Sauerkraut: The Great Pickled Vegetable

November 24, 2014November 24, 2014 / farmandhearth / 2 Comments

Riddle me this: What food is gluten-free, vegan, Paleo, GAPS, vegetarian and kid-approved? Read on …

Dear scientist chefs,

A kraut by any other name would be as sauer! Kimchi, kraut, cortido, sour cabbage, tsukemono, atsara and pickles are just a few of the names you’ll find around the world for the sour, lactic-acid-fermented vegetables that virtually every culture knows and loves. Every combination under the sun – with spices, onions, peppers, mixed vegetables, herbs, wild weeds, boiled eggs (what?!), fruits, chips of bark and probably the occasional unfortunate cricket – can be found as you travel from home to home, country to country. Eastern Europeans favor dried fruit, caraway seeds. Warmer climates tend towards spicier, peppery blends. Studying the trends in different regions, you can find the logic in it; dried fruit is available in Eastern European climates, where it grows fresh throughout the year. Spiced-up krauts are less inclined to mold, and in hot climates ferments lean towards mold very quickly. Isn’t it funny how natural food culture, separated from the supermarket mentality, really suits the region?

A few of my favorite fermenting books

In Seattle, Washington, Britt’s Pickles can be found in various farmers markets. They ferment their pickles in huge, steam-cleaned oak barrels from local wineries. Their Pickleator and other fermenting tools are available online.

Out here on the farm, we make our kraut by pretty much dumping in everything we have on hand at the moment! We held another rollicking kraut and kimchi food lab, where the class chopped up four monstrous boxes of cabbage, as well as black Russian kale and a case of fresh-picked bok choy. We threw the chopped cabbage into tubs and salted it in layers, and pounded it with a wooden rolling pin by turns until the juices leaked and the cabbage was thoroughly bruised on every side.

All the pounded, salted greens went into a huge, ten-gallon crock, and then the students set to work chopping up their unique flavor choices. Everybody was making their own delicious jar of kraut, or kimchi, or whatever you want to call it – by this stage, no true name really applied because we weren’t following any rules! White turnips, black radishes, peeled and shredded gingerroot, red and green apples, yellow onions, habanero and Carmen peppers, lacinato kale, celery, rainbow carrots, red radishes, daikon radishes and garlic were all chopped by students and their selections were mixed by handfuls in their individual kraut bowls. Then, everybody shoveled scoops of the bruised, dripping kraut into their bowls and hand-mixed it with the vegetables they had chosen, before pressing it into quart jars, labeling and capping them.

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A small batch of kimchi I prepared back in June; we enjoyed eating it on fresh bread, with slabs of cold butter, during class.

And the kale grows, and grows, and grows … this is White Russian Kale. Photo credit Kevin Jamison

These stuffed quart jars will sit on the counters in their homes, hopefully in a rimmed baking sheet or something to catch the juice that will surely leak out! Every day, for a few days or even a week, they’ll release the lid, letting out some of the built-up gases escape. Those jars hiss like a bottle of homemade kombucha when you pop the top! After a few days of this, the jars can safely sit – with only the occasional lid check – until the substrate inside is fully soured to the chef’s taste. How do you know if your kraut isn’t done fermenting? It will taste like salty cabbage! How do you know if it’s fermented enough? It tastes as sour or tart as you like it to! Then, the home cook will eat it and/or move that jar to the fridge, where bacterial activity will slow to incredibly low rates. Yes, it will keep fermenting in the fridge – but very slowly! It can take months and months for marked flavor change to develop.

One of the students snapped a few pictures for us before things got muddy – it’s a little hard to take pictures in the building at night, but you can get a general idea of what went on!

Chef Lyndsay preps some fresh bread for snacking during class

Lots of big Boos boards for chopping – they donated six to our Food Lab, very generously!

A rather blurry picture of some of our fermented vegetables, ranging between six months to two years old.

That old pickle jar is full of small heads of cabbage drowning in saltwater.

Sauerkraut FAQs from the Food Lab

Download Kraut FAQs and Recipe

1. How long does it take to ferment my kraut in the jar?

It depends on how much salt you added. With more salt, and in colder temperatures, it will take a long time. A light hand on salt, and a warm kitchen – 70 – 85F – and the kraut can go faster, maybe becoming sour in as little as a week or two. I like to leave my krauts to ferment for a few weeks or even months, and then move them to the fridge for another few months. Some purists say the real flavor doesn’t even begin to develop until after six months!

