Tag: kraut

A Fool for Pickled Chard

I finally got around to pickling chard stems again last week, when I needed to dig out several big Swiss chard plants so I could start next year’s garlic crop in a raised bed. These plants were of the Bright Lights variety, with its assortment of beautiful yellows, pinks, and reds.

Bright Lights first proved me a fool me last spring, when the plants had grown about two inches tall. I had expected to find all the various colors on a single plant, as with a capsicum plant whose fruits change according to individual timetables from green to yellow to orange. Not so with the chard. I found some seedlings with yellow stems, and others with pale pink, beet-red, or white stems. Obviously, a farmer sells a multicolored bunch of chard by banding together stems from various plants. Someone with a very small garden who wants multicolored chard may have to choose one color for herself and share other seeds or seedlings among her friends, with the hope that they can trade full-grown stems later on.

Bright Lights turned out to be just as stringy as plain old white-stemmed chard. I was fooled again in the kitchen as I pulled off the strings; as with most rhubarb varieties, the color on those pink, yellow, and red stems is only skin deep, and much of it comes off with stringing. My Bright Lights had dimmed before the pickling began.

I made the pickle as in my prior post on this topic, except in a quart jar this time. The next day I thought I would take a picture of the pretty jar, but now, strangely, the contents appeared uniformly pink. Tipping the jar, I saw that the top ends of the chard stems were all the same color, a very pale pink. Fooled again! The chard had given up its color to its pickling liquid. I might as well have pickled a jar full of white-stemmed chard and slipped in a small slice of beet.

Bright Lights chard in all its lovely colors is still growing strong in the main garden. Until the rains drown the plants or the cold rots them, I’ll search for other ways to bring their beauty to the table.

Sampling Fermented Foods in Portland

Offering cucumber pickles from Picklopolis

Only the reek of human sweat overpowered the aromas of kimchi and sauerkraut at Portland’s third annual Fermentation Festival, held for two hours on October 20 at Ecotrust’s Billy Frank, Jr., Conference Center. Organizers estimated that five hundred people attended the event last year, and this year I’d guess that more than a thousand filed up the sidewalk, around the first-floor lobby, up the stairs and across the second- floor lobby to pay their five bucks and slog through the crowded conference room, where they fought to grab samples from thirty commercial and wannabe commercial producers of various fermented food products, including cider, miso, sourdough bread, brined salmon, kombucha, Rejuvelac*, brewed ginger ale, and pickled cucumbers, cabbage, and garlic.

There were disappointments: A drink labeled kombucha looked and tasted like a batch of kefir gone moldy; wine, beer, and cheese were totally absent; the only bread was over-soured; and the salmon briners ran out before I reached their table. Still, I greatly enjoyed Jorinji’s miso soup, Pickled Planet’s sauerkraut with seaweed, and somebody’s capsicum-free kimchi (a relief after I’d tasted at least a half-dozen hot versions).

Serving Jorinji’s miso soup

I hope the organizers will find a bigger room for next year’s Fermentation Festival. Demonstrations would be nice, too, since nearly all the products are easy to make at home. Check for information about the fourth annual Fermentation Festival at www.portlandfermentationfestival.com.

Curious Farm’s kraut and more

1. Rejuvelac is a kind of kvass, a slightly alcoholic Eastern European drink fermented from bread or grain. The name is the creation of Ann Wigmore, a Lithuanian immigrant to the United States who in the latter half of the twentieth century founded centers in Boston, New Mexico, and Puerto Rico to promote a vegan raw-foods diet. A leading promoter of sprouts and wheat grass, Wigmore made Rejuvelac from whole grains, usually wheat (you can see an old film clip of her in the act on YouTube).  Rejuvelac is a very sour, cloudy beverage that’s supposed to be good for the digestion (I guess I should have drunk more at the festival, because my belly hurt all night afterward).

UPDATE 2022: The tenth Portland Fermentation Festival happened in 2019. Hopefully this annual event will resume when the pandemic has ended.

Hot Pink Sauerkraut

hot-pink sauerkraut

When my friends Wendy and Greg handed me a gorgeous, huge red cabbage from their garden a couple of months ago, Greg told me he loves to make red-cabbage sauerkraut. The Pickle Lady was humbled; I’d never made or even tasted sauerkraut from red cabbages! Now I knew what I would do with my beautiful cabbage.

I decided to take as my model a low-salt red-cabbage sauerkraut recipe from an odd little Canadian cookbook, Making Sauerkraut and Pickled Vegetables at Home. I cut the head fine, using a mandoline, and mixed the shredded cabbage with some apple and onion slices, a bay leaf, caraway seeds, and juniper berries. As always  in making sauerkraut, I tossed the mixture with salt and packed it firmly into a crock. But several hours later the cabbage had released almost no juice. This was problematic; when you’re making sauerkraut, the cabbage must be well covered with liquid to keep from rotting. The Canadian authors, warning that red cabbage is “a very hard vegetable,” suggested pressing “thoroughly with a potato masher,” but this didn’t work for me. I could have added some brine from one of the big jars of fermented pickles in my garage refrigerator, following another suggestion from the Canadian authors, but then the sauerkraut would have tasted of dill and garlic. A final suggestion from the Canadians was to add whey, strained out of buttermilk or kefir, which they said would jump-start the fermentation. That sounded to me like an unnecessary bother. So I decided to add fresh brine–that is, salted water.

Two weeks later, I pulled from my crock heaps of gloriously hot-pink, tart, delicious sauerkraut. Here’s the recipe. You can add more spices or leave them out, as you prefer.

4 pounds finely shredded red cabbage, plus a few whole outer leaves
1 large apple, cored and sliced thin
1 medium-large onion, sliced thin
1 Mediterranean bay leaf
Pinch of caraway seeds
3 juniper berries
3 tablespoons pickling salt (fine, pure salt)
1 quart water

In a large bowl or stockpot, thoroughly mix the shredded cabbage, apple, onion, bay, caraway, juniper berries, and 1½ tablespoons salt. Pack the mixture firmly in a crock or gallon jar. Wait an hour or two for the salt to dissolve.

Stir the remaining 1½ tablespoons salt into the water, and keep stirring until the liquid is clear. Pour the brine over the cabbage mixture. Lay the whole cabbage leaves on top, and add weights. (I used the weights that come with a Harsch pickling crock. With an ordinary crock, cover the cabbage with a plate that just fits inside the crock, and weight the plate with a capped, water-filled glass jar. If you’re using a gallon glass jar, weight the cabbage with a freezer-weight plastic bag filled with brine in the proportion of 1½ tablespoons salt to 1 quart water.) The cabbage mixture should be well covered with liquid. If it isn’t, add more brine in the same proportion. Keep the crock or jar at warm room temperature for two to three days, until fermentation gets underway, and then set it in a cooler place. If you’re using an ordinary crock, you’ll need to skim the brine occasionally.

Begin tasting the sauerkraut after two weeks. When it’s as sour as you like, transfer it to a clean jar, and store the jar in the refrigerator. If you like, you can freeze some of your kraut in plastic bags, rigid plastic containers, or glass jars. I don’t recommend canning it. Although with the addition of brine my recipe is saltier than the Canadians’ version, the sauerkraut will still be less salty than the USDA approves for canning.