YJL

1   Tea bag experiment

The tastes of this batch, two jars, are spicy after three days of fermentation. It’s a bit of sour, but not by much, so I moved them to refrigerator for storage.

The purpose of tea bag, I read somewhere that tannin would help crispiness when making cucumber pickles, or make them crunchy. Oak leaves seem like a common source. I have no idea if that would help since I have no knowledge at all, so I was just hoping it would. If it didn’t, at least I would have a sauerkraut with tea flavor.

Basically, I was just blindly doing it. Unfortunately, expectedly, I couldn’t tell if it worked, the textures are the same, and nor could I tasted the tea, I think the heat from chili kind of mask everything if there were other flavors underneath. But maybe, just maybe it has not given enough time to work out.

2   Ingredients

• Cabbage, big pieces
• Salt
• Onion, julienned
• Carrot, julienned
• Daikon, julienned
• Chili, sliced
• Ginger, fine grated or crushed
• Tea bag, whole

Yes, I had used a tea bag, but it’s not the ingredient I was talking about, rather than an experiment. The ingredient was the onion, in western style, onion is not uncommon in sauerkraut recipes. However, as pao cai, I don’t think I have ever seen it in any. As a matter of fact, there are usually only the cabbage, carrot, and chili from what I could remember and visually see.

Anyway, I think it’s totally fine since this isn’t western nor Asian style, but mine. Whatever I like to eat, I put them in. I sliced cabbage to big pieces, not typical German sauerkraut fine slices. This way, it’s more like the size of cabbage in pao cai.

This is only the third time I made sauerkraut, some of the ingredients I used for the first time, onion, daikon, chili, and ginger. Almost three months since last time I made sauerkraut, in which carrot was the one new addition, I was still playing safe, but not this time.