2000 Lemons: A Kraut Odyssey

I added lemon to sauerkraut, which is a pretty big deal. Then I named that lemon kraut after Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece, and things got epic!

Or weird, because the movie has nothing to do with lemons.........or does it? No, no it doesn't.

A company called Ithaca Hummus makes an incredible lemon and dill hummus that was the inspiration for this kraut. Everytime I buy it all I want to do when I get home from the store is stand at the kitchen counter and eat it aggressively instead of doing something productive like unpacking groceries or being a good father.

"Bath yourselves, kids. Daddy's busy!"

One day, in that rare moment when I stop eating to come up for air, I was reading the ingredients label of that hummus and thought how great this flavor combination would be in a kraut. Having already done a garlic and dill kraut, all I would need to do is figure out the best way to incorporate the lemon flavor. Add the juice? Maybe the zest? Do both? Just give up and eat more hummus?

So I consulted my Fermented Vegetables book to see if they had any ferments with lemons and I was happy to discover that they had a recipe for a lemon and dill kraut that was almost exactly what I wanted to do. And what was their solution for adding lemon flavor? Just give up and eat more hummus! Ha, no. It was lemon juice.

I still went back and ate more hummus though.

Ingredients

• Green Cabbage, 4 heads (8.4 lbs, or 3,800g, after coring and shredding)
• Dill, chopped (50 g)
• Garlic, minced(10 cloves, I didn't weight it)
• Lemon Juice (about 1/2 cup)
• Sea Salt (76 g, 2% salinity)

I used fresh dill, which differs from the Fermented Vegetables book, and I used a lot. I wasn't shooting for any particular ratio of dill to cabbage, I just knew I waned handfuls of the stuff in there, so that's what I did. Dill is awesome. I also planed to use a ratio of 2 cloves of garlic per head of cabbage.....but then had two cloves left over from the bulb so I just threw those in too. And for the lemon juice, I used the recipe from Fermented Vegetables as a guide for the quantity, which ended up being the juice of 4 lemons or roughly 8 oz.

Process

Here's a tip to speed up your kraut making. To get some assistance, just promise your wife you'll watch a movie with her after you finish prepping the cabbage, wait about 10 minutes until she get impatient, and then she'll come storming into the kitchen and start going at the cabbage on the box shredder like it owes her money! 

I slowly backed away at this point and made sure I had a clear path to safety should the need arise.

Once Amy had a good rhythm on the shredder (and my heart rate has slowed down to under a hummingbirds) I got to work on the mixing and the packing.

I worked it in batches, mixing every 800 grams of cabbage with a tablespoon on sea salt (which is about 16 grams), and a portion of all of the other ingredients in a bowl. Once it was all mixed, I let it sit in the bowl until another 800 grams was shredded so the salt could start to pull water from the cabbage. Then I would transfer the one that had been sitting from the bowl into the crock, mix the new batch in the bowl, and then pound down the cabbage that was in the crock with my new kraut pounder!

Thats right boys and girls, I own a kraut pounder now! Its made from a single piece of turned beechwood, it pounds down cabbage in the crock like a dream without the risk of breaking the crock, and it makes me feel like Roy Hobbs in 'The Natural'!

It's just like his bat, but instead of being made by lightning striking a tree, this comes from a man working a lathe in Poland. Eerily similar....

Once all the ingredients were pounded down in the crock I covered the shredded cabbage with some outside cabbage leaves, put my weights on top, covered the crock, and let it ferment for a full 4 weeks.

Results

This came out awesome! If you're going to name a kraut after a mind blowing movie (which is a perfectly normal thing to do), you couldn't pick a better one than this. The lemon adds an fantastic bright, citrusy flavor to the kraut that works really well with the dill. And its got lots of dill in it, which for me is one of the best things you can add to a kraut.

I love all my krauts equally, I just love the dill ones more equally than the others.

I hope you get a chance to try 2OOO Lemons: A Kraut Odyssey as I think its one of the best sauerkrauts I've made yet. But even if you don't get to taste it, you can still check out how perfect that label came out! It's got everything Kubrick would have wanted on a sauerkraut label: symmetry, simple font, and a cabbage headed spaceman. Enjoy!

He sure did love his cabbage headed spacemen.