Adventures in Fermenting My Own Kraut

What do you do when  you have most of a cabbage left over because you only needed one leaf for your last project? You eat it! Or ferment it! (Or both!)

Here we have the two ingredients I need for making my own kraut. I used 1 small head of red cabbage (about 6" in diameter) and 1-2 tablespoons of kosher salt.

I'll include links at the bottom for where to get some of the tools to help make this job a lot easier.

Chop it all up and put it in a bowl, sprinkling salt between layers. One layer was about 1/4 of the cabbage.

Here's my full bowl of cabbage. Put the lid on the container and let it sit for 15 minutes, shaking it vigorously every 5 minutes. This helps the salt get the juices from the cabbage flowing.

Start packing your cabbage into your jar. Get a pickle packer or other pushing utensil. In order to pack the cabbage down aggressively enough with my hand, I ended up breaking my jar and wasting about 1/2 cup of cabbage. Darn it! That was a good, wide mouth pickle jar. :( 

Rescue another jar from the recycling bin, this time it's a tall pasta sauce jar. Pack the cabbage in as good as you can, it's important to pack it in firmly, this helps get the juices flowing well and helps you fit enough in the jar. If I hadn't packed it in well, I estimate it would've taken up twice as much room.

Find out that your pickle pebble (glass weight) doesn't fit in the top of a pasta jar. Cry.

Fill a snack baggie with sand and use that instead. Curse the jar gods for making your good wide-mouth jar break. Remind yourself to always use a pickle packer instead.

Cap off the top with a clean cloth (a paper towel works if the one you'd planned on using got thrown away due to broken glass fragments.)

Now let that baby sit for 3+ days to ferment nice and juicy!