Bubble, bubble...minus toil and trouble

Let’s first make one thing clear: I’m a big fan of the vinegar pickle.  I love the dilly bean and the pickled corn round and swear I would walk 500 miles (more, even) because I am a junkie for those grossly addictive Zuni café red onion pickles (yes, those pickles.  The good news is there’s no need to walk anywhere. Visit those links! They are a piece of cake to create at home).  Not to mention the many occasions when pickles, snacked on between shots of vodka, have no doubt inoculated against unkind mornings-after.  Mainly, it seems I can’t ever get enough vinegar.  One, let’s say, “uncommon” habit I have is to down cider vinegar mixed with molasses on occasions I’m too lazy to brew coffee, or when I’m in need of a pre-jog pick-me-up.  Probably, it goes without my saying: Any vegetable in vinegar is basically this girl’s dream come true.

Here’s the but: If there’s anything I love more than the vinegar pickle, it’s the lacto-fermented pickle.  Science projects that double as cooking have—for the past couple years—placed high among my preferred pursuits.  These include, but are by no means limited to, sourdough bread baking, kombucha brewing, and yogurt culturing.  Among these, there is nothing quite like watching cabbage bubble up in its crock into sauerkraut and kimchi—and my latest experiment, a Japanese cabbage pickle called “tsukemono.”  There’s something wondrous about lacto-fermentation.  Given a couple days, the bacteria already present on raw cabbage turns some tricks, ups the vitamin C and lactobactilli content, and emerges something greater than the sum of its parts. You shred some cabbage, add salt, and basically that’s it: it practically wants to become sauerkraut for you. It’s like Jimmy Stewart put it, once upon The Philadelphia Story: “Vinegar pickles are a slap on the back. And lacto-fermentation is a heavy mist before my eyes.”  So maybe he was talking about whiskey and champagne, respectively, but lacto-fermentation isn’t so different from bubbly: It’s magical, it’s fortifying, and it will make you giddy.

For reasons beyond understanding, store-bought sauerkraut often contains high fructose corn syrup or other dumb additives.  On top of all this, it costs a small fortune.  Why pay for the jar or refrigerated (often pasteurized! What!) bag when it’s simple—and it really is truly, truly simple—to make your own for pennies?  It’s delicious, for one thing, and ridiculously good for you: it’s rife with vitamins, highly digestible, promotes healthy intestinal flora, boosts your immune system, and can heal your broken heart.

Ways to enjoy your pickled cabbage

• There’s no shame in eating kraut straight out of the jar, but my favorite thing is a sandwich of toasted dark bread—some kind of pumpernickel or dark rye—slathered nearly to excess with mustard, topped with kimchi or sauerkraut and sardines. It is possible to buy the fish in its “skinless and boneless” manifestation, but why do that, when you’d be paying more to miss out on tasty calcium?  What I do is I remove the primary, disorienting, crunchy spine; the rest ain’t no thang.
• Sauerkraut pushed around in a pan with juniper berries and sausage
• Kimchi fried rice: If your kimchi grows “overripe”—meaning too sour for you to bear, what you do is fry it up with some day (or longer)-old rice, throw in frozen peas, cilantro, cumin, soy sauce, eggs, and white pepper.
• Make triangles of toast, top with tsukemono, a raw (if possible) or smoked oyster (recommended: Crown Prince smoked oysters in Olive Oil; steer clear of cottonseed, because it is gross) and as many drops of Tabasco on top as you can stand.
• Drink the kraut juice.  Just do it!  It’s good and good for you.

Japanese sauerkraut a.k.a. Tsukemono

Adapted from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon
Makes 1 quart

1 head Napa cabbage, cored and shredded
1 bunch green onions, chopped
2 tablespoons naturally fermented soy sauce
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons whey (if not available, use an additional 1 teaspoon salt)

This is traditionally made with a culture derived from rice bran, but whey serves an identical purpose and is more easily obtained. (You can simply drain it off the top of your yogurt; or if you make your own cheese, you know what to do.) Place all ingredients in a bowl, mix well and pound with a wooden pounder or a meat hammer to release juices.  Place in a quart-sized, wide-mouth mason jar and press down firmly with a pounder or meat hammer until juices come to the top of the cabbage.  The top of the vegetables should be at least 1 inch below the top of the jar.  Cover tightly and keep at room temperature for about 3 days before transferring to cold storage.

Interested in sauerkraut or kimchi? My favorite kimchi instructions come from Greg Cooks: his kimchi tutorial is excellent and simple, and the results ultra tasty.  My sauerkraut advice I get, of course, from Sandorkraut.  Check out his Wild Fermentation forums if you’re afraid of poisoning yourself, but really, you shouldn’t be.