'kraut

The experiments began. I have a book on wild fermentation which is brilliant and spurred on by the cabbage mountain in our fridge we started with sauerkraut. Possibly the least scary sounding thing in the book for ralph who has issues with off/squishy/furry food. This book is brilliant, it has some really great instructions and introduces a wide range of techniques, none of which seem out of the grasp of people with a sensibly stocked kitchen. Most do not need any special starters although some will require an exciting parcel through the post. Thank you to ralph's friend sophie who sent us a kombucha mother all the way from japan and started all this nonsense.

The coffee crock and beer bottle set up for attempt number one. This has hand grated red cabbage in it with a jar top held down by the water filled bottle.

I mentioned before the hunt for hornsea pots and these are the crocks I got from ebay. There is another saffron pattern jar too. Some scrubbed pebbles and a flattened out bit of milk bottle hold down the contents.

For this batch we used white cabbage, carrot and apple grated in the magimix. I had more trouble with this one, it didn't yield much water and it was hard to keep it under the liquid. The milk bottle plastic is a bit flimsy, something more rigid will be needed I think.

The cabbage was in the jars for a pretty long time, 4 weeks for the red maybe and 3 for the other one, maybe a bit more. The red one mostly just tastes like very salty cabbage but the second one with the carrots actually has a kind of tang which I think is the ferment, it's nice. Ralph likes it.

Success.