Apocalypse Kraut

Fridge Top Ferments Presents:  Apocalypse Kraut! 

If you stare long enough, you can hear the helicopter blades whooshing by.

Along with turning my co-workers home grown cayenne peppers into hot sauce, I wanted to try fermenting them in a kraut.  So I did (really what would have stopped me).  This kraut was fermented with green cabbage, cayenne peppers, garlic, and a boat load of ginger.

"We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Cabbage after cabbage... pepper after pepper... garlic after garlic... ginger after ginger..."

I had this horrible fear of making a gallon of sauerkraut so hot that nobody could eat it, sort of like that fear you have each time you microwave a hot-pocket.  So to combat this I decided to seed the peppers, and double the ginger that I have typically added to my krauts in the past.  Instead of having the ginger be just a subtle flavor, I was hoping this would make it more of a key player as it is in some kimchi's, giving me what the kids sometimes call a "Kraut-chi".

I also wanted to make sure that the pepper-garlic-ginger mix was somewhat even throughout, so you didn't end up with a random bite of half a pepper that would burn out your taste-buds for the rest of the day.  To accomplish this, I put all three ingredients into a food processor and blended them into this horribly dangerous super hot and yet somehow delicious smelling paste.  So, for the first time in my kraut making tenure, and to ensure I didn't lose my vision while taking out a contact lens later that night, I had to use gloves to mix together the ingredients of my sauerkraut.  It made me feel more like a professional kraut maker, so I was into the gloves.

The Horror.....The Horror

And in the end, it couldn't have worked out better.  The paste was mixed in evenly, and every bite has a brilliantly gingerly flavor with a hint of heat from the peppers that you can see speckled throughout the final product.

I love the smell of Kraut in the morning!

 If you fancy kimchi, ginger, a little spice, or just food products named after awesome war movies from the 70's, then Apocalypse Kraut is right up your alley!