Shred finely several heads of cabbage.Take a crock or large jar and rinse it out. (A 1-gallon mayonnaise jar will make a nice quantity of sauerkaut. Just be careful when you pour in the boiling water; tetter rinse it out with hot water to start with.)
Pur a layer of shredded cabbage in the bottom and sprinkle on som salt. Don't overdo it, however. You can always taste the brine the second day and add a little more salt if needed.
Continue layering the cabbage and salting the layers until the crock is nearly full. Put a stone on top of the exposed cabbage.
Boil a kettleful of water and pour it into the crock until it covers all of the cabbage and the stone as well.
Leave it alone for 3 days. The cabbage does all the work. In 24 hours, you will have strong cabbage water; in 48, young sauerkraut; and in 72, the real thing.
(Don't forget to drink the juice for breakfast.)
As I posted above, mine came out kind of weak, but the only big jar I had was only about a half gallon -- it might have held the heat better if it was bigger.
The Lithuanian church near me, at its annual fair, serves up homemade kielbasa and sauerkraut dinners. They put caraway seed in the sauerkraut; I guess it's a Lithuanian thing, though my family never did it. My mother just used the canned, but after she drained and rinsed it, she'd chop an onion and put a couple of tablespoons of bacon fat in the pan to heat it up.
(The church did put out a cookbook one year that included a recipe for sauerkraut -- it started with 40 pounds of cabbage! It discouraged me right there. I think it also suggested using a stone crock, but I was fresh out of stone crocks.)
Thank you, very much.
I don't have any stone crocks, but I do have a bunch of 3 gallon glass jars that I normally use for things like flour and rice. They should work.
I put onion and caraway into the sauerkraut when I'm cooking it.........especially when I'm doing it in the crockpot.