2. How do I know if my kraut went bad?

You’ll know – it will be slimy and moldy, it will stink to high heaven, and nobody could pay you to eat it! If some mold develops on the top of your kraut, don’t be alarmed – gently scoop it off with a spoon, and replace the missing liquid with purified, salted water if necessary (you want your vegetables to stay beneath the brine!). Some of the mold might break off and float away, but just get what you can. The vegetables deep under the brine are still safe for consumption.

3. How much salt do I use?

I really don’t measure the salt – I sprinkle it in as I layer the chopped vegetables before pounding them, and during the summer I tend towards a heavy hand with salt. The lactic acid that the vegetables create are what inhibits the growth of pathogenic bacterias – but lactic acid takes about three days to kick in when fermenting cabbage! That’s what the salt is for – it does the work of inhibiting the pathogens until the lactic acid can do the dirty work. If you really insist on a measurement to get started, you can use about 1-1/2 tablespoons of kosher sea salt per average head of cabbage. Get used to using that amount, and pretty soon you’ll be able to vary up and down per your own preferences.

4. Why kosher salt, or sea salt, or whatever you had said up there?

Use salt that does not contain iodine and anti-caking agents such as yellow prussiate. These tend to make the cabbage slimy and gross.

Download Kraut FAQs and Recipe

This kimchi is covered with a cloth, and a thick layer of brine and jar weights. Generally, I prefer using lids on jars.

Simple Seasonal Sauerkraut

1 organic head of cabbage (Chinese cabbage, green cabbage, it doesn’t matter)

1 to 1-1/2 tablespoons sea salt, approximately

Optional: caraway seeds, turmeric, peeled and crushed garlic, peeled and shredded ginger, small amount of dried or shredded fruit (about ½ cup or less), other vegetables cut, shredded, julienned, diced or sliced the way you like them

1. Shred or coarsely chop cabbage; place in a metal or plastic bowl that won’t break and sprinkle with salt.

2. Firmly massage with your hands, or pound with a wooden mallet or the end of a rolling pin for about ten minutes, until the cabbage is very juicy and wet. When you start pounding, you may think “I’ll have to add water to this to get enough brine to cover it!” If you’re using nice, fresh cabbage, just keep on pounding till that ten minute mark. You may be surprised how much brine will leak out of that cabbage!

3. Mix in any other spices, herbs, vegetables or fruits that you like. I tend to keep the “other” ingredients at less than 50% of the volume, usually well below that, so my krauts are mostly cabbage.

4. Pack it all into a large jar or multiple jars, pressing the vegetables down so the brine covers them completely. Pieces that poke out or float will probably be thrown away when you open the jar to eat the kraut, so really smash it down firmly!

5. To keep everything beneath the brine, you can add small jar weights (available from Cultures for Health, Britt’s Live Culture Foods and other places), or use the stem end of the cabbage to wedge in to the top of the jar.

6. Place the jar on the counter in a rimmed baking sheet or pan to catch any juices that may leak out; you will need to pop the lid once or even twice a day for a few days. Depending on how warm your house is (70 – 80F is a happy place for fermenting!), you can taste test it as soon as three days; it may take up to a few weeks. If you don’t want it on your counter that long, you can move it to the fridge and let it slow ferment for a lo-o-o-ong time!)

Kraut will last months and even years in a cool place. My favorite ones are at least a year old. Some traditions say the true kraut flavor does not even begin to develop until after six months!

Adding caraway seeds, turmeric or even a few tablespoons of raw, cultured whey will help reduce the risk of your kraut molding.

Download Kraut FAQs and Recipe

A batch of kimchi, ready to move into the fridge for cold storage and spicy snacking!

Bacterially yours,

Mrs H
My phone was stolen so I haven’t grammed you in a while!
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Recommended Reading

I’m always building up my fermenting library (and you will be, too, with all the book giveaways I have coming up!). These are some of my long-standing, time-tested favorites. Just reading them makes me all giggly and happy inside – and of course, the wealth of knowledge that can be gleaned by cross-examining all the books should not be underestimated!

The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from around the World

Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods

Asian Pickles: Sweet, Sour, Salty, Cured, and Fermented Preserves from Korea, Japan, China, India, and Beyond

Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats

Kombucha Revolution: 75 Recipes for Homemade Brews, Fixers, Elixirs, and Mixers

The Nourished Kitchen: Farm-to-Table Recipes for the Traditional Foods Lifestyle Featuring Bone Broths, Fermented Vegetables, Grass-Fed Meats, Wholesome Fats, Raw Dairy, and Kombuchas

Cooking from the Farm: My Top 10 Cookbooks

July 22, 2014July 27, 2014 / farmandhearth / 2 Comments

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Dear gentle readers and those not so gentle as well,

We like to eat well, and we also like to save money. We like to eat local food, and we love fresh and seasonal food. Logically, then, much of what we eat every day comes from the farm. We also don’t like eating the same recipe twenty-hundred times in a season, so I am constantly scouting new cookbooks. I’ve whittled down a list of books that work very well for farmer’s market shoppers, CSA members, seasonal eaters, farmers and gardeners. I’ve stuck with this short list because every time I go to these books, I can find everything I need for a given recipe in one trip out to the farm, and the odds and ends (olive oil, balsamic vinegar), I tend to have in my pantry. These books stay in my kitchen for frequent, daily use while other interesting, but possibly less useful books, go elsewhere to be referenced occasionally.

