Here, for your delectation, is Janice Clyne’s signature Pineapple Kraut recipe. Make it, devour it and share the recipe!
Pineapple Kraut by Janice Clyne
Ingredients
1 white cabbage (approx. 1 kg) finely sliced
½ a fresh pineapple, peeled and diced small
1 tbsp fresh ginger, finely grated
1 tsp fresh turmeric, finely grated
Black pepper, a good grinding
Salt (2 % the total weight of the prepared vegetables)
Equipment
1 litre Kilner jar washed in hot water or that has been through the dishwasher
A flat-ended rolling pin or equivalent (could be your fist) for pressing the vegetables into the Kilner jar.
2 mixing bowls
A set of scales.
Method
Chopping
Reserve one of the outer cabbage leaves and cut a section of the cabbage heart to use as a wee lid later.
Shred the cabbage finely.
Peel and then dice the pineapple into small chunks and weigh it separately (don’t add it to the cabbage yet).
Grate the ginger
Grate the turmeric
Weighing
Put an empty mixing bowl onto the scales, then zero the scales.
Weigh the cabbage and make a note of the weight.
Add the turmeric and ginger to the pineapple and weigh this in a separate bowl and make a note of the weight.
Add the two weights together to give a total weight, but keep the cabbage in its own bowl for now.
Salting
For every 1kg of vegetables, we need 20g of salt – i.e. a ratio of 2%. So, if your vegetables weigh 900g, you will need to weigh out 18g of salt. The maths is simple – divide the total weight of your vegetables by 100 and multiply that by 2 to give you the weight of the salt you need.
Weigh out the correct amount of salt into a separate bowl. Once weighed, pour the salt onto the cabbage. Roll up your sleeves and massage the salt into the cabbage thoroughly and keep massaging until you have some brine.
Alternatively, once the salt is thoroughly massaged into the cabbage, leave the bowl to stand for ½ an hour. This enables the salt to draw out moisture with zero effort. And we need this moisture, as you will see in a minute.
Tamping
Once the cabbage is ready - if you squeeze some in your fist, moisture should now drip out between your fingers - you can add all the ingredients together.
Add the pineapple, turmeric, ginger and black pepper to the cabbage and mix it in well.
Take your Kilner jar and your flat ended rolling pin (or your fist). Cover the bottom of your jar with a few handfuls of vegetables and then tamp them down firmly, but carefully.
Add the next few handfuls and repeat. The volume of the vegetables should reduce noticeably and, after a bit of tamping, you will see delicious yellow juices starting to ooze out as you press down with your tamper. This is what we need – the juices flowing.
Keep going until the jar is almost full – you need a gap at the top to act as your bacteria buffer zone. When you push down on the vegetables, there should be a good amount of juices at the top of the jar. These juices are key - our vegetables need to be below a seal of moisture so as to exclude air.
Weighting
You can use the cabbage leaf and a section of the cabbage heart to stop the vegetables floating up through the juice seal and being exposed to air. To do this, take the reserved cabbage leaf, fold that whole cabbage leaf and wedge it down over the chopped veg.
Push the leaf down under the fluid level.
Then, take the chunk of cabbage heart and put that on top. Close the jar lid and, as you do so, it should press down on the cabbage heart, which will push down on the cabbage leaf and help to hold all your developing ferment beneath its own fluid.
Waiting
Sit back and let the magic happen. Fermentation. There are a range of bacteria all over the vegetables, even if they have been washed. The salt reduces the levels of bacteria we don’t want to encourage. The lack of oxygen does the same. The bacteria that like salt and no oxygen dominate and produce acids – lactic acid, mainly. They digest the sugars in the vegetables, produce lactic acid, which preserves the vegetables and, at the same time, produce all sorts of beneficial by-products in so doing. You will want to put your jar on a saucer to catch any juices that will be forced out of the kilner during fermentation.
Burping
In the first few days, all we need to do is keep our fermenting ferment at normal room temperature. Initially, carbon dioxide is a by-product and these bubbles of gas can force fluid out of the jar (hence putting it on a saucer to catch these juices). The carbon dioxide production slows after 2-3 days.
Tasting and eating
You can start tasting the ferment any time from 5 days. When it tastes good to you, refrigerate it and eat it!
