The cellar shelf

This is the fourth time I've written about the cabbage, and probably not the last. If there's a pattern, it's that the scoby is always the last thing to cooperate.

Around 3% salt

None of this is new, but making a hot sauce is new to me. It's a small thing, but a crunchy pickle made the week. The odd thing is that burping the jars worked. I've stopped expecting every starter culture to be better than the last.

There's no shortcut for making a new batch of kimchi, it turns out. I went back and checked: 19 °C. It took forty minutes, which is longer than I'd planned for the jar of kraut. Even Percy seemed to disapprove.

My notes from last time said: ‘Taste often.’ For anyone thinking about skimming the brine:

• A large jar: used once, at 13 days
• Time spent bottling the kombucha: the whole morning, Sunday
• The crock: 3 jars
• Mood: pleased, around 1597 g of cabbage

The result was a sour, bright kraut, or close enough. I'm calling kimchi with real depth a win. I wrote it all down: 6 days of second ferment, 3% salt, and a note to be more patient.

That left longer than I'd like to admit for tasting every day. The woman at the market who sells kimchi would probably have said the same thing about the brine.

The notebook says 21 °C, which is about what I expected. A friend with a cellar full of jars put it better than I can:

Nobody gets a fizzy bottle by rushing. — My father

Still packing the crock, week 40

Start small. Compared with last time, it was a crunchy pickle.

That was the fermentation weight sorted, more or less. I did the boring part first: making a hot sauce. I suspect my grandmother, who never measured the salt would have done it in half the time.

There's something about salting the cabbage that clears my head. Same again next week, weather permitting, with more bottling the kombucha.