Cabbage is the queen of autumn. This vegetable is stored for future use, trying to preserve all its useful properties. One of the most popular ways to store cabbage is sauerkraut. White-headed varieties of late ripening are best suited for fermentation. Some housewives have secrets that are successfully used in the kitchen. Someone sauces cabbage with apples, someone adds beets, cranberries, someone is limited to adding carrots. Delicious sauerkraut will turn out if you observe the proportions of these additives.
It is necessary
-
- for 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.
Instructions
Step 1
Before you start preparing food, you need to prepare the container. These can be glass containers, enamel buckets or pots. The dishes must be processed - cleaned with soda, rinsed under running water, rinsed with boiling water, and held over steam for several minutes. Treat the plastic caps as well.
Step 2
Chop 10 kg of cabbage with a knife or use a special grater. Place the shredded food in an enamel bowl. Add 200 grams of salt - if there is more, the cabbage will become tough, if less - soft. Be careful with the amount of additional ingredients. Take a scale and set aside 200 grams of carrots. Grate it and mix with cabbage. You can add dill, bay leaf - the product will be more aromatic.
Step 3
An active fermentation process takes place for the first time 6 days. At this time, it is important to maintain the optimum room temperature - + 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, sauerkraut will taste bitter.
Step 4
After the fermentation process is over, it is better to move the dishes with cabbage to a cooler place, with a temperature of −2 degrees. This is necessary to prevent the formation of mold - the cabbage will turn light, it will turn out crispy.
Step 5
At the same time, you can transfer the semi-finished product to jars, just do not close the lids right away. The juice formed during fermentation must be removed. Do not let the foam settle - remove it from the surface with a spoon. Periodically pierce cabbage in jars with something sharp, for example, a knitting needle or a kebab stick.
Step 6
Some housewives ferment cabbage on the days of the new moon. Someone is engaged in fermentation only on "men's" days - Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. Others only for "women" - Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. The nuances and secrets of cooking sauerkraut are many, many, and existing recipes. All of them are based on observing the temperature regime during the fermentation process and adding the optimal amount of additional ingredients.
