Back on January 3rd, I stopped in at my local Whole Foods to buy 22 pounds of organic cabbage. In the days prior, it began to look as if the weather might be cooperative this year; it can’t be too hot or too cold, or the project I wanted to embark on wouldn’t work. I had to acquire a new mandoline slicer as our old mandoline was no longer with us. I tried one time to shred this much cabbage by hand, but that is a horrible task. Another reason why I haven’t done this in a while, the lid of our 10-liter ceramic crock had first cracked and then broke in two after something fell on it off the kitchen counter. Caroline since then glued the pieces back together with an adhesive that was not food grade, but my feeling was that the lid never comes into contact with any of the contents of the crock.

So, with about 10 heads of cabbage cored and quartered into 40 pieces, I started slicing and stuffing the cabbage into the crock. After every six quarters added, I threw a tablespoon of salt on top, mixed it with my hand, and pressed it down. And this is what I did for the next couple of hours. The added salt breaks down the cells of the cabbage, and putting pressure on the shredded pieces allows me to fit it all in the crock. By the time I’m reaching the end of the slicing and I’ve made a huge mess of the counter and floor, the compressed cabbage has given up so much fluid that I have a good 2 inches of brine sitting atop the cabbage. All that is left is to put on the lid, fill the V-shaped rim with water, write the date on a piece of tape on the lid and wait.

Thirty-six days later it’s time to empty the crock. I’d wanted to wait until the 42nd day, but the temperatures are going up here in Phoenix, Arizona, and at a certain point the fermenting cabbage will turn soft and maybe even develop a strong alcoholic taste, which I don’t want. With that in mind, I pull the crock that’s been turning cabbage into sauerkraut up off the floor in the corner and get ready to start packing kraut into jars, 8 of them as it turns out. With 2 gallons or 7.5 liters of this German superfood, we lose a bit of refrigerator space but gain at least 8 months of fresh homemade sauerkraut. If you should think this isn’t as sexy as visiting the Grand Canyon, you’d be seriously wrong, but then again, how many people out there are able to indulge in such luxuries?