 liter Harsh Gairtopf and it's gorgeous!

We started off with a basic kraut recipe:

A few heads of organic cabbage
Sea Salt
Garlic

That's it. (you can see my handy helper)

I shredded up all the cabbage (at first I wanted to use my food processor and it was a pain in the ass so I ended up just chopping it all up) and then layered it in the pot with sea salt.  Smashing down each layer with my fist as I went.  Apparently there is a special mallet for this and it's on my list of things to get.
After my layers were finished I put the heavy stones on top, put the lid on the pot, and let it sit for 9 weeks to be exact.  Well...more like 9 weeks and a day.

When we opened it up, I won't lie, I was really scared.   But, it looked almost exactly as it did when I put the lid on 9 weeks earlier, with just a bit more liquid.

We took off the stones and scooped out all of the kraut.  It was delicious!!!

It had tons of flavor.  It was garlicky, but really good.  It also retained a lot of "crunch" and I liked that.
It wasn't as soggy as kraut I'd had in the past.
Overall, 100% a fantastic experiment.  I'm on my way to becoming a fermenting freak!

And,

If you're thinking to yourself..."fermented what?"
Here is a great link to a post from Mark on the many benefits of fermented foods.


This is a really great book and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in getting started with fermenting their own foods.