The Hunt For The Red Crocktober

Designed completely by customer request, meet The Hunt For The Red Crocktober!

Pairs well with mustard.

The ingredients in this kraut were selected completely selected by my brother through a text message. He asked for a red cabbage sauerkraut with onion, carrots, garlic, and some ginger.  Then he told me to call it "The Hunt For The Red Crocktober", told me to put a bratwurst on the label in place of a submarine, and said "That's your award winner!".

Not pictured: The award......or the carrot.

I liked his confidence, and the fact that he took care of all the creative work, so I waited until after Christmas to see if I got the giant cabbage shredder that I asked for and then went to work!

They say it can puncture the skin of a rhino from 100 yards away.

This cabbage shredder is awesome by the way! My previous method for shredding cabbage was using a single mandolin blade attachment that came on the lid of a salad spinner.  It worked, but it took forever. I could have used a knife, but I like the finer shreds a mandolin blade produces for a kraut.  I tried using the mandolin blade on my food processor once, but after 2 heads of cabbage the blade broke off and I was back to the salad spinner.

I considered getting a Spiralizer to shred the cabbage, but the idea of turning a handle on a plastic apparatus didn't sound as cool to me as sliding a giant wooden box back and forth over 3 sharp blades (I either like danger or hate my fingers, I can't decide). And I don't regret my decision. When using it you simultaneously feel like a bad ass and a German grandmother, which is a surprisingly awesome feeling.  How many kitchen appliances can do that? The one I got was from Stone Creek Trading, and if your at all interested in fermenting I highly recommend checking them out. They've got some great looking crocks on there as well.

Anyway I'm off track, back to the kraut!

For the ingredients I used 

• 3 heads of red cabbage
• 1 head of green cabbage (because I bought the store out of red and wanted 4 heads)
• 8 cloves of garlic
• 1 indeterminate nub of ginger
• 2 medium yellow onions
• Sea Salt (2 tbsp per head of cabbage)
• 1 Giant Carrot (seriously it was a huge carrot)

I've seen bigger

I finely sliced the onion with a knife, used a mini food processor for the ginger and garlic, a box shredder for the carrot, and the cabbage shredder to destroy those 4 heads of cabbage in record time! Then I combined everything in the crock, packed it down, and put it away to ferment.

The amounts of ginger/garlic, onion, and carrot, shown with no perspective.  How helpful.

I normally let my kraut ferment in the crock for 4 weeks before moving it into jars, but I wanted to have something ready for my annual Winter Horseshoe Tournament so I jarred these a little earlier than usual.

I also had some help with the jarring process.  The same brother that came up with the kraut showed up to help put some labels on and, per tradition, sample a little.

It passed the first test....he didn't go blind.

One other thing of note, unlike the picture at the start of the blog, the labels on these are mostly black and white.  The color printer I use was out of ink the day I printed them, so David used a red market to jazz them up the best he could when we were packaging them. Its one of the downfalls of running a fake business that relies on a real business's printer, but it keeps the costs down!

Another downfall of running a fake business is not being able to pay your employees.  Sorry David.

Label be damned, the kraut itself came out great! The addition of the onion made it taste like the red cabbage side dish you get at German restaurants, making it equally suited for a side dish or a topping for a sausage.

One out of One David's agree: Its thumbs up!

Hopefully you came to the Winter Horseshoe Tournament and got a chance to try it because unfortunately, most of the jars have been spoken for already. And, as shown in the picture below, they're being put to good use already. Enjoy!

That's some fine product placement.