It's A Wonderful Kraut

I'm going to be upfront with you and tell you that it really wasn't a wonderful kraut.

"Zuzu whats the matter with you? Get off of my neck and call the doctor, somethings wrong with your mother!"

Imagine if the movie It's A Wonderful Life had an alternate ending where, after all the time Clarence the Angel spent showing George Bailey what a great life he's living, George takes a swing at him and jumps off the bridge anyway. That's kind of how this kraut turned out.

"Everything was going well until I started telling him about my wings. Then he threw a cabbage at me and leaped into the river."

It started out well enough. I wanted to make a holiday kraut, and adding cranberries seemed a good way to do that. But when I mentioned it to my brother, who eats more of my kraut than anyone else, he reacted like I told him I had free tickets to a soccer game ("That's interesting, but the WNBA is on TV that night"). That made me rethink things.  And the more I did, the more I realized I wasn't all that thrilled about it either. What would thrill me would be to spice it up a little and still keep the cranberries. And looking around the kitchen, I found myself a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce that could do the trick!

So I shredded the cabbage, chopped the bag of cranberries, blended the entire can of peppers (which was probably a little excessive looking back), and then mixed it all together with some salt and packed it away in the crock to ferment. But after a week it was clear something wasn't right. 

It looks festive and fiery hot all at the same time!

Sauerkraut has a distinctive smell that usually arrives after about a week of fermenting. That's when, after a battle royale with all the other yeasts and bacteria that might be around, the good bacteria begin to take over and make the environment inhospitable to all the rest. But that never seemed to happen with this batch. 

Instead, it maintained an off smell for the duration of the ferment while kahm yeast, one of those guys that shouldn't have been able to survive anymore, started growing on the surface of the water. The good news is kahm isn't bad for you, but the bad news is it usually means something is wrong.

And what was wrong? I don't quite know the reason. It could be that perhaps I didn't use enough salt. It could be the temperature was a little too cold. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small. Wait, that's the wrong Christmas movie. Actually my guess is it was the can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce.

Maybe something in the sauce threw things off. It's predominantly tomato paste, and tomato paste usually spoils pretty quick. Or maybe there was a preservative in it. Fermenting kraut is a controlled spoiling of cabbage (doesn't sound as good as a hotdog topping when it's worded that way), and it seemed like this never had a chance to spoil. Either way this clearly wasn't working and I knew early on I was looking at a total loss. So what did I do?

Well, after 4 weeks of it being in the crock and not smelling right and not looking right, I tasted it. That's right. I disregarded all the warning signs, intuition, common sense, and anything else that has been put in my brain to keep me healthy and alive, and I ate a forkful. 

And what a horrible idea that was. It was hot, a little slimey and just not good. I managed to swallow it, then spent the next 20 minutes trying to get the taste out of my mouth and wondering if that bite was going to make a jail break from my stomach at any minute.

"When he gets comfortable and far, far away from the bathroom, that's when we make our move!"

But I held it down, threw the rest of the disaster into the compost bin, and then cleaned the bejesus out of the crock with vinegar and boiling water to make sure whatever poisoned this kraut didn't contaminate the next one.

I haven't given up on the idea of a holiday kraut, I plan to give it a go next year, and although it didn't turn out I wouldn't consider this a total loss. It was just more of a Clark Griswold Christmas than a George Bailey one. And really, whether you finish Christmas Eve by singing Auld Lang Syne in your living room with the entire town, or by singing The Star-Spangled Banner with the SWAT team after a sewer gas explosion launches Santa into the sky, the next day you'll still wake up to Christmas morning. I have no idea what that has to do with anything we've been talking about. Merry Christmas!