The Appalachian larder and the craft of lacto-fermentation

The crock is the oldest tool in the kitchen

Before refrigerators reached the coves and hollows of the Blue Ridge, the winter larder came down to salt, smoke, sugar, and time. Every farmhouse had a stoneware crock or three. Cabbage went in after the first frost, beans and corn went in at the end of summer, and the family ate out of those crocks until spring greens came back.

We still cook that way, with better thermometers. This folio covers the four preservation methods that do the most work in our kitchen. None of them is complicated. All of them reward patience and punish shortcuts.

Earthen-crock sauerkraut

Kraut is just cabbage and salt. The salt pulls water out of the shredded leaves and makes a brine. The brine keeps out the microbes that spoil food and lets lactic acid bacteria, which are already living on the cabbage, take over. Those bacteria eat the cabbage sugars and make lactic acid. The acid is what preserves it and what makes it taste like kraut.

1. Weigh the cabbage after trimming. Pull off the outer leaves and cut out the core. Save two clean outer leaves to tuck over the top later.
2. Salt it at 2.0 to 2.5 percent of that weight. For 5,000 g of cabbage, that is 100 to 125 g of non-iodized salt. Pickling salt or a pure sea salt both work. Iodized table salt can slow the ferment and darken the kraut.
3. Massage until it is wet. Ten minutes of squeezing by hand will draw out enough brine to cover. If it is an old, dry cabbage, top it up with a little 2% brine.
4. Pack it hard and weight it down. Press each layer into the crock with your fist. Lay the reserved leaves on top, then a plate and a clean stone or a water-filled jar. Everything must stay under the brine.
5. Keep it cool and leave it alone. At 60 to 68°F, kraut is ready in three to six weeks. Below 60°F it takes longer but tastes cleaner. Above 75°F it can go soft.
6. Check the pH before you call it done. We move kraut to cold storage once it reads 3.6 or lower.

A white film on the surface is usually kahm yeast. It is harmless but tastes stale, so skim it off. Fuzzy blue, green, black, or pink mold is different. If you see it or the crock smells rotten rather than sour, throw the batch out.

Sorghum-glazed root vegetables

Sorghum syrup is the mountain sweetener. Farmers grow the cane in summer, press it in September and October, and boil the green juice down in a long pan until it turns amber. It tastes a little like molasses but brighter, with a faint sour edge that loves root vegetables.

The preservation here happens before the glaze. Turnips, rutabagas, beets, and carrots keep for months in a root cellar at 32 to 40°F with high humidity. Pack them in damp sand or sawdust and they stay firm well into March. Sweet potatoes are the exception. They want it warmer, around 55 to 60°F, and they go hard in the middle if they get cold.

To glaze, roast a pound of cut roots at 425°F until they brown at the edges. Warm 2 tablespoons of sorghum with 1 tablespoon of butter and a splash of cider vinegar, toss the roots in it, and give them five more minutes in the oven. The vinegar keeps the sweetness from going flat.

Smoked trout rillettes

Western North Carolina raises a lot of rainbow trout in cold spring water, and smoking is the old way to make a catch last. Rillettes take it one step further: smoked fish, flaked and folded with butter, packed into jars under a layer of fat.

• Brine the fillets for an hour in a 5% salt solution with a spoon of sorghum, then let them dry on a rack until the surface turns tacky.
• Hot-smoke over apple or hickory until the thickest part reaches 145°F.
• Flake the fish and fold it with soft butter, a little crème fraîche, lemon, chives, and black pepper.
• Pack into small jars and pour a thin cap of melted butter on top.

Be clear about what the fat cap does. It keeps air off the surface and slows drying. It does not make the rillettes shelf-stable. Keep them at 38°F or colder and eat them within a week.

Wild-yeast vinegar mothers

Good vinegar starts as good cider. Cover apple peels and cores with water sweetened with a little sugar, stir daily, and wild yeasts will turn the sugar to alcohol in about two weeks. Strain it, cover the jar with cloth, and acetic acid bacteria from the air will turn the alcohol to vinegar over the next six to ten weeks. A rubbery, pale disc forms on top. That is the mother, and you can use it to start the next batch faster.

One firm rule: homemade vinegar varies in strength, so we never use it for canning. Tested canning recipes count on vinegar of at least 5% acidity. Our wild-yeast vinegars go into shrubs, pan sauces, dressings, and the splash that finishes a pot of greens.