Make your own sauerkraut to top Reuben bites and those game

By Beth Dooley, The Minnesota Star Tribune

Sauerkraut, a must for stadium brats and roast pork, is simple and easy to make. It relies on a simple hands-off recipe that requires just two ingredients — cabbage and salt.

Given the right conditions, the two create enough acid to preserve the vegetable. The same process is also used to make sour dill pickles, kimchi and hot sauces like Tabasco, in which the chile peppers are fermented and blended into a paste.

The method, called lacto-fermentation, dates back thousands of years and was used by many cultures, from Korean and Chinese to Eastern European. Unlike “pickling” that relies on the acid in vinegar to flavor and preserve vegetables, this process engages a specific kind of bacteria — lactobacillus — to create the acid to do its thing. T