A simple way to pickle cabbage for the winter. Sauerkraut for the winter in jars according to my grandmother's recipe

In winter, when foods lack vitamins, sauerkraut has long been the main food. This is one of the main dishes of many peoples in Europe and Asia. Despite the fact that it is a simple food, sauerkraut was eaten not only by the poor, but also by the rich. Indeed, in addition to a large amount of vitamins, it contains a lot of fiber, organic acids and trace elements. Therefore, every housewife should know how to properly

This unique vegetable is one of the oldest on earth. There are now hundreds of common ones around the world. It is useful fresh, and its juice is often used to treat certain diseases. But one of the most healthy dishes is sauerkraut, because when fermented, it increases the content of vitamin C and beneficial organic acids. Fiber goes into a more easily digestible form, and brine improves digestion. But in order for all the beneficial properties to be preserved for a long time, you need to know how to properly ferment cabbage at home so that it does not sour and is crispy.

To do this, you need to choose the right cooking time and the vegetable itself. When can you sauerkraut? It is best to do this on a waxing moon, on Monday or Tuesday. Most often, salting is done in late autumn, because early varieties are unsuitable for harvesting - they are loose and contain little sugars. You need to choose a dense head of cabbage, clean on the cut. Remove all upper leaves, darkened areas and stump. Taste the cabbage - if it is juicy and tasty, then feel free to start salting.

How to properly ferment cabbage at home so that it is stored for a long time and tastes good? Different housewives have their own salting recipes. You can make finely chopped cabbage or shredded cabbage, but you can even pickle it with whole heads. Carrots are most often used as additives; they give the dish a pleasant color and sweetness. But you can ferment cabbage without it, as well as with cranberries, apples, horseradish, lingonberries or beets. Sometimes they make it even without salt, but such a dish is not stored for a long time.

It is very easy to ferment cabbage at home. For 5 kilograms, take 4 medium carrots and 3 tablespoons of fine salt. It is not recommended to use iodized salt, the quality of the cabbage will decrease. You will also need an enamel pan, it is better if the enamel is intact. Cabbage is chopped finely or coarsely, as you like, carrots are rubbed on a coarse grater. Before putting them in a container, mix them well with salt, crush a little with your hands so that juice appears. It is not recommended to strongly crush the cabbage, because it will turn out to be soft.

You need to lay the cabbage in layers, sprinkle with grated carrots and well
ramming. Put a fresh leaf on top and put oppression. It is important that all the cabbage is covered in juice. Usually the fermentation process takes 3 days. The readiness of the dish is determined by the color of the brine - it must be transparent. It is imperative to pierce the cabbage to the bottom with a knife every day so that gases come out.

Many housewives are interested in how to ferment cabbage quickly? There is a recipe in which the dish is ready in a few hours. To do this, chopped cabbage must be mixed not only with carrots, but also with garlic. After placing in a jar, it is poured with hot brine. To prepare it, in addition to salt, you need to take sugar, nine percent vinegar, as well as any vegetable oil. Sometimes they also add hot or allspice peppers and other spices to taste.

Sauerkraut is a great winter food. It improves digestion, helps you lose weight, boosts immunity, and inhibits the growth of cancer cells. It relieves liver and stomach diseases, improves skin condition and heals burns. Therefore, every housewife should know how to properly ferment cabbage at home, and delight her loved ones with a healthy and tasty dish.

Each housewife has a variety of fruits, berries and vegetables in her pantry or cellar. On the shelves are jars and bottles, and on the floor are barrels and pots with sauerkraut, soaked apples, sour cucumbers and tomatoes, and even soaked watermelons. Learn how to ferment cabbage at home in different ways and increase your range of harvests for the winter.

How to ferment cabbage at home

Pickling has always been considered the best way to harvest vegetables for the winter. After all, we do not use any preservatives and use minimal salt. Only a few recipes contain a small amount of sugar. During the fermentation process, a unique preservative is produced - acid, which also inhibits the development and growth of pathogenic bacteria.

Sauerkraut is used to prepare various dishes. These are salads, and hodgepodge, and dumplings, and pies. Sauerkraut is also served as a separate salad with onions and vegetable oil.

In order for the preparation for the winter to succeed, several rules must be observed:

For 1 kg of fresh cabbage, add 25 g of rock salt. If you take more salt, the fermentation process will be weak or the workpiece will not ferment at all. Less salt will make the cabbage sour more quickly.

Sour cabbage in jars

The recipe is for a full three-liter can of delicious crispy cabbage.

