Easy Fermented Sauerkraut Recipe

All you need is cabbage, a salty brine, and time.

It’s amazing to watch simple, pure ingredients transform via fermentation. Crisp, sweet cabbage withers down, becoming delightfully tangy sauerkraut. Vegetables succumb to the power of salt and become softer as their cell walls break down. In its very essence, sauerkraut is pickled cabbage. The term pickle has been culturally assigned to vinegar-brined vegetables but actually refers to any vegetable preserved in brine, whether vinegar or salt. The benefit of using salt brine is that the vegetables ferment and create rich, unique flavors and adding healthy probiotics, vitamins, and enzymes to your diet.

For the most basic sauerkraut recipe, all you need is cabbage, a salty brine, and time. That’s it! Once you have the basic steps and recipe down, you can get creative by adding different spices, fruits, and vegetables to really make it your own. Start simple and familiarize yourself with the flavor profile that naturally occurs, because most of the time, keeping it simple is best. My all-time favorite way to make kraut is to add caraway seeds simply. I always have a jar of this handy in my fridge. Nonetheless, I still like to experiment with different layers of spiciness, sweetness, and all types of vegetables that lend their own textures.

Vegetables that grow close to the soil, like cabbage, foster more beneficial microbes on their surface and are great for fermenting. All you need to do is provide the right environment.