Sauerkraut

For years the Gargoyle has meant to inflict a home-made sauerkraut based on a grandmother's recipe upon various winterly gatherings, but as you may have observed, a food that requires a week of foresight is rarely a food that the Gargoyle remembers to conjure in time for the occasion.

Well, not this year!

The ingredient list could not be more trivial:

• cabbage, 1, large

• salt, 1 tbsp (evidently preferably un-iodized)

• sugar, 1 tbsp (which is evidently optional, but exists in the ancestral recipe)

And then you can get fancy and add a bit of any number of other things to it. Or not.

Best practice for seasonings is "to taste", and best practice for other ingredients is "make sure at least 3/4 of the total weight is cabbage"

• cranberries, a handful. (Gargoyle's Grandma used to do that)

• caraway seed is pretty traditional

• dill

• juniper berries (crushed or whole), if you like how pine trees taste

• thinly sliced carrot

• beets, evidently.

• ginger. Internet, you're made of monsters. Ginger in sauerkraut, really?

• nothing has meaning anymore. Cumin, turmeric, garlic, peppercorns, chili peppers, the cabbage is your oyster

• probably not oysters though

• (but if you really want to, you can find an oyster kimchi recipe, which it turns out is totally a thing, but is beyond the scope of this here)

• seriously, lots of cultures invented fermenting cabbage, so lots of seasoning profiles are totally legit somewhere, so, as ever, play with it!

Where things get interesting is methodology. Which on the surface is also trivial:

• convert cabbage into thin slivers of cabbage

• add salt and whatever

• squish the cabbage until its liquid covers it

• cover and leave alone at room temperature for 2-ish days

• check on it, and poke a few holes in it that go all the way down

• after another day check on it again, and probably refrigerate now

Now. Quite sensibly most of the internet would tell you to carefully weigh and measure your cabbage, and have a proper canning jar with a proper lid that properly controls the fermentation process. These are probably very good ideas. You didn't come here for good ideas, you came here for expeditious shortcuts and probably not dying of the monsters conjured in your kitchen-dungeon.

For converting cabbage into smaller bits of cabbage, a few methodologies can be used:

• make your human minion slice it with an enormous knife. Has the potential to produce best sized (or at least the most configurably sized, depending on the minion's skill and mood) slices, but possibly a grumpy minion

• use a mandoline slicer on a large-ish setting. Quick, practical, produces consistent slices. Depending on blade selection, they might be consistently slightly wrong slices, but well within range. This option recommended.

• possibly a fancy food processor that has the right kind of blade to slice rather than chop... but be careful not to over-process.

Note, the core is usually not delicious and is not worth the effort of including.

The results can be mixed and squished in a large bowl and then moved to a glass jar, or one can have a really large jar, drop in all the things and punch them in place.

If using a bowl, order of operations doesn't matter, but with a large jar method, it helps to either pre-mix or layer the add-ins while piling the cabbage in. It also helps to squish at least slightly as you load it in.

The method used in squishing the cabbage here was bare hands. (This is easiest after you add the salt). This is your opportunity to express the mood you're in. If you're having a bad day, show that cabbage your knuckles till its corpse is covered with its body fluids. If you're happy and you know it, massage it till it's good and wet for you. If you're feeling kind of like a cat, make biscuits and meow at it. (Untested notes from the internet also say you can let it rest after salting before massaging for an easier time of it, or you can use your stand mixer's dough hook).

When there's liquid enough to cover all of the cabbage, which is important because the brine keeps unauthorized sentient life from developing, cover it up and set it aside someplace that's not warm. (One source suggests placing an intact leaf of cabbage over the mix and weighing the whole thing down. )

This is where every authoritative source says it's important to seal it so that air doesn't get in. Gargoyle's Grandma's instruction is just "cover it with a cloth", so it gets draped with a clean dishtowel and left alone on a counter out of direct sunlight. Which should be fine if the brine step was executed correctly.

A head of cabbage with its briiiiines

After two days it gets looked at, and poked all the way down with the stem of a long serving utensil. The expectation here is that it gurgles and smells.

Another day later it should be ready to close up and put in the fridge.

Once you close it, observe it for a minute. If it hisses at you, reopen and give it a bit more time. But if you leave it be for too long, it might start developing icky white things on top, which is a condition to avoid.

Verdict: fermentation does require caution, no joke and please don't die, but it does not require expertise or sophistication or specialist tools, and the results are tasty.