Making the Best Sauerkraut on Earth in Four Simple Steps: Chop, Salt, Pack, Wait

Make your own delicious, healthy, probiotic sauerkraut! Four easy steps are all you need to turn fresh garden veggies into a long-lasting, tangy, pungent condiment.

The following excerpt is from The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. It has been adapted for the web.

4 Simple Steps to Making Sauerkraut

The English language does not have its own word for fermented vegetables. It would not be inaccurate to describe fermented vegetables as “pickled,” but pickling covers much ground beyond fermentation.

Pickles are anything preserved by acidity. Most contemporary pickles are not fermented at all; instead they rely upon highly acidic vinegar (a product of fermentation), usually heated in order to sterilize vegetables, preserving them by destroying rather than cultivating microorganisms.

“For pickles, fermentation was the primary means of preservation until the 1940s, when direct acidification and pasteurization of cucumber pickles was introduced,” writes Fred Breidt of the USDA.