The Krautfather

If  your going to run a pretend fermentation business and make different sauerkraut's that are named after movies, it only makes sense that eventually you name one after your favorite movie.  So with that, I give you The Krautfather!

"No Sicilian can refuse any sauerkraut on his daughter's wedding day."

About as simple a kraut I'll make, its nothing more than green cabbage, garlic, and salt.  Its also the largest quantity of kraut I've made to date, using a 3 3/4 heads of green cabbage (1/4 of a head was needed for some other recipe), an entire head of garlic, and some amount of salt that I didn't write down.  

"It's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the cabbage."

If you get nothing more out of this blog post, it should be this helpful tip on how to peel a whole head of garlic.  It's fun and will save you the time and agony that the traditional smashing each clove with a knife approach would bring.  Another helpful tip is to not bang the garlic around in two metal bowls while your wife is in the middle of putting a child to sleep (sorry Amy).

"Look how they massacred my boy."

Once the fun of peeling the garlic was over, I put all the cloves into the mini food processor (that I own for some reason) and diced it up as fine as possible.  This helps spread the garlic out evenly throughout the kraut and lowers the risk of getting half a clove of garlic in one bite because I got lazy with my knife chopping.

Once the garlic is diced, its cabbage shredding time.  I broke the shredding blade on my normal sized food processor making the last batch of kraut, so I'm back to hand shredding using the blade that came with my salad spinner.  Its not ideal, but it works.

"Don't ask me about my Kraut business, Kay."

After the cabbage is shredded, the ingredients are mixed a handful at a time and then compacted down with a potato masher into the crock.  Someday I'll upgrade to one of those fancy baseball bat looking cabbage crushers for this (and a cabbage shredder for that matter), but given the zero dollar budget model I'm currently working under this will have to do for now.

"Leave the gun.  Take the Krautfather."

Then, after 4 weeks of fermenting in the crock, the Krautfather was finished!  Just in time for memorial day too.  And who wouldn't want to jazz up their hot dogs and burgers at a memorial day cook-out with a garlic flavored kraut dressed up in a label like that?  Weirdo's, that's who.

Hope you enjoy it!