Homemade Sauerkraut

My husband gifted me a sturdy 1-gallon Ohio stoneware fermentation crock this past Christmas, so today I’m making sauerkraut. It’s a true homestead workhorse and I am thrilled to have it! This bad boy can hold approximately 5 pounds of cabbage, which makes a generous amount of sauerkraut.

If you haven’t experimented with fermented foods before, sauerkraut is a beginner-friendly way to become acquainted with the process. It’s fun and delicious and basically a fermentation “gateway drug.” Fermentation in general has been used as a food preservation method for thousands of years and is considered safe because the salt in the brine helps kill off the bad bacteria that can make us sick and encourages the presence of the good stuff, primarily Lactobacillus, hence why this process is called lacto-fermentation. The process is simple, too. The “hardest” part of the process is knowing how much salt to add, but we’ll get to that.

Ingredients + Equipment

To make sauerkraut, you need just two ingredients:

• cabbage
• iodine-free salt

The amount of cabbage you need will depend on the size of your fermentation vessel. My 1-gallon crock can hold around 5 pounds, so I bought two organic green cabbages that weighed about 2-3 pounds each and I used this Celtic sea salt.

The equipment and tools you need are things most people already have around their kitchen. You’ll need:

• large mixing bowl
• sharp knife
• cutting board
• kitchen scale
• fermentation vessel with weights and lid

You can use a stoneware fermentation crock like me, or do what I used to do before I had this crock and use a mason jar with a glass weight to keep the cabbage submerged below the brine. Either way, just make sure everything is clean. We want to minimize the risk of spoiling our kraut. Ready to get started?

Step 1: Gather your ingredients and make sure your equipment is clean.

I started by making sure my stoneware crock, lid, fermentation weights, knife, cutting board, bowls, and hands were clean. Warm water and soap do just fine, just make sure to rinse off any soap residue. I do take rings off because bacteria can hide in small crevices.

Step 2: Slice the cabbage.

I thinly sliced the two heads of cabbage with a Chinese vegetable cleaver. Fun and only mildly dangerous.

Step 3: Place the mixing bowl on the kitchen scale and tare it.

This allows you to weigh the sliced cabbage without adding the weight of the bowl. Knowing the cabbage weight helps calculate the amount of salt necessary to create the brine.

Step 4: Add the cabbage to the bowl on the scale to weigh it.

Once you know the weight of the cabbage in grams, it’s time to calculate the amount of salt to add.

Step 5: Calculate the amount of salt you need to add.

Generally, I like a 2% salt brine. Anything less than that and you run the risk of not having a salty enough brine (not enough salt means bad bacteria may survive and spoil your food), and more than 3% and it just becomes too salty for my taste buds.

Now, before you run away because I mentioned percentages and threatened you with math, just hear me out. All it means is that salt makes up 2% of the total weight of the mixture (cabbage + salt). It’s doable, I promise.

As a brief side note, this whole weighing of the cabbage and salt thing is relatively new. People hundreds of years ago didn’t weigh their cabbage and calculate a salt percentage, they just salted the cabbage until enough moisture left the cabbage to create a brine and they tucked it away in their cellar to preserve it and eat later. But, it’s 2022 and I have a kitchen scale and want to get this sauerkraut right so I’m choosing to weigh my ingredients. If you’d like a guide to making sauerkraut using tablespoons of salt rather than grams, Cultures for Health has a great guide.

So, to figure out the salt, I multiplied the weight of the cabbage (1,930 grams) by 2% (0.02) which came out to 38.6 grams. I decided to round up to 39 grams. So in order to create a 2% salt brine, I needed 39 grams of sea salt.

Step 6: Weigh your salt.

I weighed another bowl, taring the scale again, and added 39 grams of salt.

Step 7: Pack the crock.

I added a layer of cabbage to the stoneware crock followed by a layer of the salt and another layer of cabbage and so forth until the cabbage and salt were all used up.

Step 8: Pound the cabbage and salt.

I used a bean masher to pound the cabbage and salt together in the crock for about 15 minutes until a brine covered the cabbage. You can use a spoon or even your hands to mix the cabbage with salt, but decided to use my bean masher today.

The mechanical action of pounding the cabbage with salt encourages moisture to leave the cabbage, mix with the salt, and form a brine, and that salty brine covers the cabbage and keeps oxygen out, which assists the process of lacto-fermentation and keeps the food safe!

Now, if you aren’t using a large crock, you’ll want to pound the cabbage and salt in the mixing bowl until it releases the moisture and then add that to your mason jar or whatever fermentation vessel you’re using. The key is ensuring enough brine is present to cover the cabbage completely.

Step 9: Put a lid on it.

Once the brine was covering the sauerkraut, I placed my crock weights on top to keep the salty cabbage submerged below the brine and put the crock’s lid on. If you’re using a mason jar, you can place a glass weight or even a plastic bag filled with water on top of the cabbage to keep it submerged below the brine. Use a mason jar lid and loosely screw it on to allow air to escape.

Step 10: Wait.

At this point, we let the fermentation magic happen. I placed the crock on our counter in a corner of our kitchen. Our house sits around 68-70 degrees Fahrenheit in winter, so this crock will likely take a few weeks to ferment. In summer, this process may be faster if your home is warmer, but that’s the thing about fermentation, you just need to take some time to learn about what each ferment does in your kitchen.

As far as what I do with sauerkraut once it is finished fermenting, I plan to just eat it. I am (possibly?) weird in that I can eat kraut for breakfast alongside a cup of strong black coffee, which makes my husband shake his head, but it is what it is. I like to eat it raw for its probiotic benefits, but I also sauté it with some thinly sliced onions in a pan, toss in a few heaping tablespoons of caraway seeds, and eat it as a side dish. You can’t go wrong.

This batch of sauerkraut should be ready in about 3-4 weeks. After it is done fermenting, I’ll transfer it to some mason jars and keep it in the fridge to have on hand whenever the mood for kraut strikes, which around here, is often!