Ingredients for the starter culture:

• white cabbage - 3.5 kg;
• two medium carrots;
• 3 sheets;
• 5 black peppercorns;
• horseradish leaf;
• dill umbrella;
• 2 bay leaves;
• salt - 75 g.

Cooking process:

For 1 kg of cabbage, add 100 g of carrots.

To add spice to the workpiece, you can put a few cloves of garlic and a couple of fresh ones on the bottom of the jar.

Sauerkraut in a saucepan with caraway seeds

Sauerkraut has a completely different taste if you add caraway seeds during harvesting. We also need quite a bit of allspice peas, dill seeds and a couple of bay leaves. Also, sugar must be used in this recipe. Its amount is equal to the amount of rock salt.

For 2 kg of chopped cabbage, add 1 tsp. cumin seeds.

Cooking process:

1. Chop ripe late varieties of cabbage in any way.
   
2. Use a coarse grater to chop the carrots.
   
3. Put the chopped cabbage in a large bowl, add sugar and salt. Mix well.
4. Sprinkle with cumin seeds and mix thoroughly again.
   
5. Add the grated carrots and lightly press together to mix all the ingredients. As a result, some cabbage juice will appear.
   
6. Wash and dry the enamel pot well. Put the workpiece in it and tamp it tightly. The denser the cabbage is packed, then the better the fermentation result will be.
   
7. Lay the cabbage leaves removed in advance on top. Install oppression. If you are fermenting a lot of cabbage in a large saucepan, you can use a wooden circle as oppression. For small pots, use a suitably sized plate. Press down on top of either a bottle of water or something else heavy in weight.
   
8. During fermentation every day, you need to pierce the cabbage with a large knife to release the gas bubbles. If there is a thin rolling pin for rolling out the dough, then use it. Immediately put oppression back on.
   

It remains to wait for the result, when the cabbage is ready for use. The higher the temperature in the room where the pan is placed, the faster the result will be. After fermentation is complete, the cabbage can be transferred to jars.

Sourdough cabbage at home for the winter

For long-term storage, cabbage is fermented with apples, cranberries, beets and other vegetables. Each recipe is worthy of your attention.

How to ferment cabbage at home in Georgian

The Georgian recipe for cooking cabbage for the winter involves the use of large quantities of dark red beets and carrots. Georgian sauerkraut is served as a savory snack on the festive table when the faithful are fasting.

Ingredients for sourdough cabbage:

• a head of cabbage weighing 2.5-3 kg;
• one carrot and one burgundy beet;
• head of garlic;
• optional 6 black peppercorns, one hot pepper and one onion.

Prepare a brine from a liter of water, 50 g of salt, 200 g of vinegar and 100 g of sugar.

Cooking steps:

After 12 hours, you can try sauerkraut with beets and carrots.

You can store sauerkraut in a normal cool room.

Sour delicious cabbage with apples

Just three days after cooking, you can already taste the cabbage sauerkraut with apples and spices.

Ingredients for fermentation:

• white cabbage - 3 kg;
• 300 g of apples and carrots;
• ginger root - 45 g;
• dill and cumin seeds, 1.5 tsp;
• an incomplete teaspoon of ground black pepper;
• 75 g of salt.

Step by step cooking:

How to ferment cabbage at home with cranberries in a bucket

Sour lingonberries or cranberries enhance the taste of sauerkraut.

A set of ingredients for the preparation:

• 8 kg of white cabbage;
• 500 g fresh or frozen cranberries;
• 3 kg of carrots;
• 150 g of rock salt.

The amount of ingredients is given in a ten-liter enamel bucket.

Step by step cooking:

For sourdough cabbage, use only a whole bucket without any chips.

There are many options for sourdough cabbage for the winter, and each time you get a completely new taste of the preparation. Instead of cranberries, raisins, lingonberries and even mushrooms are used. Apples are added whole or cut. There are recipes for quick preparation of sauerkraut, and there are preparations for slow fermentation. The choice always remains with the hostess.

How to ferment cabbage at home with honey - video recipe

Video recipe for fermenting cabbage in Old Russian style

Alexander Gushchin

I can't vouch for the taste, but it will be hot :)

Content

For home preservation, it is important that the products rolled up in cans keep the condition close to fresh - this skill is called aerobatics. Crispy sauerkraut is the best marker of the professional level of a chef: despite the apparent ease of work, this task has many pitfalls. How to make fermentation correctly?

