Easiest Sauerkraut Ever

Earlier over at my skincare and wellness coaching blog, I wrote that fermented foods are among the best things we can eat to achieve radiant health and clear skin. The natural probiotics in real fermented foods aid digestion and give powerful antioxidant protection. I see so many clients who struggle with treatment-resistant acne. These same clients tend to have poor digestion, low energy, allergies, and other signs of general low immune system health. One thing I always recommend is adding more raw, cultured nutrition to the daily diet. You can buy artisanal raw sauerkrauts at your local natural food store that are delicious, but it will cost you at least $9 for the real thing. Real raw sauerkraut is so easy and cheap to make, you may as well make your own. Here's how I do mine:

Real Raw Sauerkraut

Ingredients needed:

• ONE HEAD OF PURPLE OR GREEN CABBAGE, ORGANIC IF POSSIBLE

• 1 TABLESPOON HIGH-QUALITY SALT (I use pink Himalayan but Celtic sea salt is also mineral-rich and healthy.)

• 1TEASPOON CARAWAY SEED

Supplies needed:

• CUTTING BOARD

• A GOOD KNIFE

• MEASURING SPOONS

• A 1-QT WIDE-MOUTH MASON JAR 

Shred your cabbage. Chop it finely with knife and cutting board. It doesn't have to look perfect but be sure the pieces are small. You'll be squishing them into a jar.

Add the salt and put your cabbage into a large bowl. Squeeze and press the cabbage with your hands to get it nice and bruised and juicy.

Add the caraway seeds, then pack it all up into a quart-size wide-mouth mason jar. Important: Press the cabbage down firmly with a spoon or, if it fits, with your hand. The goal is to get all solid bits of cabbage submerged beneath the juices. This will prevent mold from growing on your sauerkraut. *

Keep your kraut-to-be at a nice, warm room temperature for at least a week. After that, taste it and see if you like it. If so you may refrigerate it at this point. For even better nutrient profile, let it ferment at least two weeks before throwing it in the fridge. I like a stronger taste and tons of good bacteria so two weeks works for me. Just be sure your cabbage-y bits have enough liquid in them to stay sunken until refrigeration.

Two 20-ounce jars and a mix of green and red cabbages. It's 5:32 somewhere.

* Optional:  In her wonderful and highly recommended book, Full Moon Feast, Jessica Prentice recommends weighing your sauerkraut down with a smaller jar, filled with water, to ensure that your mix stays under the liquid line. I don't and haven't ever done that; I just press my cabbage down below the liquid every day and have never had a mold problem.

That Wiggle in Your Walk

Yesterday I wrote that gelatin doesn't have to be the junk food it was when my grandma (bless her cotton socks) was molding that day-glo stuff in a box into wiggly, jiggly shape for every holiday of the year. (This reminds me- every year she made a delicious and no doubt highly traditional green St. Patrick's Day cake out of boxed yellow cake, boxed pistachio pudding and green food coloring. It sure wasn't anything approaching real food, but the memory of it makes me smile this week as I'm preparing for a healthy St. Paddy's feast with my mom and family.)

Last year I read and loved Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan MD and Luke Shanahan.


Known on her web site as Dr. Cate, Shanahan writes with her partner, a chef, about the healing benefits of real, traditional foods. I’m a real food research junkie so the information presented in the book wasn’t very new. In fact, I was put off by the otherwise very enjoyable text because the writers clearly drew so heavily from the work of the amazing Weston A. Price Foundation but they say that their inspiration came from reading Dr. Andrew Weil - a lovely person, I’m sure, but his nutritional advices are usually far too soy-heavy and low-fat to be truly healthy. In any case, I won’t be offended if the WAPF isn’t, and Deep Nutrition is engaging and easy to read so I recommend it to my skincare clients all the time.

What makes Deep Nutrition particularly interesting is its focus on beauty as a manifestation of health. Dr. Price did so too, in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. But Dr. Cate’s book is more of the how-to book to Dr. Price’s drier anthropological work. She has a lovely passage about skincare, inside and out, which I've written a little about over here. When I reread it recently, I was hot to go and rediscovered my love of making gelatin molds to add a sweetish and snacky alternative to my usual gallons of bone broth.

The incredible Cheeseslave has a terrific recipe here that includes freshly-juiced fruit to get a really nutritious gelatin. I'll bet it tastes divine but I'm not that committed. To reduce the sugar content, I use one part water to three parts organic unsweetened fruit juice and I follow a tootsed-up recipe I devised yonks ago off the back of the Knox box. I don't buy Knox, though. I boycott Kraft, its icky industrial food parent company, and I get Great Lakes brand gelatin online because it comes from healthy cows that are pasture-raised.

I like my gel-o really firm so my gelatin content is high. Here's how I do it:

Put one cup of cold filtered water in a bowl and sprinkle with 5-6 tablespoons of unflavored gelatin.

Stir gelatin into juice until it is dissolved.

Bowl 3 cups of juice.

Add boiling juice to the water-gelatin mixture.

Stir together and pour into a your mold or baking pan that has been laid with a shallow layer of the frozen organic fruit of your choice. (I use a silicone bundt cake mold that I got as a wedding gift and it is perfect for this recipe. Next week- ask me about Punch Bowl Kombucha!)

Let it set in your refrigerator overnight and by morning you will have a very firm, very delicious treat that is relatively low in sugar, very high in protein, and full of the collagen we need for healthy hair, skin and nails - or, as we say in our house: healthy claws and a shiny coat.

It's wee-beastie approved!