Anyone Doing Wild Fermentations?
In addition to brewing beer and compost tea, I ferment my own sauerkraut. It's incredibly easy. All you have to do is slice the cabbage as thin as you like (the thinner the better, really), add about 5% of the weight of the cabbage in salt, mix it up well and put it into a five gallon bucket or other fermentation vessel. put a plate or something on top of it and some weight on top of the plate, cover the bucket with a towel and let it be. The salt draws moisture from the cabbage while the plate compresses it so that the cabbage is submerged in its own brine (add a bit of non-chlorinated water if it doesn't become submerged within 24-48 hours). Once it's submerged you can truly forget about it (though maybe not the smell, which to me is a pleasant fragrance) for 5-6 weeks. Voila, delicious 'kraut. The bacteria that commence the fermentation process occur naturally on cabbage, so you don't have to innoculate it with anything. It's a wild fermentation.
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