This list is not comprehensive, and in fact I am hoping you’ll send me your favorite titles as well; I am always looking to bolster my creative closet of books! The following books are in no particular order (other than smallest to biggest!).

My Favorite Cookbooks for Cooking from the Farm

1. The French Market Cookbook: Vegetarian Recipes from My Parisian Kitchen

Clotilde Dusoulier is the totally adorable and well-loved blogger at chocolateandzucchini, and she is not a vegetarian. She is not gluten or dairy free, either, but as it happens, most of the recipes in this vegetarian book are also gluten and dairy free. I’m not vegetarian either, but I don’t eat loads and loads of meat because it’s expensive and it just isn’t sustainable (which you learn when you are growing your own food), to eat turkey and steak every week (more often than not we’re eating bones, feet and organs!). Truth to be told, I was prepared to not like this book because so many “market” books don’t live up to their name, but truly every ingredient in her recipe will be found growing together, or harvested the same weekend. In fact, the book is divided into seasons, not categories, to make it even easier to plan your next trip to the farmer’s market. And the book is really cute, and precious, and pretty, and has lots of juicy pictures. I gave it a five star review when I reviewed it for the San Francisco Book Review.

2. Recipes from the Root Cellar: 270 Fresh Ways to Enjoy Winter Vegetables

And oh, how I love this book. It was recommended to me by copy editor and reviewer and vegetarian foodie Holly Scudero, who had an early galley copy that I loved to drool over. Mr H bought it for me when Borders Books went out of business – we pretty much cleared out the cookbook shelves, and this gem was one of the best things that happened that day. Andrea Chesman grows her own food, so her recipes have such a natural way of being seasonal that it feels a little ridiculous to even point it out. The first time I made sauerkraut was from this book; the long, lonely winter in California was filled with comforting, steaming bowls of Italian meatball soup, and pans of maple-roasted vegetables that I wrapped myself around like a mother cat with her kittens. This is one of the best books in my kitchen.

3. Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods

And speaking of sauerkraut, behold the fermentation king! For those of us who truly eat seasonally from our gardens, fermentation is one of the many food preservation techniques we rely on to get nutrient-dense, home-grown produce all year long. This book will take you from novice to advanced fermentation artist (especially if you follow it with The Art of Fermentation, a veritable treatise on the subject!). Since he grows much of his own food, and since fermentation is an art developed solely for the purpose of preserving food in it’s season, it’s very easy to find everything you need for a given recipe growing at one time. Can’t find Chinese cabbage? Maybe it doesn’t grow in your area (so you’ll have to ferment pineapple and coconuts instead!), or maybe it’s the wrong season for it (and you should try turnips and carrots while you wait!). I fell in love with this book when I borrowed it from a friend, and then I had to buy my own copy and now it’s splattered and marked in and the pages are wobbly at the bottom from when a gallon of kimchi leaked out onto it.

4. The Real Food Cookbook: Traditional Dishes for Modern Cooks

Nina Planck, who writes at ninaplanck.com, grew up with farmer parents, eating farmer food. She is accustomed to and familiar with the rhythms of the garden and the bounty and not-so-bounty of some foods. Her book has a certain respect towards the way a farm grows – look, we can’t put ground beef in every recipe or we’ll run out of cows and have a freezer full of feet – and she strongly encourages readers to vary the recipes, saying she will never make it the same way twice herself and we should adapt to our areas. I love that philosophy since I never follow recipes but, as she suggests, use them as inspiration (even though I often start out with good intentions of following the recipe very strictly, it never happens!). Her book makes me so happy, and so hungry, and so eager to run out and harvest a basketful of dinner!

5. Better Homes and Gardens Fresh: Recipes for Enjoying Ingredients at Their Peak (Better Homes & Gardens)

I guess I was a little surprised how much I liked this book, since it seemed so commercial when I first picked it up. But it actually delivers some delicious surprise! The meat section focuses on very American cuts of meat like flank steak and meat-centric dishes, but that is only a very small portion of the overall book (and that is not to say we don’t need the occasional recipe for a flank steak! It’s just pretty darn rare… bad pun?). The fritters, salads, pizzas and desserts – oh, the desserts – overcompensate the cook with plenty to work with. In fact, as I am flipping through it I am wondering if the roasted vegetables and chickpeas might make an appropriate dinner … or shoestring sweet potatoes and beets?

6. Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets

Let me just start by saying anything from Deborah Madison has my automatic seal of approval. She’s on this list twice, if that tells you anything! She has a dessert book, too, that would be on this list I am sure if I were so lucky as to own it and have some experience with the recipes (I browsed through it at at the library once, but I was visiting another city at the time so I couldn’t check it out!). Her book has an astonishing ability to have recipes that use literally every single item I dug up or trimmed off the plant that day. When I first joined a CSA, I felt like every box was custom-built for one of her recipes. I fell in love with her work and have been a groupie ever since. When you need vegetable-centric dishes from somebody who knows vegetables, and knows plants and really, really knows food – Madison delivers the goods.

7. Vegetable Literacy: Cooking and Gardening with Twelve Families from the Edible Plant Kingdom,

with over 300 Deliciously Simple Recipes

This is one of the newest books in my collection. I saw it at TJ Maxx and it was in my cart before you could shake a pasture-raised organically-fed lamb’s tail. Rich, nourishing, hearty, and most fascinating of all, divided by plant families. I could read this book all day long, but the shimmering pictures on the page would send me to the kitchen before long! Prepare to get an education on the plant kingdom, flavor profiles and recipe history when you crack open this tome of wonder. Like all her books, the recipes are full of seasonal items that grow at the same time, and, as far as I can tell, in the same place.

8. The Silver Spoon

You’d be surprised how much international cookbooks stick to seasonal cooking – not because it’s a ‘thing’ or a ‘movement’ but because they don’t all shop and eat out of the supermarket! This Italian cookbook has an easy fluidity to the recipes – they just feel so natural, so easily fresh and seasonal. It’s a pleasure to cook out of it, and easy. When I have a bumper crop of cucumbers, I go to the cucumber section and pick a few unique recipes. It’s definitely better than eating cucumber salad three times a day!

9. Food in Jars: Preserving in Small Batches Year-Round

(Not pictured above) Of course, I have to add a canning book. Marisa McClellan, with her gorgeous and tasty blog, has been a favorite of mine for years now, and she never fails to deliver! She shops her local farmer’s markets or is gifted produce from friends, so her recipes also come seasonally quite naturally. With small batches for canning – you can do this while you make lunch, instead of setting aside the whole weekend for it – her recipes are attainable and enjoyable. I’ve loved every single recipe of hers I’ve ever made – they’ve all turned into family favorites, requested gifts, popular dishes at the house. When the gas repairman sampled the pickled beets, he said, “I’ve never eaten a beet in my life! I can’t stop eating these!” He took the whole jar home.

10. I need you to fill in this blank!

I need another market-worthy book! Are there any good raw books out there, or international cookbooks? I love Mediterranean and Indian and Persian food – I’ve been curious to try The New Persian Kitchen, and of course anything by Ottolenghi but especially his new Jerusalem: A Cookbook. I love all-American, old fashioned or contemporary. What are your suggested titles? Thanks for reading along!!

Anxiously awaiting your reply,

Mrs H
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Welcome to the Farm! (Or, Signs of Life Persist)

July 21, 2014July 23, 2014 / farmandhearth / 9 Comments

Dear Reader,

Come on in! How did you find us? If you are a faithful follower that tracked me down from the old blog site, I am so thrilled to see you, you early-bird you!

We’re having a lot of fun (and a few headaches!) moving to our new blog home here, and we haven’t finished unpacking yet! Watch out for all those boxes and papers, spilling code and drafts and edits everywhere …. That sawing sound? That’s my SEO guy, trying to hack into the mainframe.

I’ve always been known for my stellar content and astral copy, but my CSS skills (or was it HTML? Or SOL?), are in the Sorely Lacking category. That’s why it takes me longer. Trust me, I’ll stick to what I’m good at and find People for the rest.

If you’re peeved at me for not writing on the old blog for the past year, and curious as to why I moved to a new platform and am suddenly barraging you with posts and letters (does one really, really fabulous post count as a barrage?), read on, Fascinated One.

