Cabbage is the queen of autumn. This vegetable is stored for the future, trying to preserve all its useful properties. One of the most popular ways to store cabbage is in pickled form. White pick varieties of late ripening are best suited for fermentation. Some housewives have secrets that are successfully used in the kitchen. Someone ferments cabbage with apples, someone adds beets, cranberries, someone is limited to adding carrots. Tasty sauerkraut will turn out if you observe the proportions of these additives.
Pick your recipe
You will need
-
- per 10 kg of chopped cabbage:
- - 200 g of carrots and 200 g of salt;
- - or 800 g of apples (sour) and 200 g of salt;
- - or 200 g of cranberries and 200 g of salt.
Instruction manual
1
Before you begin preparing the products, you must prepare the container. It can be glass containers, enameled buckets or pans. The dishes must be processed - cleaned with soda, rinse under running water, rinse with boiling water, hold for several minutes over steam. Also process plastic covers.
2
Crush 10 kg of cabbage with a knife or use a special grater. Fold the chopped product in an enamel bowl. Add 200 grams of salt - if there is more, cabbage will become hard, if less - soft. Take into account exactly the amount of additional ingredients. Take the scales and set aside 200 g of carrots. Grate it and mix with cabbage. You can add dill, bay leaf - the product will be more aromatic.
3
The active fermentation process takes place for the first time for 6 days. At this time, it is important to maintain the optimum temperature in the room - + 16-20 degrees. If the room temperature is higher, the fermentation process will proceed faster and the taste of the product will deteriorate. At lower temperatures, a taste of bitterness will appear in sauerkraut.
4
After the fermentation process is over, it is better to move the dishes with cabbage to a cooler place, with a temperature regime of −2 degrees. This is necessary to prevent the formation of mold - the cabbage will become light, it will turn out crispy.
5
At the same time, you can transfer the semi-finished product into cans, but do not immediately close the lids. Juice formed during fermentation must be removed. Do not allow foam to subside - remove it from the surface with a spoon. Poke cabbage in jars periodically with something sharp, such as a knitting needle or a barbecue stick.
6
Some housewives ferment cabbage in the days of the new moon. Someone deals with fermentation only on the "male" days - Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. Others only on the "female" - Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. The nuances and secrets of making sauerkraut are many, many existing recipes. All of them are based on observing the temperature regime during the fermentation process and adding the optimal amount of additional ingredients.