Easy Dill Pickle Sauerkraut Recipe
This kraut tastes just like your favorite dill pickle but without all that vinegar. It's also so simple to make with fresh dill, or dried dill from the summer harvest.
Ingredients
- One Medium-Sized Green Cabbage
- 3-5 Tbsps. Sea Salt
- 3-5 Tsp. Minced Garlic
- 1/2-1 Cup Fresh Dill loosely packed; OR, 1/4-1/2 Cup Dried Dill
Instructions
- Finely chop washed, green cabbage.
- In a large bowl, put down a hearty layer of chopped cabbage and a generous sprinkling of sea salt (about 1 Tbsp.)
- Add half the garlic and dill, sprinkling around the cabbage layer.
- Continue adding layers of cabbage and sprinklings of salt until you run out of cabbage.
- Add the rest of the garlic and dill to the last cabbage layer.
- Mix ingredients with clean hands or a large spoon.
- Allow the cabbage to sit for ten minutes so the salt can pull some moisture out of the cabbage and tenderize it.
- Pound the cabbage thoroughly with a kraut pounder or any flat, wooden instrument. Be careful not to bang the sides of your bowl.
- Funnel the mixture into a half gallon glass jar, or a fermenting crock.
- Continue to pound each layer and keep pounding until the resulting liquid has covered the cabbage.*
Notes
Your cabbage should be a darker green color than when it went into your crock and will have reduced in size by at least half.
*You may need to add a bit of distilled water to finish covering the cabbage. The water content of cabbage varies from season to growing practice to variety of cabbage.
Be sure that you’ve really pounded that cabbage before you settle for adding water.
To Finish Setting Up the Kraut for Fermenting
Use a glass fermenting weight, a piece of window screen cut to fit or any other thing that will keep the cabbage at the top submerged under the water.
Loosely cap your crock and place it at room temperature for at least three days, but seven is better and a month is best.
Winter is a great time to make kraut, since a long, slow ferment results in the best flavor. Summer-made sauerkraut recipes are also delicious, but they ferment much faster - so keep an eye on it!
Anything not submerged under the safety of the Lactobacillus-rich, fermenting saline solution will be subject to mold, so make sure you’ve got it all under a weight of some kind.
If you find mold, discard the batch and try again.
Tried this recipe?Let us know how it was!