Sweet on sauerkraut

(edited 9/29/2023) Saturday mornings we go to the Cabrillo Farmer’s Market, where the Kids breakfast on loaded baked potatoes and sample the offerings from local cheesemongers and I make a beeline for a Farmhouse Culture’s gut shot. More often than not, we come home with a bottle. This is the real thing, the original superfood, boldly flavored and so loaded with goodness you can really do feel you blood cells dancing for hours afterward. Especially the kimchi juice – cabbage-ginger-garlic-radish all condensed in a tiny cup.

Sauerkraut, along with other fermented foods, have been steadily gaining in popularity. It’s fresher, rawer, with more flavor profiles to choose from. More and more of us are discovering what our ancestors knew very well: it’s a delicious and versatile condiment with numerous health benefits.

Farmhouse Culture’s kraut seems like a world away from the clear sweet mushy tangy ribbons of precooked and fermented cabbage that my mom used to heat and serve with Polish sausage and boiled potatoes. Their sauerkraut is a little crunchy and, besides the traditional flavor, comes in ginger beet, sriracha ginger, garlic and dill, and my favorite, horseradish and leek. There’s a whole world of flavor.

I started paying more attention to sauerkraut after reading Burkhard Bilger’s profile of “fermentation fetishist” and raw food activist Sandor Katz, AKA Sandorkraut. Katz is the a passionate and fascinating author of the books The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, The Art of Fermentation, and Wild Fermentation. He argues that we’re killing ourselves with cleanliness: pasteurization, processing, packaged prepared consumables.

Wild Fermentation was published in 2003, the same year that world-renowned Copenhagen restaurant NOMA opened, with their focus on fermentation-focused menu and later with their fermentation lab.

There’s more and more scientific research into the microbiome as an organ unto itself and the connection between the gut and our brains. Historically, fermenting food was important for preservation but also for health, something our ancestors knew well but that disappeared in our American ultra-processed food culture.

More and more I see different sauerkrauts popping up in the refrigerated section labeled “probiotic kraut” and “raw kraut.” Not just sauerkraut, but other types of fermented vegetables are showing up on menus like Hog Island at San Francisco’s Ferry building serve house pickled vegetables, and Millennials are teaching us that kombucha is a a really delicious beverage of choice.

So fermented sauerkraut is something to eat for health benefits. But like I said, it tastes great and that’s what eating well is about. Good food for good health.

You don’t have to save kraut for a Reuben or your hot dog. It’s great on tacos, green salads, on grill cheese, in tuna salad. Here’s the horseradish leek on a sourdough panino with olive oil, prosciutto, arugula, Gruyere, plum paste, and tomato. Talk about a flavor explosion:

Farmhouse Culture is a Santa Cruz company with a wide distribution. You can buy their products online. If you haven’t had sauerkraut in a while, I highly recommend starting with one of their products. The horseradish leek is strongly flavored, like I said, as is the kimchi. The garlic dill pickle is a more mellow crunch, not overpowering at all, just like a nice crunchy dill. I guarantee you will go sweet on sauerkraut just like we have.

If you’re interested in learning more, read Sandor Katz’s bestseller Wild Fermentation. (As a Bookstore.org affiliate, I may earn a small commission from your purchase.)

More:

• Listen to Bilger’s podcast about what he learned interviewing Katz.
• Read about the Human Food Project’s American Gut program
• Read “‘Fermentation’: When Food Goes Bad But Stays Good” from Fresh Air.
• Make your own sauerkraut recipe from this recipe by Sandor Katz, the author of Wild Fermentation.