Time to Make the Sauerkraut

Give Your Cabbage a Spa Day

Here’s my annual reminder that if you’d like to impress everyone on St. Patrick’s Day, now’s the time to get your sauerkraut started.

Cabbage Spa Day

Around the time I started writing my maternal family’s stories, I also started preparing the food those characters ate. I learned to make yogurt, jelly, and homemade biscuits (not always with their methods or recipes, but close enough). I learned to take apart a whole chicken without leaving it in shreds of boneless meat, and I’ve kept a sourdough starter alive for five years now.

Also on that list is homemade sauerkraut, which my great-grandma stored in large crocks with an upturned plate on top, both to weigh down the cabbage and keep the dust out.

I didn’t dabble in sauerkraut because I wanted to eat it. As a matter of fact, I didn’t like sauerkraut. Or I didn’t think I did. But as it turns out, the mushy, foul-smelling glop of gross you get from a can is not what you get when you spend time massaging salted cabbage. You heard that right. Sauerkraut is nothing more than salted, massaged cabbage that’s been sitting in the dark. Think of it as cabbage after a spa-day. What I’m saying is that if you’ve only tried canned sauerkraut, you’ve never had sauerkraut.

That’s my sales pitch to you.