I know what you’re not saying… you’re not saying to yourself:
Oh, sure, he’s all ‘bee, bee, bee…’ and ‘whoop-dee-doo, I made raspberry sauce’ and stuff, but where’s the ‘Preserve’ in ‘Produce, Prepare, Preserve’? What a jerk! WHAT A JERK!!!
Hey now! Calm down. I was getting to that.
The thing with cabbage is that… if you get any, you get a lot. To balance that out a bit, I’ve cut my plantings down to just a couple of heads each season. As much as I like it, I have to admit that it’s not one of the crops that seems to taste completely different when grown at home. It’s probably just my lack of cabbage refinement.
Still, when they get to cabbagey goodness, and it’s hot out, you need to pick them. Otherwise, they’ll split right open. Well, we’ve been eating quite a bit lately, and so I thought I’d revisit last year’s marginally successful sauerkraut experiment.
I say marginally successful because I wasn’t sure what to look for, and so I didn’t know how long to ferment it, what it should look like, or how sure I could be that I wouldn’t immediately develop botulism on first taste. So, as I ate it, my internal dialog was something like, “Mmm… this is good. I hope I don’t get botulism. It’s often fatal and always horrible I hear… What’s that taste?… Is that botulismy? Maybe I should throw this out… It’s kinda good, though…”
Since then, I’ve learned that there’s something like 120 cases of botulism in the US each year of which about 25 are food-borne. Now, throw in there that most of them are in Alaska* where there are folks who ferment whale meat, beaver tails, and seal flippers in a hole in the ground and then eat it, and you can see that I’ve a better chance of eating rotten seal flippers than getting botulism from my sauerkraut.
* Now, getting botulism is not, you know, funny or something I’d blame someone for…
However, my favorite line from a CDC study done on the subject is this one with regard to some clam chowder… in a plastic bag… bought from the refrigerated section.
“The case-patients stored the soup at room temperature for several weeks and then ate it despite its bad odor and flavor.”
Lovely. To be fair, the plastic bag did not say on it to continue to refrigerate the CLAM CHOWDER. So, realistically, the ‘case-patients’ probably sued and were awarded millions in damages.
Anyway, here we go again.
Not Botulism
I took a nice 2.5 lb. head of cabbage, sliced it up reallllly thin, tossed in 3 cloves of garlic and 3 tsp. pickling spice, and mixed it with 4 tsp. pickling salt.
I jammed all that into a gallon glass jar and stuffed that with a quart ziploc filled with salty water (in case it leaks). Let that sit for a week or two, and we’ll have Der Sauerkraut mit Der Garlicken und Das Schpeiss.
I could easily have fit another head of that size in there, but I planted a smaller variety in the hopes that we could pace ourselves with them. Further note-to-future-self-planting-refinement lesson there. Plant big varieties for this and some small ones for fresh eating.
I’ll report back in a couple of weeks to let you know how it goes.
Unless…
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I have been afraid to make sauerkraut, so I will be interested to see how your brave experiment turns out. I really like that big glass jar!
Did you change your blog template design a bit or is it just my imagination?
Hah… you caught me at it, actually. I’m sitting here trying out customizations on a new WordPress theme that has a bit more flexibility in it. Besides, I was tired of looking at that one.
I would not concern myself with fears of death from sauerkraut. The very, very, VERY rare occasion that someone actually gets botulism involves some pretty serious tempting of fate– typically with meat involved. Still, even if you did include the rotten beaver tails and stanky, weeks-old (mollusk) soup left out on the counter in a plastic bag, 25 cases a year in a country of 300 million?
Lessee… that’s 1 in 12 million. That’s roughly half as likely as dying from a lightning strike. It’s just a little less likely than being killed by a dog. It’s about 15X less likely than being killed by your bathtub.
I’m going to continue to go outside when it’s raining, pet dogs, and take baths. I’m also going to eat this sauerkraut.
Come what may.
Aw, you make a German gal proud. I love sauerkraut. Blaukraut is delicious, too.
By the way, if you read my blog, you’d know that garlic in German is “knoblauch”. I’m just sayin’.
Lots of fun botulism facts here. I worry about this stuff, too, but I feel much better now.
Vell, vell, vell… who have ve here? Could it be…
FRAU KING?!!
I couldn’t tell from your post if you’re glad to be back or not. You know, the whole… I’ve lived a whole life bit… those are big words. What happened?
Anyway, yes… German people… we’re all so… Teutonic. How nice for us.
Welcome back.
Wow. Gee. Thanks. What can I say…
Uh, I’d like to thank my mom, for letting me come back home. And my husband, for not killing any of my animals whilst I was away, and well, the entire country of Germany for still pretty much being the same as the last time I was there. I like consistency.
Teutonic. That word always makes me think of the movie, Young Frankenstein. snort.
That was a good movie.
I love that CDC website. Did you know it has a picture archive where you can find pictures of everything from a spirochette to the African god of smallpox? Also note that each year, more people die from leprosy than from botulism. You can find this info in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which has a long list of every infectious disease and how many people have died from it broken down by week, year, and state.
Oh sorry… we kind got off the subject of gardening. How bout this heat, eh? How bout them pickling cukes? We made pickles and the garlic turned a nice shade of blue-green. What gives? Botulism???