Showerthought: People keep saying you need a fancy airlock for sauerkraut

I see folks online buying expensive glass airlocks for their first batch, but my grandma in Milwaukee just used a clean plate and a rock in the crock. The key is keeping the cabbage submerged, not the gear. I've done it her way for five years with zero issues. Anyone else just use a simple weight and a cloth cover?

3 comments

3 Comments

stellas561mo ago

Watched my friend panic because her fancy airlock kit arrived cracked. She almost gave up on her first batch. I told her to grab a small ziploc bag, fill it with some of the brine, and lay it right over the cabbage in the jar. She did it, covered the jar with a clean dish towel, and forgot about it for two weeks. Opened it to the best, crunchiest sauerkraut she'd ever tasted. She still uses that bag trick every time now.

jana1791mo ago

Honestly get so tired of the gear hype. Saw a video where someone used a ziplock bag filled with water as a weight on top of the cabbage. Worked perfectly. Feels like half the stuff sold is just to make a simple thing seem hard so you buy more junk. My great aunt used a clean jar filled with marbles to keep everything under the brine. If it's clean and submerged, it ferments. The rest is just noise.

reese_garcia8d ago

Exactly. My sauerkraut game changed when I stopped caring about fancy weights. A bag of brine works just fine and costs nothing. The whole airlock industry feels like a solution to a problem nobody had. Fermentation is older than plastic wrap, so people figured it out long before Amazon existed. Clean glass jar, some salt, and patience is all you really need.