How to make sauerkraut

This healthy vegetable is a storehouse of trace elements and vitamins, especially pectin with ascorbic acid. All sauerkraut recipes look approximately the same in terms of the algorithm of work. First, the products are cleaned and shredded, then a regular brine is made for them, and the workpiece is infused. How long the fermentation process will take depends on its catalyst. You can make sauerkraut tasty and crispy in a couple of hours or a week. The price of an ideal dish - knowledge of the basic rules and a couple of hours in the kitchen:

• According to the Soviet GOST, heads of cabbage weighing 700 g or more are used for fermentation.
• It is imperative to remove the foam that will stand out from above, otherwise the vitamins will self-destruct.
• Do not abuse salt - it is taken less than with classic salting, because it stops the production of lactic acid. Remember to mix it with the spices, rather than laying it on its own.
• During the first days, gases will come out of the workpiece, so you need to pierce it with a long splinter every day, otherwise you will ferment a crispy but bitter product.

Homemade cabbage sourdough

The abundance of recipes for this traditional winter treat for the festive table can be divided into several groups by method of work and composition. If we talk about the dishes in which the cabbage sourdough takes place at home, then these are:

• wooden barrels / tubs - ideal, but not always feasible for a city dweller;
• glass jars, preferably small;
• enameled bucket / basin.

You can ferment this product in several ways, which differ in the chemical composition of the liquid:

• in its own juice, i.e. water and some spices.
• with the addition of salt - so the cabbage will be crispy;
• using vinegar.

If we talk about crispy cabbage, then you can ferment it to get this result:

• heads of cabbage (in a tub and if they are not large);
• quarters of forks (for huge specimens from 1 kg and more in weight);
• straws (the vegetable does not always remain dense);
• chopped pieces (square shape, size up to 12 mm).

How to ferment cabbage correctly

In addition to the already listed basic points, the difficulties of housewives who decided to try for the first time to master the pickling of white cabbage are caused by the choice of additional components. According to the old GOST, carrots (100 g per kilogram of the main product), caraway seeds, sour apples (Antonovka is ideal), fresh lingonberries, cranberries and bay leaves were necessarily present here. You can properly ferment cabbage, which will remain crispy, even without salt.

Ingredients:

• cabbage forks - 5 kg;
• carrots - 0.5 kg;
• cumin - 1 tbsp. l .;
• laurel leaves - 3 pcs.;
• small green apples - 2 pcs.;
• a handful of lingonberries and cranberries.

Cooking method:

1. Remove the top sheets from the forks, cut the stump, cut the rest into quarters
2. Grate the carrots with strips.
3. Mash both vegetables with your hands for a couple of minutes - this should form juice.
4. Wash and cut the apple into several slices, put, alternating with dense layers of cabbage and carrot mixture, in a tub.
5. Add spices, berries. Pour hot water, put a load - the amount of liquid is calculated so as to completely cover the pickled vegetables.
6. The process must be monitored and daily punctured. The first 5 days, while the bacteria are actively working, the cabbage is warm, after that, to end fermentation, it goes into the cold for 2 weeks. Readiness is determined by the color of the emerged juice - it becomes transparent. After that, you can lay out the crispy cabbage in small containers.

How to ferment cabbage to keep it crispy

Even if you follow all the recommendations that were described above, you can miss some nuances and get not quite the result that is expected. Professionals are ready to give some tips on how to ferment cabbage so that it is crispy and does not lose vitamins:

• Use non-iodized salt - soft cabbage pieces and slimy brine come primarily from iodine.
• If you have added a lot of sugar, there is no point in thinking about how to make the sauerkraut crispy - it will soften it.
• It is advisable to use varieties of medium ripening and late ones - they are more dense.
• If you're wondering how to make crispy sauerkraut, never use frozen forks.

Cabbage sourdough in a jar

Most housewives do not have the opportunity to take a wooden tub and try to ferment the cabbage in it, so they are looking for an affordable alternative that will not affect the taste and quality of the dish. You can take an enamel basin as a replacement, but a more convenient option is cabbage sourdough in a jar. To do this, the heads of cabbage must be chopped, keeping the straw width at 3 mm. The process of work looks the same as described above in the tub, but there are several nuances:

• It is difficult to place oppression in such a dish, if it is not a small granite stone, which will be suitable in size to the width of the throat. There is an alternative - fill a regular bag with water about half the volume, expel the air, and tie it tightly. The load will press on the cabbage mass and help fermentation.
• You can add salt, but its maximum content in the brine is 20 g per 1 liter of water.
• Shredding is carried out across (!) The veins, while the width of the straw is standardized and ranges from 2 to 4 mm.
• You need to fill the cabbage mass so that a high slide forms above the edge of the can. Every day they press on it, compacting the workpiece, and it will settle. At the same time, the container with fermentation must be placed in a basin so that the juice flows there.

