Jim Grillio from Northshire Farms has fabulous Savoy cabbage right now at the New York Greenmarket. (Don’t despair if your farmers’ markets have closed for the season—the stuff travels well, so the heads you find in grocery stores can also be very good.) I wound up serving some for Sunday supper this week with a piece of sautéed fish and some roasted crosnes. The cabbage took the most work: I cored and shredded it, then tossed it in a not-too-hot pan with salt, pepper, and a generous piece of butter. When the cabbage had started to wilt, but neither the leaves nor the butter had started to brown, I poured in a few glugs of white wine, turned the heat to low, and covered the pan while I made the rest of dinner. A minute before everything else was done I add some more butter to the soft cabbage. It’s a lovely dish, but as I ate I was haunted by the memory of one thing I gave up when I moved to New York: space to make sauerkraut.
Don’t roll your eyes like that. Homemade sauerkraut is the bomb—tangy, fresh, vegetal and light through the dark middle of winter. I tell you what, we’ll use the French word, choucroute, which should bring to mind choucroute garni, in which the largest possible assortment of cured, smoked, and fresh pork becomes the garnish for sauerkraut. Choucroute is easy to make yourself if you have somewhere to store it. Besides, winter is exactly the time for ambitious, time-consuming cooking.
You with me? Find yourself a five gallon food-grade plastic bucket and wash it as well as you can. (I begged my bucket from my local grocery store in Colorado—it originally held pickles.) Bring a gallon of water and six tablespoons of salt to a boil and let it cool to room temperature. That’s your brine. Strip the wilted outer leaves from fifteen pounds of green and/or Savoy cabbage. Quarter the cabbage, then shred it with a knife or a mandoline. Rinse the cabbage really well, then squeeze out the extra water and toss it with 3/4 cup of salt. Put it in the clean bucket, cover it with the brine and weight it down with a clean plate so all the cabbage is submerged. Drape a clean towel over the bucket and put it somewhere cool and out of the way.
Now wait. Naturally-occurring Lactobacillus and Leuconostoc bacteria, which thrive in the airless conditions under the brine, will turn a little of the cabbagy goodness into alcohol, acid, and pungent compounds. The careful washing of the bucket and cabbage are meant to reduce the numbers of unfriendly bacteria so the cabbage will ferment and not rot. It’s the slow analog of quick pickling. Check every couple of days—there should be a few bubbles, and you should skim off any scunge on the surface of the brine.
The sauerkraut will be done in three or four weeks, though waiting longer doesn’t hurt at all, and you can spoon out only as much you need with a clean utensil. Homemade Rubens, anyone? Though once you’ve gone to the trouble of making your own sauerkraut you should really make that choucroute garni, which of course means curing a little pork and making some sausages to smoke…
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