Pass the Awesome! An experiment about life and the way it moves me |
The past few weeks have been tiring. I realize I have not written anything in a while, and I have no real excuses. That being said. Here I go.
Sauerkraut. It was not always a pile of cooked vinegary mush. No, the real thing is crunchy, flavorful, and quite good for you. It is a fermented food. A food that I attempted to make prior to starting this blog several times, each time ending in failure. Why did I fail? It turns out I was simply to flippin' impatient! A few weeks ago, when I started writing about water kefir, I decided to make a quart of sauerkraut using a little bit of water kefir as a starter. I shredded and smashed a whole head of cabbage with maybe 1-1.5 teaspoons of pink sea salt (if no starter is used- usually whey from cheese making- it is generally accepted that first timers use 1 tablespoon of salt instead. I mixed in a few ounces of water kefir and smashed the pile into a glass wide mouth quart jar. I then put a thin layer of olive oil on top as an extra (and likely unneeded) precaution. Then I put on the lid (not super tight). Based off of my previous experiences, I used a glass anchor hocking tupperware-type container as a mote. I placed it on my usually unused microwave and there it sat for roughly 3 weeks. Yes, 3 weeks. It takes a while for the the sauerkraut to finish up. You can eat it sooner, but it is more likely to go bad that way. Within one day, the fermenting cabbage pushed all of the oil out of the jar and into the mote. In the process it also pushed all oxygen out of the jar. In my previous attempts I freaked out at the overflowing mess and tried to push the kraut down into its liquids agian (BAD IDEA). This time, I just shrugged and let it alone. Since Oxygen is needed for the kraut to go bad, all was well. Carbon dioxide is heavier than regular air, so as long as it is undisturbed, it acts as a barrier. if you don't understand the c02 barrier, look up lake Nyos. The volcanic lake released a ridiculous amount of c02 it had stored up on August 26 1986. The cloud of co2 rolled down into the valley bellow and suffocated 1700 people to death. Grim, I know, but it just show that it acts as an oxygen barrier. The same rules apply here.
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July 2015
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