How to ferment cabbage for the winter

Those who prepare such a dish for storage need to consider a few more subtleties associated with extending the fermentation period:

• It is only necessary to choose dense heads of cabbage for the "reserve" sourdough.
• The period of stay of dishes with a fermented product in the heat is reduced to 3 days.
• Late varieties for the winter should be cooked with sugar (20 g per liter jar).
• It is not enough to know how to ferment crispy cabbage, if you do not understand how to store it: the air temperature should be in the range from -2 to 0 degrees, and the place should be dark.
• Do not try to ferment cabbage with onions - it will not live even a month.
• If you decide to ferment the cabbage correctly for the winter, for the first days it should stay in a room with a temperature of 18 degrees, and only on the 3rd go into the cold.
• Before closing and removing the sauerkraut, pull gauze soaked in alcohol over the neck of the jar.

How to quickly ferment cabbage at home

If you do not plan to store this preparation all winter, but intend to put it on the table in the coming days, you need to be able to quickly ferment cabbage at home. This dish is more likely to remain crispy as the fermentation process is short, although this can be a mistake. From the amount of products given in this recipe, about a liter can of sauerkraut will come out: just for a one-time serving of a snack and storage for another couple of days.

Ingredients:

• cabbage head - 550 g;
• carrots - 250 g;
• caraway seeds - 1 tsp;
• black peppercorns - 5 pcs.;
• boiling water - 350 ml;
• sugar - 1/2 tsp;
• salt - 2/3 tbsp. l .;
• vinegar 6% - 2 tbsp. l.

Cooking method:

1. Dissolve salt and sugar in boiling water, pour in vinegar. Stir until the granules of the free-flowing products are dispersed.
2. Chop cabbage and carrots equally: the straws should be thin and short.
3. Fill the selected container with cabbage and carrot mass. Tamp well with a wooden pestle
4. Pour in the brine carefully - do not do it too quickly, otherwise it will penetrate to the lower layers for a long time.
5. Pierce the product ready for fermentation with a knife or spoon twice, reaching the bottom. Cap or tighten securely with cling film. After a day, you can try crispy cabbage.

Video

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How to make crispy sauerkraut - step by step photo recipes

Crispy sauerkraut for the winter in cans in brine is a popular tasty snack loved by many. Crispy and juicy cabbage with fragrant vegetable oil and green onion rings - what could be tastier? I like to add it to vinaigrette, cook cabbage soup with it, hodgepodge, use it as a filling for closed pies, dumplings, and pies.

Therefore, I always have in the refrigerator very tasty sauerkraut in jars for the winter. This is our family recipe, according to which my grandmother used to ferment cabbage. Sauerkraut for the winter turns out to be so perfect that I don't even try other recipes.

Sauerkraut recipe: for a 3 liter jar

Ingredients:

• 3 kg white cabbage
• 1 carrot

Brine:

• 1 liter of water
• 2 tbsp. l. salt
• 1 tbsp. l. Sahara
• 5 allspice peas

How to ferment cabbage for the winter in jars:

Remove the top contaminated and damaged leaves from the white cabbage. Cut it into pieces, cut out the stump. Thinly chop the cabbage with a knife or a special shredder.

Wash the carrots, peel the peel with a vegetable peeler. Chop the carrots on a coarse grater.

Mix chopped cabbage with carrots.

We carefully remember the vegetables with our hands so that they let the juice go. So the sauerkraut recipe for a 3 liter jar will turn out juicy and crispy.

Now we put the cabbage in a dry jar, tamping it tightly. I use 1 liter cans to make it easier to store them on the refrigerator shelf, the recipe is for 1 3 liter can.

Let's prepare the brine. In a deep bowl, combine cold water, salt, sugar and black sweet peas. Mix thoroughly to dissolve dry ingredients.

Pour the resulting mixture into the cabbage in a jar to the top.

As you can see, pickling cabbage in brine for the winter in jars does not take much time, especially if you use a shredder to chop vegetables.

Then we cover the jar with a nylon lid, put it in a deep plate or bowl so that the brine does not pour out.

Place the jar of cabbage in a cool, dark place. This could be a cellar or a shelf in a closet. Every 12 hours we will stir the cabbage with a wooden spatula or spoon, reaching the bottom with it so that the air comes out. If necessary, we will add brine to the jar so that the vegetables are completely covered with it.

After 3-4 days, crispy sauerkraut in jars for the winter will be ready. Cover it with a lid and store it in the refrigerator.