Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
1
I have a jar of sauerkraut, which I’ve bought for a recipe (never having used sauerkraut before). The jar’s contents are 650g of which I need 200g for the recipe, which basically cooks it along with potatoes, mushrooms and kielbasa sausage. So, my questions are:
how long wil it keep once I’ve opened it (presumably, in the fridge)
any favourite recipes , please, that will use it up?
Now, all i have to do is chase round South Manchester and North Cheshire trying to find kielbasa (soemthing which my neither of our normal supermarkets seem to stock).
I’m no food scientist . . . . but my experience is that sauerkraut is essentially a pickled vegetable. So I think it lasts in the fridge - covered by brine juice - for 6 months or so. Over time it looses some of its sharpness in my opinion. Like other pickles, if it is covered in brine, I’m not sure if it really ever “goes bad” but if bits stick up out of the brine those bits can go bad and then make everything bad.
I don’t really have a recipe to suggest - but it goes well with any fatty meats/sausages. (There are some soup recipes I remember that use it but they aren’t my cup of tea, so i don’t have any recipes on hand). I do like kraut on sandwiches with fatty meats - a la Reuben sandwich. Just think German/Polish food and you’re good to go.
Sautee onions till starting to brown, add drained kraut and some form of apple (chopped, sauce, dried and/or cider. Caraway and celery seed would be nice additions, too. Braise until mellow and use as a side with pork or poultry, or to top hot dogs or sausages in buns.
Sauerkraut keeps for an extremely long time in the refrigerator. It is a favorite around here because Mr Rat’s father was Swiss and his family ate a lot of German-Central European food. I didn’t grow up with this and so one of the sites I was happy to discover years ago was Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes. Here are two good ones for sauerkraut:
A little off topic: These two recipes date from the earlier years of the site when it really was devoted to her family’s traditional home cooking. Very few cooking sites featured this Central European food 15 years ago, and her simple recipes were and are more along the line of Diana Henry than Rachael Ray. Very unique at the time. These days she’s delegated a lot to multiple editors and while I’m glad she’s made a success of things the site is full of trendy stuff that I just skip over. There’s still interesting new content too, but I used to find it 100% interesting.
I’ve never tried it, but if memory serves, there’s a chocolate cake recipe that uses sauerkraut for extra moisture. Supposedly, there’s no sour taste to the final product.
1 Like
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
10
Google Translate is my friend in such circumstances. Nice recipe.
I took German at school, just for two years and really struggled with it, unlike French which I found much easier. Perhaps needless to say, I failed the exam on the former while the latter was one of my four passes. No, I was never very academic (but four passes were just enough to get me a junior clerk’s job at the town hall)!
I do recall being in a restaurant in a small German town many years back. I could make out enough of the menu items but there was one word I wanted to know. I asked the waiter in my very poor German - to find he had less English than my German. But we’d both done French at school. Pilz - champignon - mushroom
Sauerkraut should keep pretty much indefinitely as it’s a fermented food. Pork roast and sauerkraut is a classic.
Like @Thimes mentioned above, you might also try a Rueben sandwich if that appeals. Sauerkraut is a pleasing counterpoint to the richness and saltiness in the rest of that sandwich. (I don’t know if you’d be able to find the sort of corned beef deli meat the sandwich calls for.)
