Every recipe assumes a 21C kitchen and mine is a 15C basement, which is the only place I have room for jars. I am running pint jars at two percent salt, one of shredded cabbage and one of carrot sticks with garlic. I would rather not open them every day to taste. What is the realistic window at that temperature and what do I use as the marker for done?
Temperature is the dial and 15C roughly doubles the clock compared to a warm kitchen. At that temperature I would not bother tasting kraut before day fourteen, and I usually call it somewhere between four and six weeks. Carrots are quicker because they are cut small, so taste those at day seven. If you want a number rather than a taste, pH strips are cheap and a finished vegetable ferment normally sits comfortably under four.
Slow the whole way through, which is why it tastes better. Cold ferments build acid gradually and you get a rounder result instead of the sharp one note kraut you get in five days on a warm counter.
Four to six weeks is much longer than anything I read. Does it keep improving that whole time or is it just slow to get going?
Days are the wrong unit and every answer you get in days will be wrong for your basement. Watch the brine going cloudy then clearing again, watch the bubbling slow down, and taste with a clean fork every week once it starts smelling sour. Your jar does not know what day it is.
Start at day ten and taste weekly from there. That is two pointless openings at most and then you are reading the jar instead of a calendar.
Fair, but I need somewhere to start so I am not opening jars every week in a cold basement for no reason.
I got impatient one January and moved two jars next to a radiator to hurry them along. Three days later they were sour, soft and slightly boozy, and the cabbage had that yeasty smell you get when it goes too fast. Slow and cold is a feature, not a delay.
Taste weekly, fridge when you like it, stop thinking about it. Cold ferments forgive almost everything except being forgotten under the stairs for a year.
@porosity_nerd · 3mo ago
Cold basement kraut is the best kraut and I will not be talked out of it. Carrots are the odd one out though, mine go from raw to pleasantly sour to unpleasantly soft in about three weeks even at 14C, so eat those first. Cabbage sitting at 15C for two months has never let me down.
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