How to make pickles and sauerkraut - Part I

All right, kids, I had to do a little quick research on wikipedia before writing this blog entry....because a) I got confused reading all the different recipes to make pickles, and b) there are at least two, completely different ways to make pickles, and I wanted to make sure I had the terminology/verbiage right for this.  

So....If I say that I am making pickles, there are two different methods I could be talking about.   One method, that I'll talk about in another post, is to simple submerge a vegetable in vinegar (or a vinegar-salt-water-sugar-and-spices) mixture for a certain period of time.   I've done this with carrots, beans, beets, onions, garlic and cucumbers.   The finished product can either be canned (safely, because of the high acid content of the vinegar), or stored in the refrigerator and eaten within two weeks (although some recipes say these "refrigerator pickles" can be good for months at a time...I've certainly eaten commercial pickles months after I opened them and stuck them in the fridge...but then again, I often eat things I shouldn't....:)




Which brings us to a second method of making a pickle: Brining/Lactic Fermentation.  This is what people

Tsukemono - Japanese fermented pickles

used to do before refrigeration was the norm - it was a way of keeping the harvest well into the winter, and it is one reason that pickles and sauerkraut are so associated with German, Russian and Eastern European cultures - although almost every culture, all over the world, has pickles as part of its food culture: Korean Kimchee is very familiar, but Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino cultures use a similar process to make delicious side-dishes.   And since vinegar itself is made from a fermentation process, we can look at all kinds of acid-preserved foods, from Indian chutneys to French cornichons, to see mankind's love of all things pickled.



Anyway, the basic idea of this kind of preservation is to add enough acid to the food to crowd out bacteria that are harmful to humans - including (especially) botulism, a potent neurotoxin that can kill humans - and the reason you must always follow recipes/directions when canning.   One way to add acid is simply to preserve the food in that vinegar mixture.  The other is to cover the food in a mixture of salt and water and let it sit out room temperature.   The natural bacteria already on cabbage leaves or cucumber skins begin to grow and multiply (sometimes commercial plants lack these bacteria, and so freshly-harvested veggies are best!).   Over time, these bacteria lower the pH of the liquid, crowding out harmful bacteria that can survive at a lower acid level.   The Wikipedia entry for Sauerkraut says: "Properly cured sauerkraut is sufficiently acidic to prevent a favorable environment for the growth of Clostridium botulinum, the toxins of which cause botulism".   Yeah!

So...pickle recipes might call for a pickle to be canned fresh, brined in salt overnight just to crisp it up, brined for three days, resulting in a half-sour pickles, or left in the brine for 1 week to....whenever - resulting in a full-sour pickle that can either be canned or refrigerated.

OK, so enough with the science already....now how do you actually do it?   Well...first the failures.  In years' past Dawn and I have both tried experiments with pickles and fermentation - only to chicken out or have things go horribly wrong.   First, Dawn tried to brine some pickles, but got skeeved out when they disintegrated on a routine check.  (Which was a good move - that's not how healthy pickles should be).    Then I tried to make sauerkraut, but got skeeved out when it grew a thin layer of blue mold on top, and tossed it.  (Good move?   Unsure...my cousin Rachel said that's normal and just to scrape it off the top....I'm still not sure.)

Then last year, we saved a whole bunch of our home-grown pickles, plus bought a bunch of farmer's market pickles and tried to can them.   We cut up the cucumbers, put them in hot jars with spices and grape leaves, and poured a heated brine (salt, vinegar and water) over the pickles.   But when we put them in the canner, we couldn't get it back up to boiling for almost 45 minutes, and then had to boil them for another 35 minutes.  (What I know now is that pasteurizing - heating jars at 180-degree water for 30 minutes - works as well as boiling...oops.)  End result: perfectly-spiced, preserved, squishy-ass disgusting pickles in 7 quart-sized jars.    Dawn, who loves cucumbers with a desperate passion (she plants special ones called "devas" in the backyard), was despondent over the wasted produce, and declared that she was done with pickle-making forever.

SOUR DILL PICKLES 
Fast-forward to this year.   I call up my friends Dave, Zean and KL, we both harvest our pickles and cabbages, and roll up our sleeves to do some serious fermentation.  I got dill from the backyard and grape leaves from the community garden, and tried to weigh the cucumbers on my crappy kitchen scale, deciding to make 2/3rds of the recipe.   Here's the recipe from "Canning for a  New Generation" by Liana Krissoff that uses vinegar and salt:
 
1/2 cup pickling spices (I say these are optional, except for mustard and leave out the cinnamon and nutmeg.  I think it makes pickles taste like cookies, blech). 
1 bunch fresh dill
Several handfulls of grapeleaves (optional?  help w crisping)
7 lbs. pickling cucumbers (no longer than 4" for easy packing)
4 garlic cloves, peeled but left whole
1 cup cider vinegar (5% acidity - optional!)

3/4 cup pure kosher salt.
 

Instructions: cut off the blossom ends of cucumbers (or both ends, if you can't tell!).  Put half spices, dill and grape leaves in the bottom of a clean 2-3gallon crock or glass jar.  Add cucumbers, filling jar no more than 1/2 full.  Top with rest of spices, dill, grape leaves and garlic.   (Don't pack the cucumbers in - causes spoilage!)

Pickling buddies...

In a large bowl, combine vinegar, salt and 1 gallon cold water.  (some recommend boiling the mixture first and letting it cool 100%  first to get rid of extra yeast).  Pour over cucumbers to just cover them (some liquid might be left over).  Set a small plate on top of the cucumbers and place a weight on top.   The objective is to keep the cucumbers submerged under the liquid - a quart-sized freezer bag filled with water or extra brine works too - that's what I used).   Cover loosely and set aside in a cool spot for 2-3 weeks, until the pickles are no longer white in the center when cut.   After about 2 days, the mixture should start to ferment and bubble - skim the foam from the surface once every day or two.  (This should just be a few spoonfulls of liquid).


So that's how to make it - I will have to do "Fermentation Part II" when I "decant" the pickles - and then I will tell you how it goes....slash how it went...

SAUERKRAUT
The other recipe we made was sauerkraut.  We washed, cored and chopped up the cabbage into "dime-thin"

Sauerkraut ready to sit and ferment...

pieces.   Then we mixed it with...um, I forget, maybe 6 Tablespoons of pickling salt (its supposed to be 3 Ts/ 5lbs. of cabbage, but my scale blows....so oh well).   I squished the cabbage with the salt a little at a time in my biggest crock pot (my cousin says she's very forceful in this part) and placed a double-bag of brine over it to hold it down, and covered it with the crock lid to keep flies and dust out.  Ideally, the cabbage will not touch the air.  The level of brine will rise overnight (again, ideally) so that's why I used a big crock.  For me, enough liquid did *not* come out  in 24 hours, so I boiled up more 2.5% brine (1 1/2 tablespoons pickling salt to each quart of water - boil, cool, use), and poured a little over the top to cover.   Scoop scum off every few days, and wait 2-6 weeks for the fermentation process to finish.   It should have a "pleasant acid taste" and should change color to a "slightly translucent pale gold-white".   (from Pickles and Relishes,by Andrea Chessman).   Again, I'll post again when its done and I figure out how it went, and what I'm going to do with it!

Here's the pickles today:

Pickles, two weeks later (I put the jars in an old cooler to catch the overflow - which explains the shmutz  in the foreground).

Sauerkraut, two weeks later - kind of pale-gold, huh?  It smells *very* krauty...