We had an absolutely gorgeous red cabbage specimen this season. Boy were we excited to shred it up and turn it into a delicious sauerkraut! So, let’s talk cabbage, sauerkraut and human health!
If you were with us in previous seasons, you might recall our “pointy shaped” Filderkraut that we grew for a few seasons. We learned this pointy shape was more of a “natural” and historic style cabbage. Globe shaped cabbage are a more modern hybrid of cabbage and were bred to be this way to make mechanization easier. Well, turns out, you can also find pointy cabbage in red variants as well! How fun!
Honestly, until we learned about this, we had been under the assumption that all cabbage were globes and that’s just how they were! It’s really makes us wonder how much of the natural world we don’t understand, simply because we’ve never seen anything different from what modern day provides.
When it comes to sauerkraut, we strongly prefer it fresh. When sauerkraut is made, it undergoes a fermentation process, which is not only tasty but the process also produces microorganisms that are highly beneficial to your gut biome. This microbiome is vital to healthy digestion, extraction of nutrition from food and countless other systems in your body.
Modern medicine has largely dismissed the entire digestion system as a “waste” system in the past. Today, it is just beginning to acknowledge just how vital food and microflora is to our fundamental health. The health of your digestive system affects every major system in the body, including nervous, endocrine and immune systems. This microbiome also reduces inflammation by outcompeting “bad” bacteria, another area where modern medicine is just beginning to understand the consequences.
Before we understood this, we used to can a lot of sauerkraut. It was certainly tasty and would last us a long time. But, what we came to understand is that we were destroying everything good that came from the fermentation process.
For this reason, we started pursuing freshly fermented Eastern European style sauerkrauts, mostly because they were even more delicious! The gist is this style usually combines carrot, cranberry (local high bush) and caraway. Sometimes it also includes onions, apples and beet.
These days, we are generally making sauerkraut several times throughout the year. We obviously love it when we can utilize our homegrown cabbage, but we’ll process it with store bought bounties as well. It is a very frequent side dish that we utilize in our cooking. It’s one of those things that are both exceptionally tasty and very good for you.
We’re always happy when we can break out the “crock” fermenter! It’s not something we always use, but it comes in super handy with massive fermentations like this one. It can easily gobble up a cabbage or two and it’s a tool we’ve found worth having around.
