Super Cabbage

A true classic – sauerkraut, pumpkin oil, garlic, a pinch of cayenne and a big slice of bread.
  After 10 years of cooking and writing about food, I still have no idea what these chia seeds are all about. I know goji berries only by the look, I tried quinoa about 2 or 3 times in my life and forgotten about it really. Like a real grump, I don’t like ingredients, which are highly sought after in the media and have a hysterical attraction to masses of people, not in the least. My curious nature is stopped by the critic in me, which whispers that these food trends are only there for a short while and delicious food will be good, no matter what ingredients are in at the moment. In my heart, I love to dedicate myself to explore different cultivated plants, which grow around me, are easy accessible, affordable, nutritious and more persistent than the popular waves of “in” foods. One of these plants, which can surely be regarded as a superfood, is cabbage. Cabbage is a versatile plaint in every way. Their small and big cabbage heads are spread throughout every family garden, around every apartment around here, but they are also found on bigger industrial fields, even on balconies and in atriums they serve as decorative plants. Cabbage grows in the warm south; the Mediterranean is its birthplace, from where it spread to the colder north, east and west. This plant has followed mankind for centuries, although not in today’s compact head-shaped form. From the heads of the cabbage and it’s younger sprouts we can cook a hearty full soup, the blanched leaves are used to wrap in “sarma”, steamed cabbage even children love to eat, but the true delicious cabbage is mostly eaten – pickled, also known as sauerkraut. The pickling process is nothing more than fermentation, where yeast and bacteria process the plaints sugars and transforms them into chemically simpler forms. Lactic acid bacteria give the cabbage a sharper smell and a sweet-sour taste, the acid itself preserves the cabbage, where it played a vital role in nutrition in our, not so long ago, history. Generations upon generations of Slovene were raised with sauerkraut, where it was eaten as breakfast, lunch and dinner.


Bakterija Pediococcus cerevisiae
  Today sauerkraut still lives on, we can find it on the shelves of any store or supermarket here, but people still tend to buy it from their local marketplace. In autumn, where cold winds starts to blow and days become shorter, the body calls out for it on its own, as if it knew by itself, without any promotions or advertising, that it needs vitamins, fibers and the hard to explain vitality, which can be found in fresh or fresh-like food. In Slovenia, in the older days, there were parts of the country, which were known as “cabbage places”: from the Ljubljanas Savlje, till Ilirska Bistrica, Ptujsko polje, Bela Krajina and Notranjska. Cabbage is still widely spread everywhere, where there are rivers as a constant source of moisture and water, and also for irrigation. The near lying Savlje and Kleče were the start of my search for good ways to pickle and make sauerkraut. And so I found myself knocking on the door of the Čerin farm, where the young farmer Ivan Čerin motivated me to make my very own sauerkraut. The farm was relatively small. The family farm grows their own sapling of the legendary sort “krajinska okrogla”, which are even more legendary thanks to the extraordinary agronomical biologist Mihaela Černe, who worked in the 70s. The cabbage is fertilized with organic fertilizer and this farm is one of the rarer few, which have to struggle with weeds manually and not with phytopharmaceutical chemicals. The result at the end are healthy cabbage heads, which, only cultivated like these, have a high level of microflora on the top, made from yeast and bacteria, which start the fermentation and a vital for qualitative and delicious sauerkraut. The grated cabbage, as a tip from Ivan, have to be salted with 2% sea salt and are pickled in 4l big glass jars with screw heads on top. These filled jars ripe with the cabbage for 3 weeks in his cellar, without even being cared for in any way – because you have a whole army of bacteria, which work for you.


No smell whatsoever – the jarred cabbage can be used in any small flat and even by individuals with a very delicate sense of smell.
  After 3 weeks of ripening on temperatures from 15 till 18 degree Celsius, we opened one of the jars at home and tasted the sauerkraut with utmost curiosity. Ohh, ahh; we were eating the best sauerkraut there is in the world! The sauerkraut had a pleasant aroma, was firm and crispy in structure and had a softly faded color, with a pleasantly evolved degree of lactic acid (not the sharp acetic acid), with a small hint of sugar and no sign of any salt dominating the taste whatsoever. 3 grown-ups ate a whole 1.5 kg of sauerkraut, together with some garlic, pumpkin oil and home-made bread. Oh, the autumn time is so wonderful! As a guardian of the good old farming practices and an endorser of sauerkraut, I can only apply to you, that you pickle your cabbage right at home. Your place the filled jars with the cabbage in a dark place, on room temperature, and forget it exists for 3 weeks. The cabbage should be closed tight with a lid and it will not smell at all. Just find a good quality cabbage farmer, like Ivan, and the quality product will do all the work for you. And if you happen to be afraid or would like to have the chemical processes of lactic acid fermentation, together with a detailed description of the cabbage grating and pickling in jars explained more in detail, just tug on my sleeve and I can explain that to you more. Are you up for it?