Red cabbage saurkraut is ready

[harmony]

I had some tonight as part of dinner.
It is super pretty on the plate.

Rather bland tasting. To early I think.

I will definately be making this again.It is very pleasant to have that vibrant colour on the plate.

My mother is staying with me right now. She was the onewho suggested we try it tonight. She immediately doused it with salt and pepper. (sigh)
She was not impressed. I think she was thinking pickled beets by the colour.

I'm thinking of tossing it with ACV when I amserving it.,to give it a bit of kick.

Any thoughts on if there is a contradiction to combining the two?

[itslaura]

I think adding ACV would be fine. I've been studying lots of recipes for lots of different fermented vegetables and I've run across many that have vinegar in them.

[shelley]

A little ACV would be a great idea, if you want the vinegar and extra acids for good digestion.

I found that one single cabbage fermented is too bland too, too much of a "one note" type dish. So I take care to add other spices, onions, carrots, for a more complex taste. Garlic, basil, oregano, marjoram, cumin, ginger, these can all go a long way to making your cultured foods more interesting! And you can use a dash of different salts too for more of a variety in flavor, such as Bragg's Aminos or Tamari/Soy or Nam Plah (fish sauce).

If you want to sweeten it so it's more like beets you can, but do so at the time of eating and not in the jar itself, as honey or sugar would feed the wrong bacteria. Sunumomo, which is a Japanese cucumber dish, uses a bit of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and bit of sugar. Very nice.

[Troy McClure]

Great answer shelley!

Cabbage is pretty bland. You gotta add spices and/or more exciting stuff as in Cortido and/or Kimchee. It makes a huge difference.

Like Shelley says if you want to sweeten a ferment it can be tricky - if you sweeten at the begining all that will happen is the (good) bacteria will feed on the sugar and turn it into acid (which is the whole point of fermentation)!!

So you may start off with sweet onions, carrots, beets etc, but by the time fermentation is done most of the sweetness is gone.

Of course ferments aren't *supposed* to be sweet - they are supposed to be acidic.

If you really want it sweet you could try adding in sweet stuff towards the end of the fermentation. Either that or just not ferment it for so long. An example of that would be sweet yoghurt which is only fermented for 6 hours or so - not enough time for most of the sugars to be converted into acid.