Customer Reviews

Making Sauerkraut and Pickled Vegetables at Home: Creative Recipes for Lactic Fermented Food to Improve Your Health (Natural Health Guide)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A clear and simple guide to basic sauerkraut and brine pickles. The book does discuss health aspects of lactic acid fermentation, but what distinguishes this book in my mind is its clear description of the process. The authors leave you with enough understanding to experiment and troubleshoot for yourself. Great fun--my first couple of batches were consumed by German friends who had been forced to eat the pasturized stuff for too long.

Even though this is a thin book, this is packed with information - basically everything you need to get you started.
The author(s) talk about why people make sauerkraut/pickles, a little bit about their use in various ancient and more modern cultures and how pickles saved the sailors from scurvy starting with 18th century, when ships started carrying them.
Sauerkraut/pickles are fermented foods, and the fermentation happens because of lacto-bacteria (named like that because they were first discovered in milk/dairy products). Actually, there are two types of them: for milk products and for vegetables. Organic products have more bacteria and ferment easier. Raw (i.e. unpasterized) milk sours by itself; pasteurized milk spoils... The white film you can find on organic veggies (e.g. plums, cabbage) is lacto-bacteria. Those bacteria - and fermented products in general - are beneficial for digestion.
The best container for fermentation is Harsch - search the web to see it. I learned from this book that the white yeast that appears over open fermentation pots is actually harmless, just it has a bad taste.
It is easier to get better results with more veggies or with more types of plants versus one type only. Salt is needed for fermentation, authors say, to allow veggies to withstand a couple of days without decay until fermentation begins. If you have organic veggies, or good container (such as Harsch), there is less need for it. Whey could also be substituted, but not fully (i.e. you still need some salt).
What else is in the book? The spices, of course. And some therapeutical applications of pickles.
And, last but not least, some recipes that seem interesting to me.

This is a great book. If you want to learn why fermented foods are so much better for you than pastuerized and heated products along with learning how to prepare them yourself, then this book is for you. It even describes a crock that eliminates all chances of spoilage or maintenance. The contents are sealed from the air the whole time the contents are fermenting. You can even use less salt. The finished product comes out crisp, fresh, and with incredible flavor.

This book does exactly what the cover promises. The layout and format is clean and the flow of information is logical as well as being easy to digest.

Not only does this little book go into details of pickling cabbages and other veggies, it does you one better. There is extensive treatment on the healthful advantages of eating cultered vegetables. For example, did you know that eating a pound of sauerkraut a day for three months, will shrink and remove colon polyps?

Then just when you think you couln't cram any more information into a little book, you are given some great ideas on what to do with your lacto-fermented foods, in a recipe section. All in all, a much better experience than "Wild Fermentation" and absolutely no political axe to grind.

If you are looking for a no-nonesense introduction to making your own lactic fermented food, then you are in the right place.

This book is a disappointment. I bought it after I got my Harsch fermentation crock and I do not find it very useful. There are 8 recipes for fermentation for different vegetables (in addition to two different variations for sauerkraut)and about half of the book has 9 food recipes all for sauerkraut (ie pineapple sauerkraut, reuben, etc) with a full page color glossy photo on the opposite page of the recipe (wasteful in my opinion). There is a section on adding herbs and spices and it is unhelpful as it does not give details for many of them on how to use/prepare them for fermentation. There is an interesting section on Healing with Lactic Acid Fermentation, but that is about it. The biggest reason I do not like this book is that there is little troubleshooting detail or any help/suggestions for fermentation when the conditions are less than ideal.

This book adequately describes how to ferment vegetables such as cabbage with a fermentation crock, but the same information could be obtained with a quick search of the Internet. There is no discussion about the risks of fermenting, and I wonder of the authors' enthusiasm for the "miracle healing powers" of fermented vegetables (discussed in considerable detail) might be clouding their objectivity. The authors emphasize the use of a particular brand of fermentation crock, and I was disappointed that alternative techniques were not discussed in much detail.

I was too hasty in ordering to see that there's only 64 pages in this "book" in the product description. There are very few fermentation recipes. A majority of the recipes are what you can make with your sauerkraut after it's done fermenting.

I already have Nourishing Traditions and Wild Fermentation, two books with much more information and many more recipes. I was disappointed with this book as I didn't read anything that I already didn't know. What was in here is good info if you don't have either of the two books (which I highly recommend you make a space for in your collection). So the quality is good, it's the quantity to price ratio that is lacking as it's nothing you couldn't find in web articles, recipe sites or Youtube videos.

This book is a complete guide to making sauerkraut; in fact, it was like having my grandmother beside me. The methods she used were given step by step in this book and the saurkraut we made is perfect. We are going to do a crock of pickled vegetables this summer using the book as a guide.

Great book for beginners. Easy to follow recipes that require only vegetables and mason jars to start . Even my very first batches of sauerkraut turned out great. Delicious!

This is a generally well-written and nicely illustrated book, but there seems to be a piece of information missing in the description for making basic sauerkraut (pages 19-20). At the end of the recipe for making kraut in the Harsch crock it states that "the water must cover the weight stones . . ." However, at no point in the recipe is the addition of water indicated. I'd very much like to try this process out but want to get it exactly right. So now I have to go on my own quest to try and figure out this water question (does the pressed cabbage make it's own water, do I have to add it, and if so, when?).