Then, toss the cabbage with some salt. For the amount shown here, about 2T, but it might depend on how course the salt it. It should taste about like a good soup: salty, but not too salty. Then add a splash or two of vinegar and toss some more.

Let the cabbage set for a few hours (usually a day, for me, until I can get around to it again). By that time it will be sort of wilty. This is important. Wilty cabbage makes crispy kraut. Really! Drawing out some of the water from the cabbage, prevents the cell walls from breaking when the kraut ferments.

Then, you can mix in other ingredients. Chopped apples are great, as are juniper seeds.

Pack the wilty cabbage into some sort of container. I like old kimchi jars, or old pickle jars, because they have a wide mouth which makes them easy to handle. Squish out all the air, or as much as you can. A few bubbles won't hurt anything, because the cabbage will be making its own juice as it goes.

Cover the cabbage with some whole leaves. Ideally, these are grape, cabbage, lettuce, collards ... something green and flat. Again ideally, these should be salted so they are also wilty. But I tend to forget that step, so as you can see, my leaves are quite fresh (these are grape).  I put them in fresh, then sprinkled salt over them.

Insert a small cap or bowl of some kind. It's hard to see in the picture, but I'm using a custard cup. The lid will press down on the cup, which will keep the leaves and kraut submerged while it ferments. Some people prefer a plastic bag full of water, and I have some homemade ceramic inserts I use also, or in the old days they sometimes just used a piece of wood, or a rock. The main thing is, make sure whatever you use doesn't have, say, lead or arsenic or iron in it. Custard cups and dipping cups are the easiest IMO.

Add water, if needed, so liquid comes up over the leaves. Then screw down the lid.

The lid should be plastic. The white plastic ones that come with kimchi are perfect. But you can also buy plastic lids from places that sell canning jars.

If you only have a metal lid, screw it on very loosely. Otherwise, you may create a bomb which will scatter glass shrapnel and kraut all over your kitchen. On the other hand, you want to make it tight enough that flies get in. And, you don't want a  lot of mold-producing oxygen. The ferment will be producing CO2 though, which forces out the oxygen for the most part, so you don't need a perfect seal.

While people tend to prefer glass bottles, they are not required. The PETE bottles that are often sold these days don't leak flavors into the kraut. Don't use low-fired ceramic though, or metals that might react, or the lower-grade plastics.

You may want to put the bottle inside a flat pan of some sort. The bottles tend to bubble over and leak at this stage.

By the second day, it should smell like kraut, kind of cleanly acidic with a whiff of cabbage. You can eat it at this point, but it's better after it sits in a cooler spot for a week or a few months, to age. I put mine in an outside fridge, but in the old days they would go out on the porch in a barrel, or in the cold cellar.

The best flavors seem to come out when the aging temps are pretty low, and most kitchens are quite warm these days. The jars don't leak while they are in the fridge though, so it's pretty easy to just stick them in the back somewhere.

Then, when you get a hankering for some kraut, just dish it out! I usually eat it raw, or put it over some potatoes in a pan and bake. The kraut flavor gets into the potatoes, and it's divine. We serve this with sausage or sauerbraten, of course!

You can also mix it with some honey, sausage, onions and potatoes for some fancier dishes.

 

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