I want all of those pickles. I could eat pickles everyday. Dilled pickles and jerk pickles in my bloody Mary sounds amazing.

My nickname. Tommy Pickles.

Some friends of mine have one of the fermenting pots with the water seal. They gave me some sauerkraut made from red cabbage and caraway seeds. Easily the best kraut I've ever had.

I'll send you a jar of the Jerk picles. I did 24 quarts of spicy garlic dill halves last night. I'm going to pick up more and do the jerk pickles Wednesday. They should be ready to ship first week of May.

Here in hot, sunny NY, we won't have cukes for a couple more months. I have been buying a few at the store and trying different pickling recipe adjustments. When the cukes are ready here I usually buy a bushel.

Very cool.

Well, we finally cracked into it tonight. It's actually pretty darn tasty. I'm not sure how it compares to regular for a few reasons. Most of the store-bought stuff is shredded very thin and ours was chopped much more coarsely. Also, I've never had it made with red cabbage.

But I have to say, it's very tasty. I'm not sure what spice my wife used. I don't think it was caraway seed, but I'm not sure. It was very easy other than having to top it off with salt water every few days. We are definitely going to make it again. I want to try some experimentation by adding different ingredients and spices, but first I want to make some that's more traditional from regular cabbage and caraway seed.

You folks are making this way too tough of a project. Sauerkraut is sour based upon how dry it is when the cabbage is harvested inho . Instead of a huge crock project the next time you get cabbage for coleslaw shred some the remaining of the head for kraut. Fill a sterile mason jar to within 3/4-1" of the top,a teaspoon of salt,fill jar till it covers the cabbage and snug ( not tight) the lid and ring. Keep in cool ,dry place for a month and you've got kraut. After it ferments the lid should seal on its own,otherwise eat at 30 days instead of sealed for 6 ish months.

Also look into brining whole heads in order to make cabbage rolls hulupki with it.... A little salty if you don't rinse them well but no need to boil the leaves etc.

Good info on the lid, just tight enough to keep bugs out, but loose enough so it can burp. Err on the side of too loose if you don't want to be cleaning soggy kraut out of your closet.

we made it every year when we 9 were kids. i think that some of the imported brands from bavaria, germany, in the grocery store today are comparable.

We ate tons of it with sausage and brisket and pork ribs.

Back when this thread first hit, we had a bit of a false start. We made a quart or two and then stopped for a while, but now we've been making it pretty constantly for about 9-10 months, i think. I let it ferment for a month. I've tried several flavors, most of them pretty traditional, caraway seed, some with pepper and/or juniper berries. I think we had one with carrot too. Of those flavors, my favorite is traditional with just caraway seeds. We've made a couple of batches with the purple cabbage. I prefer the white cabbage based kraut.

Two flavors that have risen to the top are Garlic and lemon-ginger.

You have to be careful because with the garlic a little goes a long way (at least if you crush it). Even if you get a bit too much garlic it's still good. But hey, I love garlic. We've also been using our homemade kraut to make Reuben sandwiches and the garlic kraut is our favorite on the Reubens.

The other new favorite flavor that we just cracked open this weekend is a little surprising, lemon ginger. It's a large lemon's worth of zest and I think a tbs of grated ginger. Wow, this one is REALLY tasty. It probably helps that our homemade stuff is not as salty as most of the stuff that you get at the store. It's still salty, just not as much.

I always grew up eating kraut with sausage. The other day, we bought some brisket and some pulled pork with bbq sauce, and tried the kraut with both of those (on top actually) and it was really tasty. We'll probably still mostly eat it with various sausages though since I'm sure that's cheaper.

I haven't been too fussy about sticking to a recipe and some of my batches are bordering on Kimchi rather than kraut. I have used red cabbage or a red/white cabbage mix as the base then some variation on the use of carrots, onions, garlic, ginger, red pepper and jalapenos. It's amazingly healthy stuff but I also love the taste. I regularly make a green smoothy for myself and autistic son who is reluctant to eat veggies and incorporate the kraut into the mix.

I am also a big fan of home made sourdough bread but that deserves it's own thread.

That's something that we're wanting to try too.

We haven't gotten around to sourdough yet, but right now we have 10# of sauerkraut (that was the weight of the cabbage) in the process. We started 5 pounds 2 weeks ago and then started 5 more pounds this weekend.

Our favorite sauerkraut is garlic, second favorite is ginger lemon (surprisingly tasty).

We also make kombucha and kefir.

Are you still doing kraut in quart jars? About how much salt and caraway seeds would you guess you use per jar? I had a failed attempt at making it a few years ago but would love to try again. Nothing better than a good kraut on a grilled homemade sausage with a grainy mustard.

The weight of salt added depends on the weight of cabbage you are trying to ferment..

I.E. do not use volumetric measures, as different brands/types of salt have different mass per volume...

https://www.makesauerkraut.com/salt-by-weight/

Right, what Tim has below on salt is the way that I go. It's based on the weight of the cabbage and then weight of the salt to add to get the right ratio. Sometimes I use that method, and other times I use this stuff
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.lehmans...8588_large.jpg
You don't need to use that, but I think it makes the process a little more consistent.

I only make the traditional (carraway) flavor occasionally, so I usually find a recipe on the 'Net for that when I do. I think I usually use about a tablespoon of seeds for a quart jar. Now we mostly make it in 1 gallon or 1/2 gallon jars. Right now we've got a 1 Gallon jar going (about 5# of cabbage), a 1/2 gallon jar, and then 2 quart jars (those are another 5# of cabbage).
Precisely right!