During my husband’s deployment through 13-’14, I spent less time on the computer and more time filling my hours with our baby, volunteering on New Earth Farm in Eastern Virginia. An organic, biodiverse, sustainable, water-conserving farm led by Farmer John and his business partner Kevin and their team, this is a farm that is shaking things up. We troweled in the dirt, washed eggs, worked the farmer’s market stand, dug potatoes, chased sheep and watched lambing, picked kale with red-numb fingers in December and harvested tomatoes in sweat-sticky August. I started working at the farm as a fermentation and food preservation expert, and following the vision of our farm manager Kevin, we developed an entirely new facet of the farm called the Food Lab. Here, in an airy, high-ceilinged building designed by interned architects and built entirely by donations, we experiment with food, create, invent, fail and laugh, and I teach classes in our new Food Lab – kombucha, advanced kombucha, sauerkraut, charcuterie, pasta, canning, lacto-fermentation … and I take the classes mobile, too, teaching at Williams-Sonoma, Whole Foods, Norfolk Botanical Gardens, local garden clubs, private classes, area shops and markets.

I finished my 200-hour yoga teacher training, took a prenatal yoga teacher training to add to my Simkin Center doula training and then immersed myself in a few other teacher trainings both in Virginia and in Seattle, meeting Manju Jois, Troy Lucero, Suzanne Hite and other yoga legends (I am heading off to the Baron Baptiste Level One training in August 2014! Very excited). I’m still writing for the San Francisco Book Review and their Alphabet Soup and Critical Eye blogs, and I began writing for a magazine after they came to the farm for a photo shoot and a four-page spread on the Food Lab. Journalists and magazine writers from around the world started calling for media visits every week; schools drove buses of children out for tours. All – and I mean all – the top chefs in our area, keen on the best tasting, freshest produce and the unusual weeds, bugs and herbs we could provide, started descending on the farm and hammering us with questions, the most passionate of them digging in the dirt themselves and foraging with us for wild plants. They started inviting me in to their kitchens for private, pre-hours sessions with them, working to create the most delicious, unusual, ancient foods together. Farm Table events, where brilliant chefs designed a menu based on whatever we had to harvest that day and fourteen paying participants attend to cook and eat with the chef, started selling out back to back.

Whole Foods, Williams-Sonoma, local goat farms, butchers and pork farms, Bonfire Magazine, and other wonderful area providers and organic farms joined the charge as class sponsors, providing ingredients, tools, publicity, whole-hearted support. A photographer volunteered her time to come shoot events, edit the photos and get them back to us – she shot all the pictures in this post! An appliance store donated a dishwasher. Area chefs donated used tools. Farm visitors donated cash, kitchen gear, time to paint and sweep and mop, just plain shook our hands and encouraged us to keep doing what we were doing. Contractors gave tools and materials for our building, time, skill. With a massive group effort, the building was put together, the classes fell into place, and the people started coming.

With the scope of the blog ever evolving and my audience constantly growing, the name of the blog itself evolved and I found I had to move to a different platform – quite a daunting prospect in the blog world, but I was ready to take it on with your faithful reading support! All the good information on the old blog will stay there, safely housed and accessible for us to search, read and bookmark, and the best posts will also be imported over to the new blog platform to find a fresh, new look. Things like how to eliminate some of the trash that flows from the home starting in the kitchen, or one of our hottest posts of all time – my booklist top picks and recommendations! Even how to make yourself a back-alley cheese press with these cheap items you already have in your kitchen, and if you’re in the mood for food, whip up a deviled meat spread (we have a vegetarian option, too!).

If you need something fresh to read and you’re bored, check out fantastically well-written articles by yours truly on topics such as my favorite home-made deodorant, a sneaky trick for frothing milk without a frother, a cold overnight salad that will make your family fall in love, and a list of 66 awesome things to do with your Vitamix. Did I make those sound pretty good or do I need to tempt you with a recipe for laundry detergent, too? I know, who could resist that!

Watch in shock and awe as farm-tested recipes straight from the field roll out, photos and news clips and tutorial videos, hilarious and piquing interviews, even horror stories roll out on the new blog! You’ll even start seeing things for sale. Is a cookbook in the works? I can’t say anything officially. But If I said two new cookbooks, would you believe me …? Yes, I knew you would. If I said one was a raw food cookbook, and the other was a seasonal farm cookbook … I know, you’re already pulling out your wallet to buy copies for you and all your friends. Don’t make me blush!! Events will be posted on the blog so you can find when a class is coming to a city near you, and class tours will start to open up nationwide as I do a West Coast series in August in Seattle, Washington and travel to Williamsburg in September to teach in my favorite town! And you can always visit us on the farm for a tour, a class, or just lunch with the farmhands – every day but Sunday, at about noon. We’d love to have you.

Mrs H
I’ll keep you up to date on Facebook (we’re already friends though, totes obv)
instagram.com/foodlab_newearthfarm super rad pictures from my cellphone