Whole sour cabbage
fermented vegetable preserve, popular in Romanian, Bosnian, Croatian, Albanian and Bulgarian cuisines
Whole sour cabbage is a fermented vegetable food preserve, popular in Eastern European and Balkan cuisines. It is similar to sauerkraut, with the difference that it is prepared through the lacto-fermentation for several weeks of whole heads of cabbage, not separate leaves or grated mass. No vinegar or boiling is required. It is a homemade food preserve, commonly prepared in large barrels filled with whole cabbage heads and water salted with sea salt.
Name
In Croatian, it is called Kiseli kupus u glavicama or Kiselo zelje u glavicama, with a few other varieties. In Serbian, it is called Kiseli kupus u glavicama. In both languages the meaning is literally "sour cabbage in heads".
Preparation
After the external leaves and core have been removed, the cabbage heads are salted, packed into a barrel as densely as possible and covered with salted water. A heavy load (a rock, for example) is placed above, to keep them under the water, in anaerobic conditions. From time to time the brine has to be reversed (flushed from the bottom of the barrel and then again sluiced onto the top), and topped up if necessary.
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This entry incorporates text from “Whole sour cabbage” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.