Krautraiser

The idea for this sauerkraut was simple: Hot, named after Hellraiser, and featuring a cabbage head with pins sticking out of it on the label. With little room to go in any other direction, those three things combine give you KRAUTRAISER!

He'll regret handling that habanero pepper without gloves when he takes his contacts out before bed.

My friend and I were having a beer at a bowling alley near my house and he challenged me on when I was going to do a hot kraut? Like really hot it makes you question your choice to eat it kraut? I told him I'd already done one with fresno peppers and another with cayenne peppers, and also to stop yelling at me in public because people are beginning to stare. But he wanted more, and he wanted hotter! And also, he really wanted it named after Hellraiser because he thought Pinhead would look cool as a cabbage (we can all agree he was right on that now).

So I accepted the challenge, told him I was going to make a hot one just for him with habanero peppers, and then dramatically turned around and bowled my ball hard down the lane!

The ball then hooked left and went straight into the gutter. Bowling is hard.

Ingredients

• 2 heads Green Cabbage (5.29 lbs, or 2400 grams, after coring and shredding)
• 8 Habanero Peppers, seeded and diced (62 grams)
• 7 cloves Garlic, minced (28 grams)
• Ginger, minced (26 grams)
• Sea Salt (50 grams, 2% salinity)

2 Heads of cabbage is on the smaller side of a kraut batch for me, but that was on purpose. I have a bit of a following among family and friends who I give out my sauerkrauts to, and that following tends to drop off significantly whenever hot peppers are involved. So I decided to make a small batch of this along with another large batch of Dr. Strangekraut so that people could choose what they wanted and everybody would go home happy.

For the garlic quantity, I wanted a decent amount and happened to have 7 cloves hanging around, so I used all of them. And for the ginger I decided to go for around the same amount by weight that I used for the garlic, because why not?

As far as the habanero peppers, I tried to find a decent guide from somebody who had made something similar on the internet, but I couldn't find anything and ended up losing 2 hours of my day down the wiki wormhole learning about hideous looking fish that live deep in the depths of the ocean (damned internet!). So, in an effort not to lose more of my day searching nonsense, I decided that I would just use all 8 of the peppers that were in the bag I bought and called it good.

Process

Like most krauts, I've gotten into a rhythm of shredding the cabbage until I've got 800 grams, then mixing that with a tablespoon of salt and a rough quantity of the other ingredients. Once its mixed, I put that into the crock and let it sit until I have another 800 grams ready. At that time, I'll press down the first 800 gram mixture in the crock before putting the next round on top. I repeat that until I'm out of cabbage.

This has nothing to do with what you just read, but words are boring and pictures are fun.

The only added complication to this kraut was the habanero peppers. Habanero peppers burn, and they burn eyes in particular. Being a contact lens wearer I needed to take extra precaution, so I had a process in place to avoid this issue. And here is how that process went:

1. Tell myself that I need to remember to take out my contacts before starting.
2. Forget to take out my contacts.
3. Put gloves on to chop the habanero peppers.
4. Take the gloves off with the caution of a bomb squad member defusing a landmine. 
5. Wash my hands 10 times and question if that's enough.
6. Decide its not enough, so wash them another 10 times and pray.
7. Take my contacts out with a face like I'm playing Russian Roulette in the Deer Hunter.

Coincidentally I was wearing the same headband.

Thankfully it worked out, and I ended up making the kraut without losing an eye. Always a noble goal to have.

Results

Instead of just handing out jars to people whenever I see them, I ended up throwing a release party for Krautraiser's debut (as well as to celebrate the re-release of Dr. Strangekraut, which is still awesome by the way). So the audience for Krautraiser was much larger than normal, and thankfully it didn't disappoint!

Although it didn't come out overpoweringly hot like my friend would have liked, it still has heat. It's a slow heat that builds as you eat it, which makes it extremely tolerable. And beyond the heat, the tropical flavors of the pepper along with the ginger and garlic work great with the tang of the fermented cabbage, yielding delicious results and making it one of my new favorites.

Plus, as we learned at the release party, it also pairs really well with watching Hellraiser on a giant projector screen in your backyard with good friends, a bunch of beer, and the neighbors peeping curiously out their windows questioning my movie choices! But really, what doesn't pair well with that?

Enjoy!