Sauerkraut is one of the simplest and most delicious dishes of traditional Russian cuisine. There are a lot of recipes for fermenting cabbage, but many people reasonably believe that the fewer additives and spices, the better.
Ingredients for making sauerkraut:
- about 3 kg of fresh cabbage of late varieties;
- 1 large fresh carrot;
- 3 tablespoons of coarse salt;
- 4-5 pieces of bay leaves;
- 10-14 pieces of black peppercorns.
Cooking delicious sauerkraut:
1. First you need to choose suitable cabbage heads. They should be tight and not damaged or cracked. It is also important to make sure that there are no pests.
2. Remove the top leaves from the selected heads. Then cut the head of cabbage into 4 pieces and finely and neatly chop each piece into thin long strips.
3. Wash the carrots well, peel and rinse again under the tap. Then it can be chopped in any of the proposed ways: cut into strips, grate or in a vegetable cutter.
4. Cover the cabbage with salt and mash well with clean hands so that a small amount of juice emerges.
5. Add carrots, lavrushka and pepper to the cabbage, mix well with your hands.
6. Next, you need to select the dishes in which the cabbage will ferment. It can be an enamel basin or a saucepan, or you can put cabbage in three-liter jars.
7. After the cabbage is placed in the container of your choice, it should be well crushed with a fist or pestle. It is important that enough brine is released.
Important! The container should not be filled with cabbage to the brim, otherwise the brine that stands out will flow over the edge.
8. Cover the container with cabbage and leave at room temperature for a day. During the day, you should pierce the cabbage several times with a knitting needle or a sushi stick to release the gas.
9. After a day, you need to take a sample: if the cabbage has acquired a sour taste, then you need to move it to the cold. If there is no sourness, then it is worth leaving it warm for another day. It is also important to pierce the cabbage several times a day during the entire fermentation process.
10. In the cold, cabbage should spend about two days until cooked. Cooked sauerkraut is best kept in the refrigerator.
