This kraut was the biggest after thought of all the ferments I've done. With most of them I have some idea of what I want in it, I have to buy something to make it work, and I schedule out what night I'm going to spend in the kitchen shredding cabbage. A Krautwork Apple came about by a produce problem we were having.
You see our CSA, The Good Food Collective, had spent the end of our summer share and every week of our fall share burying us in apples. Literally week after week we were bringing home at least 8 apples for what seemed like an eternity. And on top of this the co-op we shop at, Abundance, decided to reward us for being one of their top spenders of 2013 (which is frightening by the way) with a bucket of free apples! For a family like ours with two adults and one solid food eating child, this doesn't sound like much of a problem. Who doesn't like apples? But when all of the sudden the rest of the family stops eating apples because they've grown tired of them and its down to one man trying to eat every apple in sight before they go bad, you end up with a bit of a situation.
And to handle that situation we were using the apples up in non hand food form whenever we could think of it with things like apple sauce and apple bakes and what have you. So when the CSA also decided to drop 3 cabbages on us, I hit on a great idea: APPLE KRAUT!
Having two kids now, free time is hard to come by, and planning out a kraut night ahead of time is impossible. So one evening when time opened up, I hit the kitchen with no plan other than cabbage and apples needed to be shredded and fermented. I picked a random number of apples, skinned them, shredded them up and mixed them with the cabbage. For no reason I thought ginger and apples sounded good together, so I took out some ginger and shredded it. Then I decided more ginger would be better, so I did it again and doubled it. Once everything was packed in the crock I put the kraut in the basement to ferment and forgot about it. Literally. Two weeks later I saw it sitting there and thought 'holy crap I made kraut!' and retraced my steps to figure out its due date.
And I'm happy to say, that for something that was little more than an after thought, it came out fantastic! The smell of it is much different than the ones I have been doing lately. It's got sort of a mild ginger beer/hard cider scent going on. And the taste is slightly sweet with the ginger shining through. Plus, I'm thrilled with the label! All in all I would rate A Krautwork Apple a great success.
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